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As hinted at in the title, "Girl From Nowhere" is a show about a human-shaped sadistic pokémon with supernatural powers getting off on torturing other human-shaped pokémon.
As you may know, every pokémon knows a total of four moves, and the central mystery of this show revolves around the move set of Nanno, the main pokémon. The structure is a bit odd, however: all four moves are already revealed in episode 2. First, Nanno ingests a drink spiced with pills that would knock our any ordinary pokémon, yet she wakes up after just a minute with no apparent deficit to her health or psyche, thereby demonstrating that she possesses the move "Rest". Next, she gets hit over the head repeatedly by an iron shovel but suffers no injuries ("Harden"), gets buried alive but appears unharmed the next day ("Dig") and creates multiple concurrently existing copies of herself ("Copycat").
Despite having botched the Mystery plot, the show picks up in episode 3, by having Nanno interact with the well-known pokémon Mew. Nanno convinces Mew to pose as a genius artist by printing out artworks from google image search and adding some spray paint on top. In the real world, she would be found out immediately - the teacher would simply take a photo of her work, make a google search (yes, you can query an image) and find the original. However, the same does not happen this show as it takes place in Pallet Town, Kanto, a country without internet.
Then comes the twist! The school has an open house event, and Nanno convinces the school to orchestrate a live-streamed event where our non-genius student Mew is to create a painting in real time. It turns out that, despite Mew's ability to learn every TM, she was unable to learn the "paint" move in time.
If Mew were a human, she could simply say something like "I can't concentrate with an audience" and that would be that. But as a pokémon, this excuse doesn't fly (pokémon are being watched all the time and thus can't be bothered by an audience). She also can't pretend to be sick because pokémon never get sick. Instead, she takes a hammer and hurts her own right hand. A futile attempt - Nanno convinces the school that she can draw with her left hand because she once said so on Instagram. At this point, a human would have the convenient excuse of "yeah, that was a joke, sorry" but Mew does not - pokémon never joke.
There is also a second twist: since the ending of episode 2, Kanno has learned an additional mysterious move that lets her mind control other pokémon. This is illustrated by the fact that everyone always reacts to every situation in the way that is maximally convenient for her, even if it doesn't make any sense for them do be doing so.
Anyway. Since there was no way for Mew to avoid the event, she appears on stage but is interrupted by a girl-pokémon from another school I mean gym who brought one of the original paintings she plagiarized. It literally looks exactly the same but without the out-of-place spray paint. Unfortunately for her, the director declares that they don't look similar at all. And in case you're wondering: there is no newspaper in Pallet Town, so there won't be a big story where both versions of the picture are printed side-by-side on the front page.
Okay, enough of this. I think you get the idea.
I've only watched episodes 1-3 of this show, which I actually enjoyed based on just HOW over the top they are. Kanno is straight-forwardly evil and all powerful; the only times she ever displays emotion is when she laughs a the misery she's caused to others, and everything always works out exactly the way she intended it. She is never challenged or has to adapt her behavior. But that's not my problem -- my problem is the baffling disregard for how the real world actually operates (that extends beyond the fact that Kanno has supernatural abilities). This would be a far better show if Kanno pulled of similar things in the real world rather than in a strange world populated entirely by caricatures.
Here's an example: at one point in episode 3, Mew brings her first plagiarized image to the school but gets scared last minute and doesn't want to show it. Kanno, who wants her to show it to get her plot rolling, publicly declares that she thinks it's very good. Now, you could argue it's realistic that the teacher demands to see it - it's school, you don't have a right to privacy for what you've created. But her precise reaction is completely unrealistic. She just goes, "Kanno says your painting is good, therefore I now demand to see it." It just shows such a baffling ineptness for human psychology (hence the pokémon joke). It feels like something written by an autistic teenager with a fetish for powerful highschool girls. Maybe it literally is? Either way, the show is incapable of predicting how social situations actually play out in the real world, to a degree that I've never witnessed anywhere else. People often say that anime is autistic, but this show is genuinely more autistic than any anime I've ever seen.
score 2/10
silverspawnx 9 March 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5538673/ |
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16-3-2021 04:56:06