It's a good ending, but part of why it's OK is because I know there's a sequel, and that Fate will be in it, and that it's coming out here soon. (Currently scheduled for mid January.)

If that weren't the case, it would be just the faintest amount bittersweet. On the other hand, there really wasn't any other way for it to end.

And it's a blessing that the second series isn't "Return of Precia". Gad, what a bitch!

They front-loaded the fan service, which is quite common. And once the story got rolling, they pretty much stopped with the lolicon pandering. (Except for one eyecatch, which was totally egregious.)

It's a hell of a good story, and I liked the fact that they kept surprising me. And despite how it feels in the first couple of episodes, it's not even remotely a clone of Card Captor Sakura, and points for that.

I'll be writing a review, but for the moment I do recommend this. I enjoyed it a lot.

UPDATE: In comments, Griffin talks about how Precia makes a pretty good villain. I have more, heavily spoilerish, commentary about that below the fold.

I have a heuristic for what makes a good villain:

Hubris: He thinks he's strong and dangerous because he is strong and dangerous. But he isn't quite as strong as he thinks he is, which is why...

Precia suffers from hubris to the extent that she's attempting to achieve something that's impossible, but that's not really the same kind of thing. Hubris in the sense I'm talking about is a kind of arrogance. Precia isn't arrogant, she's just nuts.

Nemesis: he eventually gets what's coming to him. Maybe it's incremental punishment, or maybe it's a grand reckoning, but in the end he suffers and probably dies. And before it happens, he knows what will happen to him and why. When it happens, in the eyes of the audience there should be a feeling of justice being done, and feeling of triumph.

And in the end nemesis didn't really come for her. She lost, but she didn't think she lost. Tumbling into the abyss, she thought she'd won.

I wanted her to suffer. I'm not joking. I wanted her to scream in anguish and frustration, and to realize that her quest was a failure. There was no justice in her fate, no feeling of triumph when she died -- if she did.

Comprehensibility: We understand his motivation, even though we may not agree with it. What he does makes sense.

And it does in Precia's case. What she was trying to achieve was probably unachievable, but in the end we know what she's trying to do and why, and it does make sense.

Menace: Serious villains should genuinely scare us.

I didn't find her terrifying. I found her ugly, and cruel, and detestable, but I wasn't really afraid of her.

Attraction: But villains should also be a bit seductive. There should be just a little bit of a temptation to root for the bad guy over the good guys. We should admire the bad guy, just a little, maybe. And feel just a bit sorry for him in the end.

And on this one she fails completely. There's no attraction at all.

So as villains go, she's really pretty ordinary. Not the worst out there, but she isn't at the same level as Cell (DBZ) or Friagne (Shana), or even Valkyrie Ghost (UFO Princess Valkyrie 2) which are as good of villains as you could hope to find.

Because Precia didn't suffer in the end, because there was no feeling of justice, the ending could have been a failure. It wasn't though because by that point the story was no longer about Precia. It was about Fate, and her happy ending makes the series happy ending work. It was OK that Precia didn't suffer because by that point I was looking at Fate instead.

But without that, Precia was the kind of villain that could have sunk the series.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:16 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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