I love Mouretsu Pirates. It's one of my favorite shows ever. But there's one huge thing in it that is a critical plot point, which I have never been able to fit in or understand. It's a spoiler, so it's below the fold.

It just doesn't work for me. And the problem is that it's a critical event for the show continuity. Without it, the Golden Ghost Ship arc can't begin. Gruier can't hire the Bentenmaru. Gruier and Marika don't become friends. Gruier never attends Hakuoh Academy. The Bentenmaru never becomes a friend of Serenity. And the Bentenmaru might not survive the Pirate Hunter.

The entire plot of the series falls apart without Gruier having the ring, so that she can stow away on the Bentenmaru. But it doesn't make any sense that she should have it.

It always gnaws at me when I (frequently) rewatch that part of the show. It's a gaping hole I can't fill.

A different one is when Misa says "Reliable family trees can trace their lineage back over a hundred generations." If so, those family trees are all fiction: every member of the royal family is a "designer baby", with possibly dozens of genetic parents. When you're doing that kind of thing, family trees are kind of meaningless.

But that I can excuse as propaganda. It could be that the existence of the Rose Spring is a closely-guarded national secret. It's not the same as that damned ring.

UPDATE: The only half-way reasonable time when he might have gotten to know her is just after his faked death. Perhaps he spent some time on Serenity before going off to the Empire. Of course, millions of people live on or visit Serenity without being given direct access to princesses, so that's an issue. But if that's when it happened, he wouldn't have the ring with him. It doesn't make sense that he would fake his death, and not leave the ring behind along with everything else.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 04:07 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 388 words, total size 2 kb.