[DreamSword]

I am now up through episode 32 of Drive and... I dunno.

I'm having alot of conflicting feelings right now, and the short of it is that if the show keeps on the path it's been on, I might be the one guy who prefers the first half of Drive to the latter half.

It's become clear that there wasn't exactly a set in road map in terms of, well, anything when it comes to Drive's'.

Because yes, it is rather oddly paced and not alot of aspects do the best at interconnecting. Certain characters become totally different(Brain), when they aren't just served out of character moments in service to said plot(Heart), and while the atmosphere has become less awkward, I also don't like the direction.

The biggest symbol of this, I feel, is Chase. I actually don't like the way his arc is going because it fully gets rid of one of the aspects of the first half that I really enjoyed: The ideology of Roidmudes being given second chances at better themselves is totally gone with Chase now killing Roidmudes without much of a care, and Shinnosuke and co, for all of the posturing of "finding peace" with the Roidmudes, are now no longer caring about any of them outside of Chase.

This isn't like Ex-Aid where the Juju Burger episode asked the question of "What if there was a good monster?" This is outright raising an angle; That there are good and bad Roidmudes alike, and just tossing it aside so there's a consistent bad guy to blow up. If this were the route they were headed for, it almost makes me wish that episode 20 just wasn't done at all, given how badly is stands against this.

To give the show some benefit of the doubt, there is the chance that I entered into this whole season with the wrong mindset. Afterall, one of the few things I knew about Drive beforehand was posts people had made during the airing of Zero-One, inwhich people called that season "Drive 2." That sort of builds a certain expectation about what exactly the show's' story is going to be like, and I'll say the same thing here that I did when I first heard OOO referred to as "Kuuga 2:" I don't see it. The similarities are superfluous at best.

But I don't feel like my feelings are totally unfounded either given how much Heart, Brain, and Chase in the early episodes were talking about things like Roidmudes being liberated from humans and becoming just people and so on. There was really not alot to suggest that entire conflict was anything other than a group of robots getting back at the humans who they felt wronged them first. But ever since the introduction of 001 as the new big bad, there's pretty much nothing other than the evil robot cliche, to the point that Chase now just kills them all without any sort of care in the world. Much less interesting of an angle.

I'd also argue that the biggest flaw of the first half only got worse in this stretch. Did said first half rely a bit too much on Chase delaying progress? Sure, but at the very least Chase was an interesting character. Here in the second act, we get the "Go is mind controlled plot" and it's very forcibly drawn out by Chase not telling Kiriko what's going on. Very blatantly too. It's not even like the mind control has lead to any interesting character stuff either. Now it's just Go delaying things the same way that Chase used to, and when combined with nothing compelling to back it it just made some episodes feel like they dragged. And with how 32 ended, I unfortunately don't feel like that's going to change anytime soon.

I dunno, I'm not out and out hating Drive or anything, I still feel like the show is overall decent, but man, what a downturn in terms of my own personal tastes.