Gregory told Mopey to use a suitable sign, rather than specifying an appropriate one. A small oversight, but with inevitable consequences. One of them being that I had to pixelate it…but the context should narrow it down well enough: some kind of rude symbol that would make all of Mopey’s friends (with the exception of her two new best friends) think of her and lure them to the club room.
As Gregory admits himself, sending a message to the group chat could have achieved the same result with much less effort and disruption, but the problem with that is that the news Gregory received from Mori-senpai are simply too grave and plot-relevant to be shared in such a mundane and trivial way. It’s a matter of staging…the audience must feel the weight of the message in the way the staging leads up to it. Just posting “hi guys we re fucked” in a chat app just doesn’t convey that sense of gravity.
So the situation called for more elaborate way of getting the message out…and in such cases it’s the B-movie way to go above and beyond. Using a bat-signal-equivalent fulfills the exaggeration quota nicely…it’s a concept that barely made sense in the thirties, although in that context you could at least credit it with basic functionality and a lot of originality. But from them on it kept going on sheer weight of icon status.
And icon status is not affected by the sheer impracticality of using a thing like this (for whatever reason it’s even present on the roof of the school, were it was also conspicuously absent in earlier shots) in broad daylight, so what was going to stop Gregory?
More on Monday.
It’s obviously a bat-symbol that is pixelated for copyright reason. No other explanation is possible.
It must be the only explanation. Anything else would just be a dick move, right?