The whole ghost of the dead girl living it up in the internet was an excellent starting point. If only she and Lain actually became friends and went on internet adventures together possibly involving cults and crazy people and crazy people in cults. Or something.
In other news it's kind of interesting how this medium still manages to occasionally shock me after all this time. After all the incest, all the guro, all the gorn, all the gender-role flipping of haremus, I come face to face with saliva-fetish anime
Mysterious Girlfriend X. Because it was there. And much like the protagonist of Yosuga no Sora, if it is a thing, I will watch it.
What the fuck, is my first reaction when multiple characters are totally ok with devouring one another's spit. How the fuck did this get made.
Why the fuck was this made.
Then after a night's sleep it was like "Meh. I still don't think this is terribly hygienic." What's shocking one day is normative and boring the next. I guess kind of like Elvis and Miley Cyrus wiggling their basement parts around at people - That entire fucked up school could all lay on an endless staircase drooling down into one another like a fountain of human centipedes and I'd only be mildly perturbed by this point.
In retrospect I think this particular thing exists because it was really cheap to make. Like, they recycle the same backgrounds. A lot. It's always kind of "if they had the resources to make a show, why not make something good?" But "good" costs money. And certainly there has to be some freaks out there who love this kind of thing.
I quit when almost two entire volumes were comprised of nothing but comedic pirates. "Arghhh!"
The spunky witch girl who exists solely to be a deus ex machina machine somehow annoys me the most. Situations where realistically everyone who isn't Guts should die, but don't, because she knows meteo or some other nonsense. The cursed plate mail made by cursed dwarves that turn you into a cursed sociopath that has zero consequences attached to it.
The whole gathering the crew of frisky nakama, because that's what the other cool kids are doing in their mangas... it's clear there's no plan forward in place. It's as lost as Lost.
It's not unusual; you've got to be interesting up front to catch people's attention, but since so few things ever end up being successful, few people really think deeply about the long tail. Kirkman and Invincible are pretty remarkable for keeping the carecat alive over 100 issues, in retrospect.
:'(
