“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
If you’ve seen pretty much any Fate/ anime post-Unlimited Blade Works you know what we’re in for here with Fate/strange Fake. Lots of dramatic monologue, proper nouns, magic systems, exceptions to magic systems, pretty girls with tragic backstories, and so on and so forth. (One of those girls is our protagonist, Sajyou Ayaka [Hanazawa Kana], who I am looking forward to learning more about.) I was surprised by how well I followed the whole “the US government trying to cover up a Grail War” plot, given how long it’s been since I watched the prequel OVA to this, but if you don’t have enough background in Fate‘s whole Thing I imagine this is completely incomprehensible to you.
I’m really glad that the last thing that happens in this episode is that we are introduced to a gambling priest with a robotic arm and his quartet of sexy nuns. This is the specific kind of light novel shit I live for. More of that and less of whatever the fuck is going on with Caster [Morikubo Shoutarou], please.
Prelati [Uchida Maaya], a highlight of the OVA, was also exceptional in this episode, and really I don’t think I could’ve said it better myself:
There’s also a funny meta gag in giving her, the audience stand-in, literal popcorn as she watches the events of the episode unfold.
In any case, this is a pretty entertaining first episode. It really cannot be overstated how fucking funny it is that Saber [Ono Yuuki] gets arrested here. I know we’re all inured to stuff like that by now but, seriously, just think about that for a moment.
A programming note: the whole “Brief” article format is a new thing I’m trying where I essentially just directly port my tumblr posts here, as opposed to what I’ve historically done which is either to not repost them here at all or painstakingly edit them into longer Weekly Orbit columns (which largely, no one reads). Let me know what you think of this change in the comments below or on my Discord server. This entire format is essentially still in its experimental stage.
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