Archive for the English Anime Category


Turkey! Time to Strike

July 13th, 2025

On a bright blue sky, piles high with fluffy white clouds, five girls in Japanese school uniforms fly.So, Okazu Staff all read the initial comments about this series and decided right away that this one was going to have to be a group review. ^_^

On the face of it, Turkey! Time to Strike,which is streaming on Crunchyroll, seems like a relatively typical school cute girls doing cute things sports club anime, with girls bowling as the sport of choice. Mai-chan is a brilliant bowler, who always seems to choke. Her friends are part of the bowling club because she asked them to be. Rina, their star bowler, has had it with the low energy of the group and threatens to quit.

A paranormal plot complication will render everything in the above paragraph moot.

Director for this series is Kudo Susumu, fresh off the mess that was Momentary Lily. Scriptwriter Hiruta Naomi seems to be primarily a writer for television dramas with a penchant for paranormal narratives, as we see.

So, what did the Okazu Staff think about Turkey! Time To Strike?

 

Christian

I don’t think I’ve seen the ‘cute girls doing cute things’ genre take on bowling before, and I definitely haven’t seen a bowling anime launch into the twist that we get at the end of the first episode. In bowling parlance, a turkey is three strikes in a row, which is what Mai is capable of, but she always chokes afterwards. (If she’s choking because the turkey’s too dry, I suggest she drink some Ramune with it, which the cast were doing their absolute best to advertise mid-show). A golden turkey (nine strikes) later evolves into a dinosaur (perfect game), which I hope is where we’re headed, in case we get a new twist every episode or so; I could definitely see Sayuri getting eaten by a Brazilian Irritator later on to try and get the audience invested, as she doesn’t seem like she’ll get much character development at first glance.

Rina is the only one on the team who takes bowling very seriously, and is one of those characters who believes that someone’s bowling performance is an expression of their true feelings. I feel bad for her and her and her aspirations, as she is the literal embodiment of how “it’s hard to soar with the eagles when you’re surrounded by turkeys.”

Overall, this is a fine first episode; yes, it’s bad in the way that a lot of anime is bad, but not in a way that should stop anyone from continuing to watch.

 

Eleanor

Much like director Susumu Kodo’s previous effort and subject of our last Okazu Staff group review, the absolute trainwreck which was Momentary Lily, Turkey! seems to be a combination of two entirely different ideas mashed together because the studio only had enough budget to make one. At least it’s not GoHands this time. My favourite character by far was Nanase (the purple haired one), who during one of Mai’s main character monologues says something along the lines of “I can’t tell if that’s meant to be profound or not” followed a few minutes later by “…definitely not profound.” One could be forgiven for thinking this was in fact just a 24 minute advert for Ramune soda, but since it’s showing signs of possibly being self aware thanks to Nanase, (who coincidentally is the only character apart from Rina who isn’t a childhood friend of Mai)  I’ll give it a couple more episodes and see what happens. In the meantime if you want to watch an actually good girls’ sports anime with an avian reference in the title, go watch Birdie Wing.

 

Erica

Merriam-Webster dictionary has, in recent years, become a force for good, on Twitter, especially. Using it’s platform to explain and educate, the folks there have kept their finger on the zeitgeist, with a clear eye to providing context. Today I will take a literal page from them and start with a definition of the word Turkey:

turkey (noun)
Pronunciation: tur·​key ˈtər-kē
Plural: turkeys

1 a large North American gallinaceous bird (Meleagris gallopavo) that is domesticated in most parts of the world
2 failure, flop especially : a theatrical production that has failed
3: three successive strikes in bowling
4: a stupid, foolish, or inept person

There is a fifth definition: to speak truthfully, so let us talk turkey about Turkey! Time to Strike.

This anime has a heavy-handed and portentous beginning, that keeps us on edge throughout the generic set-up that both my wife and I named a couple of other anime that have similar set-ups in plot or subplot. So when the star threatens to quit, I was, likewise, one foot out the door, with intent to check back in when the story was almost over and we were at the big competition, with Mai and Rina competing against each other for different teams. I did not expect the different teams to be the Tokugawa clan versus the Toyotomi.

Turkey! is still both silly and somewhat boring with animation that occasionally rises from phoned in to entirely over the top. At least it’s not by Go Hands. (Despite that, their shadow lays heavily over this anime.)

Anyway, four of the above five definitions apply to Turkey! Time to Strike. And I don’t put it past this anime to squeeze in that last one somewhere.

 

Frank

Did you know that three high-tech executives once tried to take professional bowling, pigeonholed as a sport for nerdy guys, and turn it into mass-market entertainment? How’d that work out? Well, despite their best efforts to jazz it up, it looks like it’s still a sport for nerdy guys (albeit nerdy guys with tattoos). That shouldn’t stop anime creators though, as they can deploy the time-honored strategy of having nerdy activities be practiced by anime girls. However, the creators of Turkey! seem to lack faith in the power of the vanilla CGDCT playbook: the end of the first episode sees them resort to a second time-honored strategy to juice up nerdy pursuits, namely having their practitioners be isakai-ed somewhere else where they can teach the natives a thing or two.

Boring sports can be rendered palatable to the average anime viewer. Look no further than Birdie Wing, which did it by taking JoJo-esque characters and over-the-top plots and mixing in a heaping helping of yuri subtext. Whether Turkey! can duplicate that success remains to be seen. But it’s going to take more than having our girls instruct Oda Nobunaga in the finer points of converting the ten-pin spare.

 

Luce

Club members have friction all the time. Especially in sports clubs, there will be conflict between those who want to succeed at it, and those who just want to have fun. Honestly, neither is incorrect, but there has to be a way of managing that. In a club as small as five members, if you get one overly ambitious member, it can alienate everyone else. It did feel like we got thrown into episode 3, rather than 1, but it did a relatively decent, if clunky, job of getting the vibe of the club over. At least there’s no balloon boobs like Momentary Lily.

Oh, and I guess they get isekai’d via a lightning struck spherical object that psychically connects with Mai’s bowling ball? Here’s hoping they don’t just immediately die on the battlefield.

 

Matt

Turkey! lulls you into a false sense of normalcy. 80% of the episode is standard hobby anime fair, although it seems to begin in medias res as the Bowling Club teeters on disbandment with the serious first year, Rina, calling out the team’s inadequacies and quitting. The surprise doesn’t come until the end, where our heroines find themselves transported via magic bowling ball to the middle of a feudal battle.

To be honest, there isn’t anything terribly wrong with this first episode. OK, one of the characters making a pun swapping “bowling” with “boreholing” is a bit eye-rolly. The real test will be what happens next—will Mai finally embrace her desire to win by bowling over dozens of samurai? This may be the first piece of bowling media with a body count since There Will Be Blood.

If I were writing the script, I would have made Rina not just an underachieving prodigy, but a demigod/cosmic horror being that tears the fabric of reality if she bowls a hambone—that is, four consecutive strikes. The finale would pit her desire to win for her team against the threat that bowling a perfect 300 would end all existence, but she goes for it anyway Because She Believes In Her Friends. Could that still happen? Sure! Or maybe they’ll just all be clones again (spoilers for Momentary Lily).

 

Overall – It could be worse, you might as well watch it, because you have a Crunchyroll subscription and it wasn’t as bad as Momentary Lily, which gets 4 mentions here to 3 for Birdie Wing.





The Rose of Versailles movie, streaming on Netflix

May 12th, 2025

In the animated halls of Versailles, gleaming in the sunlight, Marie Antoinette in a pink and white dress is accompanied by a tall blonde wearing a red Royal Guard uniform,. One the left a noble man in a blue coat looks over his should her at Antoinette, who looks at him. In the shadows on the right a servant in a green suit of clothes looks at them.The Rose of Versailles movie, streaming on Netflix, is an ambitious, entertaining and colorful condensation of Riyoko Ikeda’s masterwork manga series set in the days leading up to the French Revolution. 

I was honored to be the editor for the English-language edition of The Rose of Versailles manga, published by Udon Entertainment. As a result, I am among a select few who can claim to have spent many intimate hours with the text of this magnum opus. I am no more intimate with the Dezaki anime than most other fans, having seen it two or three times (more on that later.) But the manga? I know that very well. ^_^

After opening credits that flash gilded splendor and brightly colored character designs in a dizzying display, we are flying above the carriage of Marie Antoinette as she, the new Dauphine, rides into Paris to the great acclaim of the French people. We are presented with a song of hope, that hunger and strife will be things of the past, now that their beautiful and beloved Antoinette arrives.

When then meet Oscar François de Jarjayes, the young scion of the noble de Jarjayes family. Born a girl, Oscar has been raised as a boy since her birth. She has been assigned the rank of Captain of the Queen’s Guard and is, likewise, acclaimed as beautiful and talented. 

What follows is a tightly wound story, focusing on a mere four characters from this grand historical epic: Oscar, Marie Antoinette, Oscar’s servant Andre Grandier, and Hans Axel von Fersen, an envoy from Sweden. To quote from the very first panels of the manga itself, “1755… In this year, three individuals who would eventually have a fateful encounter at Versailles, France were born in three different European countries.”

The manga is a massive 1300+ page epic, spanning the years before and after the French Revolution, looking at this tumultuous time from the perspectives of noble and commoner alike, centering the experience of one person, Oscar, who moved between the classes through circumstance and choice and whose decisions come to rest on the side of the people. 

The anime is a brilliant look at court life and the circumstances that turned the people against the Royal family.

This movie is about those three people mentioned in the first panels of the manga and the fourth, a loyal and loving servant carried in Oscar’s wake. To tell this more personal tale, much of the historical context is removed and some of the personal context is re-imagined as musical numbers. I really enjoyed these, noting that, of all four, only Oscar is ever seen “singing” any portion of the song. Animation during those musical numbers was grand in the way that Versailles is grand – over-produced and hard to watch, too much to take in. It was perfect.

While we’re on the topic of Versailles, this anime does the same thing the original anime does – it simplifies the visuals of Versailles. We see that it look fancy, but that is not how it looks at all. Versailles is entirely covered inside with marbles and porphyries and paintings so that there is nowhere for one’s eyes to rest. Every inch of floor and wall and ceiling is illustrated and gilded. This is important to understand, because as we see a young, presumably naive Marie Antoinette being besotted by clothes and watches and jewelry (and, in reality gambling), we must understand that Versailles is beyond normal people’s reckoning of how money is meant to spent. This is literally the kind of opulence the current US President aspires to, but as he is a short-fingered vulgarian, his vision is limited with no artistic aesthetic value, so his towers are classlessly gilded and tawdry. But I digress. My point is, that in the manga, we are meant to be exasperated with Marie Antoinette from the beginning, losing faith in her along with the French people and losing hope when when her own mother writes her to stop, already and remember her responsibility as well as her privilege. We are given leave to sympathize with her again at the very end of her life, as a mother who cares deeply for her children but, although she retains her dignity to the end, she also retains her unchanged belief in royalty’s claim of power granted by God, which makes her a hard person to like.

What this movie does well is frequently pay homage to both the manga from which it sprang and the original television anime series, directed by Dezaki Osamu, which led to his later masterwork direction on Dear Brother. We are frequently given moments from the anime, reimagined, and we once again meet old friends, who get a line or two: Rosalie, Bernard, Alain, Girodelle. Girodelle had 6 lines. I counted. I love Girodelle, in part for the fact that translation of his name is a key element in the presentations I was doing about translation and editing some years ago. Of the principle characters in the first half of the story, Girodelle is one of the few nobles who has no basis in history. So is ジェローデル Girodel or Girodelle? He only has one purple suit and I know how his story ends, which was a whole homage of it’s own. I won’t spoil the fun, though, in hopes that one day we finally do get the Rose of Versailles Episodes volume 1.

Homage to the manga comes in still screen shots (something Dezaki favors in his anime) that are rendered to look more like the manga, especially classic “shock eyes.” I know I mentioned this before, but while editing RoV, I collected a lovely assortment of  Osca’rs expressions and eyes. So much of the story is told through the way she changes, from her youthful determination

to the moment she chooses her fate – her look of grief and despair cloaked in her desire to not waste her death.

Many of these looks are captured by this movie, something I really appreciated. The scene where Andre and Oscar spend the night together is also very reminiscent of the manga, to great effect.

Every time I watch this series to review it, it is so politically relevant I feel a bit nauseous. My first encounter with it was when Bush “nice-guyed” us into wars we did not belong in, and the second time, I finished the final disk just as police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mississippi and again at the protests of that death, and this time I watched the movie as a petty and gobsmackingly incompetent man is funded by another petty and delusional man in order to destroy our Commons, so they can scrape more money out of our economy for their clothes, jewelry and gambling and the Mar-a-Petite Trianon. As prices rise and shelves start looking empty, I have to expect that we will be seeing scenes similar to those in this movie.

The voice acting was top-notch throughout, but I feel the need to praise Sawashiro Miyuki’s Oscar for a powerful performance throughout. She was outstanding in every scene, but the night before the storming of the Bastille, as she querulously ask if Andre would sleep with her, with a catch in her voice of fear and hope…breathtaking.

A number of people I respect felt that this movie was a superficial treatment of the story, I politely disagree. It chose a new path through this story, focusing not on events, or politics, or economics, but on the lives of four people who live through this history-changing event. And as that, I found it a fresh and approachable take on one of the greatest historical manga of all time.

Ratings:

Animation – 9 CGI was a little intrusive in some places, but the more over-the-top, the better it worked.
Characters – 9 We still get a sense of them
Story – 9 Of all the revolutions, the French Revolution never ceases to be relevant

Overall – 9

I understand why, when I stood on the spot formerly occupied by the Bastille, that there is no trace of the building. I wonder what our next revolution will pull down.

In happier thoughts, I am reminded of the time we visited the Margaret magazine 40th anniversary exhibition and were able to pose with Oscar and Andre, but the moment that really blew my head off, was coming around the corner to find myself facing the portrait of Oscar as Mars that, in the OG anime, she commissioned. There it was, lifesize in oils, and for a moment, reality bent and it was all real. ^_^

 





Anne Shirley, Streaming on Crunchyroll

April 30th, 2025

In a large field of flowers, two girls make flower crowns. A girl in a green dress and dark hair places a crown of flowers on the head of a red-haired girl in a white jumper dress over a dark read blouse who clutches a flower crown in here hands.Guest Review by Burkely Hermann

Burkely Hermann is a writer, researcher, and former metadata librarian. His reviews can be read on Pop Culture Maniacs or his personal WordPress blog. He can be followed on Instagram, Bluesky, or on Mastadon communities such as library.love, glammr.us, genealysis.social, and historians.social.

Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan girl who has a troubled childhood and comes to live with her cousins (the Cuthberts) in a house named Green Gables on Prince Edward Island in Canada. While Anne’s cousins were expecting a boy instead of a girl, Matthew quickly warms up to her, taken in by her active imagination. However, Marilla wants to replace her with a boy, at first, but later comes to like Anne. Even so, she attempts to be strict and firm with her, in an attempt to tame Anne’s impulses and occasionally stubborn nature, which are seen as socially unacceptable, like wearing a flower crown to church. Through it all, Anne becomes used to her new life, farmwork at Green Gables, family-of-sorts, and friends, even though she has many insecurities and loses her temper when people make fun of her. Anne Shirley is the newest anime adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic 1908 book Anne of Green Gables. The last time this story had an anime adaptation was in the late 1970s.
The series artistry is colorful and vibrant, thanks to Answer Studio and character designer Kenichi Tsuchiya. He previously worked as the key animator on 37 out of 39 of episodes of the classic yuri anime Dear Brother. Anne Shirley has a nice, charming, and beautiful feel to it. This is complimented by Michiru Ōshima’s wonderful music composition, which sets the mood for series, especially when it comes to Anne, which the series centers around. Ōshima previously composed the music score for Bloom Into You. Series writer Natsuko Takahashi also screenwrote for two series with yuri themes: Blue Drop and Stardust Telepath. Furthermore, some of the series cast have lent their talents to voice characters in Kannazuki no Miko, Fragtime, Blue Drop, Akebi’s Sailor Uniform, and other media with yuri(ish) themes. For instance, Yume Miyamoto, who voices Diana Berry in this series, voiced Rouge Redstar in Metallic Rouge last year. Otherwise, voice acting is one of the strong suits of Anne Shirley.
Vrai Kaiser for Anime Feminist has said that viewers can see traces of protagonist Anne in the “evolution of shoujo and yuri” and stated that Anne’s friendship with Diana fits into the “tradition of Class S” that Yoshiya Nobuka pioneered beginning in the early 20th century. Some years ago, on this very site, it was noted that the scenes, in the original novel, in which Anne and Diana take friendship vows “could be as romantic as anyone could wish.” Otherwise, many years ago, scholar Laura Robinson quibbed that Anne, during the aforementioned novel, “consistently establishes intense relationships with women” and manages, while achieving community social acceptance, to disturb complacent attitudes on everything, including sexuality.
The second episode of Anne Shirley is where the yuri-ish content of the series begins. Anne meets Diana for the first time and they agree to be “very best friend[s].” They solemnly swear to be faithful bosom friends, i.e. very close, cherished, or intimate companions, “as long as the sun and moon may endure,” while holding hands. There’s a certain romantic aura to it, which reminded immediately of the beautiful scene between two protagonists in RWBY‘s most recent volume. Otherwise, Anne gushes about Diana to Marilla, and signals to Diana in Morse code before going to sleep, again showing their connection.
In the episode thereafter, Diana’s painting (that she gifted to Anne) is hung in Anne’s room. Later, at the Sunday school picnic, Diana calls Anne her “dearest friend” and places a flower crown upon her head. For two days in a row, Anne walks to school with Diana and the other neighborhood girls, and all of them have fun together. Diana makes clear her worries about Anne after she hits Gilbert Blythe, a playboy adored by fellow schoolgirls, over the head with her school slate after he makes fun of her red hair. Not long after Anne tells Diana she would do almost anything for her before leaving school. In that same episode, the series opening sequence is shown for the first time. Among many other moments, it features Anne and Diana dancing together, and enjoying one another’s company, leaning against a fence, when both are older, with Diana holding a flower crown in her hands.
The most recent episode had some of the strongest yuri-ish moments, if they can be called that, in Anne Shirley as a whole. Anne expresses her worry that Diana will leave her when she gets married to a man. When it is threatened (by Diana’s mother) that they will never see each other again after Anne accidentally gets Diana drunk, they promise to one another in a manner that makes them sound like lovers. At one point, Diana says “I couldn’t love anybody as [much] I love you” and declares that she will always love Anne devotingly. Anne acknowledges and reciprocates Diana’s love. Following this, she kisses her on the forehead and cuts off a lock of her hair (with Diana’s consent), and promises to remain faithful to her. As they part, tears are shed, especially by Diana. Their separation is short-lived. Anne and Diana writes letters to one another, which fellow students pass to them in the one-room schoolhouse, either declaring that they love each other or will be together until “death do us part.”
Unsurprisingly, Anne and Diana are allowed to be on speaking terms again after Anne helps Diana’s sister Minnie May get better from terrible and deadly cough. The episode ends with Anne reading a letter Diana sent her, with both voice actors reading the last two lines together, including the statement that “nothing but death can part us two,” which foreshadows that something will pull them apart in the future. I am reminded of what Pragya Agarwal wrote in The Conversation about medieval women: that letters gave them the opportunity to “express themselves and wield power, when they had little other means of exerting influence,” while allowing them to express their “forbidden” emotions. The same idea applies here to Diana and Anne. When the former’s mother put a clampdown on their close friendship, this did not stop them from communicating. In fact, their communications became more eloquent and abundantly made clear their deep emotional connection.
While the original novel and previous adaptations have a heterosexual ending, akin to the ending of Dear Brother, or the heterosexuality baked into the Western animated series Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure, which have yuri themes and yuri subtext respectfully, this series is slated for a full run of twenty-four episodes, with nineteen remaining. It will likely end in a heterosexual way with Anne becoming romantically involved with Gilbert (since Anne dances with him in the series opening). Even so, there is no denying that the strong and intimate female friendship between Anne and Diana will remain a key part of the series going forward.
Ratings:
Art – 9
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Service – Maybe 1 or 2? This is pretty tame.
Yuri – 2 or 3
Music – 9
Overall – 8
With four episodes currently aired, I am curious to see where this series goes from here, even though I am fully aware it won’t have yuri themes anywhere close to Marimite nor Rock Is A Lady’s Majesty, both of which have Class S themes. There’s something to be said for intimate female friendship, which seems in vogue for anime these days, and that’s what’s a fundamental part of this series, even if it (more likely than not) has a heterosexual ending.
 
Erica here: for this interested in the making of the original 1979 anime based on Anne of Green Gables, check out ANN’s Richard Eisenbeis talking with the voice of Anne for that anime, Yamada Eiko.




Rock Is A Lady’s Modesty, Streaming on HIDIVE

April 14th, 2025

Four girls, dressed in old-fashioned modest white Japanese school uniforms, with black trim, rock out hard at one another, glaring over their instruments.If you hang around in Yuri spaces long enough, you’ll discover that an inordinately large amount of early Yuri takes place in private schools for young women from the upper classes. There are several good reasons for this. One, by putting the story in a place or time or status level that is unreachable by the average reader, the story is given an exoticism, and therefore freedom to explore outside the mores of Japanese society. This story happened “over there” and “at that time,” so our rules do not apply.

Also, as James Welker explores in his book Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls‘ Comics Artists and Fans, that exoticism adds legitimacy by the connection to high art of the 20th century through cinema, literature and drama. This second piece was a new thought to me, but when James mentioned this in his book lecture at NYU, it opened a whole new field of perspective for me. Of course artists and writers of the Japanese new wave were reaching over towards their literary, artistic and cinematic peers in Europe and America.

This perspective is shockingly relevant for this season’s girl band comedy-drama, Rock Is A Lady’s Modesty, currently streaming on HIDIVE. Especially as I am reading Ada Palmer’s book, Inventing The Renaissance, in which she makes a strong case for “legitimacy” as a kind of currency among the elite.

We are swept up in the life of Suzunomiya Lilisa, a first-year at Oshin Girls’ Academy. She is admired by the students that surround her, for her grace and refinement but this is a façade, as Lililsa is a Suzunomiya by marriage and is working on faking her way into legitimacy to make her mother’s life easier. When she finds a guitar pick that was dropped by the equally refined and graceful Kurogane Otoha, Lilisa is sucked back into her previous life of hard rock, competing with Otoha for supremacy in music.

If this story sounds intense, well, it is, but it is also very funny, as both Lilisa and Otoha are vulgar at one another, as they seek to dominate the other in an abandoned music room, drum versus guitar, but the very essence of polite society in other ways. Their Keigo is polished and perfect. We have had discussions here on Okazu about the status of elite families in Japanese entertainment being communicated by the number of syllables in their family name. 3-4 syllables is pretty common. Lilisa’s family is a clearly superior 5-syllable family. When we meet the Student Council President, we are meant to understand that Fujimurasaki Yukari, with her impressive 6-syllable name puts her way above even Lilisa’s family’s elite status. We all had a good laugh about it.

I admit to having been disappointed by some of the music in last year’s girl band stories, but Band-Maid puts down some strong work in that department for this anime. The music is good and hard, which aptly fits the story.  The music scenes are animated with CGI, which not everyone liked, but I think it’s fine here, because, more importantly, what we see them playing is what is being played. That is always important to me, that it’s not just generic wiggling of fingers.

Yuri fans might expect that a story set in an elite private girls’ school might have something of interest, and indeed, there is. Otoha’s behavior towards Lilisa rides a boundary of shameless macking designed to excite the girls around them into absolute tizzys…which is exactly what happens. Lilisa is not above noting how beautiful Otoha is and their first meeting is wrapped in a haze of “fated meeting of one’s eternal partner in front of Maria-sama,” or something similar.

Ratings:

Art – 7 More funny than good, and YMMV on the CGI, but it works
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Service –  Otoha does it all on purpose
Yuri – 4

Overall – 9

With two episodes having aired, I am an enthusiastic fan of the mashup of Class S school vs commoner sensibility, Yuri service and rock and roll that Rock Is A Lady’s Modesty is offering up.





Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, Season 1 Blu-Ray Steelbook, Disc 2

April 13th, 2025

The front and back cover and two blu-ray disks of a steelbook set. On the right is a girl with scarlet hair in a white uniform with black and gold collar, on the left is the same girl standing in front of a giant white robot with red, blue and yellow features. The two disk are gold and black. If you have ever watched Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, Season 1, then you know why it took me this long to get through disk 2 after I reviewed Disk 1 in January. It is large heaping doses of trauma with just enough wholesome that you’re ready to be traumatized all over again.

The duels has been all but rendered moot, by the corporate shenanigans of unsavory adults who see their and others’ children as pawns. The council members frankly lose their minds in this disk. Guel’s arc becomes increasingly desperate, culminating in yet another horrific moment, while his brother Lauda begins his descent toward unhinged. The politics of Space vs Earth, which one might hope makes sense, simply doesn’t. as Earth attacks not the products, but the people, with a team lead by a psychotic pilot. The plot spins out of control, and Shaddiq pulls strings to no apparent purpose. Who was any of that for? It wasn’t going to help Earth, obviously and no one in Space gained, either.

Suletta and Miorine have one of their periodic fights only to be reunited just before they suffer yet another trauma, this one well-intentioned, but utterly horrific, nonetheless. Suletta’s continued “baby seal waiting to be slaughtered” isn’t the right tone one wants from one’s hero…or villain. And one begin to feel that Prospera doesn’t love Suletta so much as sees her as a useful pawn, like all the other adults in this story. Should there be a moment of respite, another trauma will rush to fill the void.

This disk is rough, there’s just no getting around it. Knowing that going in to it did not actually help. Worse, the animation is really very good, one can mostly follow the mobile suit fights, which are always, IMHO, the weakest points of any mecha show. Good animation when terrible stuff is going down, again, does not make it better. ^_^;

Phew. I’ll need a long break between this disk and the next season, for sure.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – The continued trauma of children for no reason is so much fun. Not.
Characters  –  Deep breath….8
Service – I’m going to say that the violence is the “service” this time. That’s a lot of detail for animated violence.
Yuri – 5
Rage – 10

Overall – 8

In those few moments when Sulette and Miorine do connect, one feels hope and sees the beginning of a meaningful relationship. I know it’ll be fine, but there’s a lot between the story now and that end.