Dawnleaf Watches Sunday Without God: Episode 2 – Do Gravekeepers Dream of Zombie Sheep?

Please forgive me for my two week hiatus.  I was on vacation, and I figured that I really needed a break from this whole Vampire Knight business, anyway.   All right, on to the anime Sunday Without God, which doesn’t have vampires in it but does have a white-haired pretty-boy with a gun and undeads degenerating into animalistic creatures who run on instinct.  Aaaargh…

We meet a pretty purple-haired woman who introduces herself as Scar.  I’m not the only one who has ‘Be Prepared’ stuck in their head now, right?  Okay, good.  This woman is a gravekeeper, and our resident snow-haired asshole explains how she has no emotions and just acts blandly polite, like most politicians.  However, I’d say that she seems to function more like Google, with the way he talks to her.

She confirms that Ai indeed is a gravekeeper, even though she doesn’t even remotely act like one.  Unless it’s all a complex façade, but that can’t be because then it would be interesting.  And pointless.  Admittedly, I did get some enjoyment out of the guy’s reaction at being told that he was wrong.  It’s probably because I don’t like him, though.

We also get to see him get shot, and I honestly cheered when a brunet with a gun rounded the corner, and made the split-second decision that this new guy is my favorite character and began chanting “SHOOT HIM AGAIN!”  Admittedly, it would have been pretty difficult to explain if anyone else was in the room with me.

Okay, so why, exactly, do I not like Mr. Humbert?  I mean, besides his weird design (I understand why he isn’t facing the camera in most of the promotional material, his eye shape/placement and his head look odd face-on), he’s just sort of a dick.  He acts so self-confident, like everything he says is 100% right and everyone else is an idiot.  Like he’s got everything all down, and no one else gets it.  And that it’s perfectly all right for him to force his beliefs on other people and murder them, and anyone who calls him on it just doesn’t want to admit that they’re wrong, man. 

The brunet who shot him shot him hates him because he murdered his wife, and our white-haired pretty-boy acts like she needed to die and it was totally his decision to make and that the brunet just didn’t want her to die. 

He’s also immortal now, so add ‘unkillable’ to the list of his traits.  Literally, when he got shot, his biggest worry was that his badass coat now has a hole in it.  Maybe this would be entertaining if he acted really camp and then started complaining about how his nails are broken and how his hair is all messed up, etc.  And he doesn’t age, too.  I bet Ai doesn’t, either, because lolis are eternal.

He also goes on about how Ai has to give up on being a gravekeeper and forget about her old life if she’s going out into the world, and turns a gun on her when she says that she doesn’t want to.  I don’t even like Ai and that scene made me want to repeatedly punch him in the face. 

Oh, and then, the anime starts trying to make us like him.  It’ll take a bit more than some comedic dialogue with Ai, a piggy-back-ride, and a few cookies to make me forget this entitled asshole’s random murdering antics and dickery.  In fact, every time they do that, it makes me hate the show more because it makes them look incredibly wishy-washy about the handling of his character, and really showcases how terrible this anime is at making me like it.

And I still am really not exactly what direction this anime is trying to take.  There still is no clear end goal.  A story with no real goal is okay if the characters are decently interesting or likeable, but I feel like I’ve made my feelings about them fairly obvious.  Ai’s just your typical loli (and a lot of the drama in this hinges on you feeling for her, so her not being all that unique or likeable makes it feel shallow), and the guy’s… well…  Y’know.  The brunet guy (with the extremely feminine name ‘Julie’) might be okay, but Mr.  Hampnie Humbert blew him off, so who the hell knows?  And they were childhood friends, which might have added some interesting tension, but screw that crap!  It’s not explored at all.  The white-haired pretty-boy treats him the same arrogant, aloof way he treats everyone else, and Julie treats him the way you would treat a stranger who killed a loved one.

Oh, and why the hell isn’t Ai angry at him?  She isn’t.  She trusts him. She refuses to ride on his back.  Why?  “It would be embarrassing!”  How about, “HE MURDERED EVERYONE I EVER KNEW FOR NO REASON!”  She gives him cookies.  Is this anime going to make her have a crush on him?  Why is he even keeping her around, anyway?  Is he a pedophile?

He doesn’t even tell her why he murdered everyone.  He tells her to figure it out herself.  I think the show will probably cough up some BS reason in the future about how they were already dead or something, but Ai doesn’t know that.  She shouldn’t be giving him the benefit of the doubt.  He hasn’t done anything to show that he didn’t just do it for funzies.

And Ai’s apparently half-gravekeeper.  I don’t understand how, if humans can’t reproduce, a human and a gravekeeper can, and even why a gravekeeper would, but meh.  Maybe I should do a post of ‘relevant’ questions in which I spend more than half of it asking questions which gradually degenerate into me asking why this is called Sunday Without God if it doesn’t explicitly take place on Sunday and if they make clothes out of zombie sheep.