Well, it wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be, but we're doing the third book. And it's going to be a hoot. Unlike book 2, which was action-adventure, book 3 is comedy and character building.

Best line in this episode: "No, they're staring at you. I'm in disguise."

We do indeed get to meet Shou, from the insurance company. And we get to meet Chiaki's father. He's larger-than-life, which is what I expected. He also continues to be interested in helping Bentenmaru out. Looks like the friendship between the two ships goes back a hell of a long way. Likely there have been cases in the past where Bentenmaru has been able to help Barbarossa.

But for the time being, it's Marika who needs the help. And Kenjo Kurihara is willing to give it.

He certainly shows no sign of contempt for her. She's young, but he knows what she did for Gruier, and that means he has a lot of respect for her. It's obvious she has the potential to become a great pirate captain, and that's exactly what he wants from her. All she's missing is experience.

What's the most important thing about a crew, for you, Kato senchou? Kenjo says that different captains need different things. Marika got her crew ready-made so she's never thought about it before. The answer turns out to be that Marika needs people she trusts. Which obviously means she can't recruit strangers. So the Yacht Club it is.

The big surprise is that they aren't going to be using Odette II. The crew of Bentenmaru are in an isolation ward on the hospital ship. Bentenmaru itself has been disinfected, but there's no one on board. And the story is going to be about the Yacht Club learning to fly -- and fight -- the Bentenmaru.

From the preview, it's going to be hilarious.

It's also going to be interesting to see who takes which jobs. A couple of them are obvious: Lynn will do Courier's job (electronic warfare), and Syoko will do Hyakume's job (radar and sensors). From the next-ep preview, it looks like Chiaki takes San Daime's job (engines and power). It might be that Lilly takes Luca's job (navigation).

They showed Gruier sitting at the station Misa uses. The idea of Gruier and Grunhilde going on this mission seems like it would give Catherine heart failure, but maybe not. (It also could have interesting legal ramifications, in as much as Gruier is Serenity head of state (I think). But if she's working for Marika, then perhaps the Letter of Marque excuses all.)

In the previous mission, Marika was the trainee. She's in command, but she had an experienced crew. She could ask their advice if she needed it. She could rely on them to take care of a lot of things without her asking them. And if she made, or was about to make, a bad decision she could depend on them to speak up and say so. (That happened in ep 9, for example.)

But now it's not like that. As inexperienced as Marika is, everyone else except Chiaki has even less. Plenty of enthusiasm, and plenty of talent, though. But the only relevant experience that some of them have was the attack by Lightning 11. Their experience flying Odette II is of marginal use to them on Bentenmaru. (And some of them are new, and don't even have that.)

Marika's got Chiaki, at least. But Marika is the captain, and she's going to have to train everyone. Next ep they're going on board Bentenmaru and will start learning to fly it.

And in the next-ep preview there's a picture of the real bridge crew clustered around a comm screen, looking horrified. There are going to be a lot of fun character moments in the next episode.

Next ep, and maybe part of the one after, will be a training cruise, with the girls learning their jobs and getting familiar with the ship. It will include an FTL jump.

And I think there isn't any doubt at all that Marika is going to turn to Mami to come up with pirate costumes for her boarding party. (I wonder if Mami's whole club will get involved? I bet so.)

They changed the ED. The old one was Marika, Chiaki, and Mami. Now they've added Gruier and Grunhilde. In the "work clothes" image, Marika is in her new pirate costume (with Mami's changes). Mami is in her maid costume. Chiaki is in her work coveralls. Grunhilde is in her admiral's uniform, and Gruier is in her Princess Dressâ„¢.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:11 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 775 words, total size 4 kb.

1 They updated the Lost Child visuals.  Even in the spinning paper doll setup.  Mami really updated that pirate outfit.  Dark Mami also showed her fangs a bit.  I love her.

I was kind of hoping for more scenes of Misa being chased by the cat-monkeys.  That'd have been fun.

This'll probably take us to about ep 17, then I guess we'll get the final story arc there.  Though I believe books 4-6 are actually 1 long story arc, so maybe they'll condense it?  Or maybe it'll be original content to end off the series.  A lot of ways to go with it, really.

Oh, and I loved the pants-suit line.  That had me in stitches.

Posted by: sqa at April 07, 2012 08:00 PM (ZtkPH)

2

The OP music drives me nuts; I always skip it. But I really like the ED, and often watch it just to listen.

By the way, sqa, please be careful of spoilers. OK?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 07, 2012 08:04 PM (+rSRq)

3 Here's a poster of Marika and Chiaki from Megami magazine. I guess there's no scene like this in the anime.

Posted by: muon at April 07, 2012 11:57 PM (JXm2R)

4 I'm attempting to be careful about spoilers, but I know exactly 0 about what happens in the Light Novels.

I've just seen some comments that Novel 4 is part of a bigger arc.  So it raises a few questions about where they'll be going with the anime.

Now, here's some pure speculation:

I think we're going to get an anime original story arc to end the series. I say this because the copyright dates through episode 14 are still 2011.  That means we're in April and the most recent episode was done over 4 months ago.

Given production lead times, it's very likely most of the production work was done before Volume 5 was fully written.  Also, this series got an anime greenlight before the 2nd novel was published.  So either it's just Volume 4 to end or they'll go with something original.

I would really hope, in a series like this, that they could get the author to give them a scenario to work off for an original arc.  There's a whole lot going on in the background.  It wouldn't necessarily be a sweeping arc like some of the rest, but it could work.  It's not like our Director/Series Comp guy isn't the creator of Nadescio or Stellvia, two very good space opera-type series.  (Actually, this series is SOOOOO his take on Star Trek, it's pretty obvious, but I love Stellvia, so that's why I was in so much on this series.)

I was going to say that Sato has the staff to do it, but then I looked at the staff.  Sato could do this, the rest of his staff is really, really untested for original work.  Okay, so it'll just be Volume 4, then hope for a 2nd series.

Oh, and could anyone recognize the references to one thing Marika was doing?

When Marika & Gruier got the suits, I feel like it's a specific reference to something.  I just couldn't quite place it.  I was thinking Julia from Cowboy Bebop at first, but that doesn't quite hold.  It feels like I've seen two female anime characters in that type of suit getup with those types of glasses.  I just really can't place it. 

One thing about ep 14:

And really the series as a whole.  Marika is obviously learning and she's, directly, our audience stand in for the series.  We're learning through her.  Yet they've never actually talked down to Marika or the audience, at all. 

So for this episode, we got to see Marika work out the details of something she simply hadn't needed to address yet.  But they also pointed out there's a whole lot of ways to pick a crew.  Granted, Kenjo & Chiaki knew that she really didn't know how to pick them out but at the same time was trying to do it completely solo because her entire crew was in the hospital.   There wasn't any "you're a beginner, let me do this for you".  It was discussing the topic and cutting off the problematic answers before Marika got stuck with them. 

To Chiaki, taking the Yacht club out was the most logical solution, but to Marika it really never would have crossed her mind.  To Marika, Work is Work, School is School and Piracy is Piracy.  She'd never mix them nor thinking of mixing them.  (That and taking a bunch of High School girls on a Pirate ship sounds more like a Hentai plot than a Star Trek episode, given the "realistic" setting of the series) 

Further, we got to see that Marika is very good at delegating tasks and doing her "own" tasks very well.  But there are always times the Captain needs to make executive decisions that go against the people you delegated tasks to.  She's going to get a fun lesson in that over the next few episodes.  The "Captain needs to be the most knowledgeable person on the ship" is an old concept, but there's a whole lot of truth to the reality of it.  It'll be nice to see.

I also liked how Marika wasn't comfortable with the notoriety.  Until recently, she had just been a some-what cute high school student.  Now she's an interstellar celebrity.  That was quite the shift for here and it'll be interesting to see how long that takes.  But even to Marika, she's seen the reactions that Gruier gets, so she really couldn't quite get it, at first.  I liked that.  It's actually the arc a lot of people go through when they do get some level of notoriety.  It can take a while to sink in that life has changed, even if they don't feel they actually did all that much.

Posted by: sqa at April 08, 2012 11:39 AM (ZtkPH)

5 Sqa, book 6 was published in March, 2011, ending the story arc that started in book 4 (at least, according to the Wikipedia entry; I haven't read any of them). Book 8 ("Purple Witch's Ship") comes out in 2 weeks. Also, I can't find anything about the anime being greenlit before book 2 came out in April, 2009; ANN has it as being announced a few days before the release of book 3, and then delayed until 2012 about halfway between the release of books 6 and 7.

My guess is that they originally planned a 13-episode series based on the first three books. With most light novel series, they'd have had a bit more material than that, but this one doesn't seem to have been serialized in a magazine before being published in book form. The delay could have had many reasons, but that's likely when they decided to go to 26 episodes, and they had the whole three-parter in hand when they made that announcement.

(side note: the Wikipedia page has all of the yacht-club girls except Jenny and Lynn as "original to the anime"; apparently they never got names or descriptions, so Shoko Kobayashimaru is an original in-joke)

-j

Posted by: J Greely at April 08, 2012 01:08 PM (2XtN5)

6

At this point, my wild ass guess is that they're not going to use book 4. They're going to stretch book 3 out a long way, and then I agree with sqa that they'll create an anime-only story to finish the series.

And we'll get told that there's another series planned, and that one will start with book 4.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 08, 2012 03:27 PM (+rSRq)

7 There was also Sato's comment along the lines of "removing the romance". Maybe a significant chunk of books 4-6 is just being chopped out; that would make sense, particularly if it wasn't about Marika. Cut a whole book's worth of material, and you're back on track for 26 episodes.

Now, if it was yuri romance that was cut, then a lot of fans will be unhappy...


-j

Posted by: J Greely at April 08, 2012 04:26 PM (2XtN5)

8 Hrmm... I could have sworn I saw an early 2009 date on the anime adaptation news.   That would explain part of my mess up there.  And I really should have sent Google Translate on the Japanese Wiki page.  English information on the LN series is almost non-existent.

Still, this one has definitely been in the tank for a while.  Which might have worked well for it, as it avoided more crowded seasons. 

On how it'll end:

With having a proper timeline now, it's still hard to say they'll cut down 3 LNs into 6-10 episodes.  For a series in absolutely no hurry, that's a tad odd.  2 LN being 13 episodes is actually pretty rare.  Most series are between 3 and 5 LNs into one course.  So it's technically doable, but I'd be really, really surprised.

I think they probably stretch book 3 out to 6 or so episodes, then we get some wrap up, maybe a history story arc, fleshing out the other characters.  Maybe Ririka joins them for a jaunt somewhere. 

Granted, the translated Japanese text seems to imply that book 7 carries directly from the world changes of 4-6, so I guess they couldn't just do book 7 either.  That'd have been an option.  So, yeah, either a quickly done 4-6 or original.  Given how much of a world there is, they really could do something original & author blessed.  I'm still surprised that more creators didn't do what Oba did with One Piece's 10th anniversary movie and find a way to integrate it and make it canon.  You can't tell every story in your original works, even if Oda is actually trying to.

Posted by: sqa at April 08, 2012 08:14 PM (ZtkPH)

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