originally posted on ace-reviews.tumblr.com on january 30, 2017
uuuuuuuuuuuuuugh
THE STORY THUS FAR: shinpachi tries to find out who sent otsu a threatening letter while gin-san and kagura cosplay.
It’s the start of Gintama’s first serious story arc when Gin-san gets into a car accident and ends up with Soap Opera Amnesia. To the story’s credit, they try the “hit him again and see if he gets his memory back” thing fairly early on and it doesn’t work. They (or, specifically, Okita) even hit him with another car, which not only doesn’t work, but makes things worse, so at least they won’t be relying on cartoon logic to fix this one.
After a walk around town in an attempt to find something or someone who will jog his memory, complete with an attempted kidnapping by Sachan and a near-death experience involving one of Otae’s omelets, Shinpachi and Kagura try to get him to use his wooden sword to stop a spaceship crash, which also doesn’t work. The ship crashes into Odd Jobs, the pilot is arrested, and after some reflecting of the episodes events, Gin-san decides he’d rather start over than continue trying to regain his memories, and splits from Shinpachi and Kagura.
A lot of the time when Gintama has a serious story arc, I find myself sitting through it mostly just waiting for the punchline. That’s not to say they’re bad, they’re just so tonally different from the rest of the series that’s it’s practically a completely different anime.
I can’t say much for the storyline as a whole until I’ve watched it all, but as far as set-ups go, it seems pretty standard. I might just be sick of amnesia as a plot device, but at the moment I kinda don’t care. I already know he’s going to get his memories back, so there’s no tension there, and the concept of “main character loses his friends, tells them to fuck off, then later learns how much they care about him when they come back anyway” has been done before, and it’s always cheesy and kinda dumb.
Next episode continues the amnesia story. Till next time.
[ko-fi]
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