Mahou Meido Meganekko

Well. At least now we know which side of the road Miyafuji walks on.

Yes, it was about Charlotte (Shirley) Yeager and Fransesca Lucchini. Turns out Shirley’s a speed freak and she wants to break the speed of sound. Best she can do is about 800 kph (mach 1 = about 1200 kph for the metric impaired). Yes, it’s a beach episode, so we see the girls in their swimsuits. Well, until Shirley’s disintegrates in the midst of battle. Understandable, considering what it (and she) had just been through.

We’ve reached the point where logic is getting thrown out of the window though; what shredded her swimsuit should have shredded her. Not to mention the minor detail of Miyafuji and Lynn suddenly not knowing how to swim, despite getting dumped in the ocean during episode 3.

Next week is Sanya.

And Crunchyroll needs to get it’s act together…. I can’t download! Says media mods only now…. hope the sales plan didn’t get tossed, or I’m back to being a pirate.

Edit: Oddly for a swimsuit episode, we get to see pants!

From ANN:

Coharu Sakuraba’s Kyo no Gononi (Kyō no 5 no 2 or Today in Class 5-2) manga is being adapted as a television anime series. The comedy manga follows the “lightly ecchi,” everyday life of fifth grader Ryōta Satō, his childhood friend Chika Koizumi, and the rest of their school’s Class 5-2. The manga was already adapted into a four-episode video series in 2006. The television series will premiere in Japan in the fall.

Fifth graders.

“Lightly ecchi.”

Greaaaaaat. Kodomo no Jikan with 11-year-olds instead of nines. That’s so much better. If that’s Chika on the cover (looks like a young Luna from Gravion), then I’m afraid. Very afraid.

Steven linked to this article a couple of weeks ago, about the really bad pollution that will greet the athletes of the Beijing Olympics.

I do so enjoy the schadenfreude of the tremendous embarrassment the Chinese are going to suffer from this, but only today did it dawn on me, that someone else is going to take it right in the solar plexus. Hell, the nuts.

Kyoto, which was already a dead duck — and buried to boot, is about to have the grave paved over. But that’s not all.

What will the American public think of the environmental movement having a tizzy over “carbon footprint” and every little tenth-point change in the average temperature, after they spend two weeks watching this?

If I were G.W.Bush, right about the midpoint of the Olympics, I’d call congress back into session, to consider drilling in ANWR and drop a sly reference to the pollution in Beijing while I was at it. “Some pundits of disaster would have us believe that it is but a short step from drilling in Alaska, to the air of Beijing shrouding all our cities. And they would be right — if each of our cities contained 15 million people, and had no pollution controls whatsoever.”

Outside of really pissing off the Chinese, in combination with high gas prices, he’d force the Dems to roll. Which would explode their support from the looney left (not to mention a few heads) and maybe they’d be the ones to stay home this November!

Damn, what can I say? Bush shoulda picked me to replace Karl Rove.

I’ll take obscurity over being drawn as a loli catgirl, thankyouverymuch!

…says the guy who just started a City of Villains character named “Nekomune” in a guild called “SOS Brigade.”

Sorry to be so unoriginal, but our first choice, “Hair Club for Harkonnen” wasn’t permitted. We were going to have the coolest ranks too… Baron Barber, Sardukar Pedicurist, Bené Gesserit Hairstylist, Fremen Manicurists, etc.

Of course, Dr. Heinous and I both have animé themed characters. My other one is “Ito Nobunaga” and his note is “An honorable swordsman and direct descendant of the famous samurai; he is only thought of as a villain by lessers who do not follow the code of bushido. (Don’t tell him he got the name wrong, it makes him angry. VERY angry.)”

The “famous samurai” is of course, Oda Nobunaga, so the in-joke is that he’s a westerner who doesn’t understand Japanese surnames come first.

Finished the final episode, and the coda.

Yes, both of the “big reveals” caught me by surprise.

Yes, both are incredible clichés, absolute groaners.

Yes, I find it hard to believe they could have told that story straight.

But in the end…. I believe they were. I don’t remember if it was Toren, Avatar_ADV or Brickmuppet who said it, but that one moment where they give a sly wink to the audience… it needed to be there for me to believe this is actually a parody, and it wasn’t.

The director set out to see how many clichés and tropes he could cram into a series, without making a parody of mecha stories. He needed the twenty years of experience, not to make a great parody, but to avoid making it a parody or start mocking it, even unconsciously. Amazingly, he succeeded (I hazard to say, brilliantly) in making a story that is so over-the-top ridiculous that it has to be parody, yet it isn’t.

Update 7/26 9:39 CDT: As I said to Steven in my response:

I really do see your argument; the series is so absurd at times — it just has to be a parody. I just can’t convince myself that it is. Especially given the parallels in flavor to Godannar (which brodcast a year later, and appears to have shared no staff). Granted, the latter is MUCH higher in angst, but it’s got a lot of the same “over the top” feel to it. Camel toes, high heels, and bouncing tits, on mecha? The teams all together, manage to insert just about every fetish there is, except yaoi? Ye gads. Sometimes when an enthusiast is operating in a niche and pushing the envelope, the line between “enthusiasm for your subject” and “parody of your subject” can get awfully thin, and I think that’s what happened in both cases. I seem to recall some reviewers tried to tag Godannar as parody also, but IMHO, if there is parody, it isn’t deliberate. It’s just that mecha shows fail to make a full transfer across the culture gap. I think we can’t wrap our Western minds around the idea that someone might have actually been serious when they made these series.

I mean, hell, we are enjoying Strike Witches enormously, but try explaining that to the average person on the street. Even many animé fans are panning it.

Philistines, the lot of ‘em.

Man, that Sandman is such a playboy. “Fae, you have become strong and beautiful!”

As for the ending, of episode 11, I was not surprised at all. since (major spoiler) Show ▼

The last episode is going to have to do a LOT better than this.

You know what that means. Now while Strike Witches episode 4 downloads, I’m going to watch another episode of Gravion. Not twittering it, since that would take too long and I’m going to watch Strike Witches next.

And then I think I’ll pre-order Dai Mahou Touge. “Lyrical Tokharov, kill them all!”

Update: Ok, 2 episodes of Gravion left, and I’m back in the corner of “Yes, they were serious when they made this show; they just didn’t realize how stupid they were being.” I submit Godannar as evidence — Gravion has far better villians (which isn’t saying much — Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying had better villains than Godannar), but I’m getting that same vibe. Mecha fans just don’t seem to care how idiotic their show is.

I’ll hold off watching until tomorrow night.

And a final note: (possibly NSFW)

Show ▼

Um, are we going to lose the fog from this sequence on the DVD? Yikes!

And next week’s the swimsuit episode?