The perfect demonstration of the (low) quality of this series is the fact that ep 7 is a swimsuit episode.

I think maybe what I was expecting from this series was something maybe a bit like Divergence Eve/Misaki Chronicles, albeit I didn't expect it to be anything like as good. I was expecting a story about men and women fighting against a science fiction threat, to save the planet, and everyone being heroic and loyal and dedicated, and having a tough time because the foe is tough. Yeah, there was some internal intrigue in DE/MC, but mostly it's about loyal characters fighting hard for a good cause.

That isn't this series. This series is more like a high school romangst series except that half the characters are organic AI's who have super powers. There's even a love pentangle.

An asteroid-sized extraterrestial being of some kind moved into the solar system and took over the orbit of Pluto. They say. Humans named it Thanatos. The star charts we get shown have Pluto's orbit being circular and on the ecliptic, which it ain't. Anyway, the thing, whatever it is, fires off three small glowing things towards the Earth.

They arrive just as an orbital shuttle is being launched and one of them collides with the shuttle, destroying it. Our Hero is Jin, and he and his mother and sister were passengers. His father was the pilot. The explosion was curious in that it didn't turn all the passengers into jam, or even less. Jin came through it alive and pretty much unharmed. Only problem was that he was falling, and would die on impact. Except that something glowing came and caught him and carried him safely to the ground.

Since then he's become notorious, for two reasons. The government blamed the accident on his father and kept secret the three objects.

What were they? Well, apparently, dragons. One of those, I assume the one who collided with the shuttle, is dead and the body is stored in a big tank at ISDA, a military organization. The other two are named Toa and Widow. They are shape changers, capable of being either dragon in form or human in form. It was Toa who saved Jin, and apparently has been keeping an eye on him since. Not obvious why, except that the story requires it.

Moving right along, ISDA used cells from the corpse and started cloning dragons of their own, and somehow or other managed to figure out something called "Resonance". It means that at a certain point in development of the cloned dragon, a human sheds every stitch of clothing and goes into the chamber and puts a hand into the tank. The proto-dragon sticks the arm with tentacles and sucks out some blood, or something like that. If it fails, the human starts screaming, and then the human's body explodes. If it works, the human starts screaming, and then doesn't explode.

Once Resonance has been established between the two, they have a master/servant relationship thereafter. If all goes well. The dragons spend most of their time in human form, but they are effectively slaves. Their human masters are called "Dragonauts". The goal of the project at ISDA is to create enough dragonaut/dragon pairs to go out and attack that planetoid and destroy it.

It doesn't always work correctly even at that. There may be some sort of weird mental feedback between them. At the beginning, one of the pairs goes bozo, somehow. The dragon, in human form, becomes a serial killer. Eventually the dragon, in dragon form, eats its master, and one of the other dragons is ordered to kill that one.

Another case where it doesn't seem to have worked is Jin's childhood friend Kazuki. He goes through the resonance ceremony with a new dragon who ends up being named Gio. All instruments seem to suggest that it worked, and Kazuki lived through it. But when Gio hatches, he utterly ignores Kazuki and goes off on his own. At one point he claims that he won't take orders from anyone. No one knows just what is wrong, or why Gio didn't end up the same as the others, in part because they haven't been able to capture him to take readings and find out.

Kazuki flipped out when Gio and Jin ended forming a partnership. Jin is forming a relationship with Toa, without going through the Resonance thing, and Gio says that he exists to protect Toa. So they end up forming a loose partnership to try to find her, since she's run away.

Jin ends up riding Gio to the moon. Kazuki now hates Jin with a murderous passion, and I won't be surprised if it turns out that Gio goes the same way as Spirytus, the one that became a monster.

Lessee. Beneath all the SF glitz, what's happening is a love tesseract. Jin loves Toa. Toa loves Jin. Gio seems to love Toa. Gio and Jin are cooperating in ways that makes Kazuki jealous of Jin, because Kazuki thinks that Gio should love Kazuki.

Jin is nice to Sieglinde, and she starts liking him. Akira seems to be playing her own game, and helps Jin a few times. Blech. Our hero is actually building a harem.

Meanwhile there's all sorts of weird political intrigue going on, mainly because of someone named Garnet, who is commander of a competing military unit. Her folks have also been trying to create dragon/dragonaut pairs, only they always fail. The ISDA doesn't know about this, evidently. She seems to be the big-bad.

Just now I was looking at Wikipedia and picked up a few spoilers that make clear that the story is even worse than I thought. About Garnet: Turns out she is a dragon herself.

Anyway, I've had enough. I'll scan through the 13 eps I bought to take frame grabs, but I'm not going to watch any more of this crap.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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