Not. A. Trap.
By the way, is anyone else having trouble downloading? I’m watching the stream, but the file download keeps ending prematurely. Given last week’s issues, this is really bothersome.
Edit: Miyafuji has given up groping for this episode, and is acting normal, despite the base having a sauna and private outdoor nude swimming area. She also gets sent on her first real missions, night patrols with Sanya and Elia.
Wilcke and Sakamoto are speculating that there may be more to the Neuroi than they know… but the high command might. There were a couple of offhand lines that make me think this is going to develop along philosophical lines similar to Gundam. A sort of ‘Wars are fought because the military has to have something to do’ philosophy. And I don’t really care for that strain of thought being introduced into my cheesy mindless entertainment.
Another thing, watching the stream, CR hard-encoded popup ads on the screen. Ads that cover the subbing. Bad. Really, really bad, especially given the download issues (which I sent them an email on.) CR, are you trying to drive me back to piracy?
Update: And Author bails.
Update: Whereas Steven returns. Will be interesting to see what he thinks. I’m putting SW on the bubble; if CR keeps frustrating me with bad downloads and/or popup ads over the subtitles, or the show dives off the Stratos 4 cliff, I will just go watch Sekirei for my mindless fanservice with zest.
Update: And I forgot to note, episode 5 also blew out Don. At this point, I’m all for declaring episode 5 non-canon and moving on….
Update: There were a few asides about the potential uses of the Strike Witches in the comments at Chizumatic, but given that I already have four five comments on that thread, I decided it was time to give it a rest.
We found out in “non-canon” episode 5, that the Striker units can be tuned for offense, defense, or speed. Yeager has hers tuned for speed, but apparently kept a fair amount of defense, given
Bishop appears to be tuned for offense/accuracy, Sanya for offense/power. The weapons they carry are expressive of these traits. Sanya’s seems to be exceptionally tuned to offense, given that she’s never deployed a shield that I recall. (Maybe in ep.1 or 2? And meta-story, I’m sure the weapons came first and the traits later, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
Miyafuji may or may not have had hers tuned to push her defensive power, but I know if I were Wilcke, I’d want the demonstrated healer behind the most powerful defense possible. What are the other girls’ tuned for? My guesses:
- Hartmann: Offense. We saw her being photographed because she made ace or something of the sort. (Ep. 3)
- Wilcke: Defense. She’s the unit commander; tends to hang back and direct the battle; never demonstrated any major offensive power.
- Luchinni: Speed. Her personality and the fact that she hangs out with Yeager makes me think this. She appears to be Shirley’s assigned wingman, and would need to be able to keep up.
- Perrine: Offense. If they follow the manga, that is.
- Barkhorn: Not sure. Given her previous mindset, I wouldn’t be surprised if she were heavily tuned offensively. Now, I don’t know
- Sakamoto: Balanced, maybe a touch offensive?
- Eila: No idea.
Note that I’ve been getting Eila and Barkhorn reversed since my comment about episode 7 previews.
The only thing ep 5 did to positively advance the story was to give us time with Yeager and Lucchini. I’m with you; as far as I’m concerned, ep 5 didn’t happen.
There weren’t any ads in the download. (You got me curious about just what they were doing. I didn’t look at the streaming version of it yesterday; maybe I’ll take a look next week.)
Small popup, similar to what you see on network TV. Covered only a small part at the bottom of the screen, but it was a translucent white, with text, meaning it obsured the white subtitles. I ran and re-ran, and re-re-ran the show with pauses to get the text you typed in your response (thanks, btw) but I said to hell with it about the time the Neuroi showed up. I think the ad was for one of the major airlines, but I was actively trying to ignore it. If it had dropped down from the top, it would have covered nothing important, and been no more annoying than the ones on TV.
Interestingly, I watched all six episodes of Sekirei over a couple of nights, and such ads were nowhere to be found. I imagine they couldn’t sell that space if they had tried…
I think it’s possible that Sanya’s rockets are enhanced by her magical power filtered through her Striker units. [spoiler]But we have to do some scrambling to explain the fact that the rockets were equally powerful when Eila was firing them.
But there could be such a linkage which permitted Sanya to feed power to the rocket unit even when someone else was using it. The docking unit which holds the striker units when not in use also ejects the weapon. It’s not impossible that the weapons are special.
Which leads to the interesting possibility that Miyafuji did exactly the same thing when Sanya borrowed Miyafuji’s gun.[/spoiler]
Hmm. I’ve assumed more or less a direct linkage from girl to gun, but that the guns were selected (consciously or not) based on an aspect of the girls’ personality. In other words, they could fight well with any weapons, but they fight better with weapons that “fit” them. So Eila could use the missile launcher (which seems to have a whole lot of reloads, by the way), but not be as effective with it as Sanya. And Miyafuji could pick up Sakamoto’s katana, but wouldn’t be nearly as effective with it.
If they are linked to their weapons even when not carryingt them, that may impact episode 2, where Sakamoto told Miyafuji to use the gun herself. It was Sakamoto’s spare gun, so was she helping Miyafuji without the latter’s knowledge?
Aside: Of all the girls, it’s Sakamoto’s and Wilcke’s stories that I want to see.
I’m not sure Wilcke has a story. I suspect not.
I agree that Sakamoto’s story will be the most interesting, but that’s because it’s going to be about the years she spent with Dr. Miyafuji. We still don’t have the full story on just what supposedly happened to him, let alone what he was working on when he died, if he did.
As to ep 2, I think you have it wrong. What I’m thinking is that the gun and Striker unit on a given fixture are linked to each other. So the gun that Miyafuji was carrying came from the same fixture as the Striker unit she was flying, and that meant it was her that was powering them both. Sakamoto had nothing to do with it.
A potential problem with that theory is that Sanya lost one of her Striker units to the near miss. If they’re linked to the guns through the unit, then there should have been some degradation of accuracy or warhead strength.
Sigh. Two grown men, endlessly debating the finer points of technology behind a show that involves barely post-pubescent girls drawn wearing as little as possible while firing big guns. Who says all the broken people are over at Derailed by Darry?
Side note about the ads on CR’s streaming version: If you put the player in full-screen (it’s a button near the bottom-right), the ads show up in the black below the video area, so don’t cause problems.
That was a really nice, sweet episode. There may indeed be something to this show in the end.
> the ads show up in the black below the video area, so don’t cause problems.
… er, on a 4:3 monitor, that is; on a widescreen you’d probably still have the problem.
Plus, given a 22″ widescreen, it gets really pixellated. One thing I’ve also noticed is that CR is saving filesize by encoding the OP and ED a crappy as they can, and then saving the better resolution for the main story. Problem is, they also encode any scenes prior to the OP just as poorly.
Does Strike Witches have different Ads than Blassreiter? If they’re the same, there’s a (somewhat hard to see) spot on the right edge of the ad that you can click that makes it go away.
Not sure, but it would make sense if they do. If I’m forced to watch the stream again, I’ll check.
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