Meta-blog: Finals done. Moving back home tomorrow. Episode re-review imminent.
As I come out of Nozomi rehabilitation here in the era of Suzuna, it is always fun to see where the madness all began. Here, she was a mere demon spawn who had not even earned her pitchfork yet (she would do so in the very next episode), and before she even appeared in the anime, folks were already pinning the lesbian label on her. Bahaha, we're so psychic. While nothing truly thrilling happens in this episode, it contains a lot of viable set-up, not limited to Hikari's first introduction to an actual contest. Aipom also deserves a mention here, being a long-winded foreshadowing of things to come. A few folks were disappointed about how little contests had changed in DP aside from stickers being a CG eyesore, and while it would have been nice to spice things up, at least we got some new (though inferior) blood.
Pochama's appeal was pretty lame. It's not like she's blasting bubbles from point blank range; rather, a Tetris tower of bubbles very slowly falls on her, but Pochama has the apparent ability to make itself multiply, thus forcing you - the viewer - to buy multiple sets of plushies. I am also not a fan of how Aipom's contest love comes from out of the blue, even if it had never before seen a contest. And at this point, Nozomi is a very dry character with no distinguishable personality outside having a fetish for 10-year-old girls' hair. Looking back on this thread, there seems to have been a lot of animation complaints, which is incredible considering not only how awful DP010 looked, but the fact that this actually may have been the best-looking DP episode up to this point. This episode is a fairly standard contest set-up overall with a few flaws, but at least at this point, I was not yet on Nozomi Derangement Syndrome.
B