Anime original by GoHands
Streaming on Crunchyroll
Premise
In a post apocalyptic world emptied by monstrous robotic invaders, a group of five girls battles them with goofy norse-themed weapons. When shy loner Renge shows up, they take her under their wing and talk a lot about cooking.
Zigg’s verdict: A Momentary Lapse of Reason
In a recent podcast I made a pretty ill-judged comment, namely that I was actually kind of interested in watching this show due to the combination of the trailer showing off wacky girls with crazy weapons combined with GoHands’, er, distinctive animation style. Unfortunately, the thing I had forgotten when making that comment is that while the studio’s visual choices are frequently goofy and unorthodox, that doesn’t apply to their writing, which is universally garbage. Watching this episode was a harsh reminder of that.
Really, what’s most surprising about episode 1 of Momentary Lily is the spectacular array of ways in which it is absolutely insufferable. The action is pretty visually deranged but at the same time kind of uninspired, and it’s also a colossal bait and switch, as after a few minutes of opening pyrotechnics the show snaps into ‘cute girls talk about nothing’ mode where it stays firmly entrenched for the rest of the runtime. And when I say ‘cute girls talk’ I mean it – these girls do nothing but talk and talk and you’ll be begging them to shut up after a few minutes. There’s so much dialogue here it makes My Dinner With Andre look like 2001 A Space Odyssey, and almost all of it is inane rubbish. Each of these girls has exactly one character trait – The Gamer one! The Boobs one! The Serious one! – and all they do is hammer on that personality trait ad nauseam even though the amount of substance each character has could be laid out in a single sentence.
That’s not even getting into the flimsy world-building about how this is the cosiest apocalypse ever, with the amount of scrabbling and infodumping here reading like a 13 year old struggling to cram all their definitely thematically consistent ideas into their first fanfic. In a season that seems more swamped by shitty isekai than ever I had hoped that GoHands could at least provide a distractingly weird alternative, but this ain’t it chief.
