CONTRADICTION, YOUR HONOUR!!@
So, at episode 12 of Gosick, has this show gotten any better? The answer, manifestly, is a big honking NO. In fact, the verdict is now DOA. Turns out that the first arc was the height of deduction for this series so far, which is staggering for a whodunnit. We’re talking elementary school reasoning capabilities at work and Victorique continues with her staggering leaps of poor logic that gets worse and worse as the cases come along.
Now, I understand (adopts otaku-browbeating condescending tone) that the focus of the show is really the gothic lolita, which is all it takes to sell it the show to the scum that will actually fork out cash for it. But even they have to admit she never gets any better in characterization and makes a mockery of the “old wise crone” act she always loves putting on in terms of maturity. The humour quotient also takes a huge plunge and is just made more insulting by Kujo (who is really one of a kind for Victorique) being the densest, most annoying Watson ever in the history of whodunnit literature in all forms of media. In fact, I would suspect him of being a Watson parody if the writing had shown the slightest bit of cleverness with his character, but instead he’s simply just your dumb harem lead transplanted into a different genre, as shown by his rejection of Avril to settle for the daily dose of ritualistic abusement at the hands of the not so brilliant Sherlock rip-off.
The sheer ineptitude of our muscle help here is demonstrated in the third arc (Golden Wolves) in which not only is he of zero use subduing the killer, but he had to be improbably saved from falling to his death by Victorique (the most laughable case of physics ever). If the aim of the character was to annoy me into a blinding rage, I congratulate the writing team, because they’ve succeeded splendidly. Not only are his lines pure drivel (I dare anyone not to grit his teeth at the constant VICTORIKA?^2) but the voice actor also plays his part in making Kujo pure plot poison every time he opens the mouth. My personal theory is that the character was written in this fashion because of the need to contrast the two archetypes, and Victorique is such a poor sleuth that Kujo HAS to be written in this fashion to make her sound brilliant. Any cliché attempts to beef up his character with the third son of soldier backstory is completely laughable, as shown in the pics. Of course, if the show had been clever it would have tried to equalize the dynamic by fusing the Inspector with his sister and having a more level-headed Watson give acerbic one-liners on the soundness of her deduction.
All in all, this show is a huge dud. About all I can recommend is the art direction for the architecture and background sets, which is generally far more inspired than the work for the character designs. Still it’s clearly not enough to save the train wreck.