No spoilers for micro-episode 1, Unendurable Labyrinth, but I will go hard on "The Bully" spoilers in this review.
Unendurable Labyrinth is kinda fine--maybe a 6 star micro episode. The setup and worldbuilding is good but the payoff cuts off the climax way too fast. I wanted some denouement for that one, personally.
"The Bully" on the other hand is one of the more 'interesting' episodes but probably one of the most actually f'd up episodes of the season. The premise is that this girl gives some initial kindness to a lonely boy and he immediately gets fixated on her, at which point her kindness gets warped into bullying. The thing is this gets all sorts of weird if you actually think about it. Like, maybe it's a long-con revenge story, but even if so, it's an extremely f'd up revenge story to basically take the object of your revenge, give them a kid, and then have your 'revenge' be them abusing this new child. How is that revenge? And if it isn't revenge, what even is it? As soon as you think about this story, it's terrible people doing terrible things to each other and to other totally innocent kids, and acts of kindness becoming acts of violence as a result. Sometimes Ito stories fail because the moral is too obvious or mundane, but this is maybe the only one where I'm fascinated by the twists but think I actually disagree with the logic that goes into the premise at some level.
Unendurable Labyrinth is kinda fine--maybe a 6 star micro episode. The setup and worldbuilding is good but the payoff cuts off the climax way too fast. I wanted some denouement for that one, personally.
"The Bully" on the other hand is one of the more 'interesting' episodes but probably one of the most actually f'd up episodes of the season. The premise is that this girl gives some initial kindness to a lonely boy and he immediately gets fixated on her, at which point her kindness gets warped into bullying. The thing is this gets all sorts of weird if you actually think about it. Like, maybe it's a long-con revenge story, but even if so, it's an extremely f'd up revenge story to basically take the object of your revenge, give them a kid, and then have your 'revenge' be them abusing this new child. How is that revenge? And if it isn't revenge, what even is it? As soon as you think about this story, it's terrible people doing terrible things to each other and to other totally innocent kids, and acts of kindness becoming acts of violence as a result. Sometimes Ito stories fail because the moral is too obvious or mundane, but this is maybe the only one where I'm fascinated by the twists but think I actually disagree with the logic that goes into the premise at some level.