How are you feeling, Gesicht? Good?

I don't know very much about PLUTO despite reading some of the manga when it was new. I know that it is well regarded, and that fans have been eagerly anticipating the anime adaptation for years. But then the anime adaptation really happened, and basically no one is talking about it (at least not adjacent to the sliver of Internet that I occupy), presumably because every episode got dumped at once on the Netflix, as the Netflix is wont to do.

I don't know anything about Astro Boy either.

There are only eight episodes, but each episode is about triple-length, so it works out equivalent to a two-cours series. I've watched three of these episodes so far. The anime is good, but it's not blowing me away. I should probably have mentioned the author of the manga earlier, but yeah, the mangaka is Urasawa Naoki. I think Monster is fantastic, and I enjoyed 20th Century Boys. Everything else he's written is critically acclaimed too, but I haven't read them. Honestly, I'm surely unqualified to provide more than a passing acknowledgment that a PLUTO anime exists, and you should probably give it a try to see for yourself rather than going off of anything I might say about it. Still, maybe I'll circle back after finishing the rest of it to tell y'all how it went.

There was a time when I would have been so stoked to see this.

Until I watched Suisei no Majo (The Witch from Mercury), Kidou Senshi Gundam SEED (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED) and its sequel Gundam SEED Destiny were the only two series from that venerable franchise I had ever watched. I did enjoy Gundam SEED and thought it was good enough to buy the giant DVD box, but I probably enjoyed blogging about Destiny more because it's easier to get more mileage out of deeply flawed shows. I wrote most of those posts before adopting WordPress, and never got around to properly migrating all of them. I keep meaning to, though, someday.

Kira looks normal.

At the time, I thought a third season of Gundam SEED would not be too far away. As it turned out, ah, a variety of reasons prevented that from happening. I won't go into it since I don't have a complete understanding of the relevant facts (or at least not a confident understanding). In any case, a 20-year-anniversary movie project is expected in early 2024 now. The details I've been seeing about it do not exactly inspire much enthusiasm, though, at least in my case.

You ARE the villain, right?

At a minimum, the way the already distinctive character designs have evolved appear distractingly silly. Maybe I'll get used to them, but I can't take any of the promotional materials that I've seen so far seriously. More importantly, I'm skeptical a movie project can cram in all the things I'm expecting it to include in any sort of coherent way. I suppose it doesn't need to necessarily wrap everything up as a single movie. I had my doubts when I first heard the GIRLS und PANZER follow-up would consist of six movies, and that is working out well so far. They sure are taking a long time, though. Perhaps, if the FREEDOM movie is popular enough, Sunrise will make more.

I heard you liked helmets.

Now that Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo Season 2 (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2) has finished, I should probably capture my concluding thoughts on the series while they remain somewhat fresh. However, I get the feeling that would result in a long blog post, so maybe I ought to break things up into multiple entries despite the risk I might simply lose interest in writing more before completion. Anyway, the first post in this series (?) is about Elnora. If you've been following me on the Twitter, this should surprise you not at all.

Notably, I never stopped seeing Elnora as the girl she used to be.

Many viewers (if not most viewers) seemed to regard Prospera as the main villain of the series. This is not an incorrect perspective, but I think it's incomplete. I take the position that she is both an antagonist and a protagonist. This is not to say that I thought of her as the protagonist—that's clearly Suletta—but I do see her as a protagonist. (Fuck your deuteragonist and tritagonist nonsense. You're reading an anime blog, not a fan wiki.) That's not a controversial position for me to take, is it?

Maybe she'll start calling you Mom without sounding sarcastic.

I'll need to put more thought into this, but my initial impulse is to suggest Elnora embraced the forgiveness aspect reflected in (or constrained by) The Tempest a lot more readily than I expected. Like, she had already forgiven Delling during the scene where she's fucking with Miorine's head to get her to aspire for the Benerit leadership role, right?

I wonder how soon Elnora realized she was going to end up in this chair.

I also found Prospera's Quiet Zero plot to be a lot less sinister than what most people were assuming. (Never mind that I still have no idea what Notrette's original Quiet Zero plan—or Delling's intentions for the project, for that matter—were meant to be.) Now, I'm not part of the "Prospera Did Nothing Wrong" faction, but I do view her actions from a position that is decidedly more favorable to her than most seem willing to adopt. Let's just say I'm grading on a curve.

Asirpa is short.

The fourth season of Golden Kamuy was supposed to finish at the end of 2022. A staff member's death delayed production, and the cours restarted as a Spring 2023 show. As with other long-running anime (well, longer-running, relatively speaking), there's not much I can tell you about this series if you're not watching it already. Read the manga. It's great. I would tell you to start watching the anime, but that's probably a harder sell now that there are nearly 50 episodes (more, if you count the OVAs). You should have started already.

Don't stare. It's impolite.

This is one of those series that does everything well. There's comedy, there's drama, it's wacky, and it's serious. There are a lot of characters, and most of them are mental cases, but you'll also spend enough time with them (well, the ones who don't suddenly die) to appreciate what they've got going on and what motivates them. We already know the anime will cover the entire manga, so it's at least something newcomers can start without worrying about it being incomplete. There are honestly still some rough parts where the scenes or action are clearly difficult to animate, but we're at least well past the immersion-breaking 3DCG bears and fire from the first season.

Weird how your dad never mentioned murdering all those people.

The viewpoints I see about Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury) in my sliver of the anime fandom uniformly vilify Prospera, differing only in the intensity of the condemnations. However, I still regard her as a protagonist. I also support her quest for revenge even though I'm uncertain as to the specifics of her plan. (Spoilers henceforth for the first 17 episodes.)

You're not young Bel, right?

A significant factor responsible for this (apparently minority) view is my unwillingness to minimize Delling Rembran's role orchestrating and initiating the mass murder depicted in the "PROLOGUE" episode. I don't believe there's been any meaningful attempt to justify the assault, so I'm mystified this doesn't come up more often. It's as if viewers collectively shrugged and concluded it was all right because we barely knew those people.1

You don't always recognize the last time you'll see a loved one when it happens.

Elnora Samaya, of course, did know those people. She escaped with four-year-old Ericht as the facility's sole survivors while cold-blooded killers butchered her husband, her mentor, and everyone at Fólkvangr. (I'm unsure how many died in total, but it seems like dozens.) Consequently, this factor shapes my perspective about everything Elnora has done (and has been accused of doing) in her Propsera guise. To be clear, I also do not perceive her purported transgressions as being especially egregious. The worst accusations I can levy involve emotional manipulation, but assigning blame exclusively to Prospera for the actions others take strips agency away from those victims and reduces them to mere instruments.

I guess she doesn't have a shitload of Suletta pictures decorating her desk.

Granted, I'm taking Prospera at her word when she offers explanations or insights.2 For example, I assume Ericht really was dying and that Elnora did not turn her into a child-Gundam chimera for Fullmetal Alchemist reasons. I'm also accepting Prospera's explanation to Miorine in episode 14 about enrolling Suletta to fulfill her wish of attending school while keeping her in a safe(r) environment as sincere. Likewise, I scrutinize her role as a mother through the same lens Suletta uses. Every on-screen interaction (and every historical one, according to Suletta's beaming admiration) appears authentic. Although, Prospera is possibly playing a long con, and has devoted considerable energy for decades to deceive and exploit her own daughter(s) in pursuit of a convoluted revenge plan.

See, Suletta trusts her.

Maybe Prospera's true face (as it were) will be revealed and she'll get her comeuppance when Suletta (and Ericht) turn on her, but I'm not sure I find this prospect convincing. This is partly because I don't know the particular specifics of her revenge plan. After all, Prospera has had at least some opportunities to stab Delling in the neck, so simply offing him doesn't seem to be the primary objective.3

I do find it odd they use portable data-storage devices.

Moreover, I'm increasingly cognizant that The Tempest ends with a wedding, not a bloodbath. I'm disinclined to believe G-Witch will end with Elnora in ruin, and Delling triumphant. However, I'm also skeptical the conclusion will adopt the forgiveness aspects from The Tempest, particularly since Prospero's betrayal involved a loss of authority, not the literal murder of everyone he cared about. I'm pro-revenge enough that I would find such a finale distasteful, almost as a matter of principle.

Note 1: E.g., "What Delling did to that lesbian couple was objectively terrible, but not subjectively so because they weren't 'our' lesbian couple."

Note 2: Maybe she's manipulating me.

Note 3: I have no idea how Quiet Zero fits into this.

Ship girls as a concept still seems weird if I think about it.

After multiple production delays, the eighth and final episode of KanColle: Itsuka Ano Umi de (KanColle: Someday in that Sea, alternatively, KanColle: Let's Meet at Sea) aired on 25 March 2023. Being an outsider who is unfamiliar with the game, the second season of the Kantai Collection anime made me wonder whether its tone is reflected in the gameplay. It's been a while since I watched the first season and the movie, but I don't remember either of them being so consistently serious throughout. It would be easy to say the tonal shift is because so many ships "die," but at the same time it feels as if the series tries to soften the loss the way a parent might lie to small children by saying beloved pets have gone off to live happily on a faraway farm. Unless they really did go to a farm?

Ship girls sure age well.

Ultimately, I can't claim the second season of Kantai Collection was a good anime for anyone other than viewers who really wanted lingering shots of Shigure doing Shigure-type things. I don't mean to imply that the show is full of cheesecake and fan service. It's not—not at all. Rather, I mean that this short series felt like I was flipping through a photo album that captured memories of her experiences during the war.

Shigure DIES. P.S. Spoilers.

Incidentally, I suppose I should acknowledge Kancolle's ties to World War II. Naturally, since the adversaries in its world are fictional "Abyssals" instead of the Allied powers, key events were re-imagined so that certain outcomes differed from their real-world counterparts. (It also allowed for the sort of cameos you might expect under these conditions.) Does this make the montages at the end of the final episode more or less poignant? Once again, as an outsider, it's not clear to me at all. Nevertheless, I appreciate the franchise for what it is, and I'm curious what the future has in store for it.

Space Oomfie.

As you may have noticed, I really enjoyed the first cours of Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury). I've watched so little from the Gundam franchise that I'm hazy on a lot of its common, recurring themes. Nevertheless, I at least know the depiction of death and the consequences of war are integral companions (in some way) to the cool-robot plastic-model-sales aspects.

Nika realizing how much extra work killing that guy is going to create for her.

However, I'm not well versed in terms of how Gundam presents these elements or how it communicates its perspectives about them. My assumption is that it adopts a "killing is bad" approach, but I'm willing to trust it at least has a more nuanced view than something like Sword Art Online II:

2016-01-08-18:16< Evirus> The robber had already killed one person and was about to shoot the mom, the teller, basically everyone. But sniper girl, who was like five at the time, managed to get the gun and shot the robber dead. And she was a pariah ever since, even to her mother.

ANYWAY, I don't know if this ultra-pacifist view crudely depicted in SAO II in any way accurately reflects a mainstream Japanese view, nor do I know if Gundam has anything similar. For the purpose of this blog post, I'm going go assume neither are true. That said, episode 12 of Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo ends with a violent death that leaves one of its leads shocked and deeply troubled.

At a minimum, Prospera is way better than Sinon's mother.

Now, the most important aspect of this character's reaction is her disbelief the person responsible for the killing could appear untroubled by the act. That is the critical focus of the scene, but the implication "all killing is bad" still looms. We'll have to wait until the second cours begins in April 2023 for more clarity on these points, but anything other than unambiguously concentrating on the mental-state aspect of the scene will appear alien to me.

I think this qualifies as an imminent threat to life or bodily harm even if he's not using the sights.

The distinction derives from my inculcation in a common American belief that using deadly force is justified in the defense of others. The legality and scope of this doctrine varies by region and jurisdiction (as do American self-defense doctrines and perspectives as a whole, for that matter), but I presume it's at least much more common in the United States than it is in Japan. I just don't know how it's portrayed in Gundam.

I like Shigure because she has nice hair.

Is it necessary to watch the first season of Kantai Collection before watching the current anime? No, but it turns out the answer is no for an atypical reason: Because it wouldn't help. This is to say that my ignorance of Kancolle as a franchise—despite having watched the first anime nearly EIGHT YEARS AGO still leaves me with an incomplete understanding about KanColle: Itsuka Ano Umi de (KanColle: Let's Meet at Sea). I've also watched the movie. That doesn't help, either.

I might have recognized you if you had more fan art.

Through three episodes (it started late), there's nothing I remember of the previous Kancolle anime that would assist me with the second season. What would really help is a greater understanding of the video game. I would probably also benefit from being more familiar with the actual ships and the naval battles they joined. As it is, I am less invested in the show and its events than I think it wants me to be.

Looks humid.

This is not to say that the anime is confusing or difficult to follow, though. The plot so far is straightforward and the characters' motivations are not unclear. What I'm missing are ties to the characters themselves, since I basically don't know any of them. Shigure, the lead, I only know because an old anime blogger used to post about her regularly. She seems okay, but I don't expect to be as moved as I might otherwise be if the season really does turn out to be about her survivor's guilt.

Are you going to die this season?

Of course, I don't genuinely know if an emotional connection with these boats is really going to be necessary to get the most out of the long-awaited second season of Kantai Collection. The opening episodes have had a much more serious tone and higher stakes than what I remember of the first season. This could change, but we're quite a distance away at the moment from curry battles and friends who poi all day and POI POI POI all night. Kongou did briefly appear in the most recent episode, though. Maybe her BURNING LOVE remains unquenched.