Day One Hundred and Forty-three - Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne, Episode 1, "Okay, hold on... did that woman just attach a chain to-OHMYGAWD!!"

I felt it was time to try another Netflix anime of a series that I'd never watched before. Initial impressions were somewhat promising, as the title card was suitably fan-service friendly, but it was yet another one without dual audio.

Well, they can't all have terrible dubs, so I gave it a try.

Really, the dub wasn't the problem, as it was actually somewhat decent... and neither was the plot or the art style all that troubling (well, I do have one or two needling issues there). It was the brutality gimmick that really bothered me.

See, Rin:DoM centers on a buxom private detective type who has the uncanny ability of resurrection. In the cold opener of the episode, we are treated to her very violent and certainly unhappy death as she's tagged several times by a shotgun and plummets quite a few stories from the rooftops to street level.

Granted, in the very next scene we're shown that she's perfectly fine the following morning, but still... it was hard to watch.

After the cold opener, the majority of the episode revolves around a man who feels his memory, his very life, isn't his own. Rin takes it upon herself to investigate and stumbles onto professional hitmen, secret cloning and organ harvesting operations, and a very disturbing sadist doctor-lady... oh, and zombies.

Weak storytelling and the horror gimmicks randomly popping up aside, what is truly disturbing are the lengths of brutal domination and torture that the author forces Rin to endure for the sake of... well, what? Gratuity is all I can come up with.

Literally the sadist doctor pierces every fleshy bit of Rin's body, going so far as to attach a long length of chain to what is implied to be her genitals... a chain that the evil doctor yanks just for the heck of it.

Ick.

Also, ugh.

It's those moments that are just completely unnecessary and over the top. Not that I'm a fan of censorship, I just can't call the anime quality when it resorts to this level of on-screen torture to fill some time.

Then, there's the zombie horde that just comes out of nowhere.

I mean, I could swallow the evil sadist doc-lady cloning people to harvest their organs... I could also live with the hand-wavey way she macguffined a "chemical memory transfer" so that the clones retain the original's personality... but random zombies?

What the hell?

The little trouble I had with the art is that a lot of the featured style swings way too liberally back and forth between flat and boring and overly extravagant. Like everything is dull and solid colored until you get to that one frame where Rin is putting on nylons and THEN there's deep texture.

Meh.

I'll probably stick around an episode or two more, despite the red flags, just to give the series a chance to redeem itself... but, anime really doesn't work that way. It's stories are generally already written and approved long before anything gets animated. I don't hold much hope for improvement, but we'll see.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~