Pet (Anime) Review - It Would Be A Lot More Interesting if you had an Idea of What was Going on.
Normally I would stop reviewing a show like Pet at episode six, but there was one thing that kept me watching. See, the show 'killed off' a character in a way that seemed they had no reasonable way to keep that person in the narrative. Thing is, to pull him from the story now would be incredibly stupid and make almost no sense, so I thought to myself 'You know what? I'm going to stay right here and wait to see what level of BS they are going to pull to justify him not being dead'. So I pretty much stuck with the show until the reveal I was waiting for, got exactly what I expected. That is where I am at with this show.
The show features what I am going to call 'Psychics' even though the show never calls them that, who can hypnotize and even rewrite the memories of people. In some instances, they can 'Crush' someone, or basically make them go brain dead. When they enter someone's mind, the most powerful of psychics can use an Image, which does stuff you can't do without an image. Normally a psychic can screw around a little bit with your mind, things you would expect an anime version of Hypnotism to do, but the Image allows for the rewriting of memories or crushing.
To start with my biggest problem with the show, I have no idea how any of this works. Because one guy's image is 'water' he leaves behind puddles, and because he was in this other buys 'peak' (A Peak is someones fondest and most defining memory, a Valley is basically the opposite) he can bypass a persons lock (A defense mechanism to prevent a person from finding your peak). They guy with a door doesn't like valleys, so sometimes his door wont' open if they are trying to dive into a valley, and another guys image is a fish that let's him swim really fast and do stuff faster. It's kind of like this dream world they go into when doing their psychic stuff is ruled by metaphors, but metaphors that don't really mean anything. The logic of the show basically allows for them to do anything the show feels they should without any real regards for how this world actually works, so nothing that happens has any impact, and it's hard to make sense of it all.
An example, when trying to find out where a guy's peak is, he says 'Someone with a really strong lock makes that lock easy to find' and points out a dog walking around underwater. And this does sound odd, but in another scene, we have a child running through a house with countless numbers of feet crashing through the ceiling trying to crush him, and that's not even his lock or a guy who can use an image. Is the underwater dog really that strange in these sequences? It's kind of the least strange thing I'd seen by that point.
It also takes forever before you finally start to find out how you are supposed to feel about any of the characters and to be frank there is very little to all of them. I'll just roll 'The company' they work for in with them, because they kind of just seem like the Mafia, but you don't find out much at all about them up until the tenth episode. The supposed antagonists of the show (I say supposed, because it may be another character or maybe another group, I don't know after ten episodes) just doesn't have much of a presence despite being the driving force behind every character's actions.
It's hard to dissect the plot here as well because there hardly is one. I only just now started to understand any of these characters, and really I don't find any of them likable or interesting. Nothing is interesting in the narrative to keep me hooked, and worse yet I can't get a grasp over how the world even functions.
There is one thing to have supernatural powers be unexplained in certain cases. For everything wrong with Babylon, one of my more recent anime reviews, keeping the nature of Ai's power such a mystery worked because this wasn't a world that operated with a bunch of supernatural abilities. As far as I could tell, she was the only person in the world that could do anything supernatural. Here, however, everyone involved knows about the psychics and what they can do. The audience is the only group left in the dark about what is going on, and it makes it hard to get invested.
While I will still be here on Steem for the time being, a lot of my work is going to be moving over to Hive once my full power down here is finished up.When that happens, feel free to follow me over on HIVE, either the current main site or Peakd (Steempeak's Hive Front end).