The World God Only Knows - Episode 10

Now that we've been introduced to our latest target in the form of Shiori Shiomiya last episode, it's time for Keima to get down to business and start winning her over as his latest conquest.

That said, Keima's approach to Shiori seems hugely unlikely to make her warm to him, as he begins his gambit by talking about what a waste of space books are in this world where all of the information within them could be digitised - I can't say I disagree with him entirely on that front, but of course Shiomiya's feelings are vastly different, and in the end Keima's comments provoke enough anger for her to actual open her mouth and call him an idiot.  This is quite something for a girl who internalises all of her thoughts and feelings, barely daring to speak a word to anyone while happily losing both her mind and consciousness in a good book, as evidenced by a decidedly long monologue on Shiori's part.

As the episode continues so does Keima's "war against books", as he deliberately allows himself to be caught scribbling in them and otherwise slagging off the literature which Shiomiya holds so dear to provoke a response.  Eventually, this overload of anger and frustration is so much that Shiori's inner thoughts becomes her outward conversation while her outer thoughts become an internal monologue - a switch which gives Keima the upper hand.  Come the end of this episode, our protagonist has enough information to get well and truly inside his target's head, which moves us forward to the next episode and his future plan of action.

As per last week's episode, this tenth instalment of The World God Only Knows is a solid offering which builds on everything we saw last time around, but it never really manages to do anything to drag me wholly on-board with its story.  Shiori's personality was made perfectly clear last time out, so I'm not sure it needed to be expounded upon at such length this week, while Keima's personality again becomes hard to bear as he sets out to deliberately annoy Shiori for, ultimately, nothing more than his own benefit.  What's more, this campaign of irritation reaps unrealistically high dividends incredibly quickly, which makes his plan feel somehow both unsatisfactory and unfulfilling.  It seems that no matter how much I want to like this series is always falls a couple of steps short of being anything more than acceptable and hovering in the realms of mediocrity with only the odd purple patch here and there to bring it to life - sadly, this arc hasn't seen any of these more impressive moments so far despite the potential that it seemed to hold.