Review: Victor and Valentino “Charlene Mania”

OVERVIEW

Victor’s plans of having a fun day off is constantly interrupted by Charlene, who keeps spraying him with some “perfume”. The only effect it has is annoying him and slowly making him lose his hair, but everyone else seems to become hopelessly infatuated with her, even dressing as her and making monuments in her honor. She eventually confesses it was a love potion, though Victor hates her so much that he is immune, but everyone else goes insane, forcing Victor and Charlene to work together to undo the spell.

OUR TAKE

Upon bingeing the first season of this show in preparation for these reviews, I have to admit that Charlene’s character design definitely stood out as being pretty dang cute. Add her propensity to create mischief and her precocious crush on Victor and you have a pretty solid recipe for a maximum capacity critical mass of adorable right there. Granted, the Amy Rose style “girl who crushes on one of the mains but is constantly rejected” is a bit played out and gets more concerning the more that she gets rejected but doesn’t learn the meaning of no, but the never fail to make it cute enough to pass. Although when the plot of the episode is that she is constantly trying to coerce Victor to like her via magic perfume, only for that to turn the whole town into a cult for her, it starts to get into the realm of alarming that she doesn’t have to think or self-reflect on how her actions caused this whole mess to begin with.

I mean yeah, honestly my thoughts on this episode were going to be pretty tepid when I first started writing this, but seriously, WHAT THE HELL, Charlene?! Victor may be sneaky and lazy at times, but he earned that day off and he had his plans for it, only to get it completely up ended by someone who clearly does not respect boundaries and is willing to remove the free will of the object of her affection in order to make them like her. Putting all that together, I would probably ALSO have such a burning hatred of her that this perfume would cause my hair to come out, as is apparently the side effect of Victor being so adverse to liking Charlene that it has that effect on him.

I realize that this is an episodic show so there isn’t a whole lot of status quo shifting, but I really hope she’s given a chance to give herself an honest look and maybe change some things about herself. Seriously, everything about this episode is her fault but that’s just completely forgotten by the end. It’s addressed, sure, but it very likely isn’t going to lead to anything substantial. Just because she helped fix it doesn’t change the fact that she caused in in the first place! It also helps that Victor is pretty dumb. Ah well, tomorrow is about supernatural old people!