LoGH Episodes 1-15: Spoiler-Free Commentary

Legend of the Galactic Heroes is too long to write neatly tied-together essays on while you’re still watching the early episodes. In fact, so much happens in just the first fifteen that for the first time in my (admittedly short) blogging life, I could actually use some episode summaries – and there aren’t any, of course. I should write some, but it would be boring and I wouldn’t be very good at it. In lieu of that, I offer you some sweeping commentary which is generally spoiler-free since I hope that I might persuade others to give this classic a try, and because anything I write further into the series will probably be spoiler-laden.

Ecole du Ciel Vol. 1: A GCSE in Gundam?

I don’t read enough manga. It’s not that I dislike it, it’s that I find it hard to relax with a book, or more specifically with the physical shape of a book, a codex. To ‘come home after a hard day’s reading and relax with a book’ carries a certain contradiction, as I’m sure you can see.

But I try. After all, manga has a number of practical advantages over anime as a form of entertainment: it’s much cheaper, and it’s available in the UK pretty much as soon as it’s available in the US because (glory be!) books don’t have those pesky Region Code thingies. [Wouldn’t life be awful if they did?]

Credit is therefore due to Kaoishin-sama for putting me onto Ecole du Ciel. Ecole has what it takes to interest me: obscurity value, curiosity value and hawt Mobile Suit-on-Mobile Suit action value. Plus the manga-ka is Mikimoto Haruhiko, who has an impressive set of character design credits including a number of Macrosses (and the animation direction for Do You Remember Love?) and War in the Pocket. And the first volume arrived in my letterbox recently, so here I am talking about it.

Mecha Obscura

Gasaraki is the unacceptable face of large robot action. If Gundam 00 is mecha pornography, it’s standard middle-of-the-road product, whereas Gasaraki is the equivalent of something only legally available from one shop in Amsterdam, catering to a bizarre paraphilia involving several species of animal and copious amounts of various bodily fluids.