New Season (and No Bloody New Entries)

Herro. I am back.
Actually, I'm not sure why I'm back, since maybe four people on this planet read this (I know three of them, and the fourth one is a certain person who may or may not be me), but hey, writing is good for me.
Wait, let me rephrase that.
Writing is my only way of doing something constructive instead of sitting in my basement and guzzling stale cola. That should be more like it.
So well, we have a new season on our hands (and it's kinda sticky and won't come off no matter how hard you scrub), so maybe I should get my ass in gear and review.

Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! (hereafter known as Chu2Koi)

Well, well, well. What have we here. Another high-school-romance-with-a-twist series.
You can barely look through the lineup of the last two seasons without being hit in the face by another case of "high-school boy meets girl, but..."
Another. BONK.
Dusk Maiden. BONK.
Hyouka. BONK.
Kokoro Connect. BONK.
Nyaruko. FHTAGN.
High School DxD. SPLAT.

Now I'm never gonna get that stain off.
Well, half-assed jokes aside, Chu2Koi suffers from a bad case of seen-it-before. Yuuta's character design, for example, is painfully generic in the first place, not to mention that we saw the exact same back when Hyouka and Kokoro Connect were running. Exact same, I tell you.
Is there some kind of brain-plague among character designers that makes them unable to think up more than three possible character designs for high-school-age boys? Even when the series isn't a projection-oriented one, every single protagonist is still so astrofucking generic that I literally have trouble telling the difference between them. Is it that hard to come up with a character design (or now we're at it, a concept) that, while it doesn't have to be completely novel, is at least not a carbon copy of at least a dozen others out there, just given a touch with the color picker and having a crude black bar scrawled in pencil over the serial numbers? Bloody hell, you'd at least think that they could make a main character who's (GOD MY OH) black-haired. It's not even that much of a far cry, in the name of the Spinning Martian Jesus-Lizard. It doesn't change the character's personality or anything. It only serves to distinguish him. Or is that a crime in the world of KyoAni? I can vividly imagine a character designer who dared to make a leading male with blue hair (in a world where hair colors seem to be chosen by using the color-picker tool on a high-contrast photo of the Copenhagen Pride Parade) being dragged off by fomori to be fed into the Character Designer Broiler, where all the fired character designers go to die and then be eaten by Mikaboshi.
What? I had a series to review? Well, fuck.
So well, aside from the character designs and setting, Chu2Koi actually manages to be genuinely novel and entertaining. Its main sources of humor are cringe comedy and slapstick, both of which it does respectably well. Reaction shots are a special forte here, too, one of them actually being well-done enough to reach my withered little heart, shrunken into a cold, hard little pebble of pure hate by years of reviewing, and make me laugh out loud. The series' approach to the high-school love-com setting is refreshingly tongue-in-cheek, and the whole chuunibyou topic is enough to make the series seem less stale.
However, there still doesn't seem to be a lot to work with, and it seems as if it's only a matter of time before the chuunibyou gimmick runs out and the soulless marketroids get into the plot, turning it into
yet another
romantic drama, utterly raping what could have been a great series and then shitting down its throat. The main problem here is quite simply that its gimmick doesn't seem to be very long-lived, and I have an accurate Spider-Sense tingling in my hideously bloated gallbladder that tells me that it's gonna wear off about midway through the series, like all the other otaku-comedies out there, and that it's gonna turn into the seventeenth or so good show of the last decade ruined by the ham-handed application of predictable, cliché, bleeding-heart romance.
Then I will be sitting in my chair, screaming and flailing and firing mouth-launched Excelion Breakers left and right, and it will do nothing.
And Mikaboshi will be sitting in his chair in the Wicked City, and he will be laughing. And laughing. And laughing.
Rating: 75/100. I wish I could hope that it would keep on being that good, but I know that it won't, and it pains me oh-so-much.