but I just can’t really get over how much of the episode was devoted to the lives and backstories of the otome game characters. Either make the characters interesting and unique or let them be just tropes and let us already be familiar with them because they are tropes; don’t waste time explaining the backstory of the copypasted commoner protagonist with rare magic powers going to a school for nobility as if we’ve never heard of that before.

I think that was part of showing the protagonist’s level of familiarity with otome games (a genre your average 50-something male Japanese bureaucrat isn’t likely to care about) in general and the game he’s stuck in in particular. They did spend more time than was perhaps strictly necessary on ramming that point home, but given how much of what’s premiered so far this season has been trash, this show is still looking pretty good by comparison.