Twice, I thought over how I would approach reviewing this, the final volume of Stellvia. Twice I thought about the plot, the characters, the Yuri, and twice I had the same thought: Battle Atheletes.

These two series have quite a lot in common. Both are series that ran in Dengeki Daioh magazine, both have lead females whose extraordinary talents save the world, and both have a cast of supporting characters that are more interesting than the lead herself.

So let’s do a compare/contrast for fun. To start let’s compare the Yuri:

Battle Athletes clearly wins here. There are so many potential couples – many of whom make *sense* and are not just random pairings of two women who stand next to each other on the screen. And there are at minimum, two canon couples – especially if we count the manga. Mylandah and Lahrri and Kris and Akari are couples. No ifs, and or buts. In contrast Stellvia has only one Yuri couple, but a very decent one it is. I once again enjoyed the heck out of Yayoi’s and Ayaka’s public acknowledgment of their feelings. Not as good as Kris’ and Akari’s manga kiss, but just as public. ^_^

Comparing them as space stories:

Stellvia wins, no question. While both series have invading aliens, threats to the planet and the like, the Battle Athletes anime has so many other, incredibly stupid add-ons to the basic formula that even thinking about it makes me squirm. Stellvia sticks with bug-eyed monsters and a gigantic threatening alien energy menace.  I think, perhaps, the aliens in BA might have not been so bad if they hadn’t chosen the stupidest plot complication EVER as their means of attack.

But, as I thought it over, the real point of comparison has to be their lead characters. And this is why, both times, my mind connected the two. Because once again, Stellvia is vastly superior. Akari from Battle Athletes is the typical idiot savant character. She can do NOTHING right, ever, no matter how hard she tries. But she never really tries, until a crisis occurs and her innate skills mystically pop into overdrive. (This is far more prominent a theme in the anime than the manga, which was mostly free of this.) At every step up the ladder Akari starts back at the lowest level until a miracle catapults her to the top.

This happens to be something that generally bugs me about anime – one of the main themes of nearly every anime is “hard work” – and especially “teamwork” – will get us to the top. There’s a lot of cultural reasons why this is so that I won’t get into but what bugs me is that, in anime it is so rarely either that really gets anyone to the top. Sailor Moon never really works hard at anything, she just *is*. The same is true for most heroes and heroines of manga and anime. Of course fighting series are full of work, but the heroes follow a similar pattern – they are defeated, then come back and defeat the person who just beat them – usually by having miraculously, sometimes magically, sometimes just from sheer “guts”, powered up a gazillion orders of skill/power.

In stark contrast, Shima works her ass off through the whole series. Volume 8 of Stellvia has scene after scene of her working hard enough to make herself puke. There is the teeniest deus ex machina at the end of the series, at zero hour, when the clock has counted down to one second, etc, etc; but as Shima has spent the entire series actually striving to do this *one* thing, I can forgive it without prejudice.

And her moment of lucidity arrives just as infuriatingly cool – or is that, clueless – Kouta melts down completely. That was worth watching the volume for because that boy was annoying the living daylights out of me.

So, yes, Battle Atheletes has more Yuri, but I genuinely think that Stellvia is the better series. It makes sense. No cows. No transgender psychotic murderous twins, no resurrected dead parents. Just one teeny little handwave and a lot of good solid human moments.

Ratings:

Art – 7 Consistent, mostly, throughout, but never great. The CGI stuff is quite good.
Story – 9 I kept nodding over and over as key “space opera” points were handled, competentely
Characters – 9
Yuri – 7
Service – 3 The uniforms. Ugh.

Overall – 8.5

Stellvia was one of my best anime of 2004. Over here in 2006, it’s still in my top twenty of things I’ll reach for to rewatch. My only regret was that the sequel was never, and will never, be made.

Even though Stellvia, Volume 7 doesn’t actually have any specific Yuri scenes (despite Ayaka and Yayoi prominently displayed on the cover), I’m still classifiying as a Yuri anime, both because the series has strong Yuri content – and because Ayaka, having found herself once again, uses what she’s learned to assist Kouta and Shima, in a way that still let’s you see where her actual interest lies.

This volume strikes a really nice balance between the plot, the characters and the larger body of humanity behind our immediate vision. For once we’re given something to hold on to regarding the threat of the “Cosmic Fracture.” It’s not just a vague thing with BEM (Bug-Eyed Monsters for those of you too young to have read any old school sci-fi) attackers. Destruction is actually imminent and the time-line is short, like a good space opera ought to be. The tension builds between different military and governmental factions – differences that will come to affect the people on earth, as well.

And meanwhile, our heroes are still just children. They are learning to figure out who they are, and where they want to go (or need to go) to be the people they have to be; both for the current crisis and for the future. In the middle of all this is Ayaka, who suddenly arises to the position that she never felt comfortable in before – guide, mentor, sempai. She repeatedly tells Kouta, Shima and us that she’s not “good with things between guys and girls”, well duh, darlin’. But it’s equally as obvious that having found her own center and rebuilding her relationship with Yayoi has given her greater understanding of human relationships as a whole.

The vibe between Kouta and Shima in this volume really rings true. Kouta is still clueless and Shima is still irrational and, as the others point out repeatedly, that’s pretty much the way it is between men and women. Jojo and Akira get a little extra screen time so we can see how they are doing – they seem to be doing pretty well, despite occasional setbacks. And the commander and the doctor are still kind of cute – there’s a certain awkwardness about their courtship that makes one feel that some things never really change.

Rinna becomes a lynchpin character for a little while, as we get a glimpse of the larger politics behind the formation of a last ditch effort by humanity to survive. As much as I find whiny little sister types annoying in anime, I wasn’t bothered at all by her in this volume. Perhaps the soothing influence of being with her parents again…another thing that reads pretty real to me.

Overall, as I said in the beginning, there’s a very solid balance in this volume of story, character and peripherals. If you haven’t enjoyed Stellvia up to this point, there’s nothing here that’s going to make you like it – but if you like it, you might begin to love it. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 7 the noses are back, whee!
Story – 7
Characters – 8
Music – 7
Yuri – 1
Service – 2

Overall – a strong 7

It’s easy to appreciate this volume knowing that we’re heading into the final stretch. But even on its own, it’s easy to enjoy this volume for all the classic signs of the “battle is nigh” in the grand tradition of Seven Samurai and all its Western, War and Sci-Fi relatives.

Let’s jump right into Stellvia, Volume 6, shall we? In this volume, we get one of the best bit of character interaction I’ve ever seen in any anime. All the girls argue. At once. And with a level of snarky bitchiness that I’d actually expect from a group of four women arguing.

For that, and that alone, this volume is worth watching. As I do go on endlessly, the strength of this series is the humanity. The plot is really pretty meh. The aliens are bugs, literally, and they are horrible and violent and we can feel righteous about destroying them in the classic space opera fashion. The time spent with clueless Kouta (and his inability to ASK what is bothering Shima when she spends six hours crying in his presence….I mean really, could he be anymore of an annoying clod?) is just marking time in between the great moments as all the four main female characters crash and burn in their own ways.

Ayaka seems to have gotten herself together, but Yayoi starts to lose it. Akira, who is suffering a completely normal crisis of identity and confidence – and a bout of plain old jealousy – turns out to be quite perceptive. She not only pins Arisu to the wall on running away from being a pilot, but implies that Arisu’s crush on Shima isn’t as secret as she might think. AND she gets the snarky award for telling Yayoi that her subtlety is no beard for her real interest.

Arisu tries to be the good guy and gets stabbed in the back by an entirely self-absorbed and petty Shima, who is so entirely caught up in herself that she can’t even see that she’s being a jerk. I bet none of us have ever been there, huh? ^_^

The girls all make up in the time-honored anime fashion of having a good cry, which I object to, but the fight *was* stellar.

The art wasn’t as bad as usual for some reason. I can’t imagine why. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.

For the rest of this series, the plot is fairly inconsequential, even tiresome, but the characters reign supreme. This anime, like Patlabor, is about the people. The rest is just window dressing.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 4
Characters – 8
Music – 8
Yuri – 5 (mostly from Akira’s bitchy implications, but still there’s shades of Ayaka and Yayoi on their own)
Service – 6 (any spacesuits that have separate colors for the secondary sexual characteristics are *entirely* servicey seriously)

Overall – 7

If you don’t like it, you don’t like. I like it. ^_^

You know what really sucks about Stellvia?

Nothing.

By Volume 4 of Stellvia, the whole space opera plot seems to have disappeared completely, with only the vaguest twinges of something coming in the future. So the writers are at leisure to explore the relationships between people, rather than focusing on external (and, admittedly, somewhat silly and nonsensical) threats from space. As a result, this particular DVD feels much more like a shoujo series than the shounen one it is.

All of the cadets on Stellvia now have to switch to a completely new flight system. Shima, who, with a lot of time and practice, was a decent pilot with occasional flashes of real skill, now shoots to the top of her class as a prodigy. This causes Ayaka of the “Big 4” to peg her as a rival, and to try and stop her meteoric rise. In a pretty nastly little scene, Ayaka sets out to hurt Shima in a joust, and is only stopped because Kouta gets out into space in time to save Shima. We learn that this is not the first time Ayaka has done this – she was the reason Yayoi was injured and held back a year.

This “incident” is the major conflict that drives the entire volume. Shima stresses that Ayaka hates her, even as the episode brings her closer to Kouta. Yayoi is confronted by two wildly conflicting issues – one, she can’t ever forgive Ayaka for what she did to her – and worse, tried to do to Shima – but two, she wants desperately to be able to forgive Ayaka.

In the background of Shima and Kouta’s relationship (which is so utterly, completely NORMAL and not dysfunctional, that it’s a bit disturbing…) we see the development of something growing between taciturn Akira and goofy Jojo, a hint of the space station commander’s crush on the doctor and, of course, Ayaka and Yayoi.

All in all, a very satisfying volume, really.

But let me go back and obsess for a second on Kouta. When I watched this series originally, I really disliked him – and up until now, I have maintained that dislike, because I really find idiot savant characters distasteful. Well, on second viewing I now find that I have no characters in this show to dislike. They are all so damn normal. And real. And not at *all* stereotypical Japanese dysfunctional relationship dorky. I mean, sure the guys are dorky, but like real 16 year old guys – not like emotionally and sexually dysfunctional sociopaths, like so many male characters in anime. (If *I* were a guy, I’d really protest how utterly stupid and pathetic so many male characters are…but I’m not, so I don’t care. But I digress.)

In fact, when Kouta kissed Shima I was so relieved that I almost cried. It was just like real people who do actually touch their boy/girlfriends, hold hands and kiss them and stuff. Wow! Imagine that!

But that leaves me with no one to hate. How irritating. I’m really even having a hard time disliking Linna. Darn these incredibly likable and well-written characters!

Over on the Yuri side of things, Ayaka and Yayoi’s relationship begins here, in a sense. There’s always been *something* between them, but after we learn about the the “incident”, anyone with eyes can see that that’s not all. And the end of the volume is just the beginning for them, as well as everyone else in the series.

Even the art is, for this brief moment in time, very stable and decent…sometimes almost approaching *good.*

Ratings:
Art – 7
Story – 9
Character – 9
Yuri – 7

Overall – 8

So far, Volume 4 of Stellvia has been the best of the breed. I hope that it gets better from here!