Shoujo☆Kageki Revue Starlight Episode 12 Discussion

Jacob194 said:
Really epic and emotional, for what should've been a common happy ending, it turned out grand af.

AOTS, AOTY for me.

Really sad it's done and finished.

Rainen mo mata kokode ao o, kono hoshi matsuri no yoru ni. (in another universe maybe)

TheKillerAngel said:


I am going to have mad Starlight withdrawals.

Xathanjon said:
Ok so maybe I am just the 1 percent but I watched this show all the way through and I'm ready to take a stand. I would love to hear what others have to say about this because I just didn't get it at all.

I enjoyed the first episode just fine, but the second felt like a rehash of the first at best and almost a copy paste at worst.

The third episode made me even more frustrated as Karen had to face what, at the time, we considered the biggest threat in terms of winning the auditions in Tendo and when she obviously loses (and badly I might add) she drops to the bottom of the leaderboard. What? That makes no sense unless you want to tell me that they have been having lots of matches off screen and Karen was already low on the totem pole. She won her first two matches.

That brings me to episode 4. I can't get too upset at this one other than the fact that after the disappointment of the week before, I didn't get any fight in that episode at all and when they finally got back around to it, we had the dumbest fight in the whole show by far.

Episode 5 pains me. Reused animation, goofy sound effects and the fact that in all honesty Karen never should have won that fight in terms of how much of an advantage Mahiru had. It took all of the drama and weight of the previous Revues and turned it into a cheap joke.

That brings me to the 6th episode and I'll be honest, I may have been harsher on this one since I was already quite soured on the last few episodes but my biggest gripe here is the scene where Kaoroko is about to leave on the train and her and Futaba get in a fight and they are just interrupted by the phone giraffe telling them, "Hey, got a problem you need to settle? Well come on down here and you can just fight it out of your system!" This took any weight that the auditions had right out of the picture for me.

That was until Episode 7. It was this episode that answered so many of my questions and got me back in the right mood to watch the next 3.

8-10 I'm sure I could find problems with but I don't even want to try because I enjoyed them so much. That being said the 11th episode was not only slow and mostly boring but it did little to explain any of what happened before. At best this is all a metaphor or something and at worst, Hikari used her wish to rewrite the play they were going to perform and the play was actually just this anime the entire time. Either I'm over thinking it or perhaps not thinking hard enough.

I really do want to understand this show so I would love to hear a defense of it and why people think it deserves AotS or (and I can't begin to agree with this one) AotY. I don't want to ruin others enjoyment of the show I just want to understand what I missed because I wanted to love this show.

HaruhiismX said:
The Giraffe being aware of us, and cheering with us was quite cool. I wasn’t too sure of the deeper plot in this series, but it was still wonderful nonetheless. (7/10)

sXeblues said:
Two weeks ago, when asked my thoughts about where the show would possibly go, I said the following:

“I half expect some drawn out drama to unfold with Karen trying to process what Hikari just did to her. I assume she’ll build up the will to fight on, in spite of what happened. Either by herself, or with the help of the other girls. And either she’ll face off against Hikari again, or she’ll in some way appeal to Hikari... And/or, the final episodes will deal with the ‘Starlight’ performance proper, and Karen will end up crashing it, much in a similar fashion to how she initially stumbled onto the underground auditions. And everything will probably end with some grand estimation of their having accomplished their goal of being on stage together.”

All of which pretty much played out, in these last two episodes.

The series is fine. Just, sort of okay, to me. It wasn’t anything spectacular. And that’s because, somewhere along the way, it lost its cohesion, and whatever it was that drew me into it, at the beginning. For those that like it, for those that are head over heals in love with it, you rock. And I’m so glad that it worked for you in all the ways it didn’t for me. Peace.

Jacob194 said:
The series isn't big on the mystery part, it does have some reveals (ep 7 and 8) but aside from those 2, you can predict what's going to happen, heck even predict the ending from the first couple episodes, I think what's more important in those kind of predictable anime is the journey that leads to it, for me it did it right, for you not really and that is understandable.

Anyway just wanted to say that.

BatWeeb said:
I'm probably going to get some flak for my opinion, but to me this felt like more of a cop out than episode 13 of Hanebado.

I've said in both of my previous comments that I wouldn't mind a happy ending as long as it wasn't tropey or didn't feel forced, but to me this felt like both. I even started searching for all the tropes that were used in this episode so I could post them here and write a wall of text about how I hate this kind of bullshit, but I stopped halfway and gave up thinking "Ah, fuck it. The rest of the anime was good enough, this isn't worth the effort".

I think I just have to give up on expecting anime to handle tropes and cliches in a good / smart way, since those that have managed to do it are few and far between.

Well, all in all this anime was a good watch and definitely a hidden gem of the season. The ending might've got on my nerves but it didn't detract my enjoyment of the show as a whole, though it definitely made me lower the score ¬_¬

BatWeeb said:


I understand the implications of the ending and I already had a suspicion since the beginning that they were going to "force" it into a happy ending for Karen and Hikari just because they're the protagonists, that's basically Anime 101 and something that grinds my gears. I didn't like the execution of the episode and how cliche it was, thus making this the episode that I least enjoyed in the whole show. It also doesn't help that I got my hyped up after the time loop reveal only to be left extremely disappointed in the following episodes, making me enjoy this anime less and less every week until the finale.

BatWeeb said:


This episode was full of cliches and they were pretty obvious and easy to spot, but then again this is a nitpick of mine with absolutely every anime because I grew tired of cliches and how they're used in this medium.

That's my biggest gripe with the Time Loop plot. The only thing that I took from it was that if they were not going to build on top of that then they shouldn't have done it in the first place. You don't take such a plot twist just to use it as a tool for character development and then throw it away a few episodes later, that thing was pure wasted potential, nothing else. Sure, it gave Banana a much needed character development, but they sure as hell could've done in a less exaggerated way.

The final fight was just cookie-cutter Anime 101 stuff, it didn't impress me one bit and Karen just went full shounen protagonist with that classic trope of "I'll keep coming back no matter how many times I fall down" and then one shotting Hikari in the end. The rest of the episode after the fight was just meh.

But even with all these pet peeves and nitpicks I still enjoyed it. I understand the ending, I understand why it happened, I understand what it represented, but I still feel that it was too cliche and meh.

BatWeeb said:


I'm not saying the series as whole is cliche, I'm saying the series uses cliches in a way I didn't like and that the last episode in particular used tropes I'm not fond of. There is originality in its story that's for sure, but the execution was mostly par for the course, that's why I used the term "Anime 101". I wasn't using it to describe the plot, just the directing and execution of the series and especially the last episode which didn't feel special or emotional to me.

There definitely is potential, but I think we got a pretty decent closure for the 99th Class story, so if they ever continue it I hope they do it with new characters.