As the
fairly well-received (even by people who hate moe) Girls und Panzer has taught us, adding heavy weaponry to a Cute
Girls Doing Cute Things™ show can be done, and done rather well. Did this live up to my expectations? Well, let’s see.
The plot is
simple: cute little girl arrives at academy, and the girls in the survival club
game try to make her want to join them by letting her join in in one of their
games.
So,
basically, it’s cute high school girls with guns holding survival games instead
of cute little girls with tanks. And, I
admit, it’s rather uncanny how the phrase ‘cute high school girls with guns’
seems to sum up the anime industry. All
this show needs are demons to fight, transformation sequences, and rainbow hair
and this would be like some sort of anime loaf.
Also, I’m disappointed
at how unstylish the opening is. It’s
not as awesome as the PV. It just has a
generic song and none of the Bebop-like style that made the PV great.
However,
they seemed to save the style for some of the songs on the OST, because, at one
point, I heard a jazzy piece with pianos and trumpets blaring while a blonde
was going crazy with a machine gun. I
admit, it was really awesome.
So, the
characters? Actually, much better than I
thought. I mean, only one character
really got focus, the main one, but I think that she was handled pretty well,
all things considered.
Initially,
we see her going to school by herself.
She’s overly excited, happy, and cheerful. I thought we were getting a genki girl, but
then some people tried to talk to her and she was really shy and nervous around
them. Later, we learn how she really
wants to make friends, but her crippling shyness makes it impossible for her to
be anything but lonely. This is a very
realistic problem to have, honestly, and while I can’t say that they were being
subtle, it was okay. Honestly, it reminds me a bit of Yuki from Tsuritama.
Thus, she’s
probably going to join the club more because she doesn’t want to spend her high
school life alone rather than because she wants to get in on some running-and-gunning
action (I don’t get why no one in that school wants to join that club,
honestly. I would totally join something
that fun-sounding in a heartbeat).
However, if
a scene in which she watches a Rambo
movie and pretends to be him is any indicator, she probably has some gun nut
tendencies. I can’t really fault her on
that, she seemed like she was having a great time. And it was really funny when someone walked
in on her doing that and she freaked (“It’s not what it looks like, okay?!”) as
if someone walked in on her, I dunno, making out with one of those giant pillows
with Justin Bieber’s face taped onto it or something.
The other
girls haven’t had a whole lot of development yet, but I can’t quite nail a
stereotype for each one yet, which hopefully means that they will be a bit more
rounded than most. Okay, they’re all gun
nuts to varying degrees (I really liked the blonde one mentioned earlier, but’s
probably because of that scene mentioned earlier, which was actually pretty
badass), and one of them seems to be a bit
of an airhead, but it’s a lot better than Chronicles of The Going Home Club, whose stereotypes I could pick
out from scene one. They’re all fine; I
guess that’s what I’m saying.
The ‘survival
games’ aspect was handled fairly well.
It seems like there are a lot of routes that they could go with it, and
I hope that they are the meat of each episode, because the part with all of the
cute little girls in the forest with guns going after each other was really fun to watch. I can’t really describe why. I think the phrase ‘cute little girls with
guns going after each other’ is one that should speak for itself.
There definitely
is something really fun about the fact that the people shooting at each other
and leaping out of trees are cute little girls.
However, I think that there is money to be made in a male counterpart to
this show. I think there’s definitely a
market to be exploited in that.
Sound good,
Kyoto Animation? Wanna try it out?
*winkwinknudgenudge*
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