Guilty Crown – 10

Episode 10 –

You know, I find it almost frightening how terrible Guilty Crown is at developing it’s characters. Seriously, it’s not something that should be too hard to do, and yet, this show miraculously manages to prove me wrong each and every week. Even with an interesting plot, without strong characters to push the story forward, a series won’t get very far. And Guilty Crown is proving just that, where even with the odd but intriguing plot twists this episode, I could care less because I just don’t give a damn for the main cast. It’s amazing just how terribly written the characters for this series are, which makes me think that Production IG should fire their writers if they want to salvage this series.

As I’ve already said, character development seems to be the bane of existence to this show. Shu once again reverts back to his wimpy, cowardly self, and Inori fails to make even a bit of progress about her own emotionless persona. She’s still the same old seemingly emotionless girl, only this time she seems to “have fallen in love with Shu”, even though there was no proper character development to indicate why she fell in love with him. Not to mention, whatever happened to the part where Inori claims she was “faking” to Shu? And then there’s Gai, who remains a cool-headed enigma that we still barely know about. We finally learn that he’s fighting for Inori’s sake, but that was fairly obvious, and it doesn’t really add much to his character.

As for interesting events, the most notable would have to pertain to Inori. Ironically enough, the interest in Inori is built up solely through flashbacks, rather that through her current personality (which reinforces the whole character development problem). Inori obviously has some sort of strong ties to the voids of people, where she seemed to react to the Apocalypse virus. Is she the central core to this virus, or some collective consciousness, or perhaps something even bigger? She also might be Shu’s older sister, and might have fallen in love with him before but was separated in a twisted manner. And she pretty much gives a hint to the factor in solving the Apocalypse virus issue; a song of some sort (yep, definitely sounds like Macross Frontier). Of course, another interesting event would be how the virus seems to be making a comeback this episode, once again on a large scale similar to whatever had happened over a decade ago.

All this intrigue, where the world seems to be falling into chaos, does add a heavy atmosphere to this episode’s plot. But it’s also a plot that feels superficial at the same time, especially when I don’t give a damn for any of the main cast or what’s going on. A story is compelling because you sympathize with the characters, and want to see how their journey moves and changes them. Chihayafuru would be an excellent example of characters done right. Guilty Crown? Peh.

Overall Enjoyment: 2.7/5

Screenshots are later in the post.