Robotic;s Notes 02 -Revenge of the SemiColon

Aki’s facial expressions are pretty much all awesome screen caps.

Coming into this week there were a lot of doubts. RN isn’t some action series where there is a serious concern that budget drops from week 1 to week 2 might make first impressions worthless. Still, the pacing in the first episode might have given way to something more madcap by the time the second episode came around, so I can’t admit I was free of worry despite how irrational my fears seemed at the time.

And irrational they ended up staying. The girl at the end of the first episode has not yet shown up with magical powers in hand to completely ruin this show. Instead it was more slow paced robot club antics, exactly as I was hoping for. Except there was no Skal. Can’t say I’m not disappointed by that.

It’s like what if the derp facing cat from K just stayed that way and turned into the lead character.

What we instead got this episode was a time to better flesh out the cast’s personalities and back stories. The girl in the shop, Yashiro (the RN one not the one from K), and Aki. Of the latter we got a bit more of her backstory  and a lot of talk about her sister. The guy who refuses to join their club showed up again briefly this episode, and we were introduced to two new characters, Doc and Karate Girl. Doc is a reasonable, multifaceted  and fun character to watch. Karate girl is infuriating, though I suppose that they have plenty of time to develop her into less of an annoying twat.

Aki Face

The one I really want to focus on is Yashiro. It took a bit of work, but I think with this episode he progressed past the hallowed title of Protaganist-kun, and as such will call him by his actual name. The big point in favor of this is the fact that he seems to secretly have a strong silent personality here he actually goes around Aki’s back to help her out, all in order to maintain his charade of being an aloof asshole. It’s not an amazing turn, and the idea of the protagonist’s personality just being the persona they use to protect their female childhood friend was better when they did it Stein;s Gate. That isn’t quite the most damning of complaints.

This was almost more moe than anything Kyoto animation has ever made.

Thankfully, another aspect of the show that actually forgot to turn it’s punch card today was the “telling you everything narrative.” There were some pretty bad offenses against Show Don’t Tell last episode, so I’m glad that all the exposition this time around, with the exception of him explaining her illness at the end, was done by way of back and forth dialogue with almost everything easy to pick up by context clues. If Mr. “As you already know…” proves to remain MIA, then I can’t say I would be too broken up about it.

So yes, reasonable second episode we’ve got here. It’s no Jojo’s Bizarre adventure, but this was a perfectly competent well executed continuation of the promise of the first episode. I enjoyed the fact that this episode gave us more nerds doing nerdy things. I get the feeling that we can expect a lot from that. It’s still very slow, but hey, Stein;s gate started slow too. 

Lost but not forgotten.