by kiryugoji04 » Sat Jul 22, 2017 2:17 pm
Episode 1 was alright. Cool fight, great miniatures. Love the audacity of a water fight even if water doesn't miniaturize well at all. Pacing felt a little rushed to get everything introduced. Episode 2's pacing was improved and the introduction of Laiha was cool. Great miniature work again.
Last night's episode, however, was not so fond of.
So the good: The miniature work continues to be of excellent quality; the Reito/Zero pairing was fantastic and I think the two of them together are going to be a lot of fun; the world building is getting really interesting (Ultraman King!).
The Bad: Misogyny! So last week they introduce us to Laiha as a pretty interesting character (monster hunting detective warrior person), albeit fairly trope-y (fairly standard hardass warrior girl trope). This week she's shunted off to the side to play nanny to a bratty little boy, and she just gets to stand there and take his abuse? That feels really crappy when you have, say, Hokuto slapping a kid in Ultraman Ace for being a total brat and sitting him down to teach him a lesson. That's an extreme example and I don't need to see people hitting children in Geed but when the alternative is turning a monster-hunting warrior into an impotent nanny figure, it stands out as badly written and indicative of the casual misogyny that runs rampant in these shows. On top of that, near the end of the episode we get a really awkward low angle of Laiha approaching the camera that turns into a crotch shot before she kneels down to start cleaning up Riku's mess because apparently she's also going to be his mother figure now. And she's not just cleaning up his clutter, they made her give this loving, motherly smile while she does it. Ugh. The only thing almost positive the show gives her is a solo demonstration of her martial arts skills but it feels incredibly pointless and almost a little leery. Why not use those wasted seconds to give her character something worthwhile to do?
Compare her to Riku, who feels incredibly spoiled. Laiha has trained all her life to be an expert martial artist in order to, uh, be a nanny, while Riku's getting all these powers handed to him, barely knows how to fight, would rather sleep than try to improve his skill set, etc. How would he have defeated Darclops Zero without the power-up that he had no idea he was going to receive? Why couldn't the episode have taken a cue from Ultraman Leo and had him training to fight better with the power-up coming as an added bonus or after Darclops is revealed to have another trick up his sleeve that Geed still can't counter? What we have instead feels extremely lazily written. A better show would use his spoiled attitude as a character flaw for him to grow out of and – who knows? – maybe this show will still try something along those lines but I don't really have any faith in that after this episode.
It really seems like it's impossible for one of these shows to go more than two or three episodes without doing something wildly misogynistic. I always hope for better but I'm never surprised.
Artisanal Practical Effects & Kaiju Content