Ubu is complaining about UFO Princess Valkyrie and he has good right to do so.

He also talks about how uncomfortable he is with Sanada-san's catgirl gun. If she shoots it at a human woman or girl, the target gets transformed into a catgirl, who instantly becomes loyal to Valhalla and is willing to work without being paid. He calls them slaves, and he isn't wrong. But that's only just one of the bad things they do in the series. Spoilers below the fold.

She's not the only one. By the time the series is over, three different major buildings in that town have been severely damaged by having Valhalla space ships crashed into them. None of the building owners ever get paid for the damage, however.

A fair number of them are loonytunes, too. Valkyrie is waaaay over the line, but she ain't the only one. Chorus is schizophrenic and delusional; it's amazing that they let her wander around free. (There turns out to be an important reason why Chorus is so sick, and it gets fixed at the end of the second series. I was very happy to see that Chorus was much improved in the few cases where she appears in the third series.)

In her own way, Inarba is even worse. She's the Valhalla Inquisition (no Monty Python jokes, please) and I think she's a sadist, using her powers to dish out really severe punishments to others for minor peccadillos. She has the ability to create immersive illusions and uses that for her punishments. In the first episode she appeared in she decided to punish Chorus and reduced her to tears, and that made me hate her. Chorus has enough problems without Inarba doing that to her.

Inarba also punishes Rika, Kazuto's younger sister. In fact, she tries to do it twice. And she doesn't have jurisdiction; Rika isn't a citizen of Valhalla or in any way connected to Valhalla legally, and she isn't on the planet when Inarba does that. There's a serious jurisdiction issue here that Inarba doesn't give a damn about. (But Inarba doesn't give a damn about much except punishing people.)

There are eight princesses but we never really get to know Nesty. Of the other seven, Hydra is the only one who is even remotely close to normal. Fam is nuts, too; her thing is meganekko, and after she arrives she turns most of the girls at Kazuto's high school into her own army, which eventually faces off against Sanada's catgirl army.

But Mehm is the ugliest. At the end of the first series she takes Hydra and Valkyrie home to Valhalla and there's a public announcement that Valkyrie is going to get married. Kazuto and his friends use Raine's ship to travel to Valhalla because Kazuto wants to say goodbye to Valkyrie and wish her well.

They end up having to fight their way through a naval blockade. And it turns out it's all a plot by Mehm to get Valkyrie and Kazuto together again.

It turns out that a fair number of Valhalla navy ships are destroyed in all of this, between Shiro and Marduke flying fighter ships and Hydra laying down cover to get Raine's ship to the palace and some other things. How many Valhalla soldiers and sailors died that day for Mehm's little morality play?

(Speaking of Hydra: she was firing on the Valhalla Navy. Wouldn't that be treason?)

The Valhalla royal family is merciless, pitiless, arrogant, and manipulative. They're not very nice people at all.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:31 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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