Love of Kill is starting to feel a little bit lost. I noted early on that with the amount of time spent each episode on recap kind of made me worry that Love of Kill didn’t have enough actual plot to fill a season and episode 5 is definitely not making me feel reassured that this story is on solid ground.
The throwaway one villain to find out they were working for someone else who sends another minion ploy is plot stretching at its worst and it makes it really hard to care about any of the interim steps because ultimately you know nothing fatal will happen to a key character until we’re further along the food chain.
Love Of Kill just feels a little bit empty.
Honestly, I really want to like this story and I’m still really liking Song’s character. But it is definitely the more the idea of the story than the story I’m enjoying at this point and if I step back and cast a critical eye over this episode I’d have to honestly say nothing of particular interest happened.
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Sure Song takes out the mediocre threat (the guy who apparently can’t feel stun guns, incidentally they doubled down on the whole fried nerve idiocy from last week with Song making a really forced reference to it after the guy takes multiple bullets before finally being put down) and collects Chateau who had escaped the car before it exploded (as everyone had already suspected) but was now injured.
About the only unique development here is that Song also took an injury and Chateau finally gets to have a turn in taking him to safety.
Naturally Love of Kill decides this is the perfect time to get Jim, the guy from the office who has no mouth and a voice that just does not connect with anything else in the anime, more involved. Thanks, but I could have done without that. From character design to his voice there is nothing about this character that I wanted more of in this story and yet here he is and honestly there isn’t one minute he’s on screen that doesn’t kind of break me out of the story and world.
Maybe that’s being needlessly harsh or nit-picky to a decidedly minor point in the grand scheme of things. Still, it is how I feel about it and to be honest given both the boss and Jim board the boat with Chateau to start a new job at the end of the episode, I suspect both of these so far non-characters are suddenly going to play a larger role (which the OP certainly suggested they would).
But what I’d really like is more Song and Chateau.
I guess we don’t always get what we want. Though I suspect my enjoyment of Love of Kill is going to decline proportionally to the amount of screen time Jim gets.
Besides, who wouldn’t want more of the guy, who despite being stabbed in the side still has enough moxy to flirt with Chateau and isn’t even deterred after she pokes him in his wound.
As much as Love of Kill is offering a different take on romance, it just isn’t a solid enough anime in its own right and there’s too many missed opportunities or decisions that I wish had gone a different way to really say I’m loving this story. But I will persist in watching it because it isn’t a train wreck and those elements I do like are keeping me intrigued and hopeful that maybe Love of Kill can pull itself together for a solid final act.
Images from: Love of Kill. Dir. H Ooba. Platinum Vision. 2022
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Karandi James
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