And They Say Gije is an Honourable Man

If you watch the eighth episode of Space Runaway Ideon, you will see Gije struggling to make combat honour work. If you ask me, his increasingly wild rules-lawyering provides much of the episode’s pleasure. ‘Okay, I had to take children hostage to make you duel honourably with me, but they’re being held hostage by my assistant, and the warrior code doesn’t apply to him as he’s a commoner, now can we get on with it please’.

Caligo Madocae

I’m a little tired of this angle.

XI: The People in That Thing Are Insane

I wasn’t planning to mention this, as I don’t have the energy to do it justice. But I also don’t have many other ideas, so here we are.

I got my hands on Mazinkaiser SKL‘s first episode on the evening of December 31st, so it makes it into 2010 by a whisker. Readers are invited to imagine any of my standard enthusiastic responses to giant robots fighting after this here colon: burble SKULL burble explosions burble. The amount of actual and implicit violence against women distressed a small thinking-section somewhere in my head, but the other sections argued it down—’It’s not normal,’ they said, ‘to simultaneously have scruples and an anime blog’.

If you want to read more, Crusader wrote a solid reaction, Ghostlightning tried to pin down SKL‘s essential puerility and psgels was unimpressed. EDIT: Dave weighs in with a SKL-as-1998-Manga-Video-property take.

X: Life in the Old Scopedog

I heard a lot about Votoms in 2010. Shining Heresy, the defrosted-Chirico-vs-Space-Catholics OVA, was (finally) translated, and there was a sudden flood of new material produced or announced: Alone Again, Phantom Arc, Case;Irvine and Votoms Finder.

I’m cautiously optimistic about this. The CGI action in Pailsen Files was tolerable more often than it was great, and one wonders how much more interest can be wrung from the life story of Chirico Cuvie. But Case;Irvine and Votoms Finder aren’t about Chirico (from what I can gather, Takahashi isn’t even involved in them). This could make for some interesting uses of the Astragius Galaxy, which is a very nice real robot setting. Okay, it probably won’t, but it could, right?

Also it’s sort of heartening that someone, somewhere, reckons money can still be made out of this franchise.

IX: Victory

I watched the last episode of Victory Gundam this August, about two-and-a-half years after I watched the first episode. I thought it was a fairly bad mess with salvageable, enjoyable facets. I stalled about half of the way through, which is fairly common with lugubrious fifty-episode-plus Tomino anime, but I also stalled for a long time before watching just the final episode itself. Because now that I’ve watched it, I’ve more or less caught up with the production of Gundam.

Well, that’s a lie. There’s still the 00 movie, which I probably won’t enjoy, and three-fifths of Wing, plus Endless Waltz, the one part of the franchise which I find entirely unwatchable. Beyond that there’re a few oddities like Mission to the Rise which I can’t be bothered to watch, and of course a substantial amount of manga, games, prose &c. But still, finishing Victory created a sudden absence: I no longer have the ‘see more of whichever Gundam I’m working through’ option when I’m bored.

VIII: The Perfect Strategy

I watched Overture to a New War last January. I’m not sure if it was freshly translated back then, or if I just happened to choose that time to watch it. It’s a filled-out and more coherent replacement for the first two episodes of Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

While reviewing some of the Alliance’s officers, Truniht poses Yang a simple question: what is the strategy for certain victory? And Yang says to assemble six times the enemy’s numbers, supply the troops perfectly and ensure the commander’s orders are transmitted without error.

The Legend doesn’t do jokes, or rather doesn’t do funny jokes, but it can be wry when it wants to.