Thoughts on “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" Season 7

I don’t think there’s been a season since Season 2 that was as focused on character development and life lessons as Season 7. Seasons 3, 4, 5, and 6 all started off with a big adventure story followed by a run of high concept stuff. Season 7 has been 100% hardcore character development from the get-go, starting with the low-key “Celestial Advice”, in which Twilight consults Celestia over her worries about Starlight’s future. I’m wondering if the imminent release of the movie has anything to do with this; maybe they’re saving all the adventure stuff for that. Regardless, it’s been really enjoyable for the most part. We’ve gotten to see the characters just settle down and go back to living their lives, instead of going on huge adventures, parodying zombie movies, getting sucked into comic books, turning into bats, going on disastrous boat trips, or anything of the sort. All of the Mane 6 have gotten a really solid episode focusing on them, along with satisfying supporting roles in other episodes. We’ve also gotten episodes focusing on Maud in “Rock Solid Friendship”, and Big Mac and the Cutie Mark Crusaders in “Hard to Say Anything”, and one where Starlight plays a main role, “All Bottled Up”, where she’s paired with Trixie, as well as two others, “Rock Solid Friendship” and “A Royal Problem”, where she plays a strong supporting role. Season 7 also follows up on the dragon and changeling stories that began in Season 6, with “Triple Threat” showing Dragon Lord Ember and Thorax, now leader of the changelings, meeting for the first time, and “To Change a Changeling” showing us how changeling society has evolved now that they’re out from under Chrysalis and no longer have to steal love.

The first three quarters of Season 7 pay off a bunch of plot threads from Season 6 (and earlier in some cases)—Starlight’s tutelage in “Celestial Advice”, Starlight’s friendship with Trixie in “All Bottled Up”, Celestia and Luna’s still not always harmonious relationship in “A Royal Problem”, the new leadership for the changelings and dragons in “Triple Threat” and “To Change a Changeling”, Pinkie and the yaks in “Not Asking For Trouble”, and Fluttershy’s new assertiveness in “Fluttershy Leans In”. Sprinkled in are slice of life episodes, which make up most of the last quarter of the season and are almost all really fun. “Secrets and Pies” gives us another full episode of Pinkie wackiness, which I feel like we haven’t gotten since “Too Many Pinkies” back in Season 3. “A Flurry of Emotions” and “Once Upon a Zeppelin” show us how things are in Twilight’s family now, and also give us an idea of what she actually gets up to all day in her castle.

The less good

It’s not a perfect season; we get a few “bad” episodes, in the usual Friendship is Magic sense of “bad”, a perfectly well constructed episode that lacks some je ne sais quoi compared to the best of the series.

Three episodes so far have fallen in this category for me: “Hard to Say Anything”, “Campfire Tales”, and “Daring Done?” The worst of the three (but nowhere near the worst of the series, let alone actually “bad” in a general sense) is “Hard to Say Anything”, which follows the Cutie Mark Crusaders’ efforts to help Big Macintosh with his crush on Sugar Belle, the baker pony from Starlight’s old village. He has a rival, Feather Bangs, a boy band pony who competes for Sugar Belle’s affection. The episode is just sort of tedious, and the Cutie Mark Crusaders got up to the sort of shenanigans that I thought they’d left behind them at this point. (I’m a little biased towards the Season 2-era Mane 6, but for me, the Cutie Mark Crusaders’ best is all during and after getting their cutie marks.) The episode does have good parts, though; most of the Feather Bangs scenes were really funny, and he surprisingly turned out to be a likeable character. Seeing Sugar Belle again was also nice; I’d forgotten how cute her voice is.

“Campfire Tales” is about the Cutie Mark Crusaders and their big sisters; trapped in a cave by insect attack while on a camping trip, the big sisters each tell a folk tale to pass the time. With the framing story and three folk tales to get through, there isn’t enough time to develop any of the folk tales in a really satisfying way. Rarity’s came closest, though; it had a real emotional arc and a Chinese-inspired aesthetic that I liked.

“Daring Done?” is another Daring Do episode. I’m not a huge fan of these in general (except for “Stranger than Fan Fiction”, which is hilarious because of Quibble Pants). This one adds Pinkie Pie and a more emotional Captain America: Civil War-style character arc for Daring Do, so it is better than “Daring Don’t”, but the good ideas somehow just didn’t come together for me. Maybe I’ll appreciate it more on re-watch.

These three were the episodes I enjoyed least from this season, but they were still pretty good compared to the worst of other seasons—stuff like “Power Ponies” or “Applejack’s ‘Day’ Off”—and I have a feeling when I do a full re-watch of the series, with Season 7 coming straight after Season 6, these three won’t seem too bad at all.

Favorite episodes

Three of my favorites so far have been “Rock Solid Friendship”, “A Royal Problem”, and “Triple Threat”. I love when stories combine established characters in new ways, and all three of these episodes, along with some of my other favorites in Friendship is Magic, do that.

“Rock Solid Friendship” combines Pinkie Pie, Maud, and Starlight, as Pinkie pressures Maud to make friends with Starlight so Maud will move to Ponyville, without realizing that Maud and Starlight are already becoming friends on their own. Maud is always hilarious, and watching her interact with Starlight is a lot of fun and makes both characters more interesting. Pinkie was also utilized well and got to be a driver of events and learn a lesson even as a supporting character.

“A Royal Problem” combines Celestia, Luna, and Starlight, as Starlight takes on her first assignment from the Cutie Map and quickly realizes the friendship problem is between the two alicorn sisters. At this point, there’s no plot reason to have Celestia in the show at all, but that also frees the writers to fill in details about her character that wouldn’t have come up when she was Twilight’s wise and all-knowing mentor, and both this episode and “Celestial Advice” do a great job of it. Both this episode and “Rock Solid Friendship” show that Starlight has found a niche where her social tactlessness is an asset; only Starlight would have the audacity to do what had to be done to force the princesses to see things from each others’ perspectives. I also liked that Celestia gets to be nurturing again at the end, helping soothe Starlight’s fear of failure.

“Triple Threat” combines Spike, Ember, and Thorax, as Spike realizes he invited both leaders to visit him in Ponyville on the same day and tries to keep them from meeting each other, since he’s afraid the gentle Thorax would mix badly with the fierce Ember and the result could be a war of dragon vs. changeling. This sort of plot can get old fast for me, but Ember and Thorax find out about each other just as I was starting to think the jig was getting old, and I enjoyed that Thorax and Ember worked out their issues with each other directly, like rational people. This episode is also one of the funniest of the season. It had my favorite joke of Season 7 so far, when Ember can’t tell Twilight and Starlight apart.

“Triple Threat” is a funny episode, but Season 7 overall has been more serious than Season 6, and has one of the sweetest and most adorable serious episodes of the entire series: “The Perfect Pear”, which tells the Romeo and Juliet love story of Applejack, Big Mac, and Apple Bloom’s parents, Bright Mac and Pear Butter. Season 7 hasn’t been great for songs, but “The Perfect Pear” has “You’re in My Head Like a Catchy Song”, my favorite song of the season. It also introduces Grand Pear, the Apple siblings’ maternal grandfather, voiced by William Shatner. William Shatner actually does a great job; he modifies his voice enough that I didn’t even realize it was him until I saw the credits, so you focus on the character and not William Shatner. I hope they’ll bring back Grand Pear for another episode so we can see how he relates to his grandchildren after being out of their lives for so long. (The obvious Grand Pear / Discord meeting is optional for me; I’d rather see real characterization than fan service, no matter how fun it would be. Though I won’t say no to it if they do it gracefully.)

I also really enjoyed “Discordant Harmony” and “A Health of Information”. In “Discordant Harmony”, Discord tries to change himself for Fluttershy’s sake, only to discover that she liked him the way he way, while in “A Health of Information” Fluttershy has to unravel an ancient mystery to find the cure to a plague. They’re not as good as the four episodes I mentioned above, nor are they my favorite Fluttershy episodes, but I thought both had an interesting hook, and I liked seeing Fluttershy have real stories that focused on something other than her being assertive now (which, as I’ll discuss later, I have some minor gripes about).

“Fame and Misfortune”

After spending a fair amount of time reading the comment sections on the My Little Pony wikia and the forums on Derpibooru (and a little bit of /mlp/ on 4chan, so sue me), it’s become apparent that there’s a lot of burnout in the fandom. When people are burnt out on a fandom, they start to get hypercritical and lambaste the writers over weird things, or complain that the show isn’t some other thing that it’s never been but they’ve decided would be more enjoyable to them than what it is. I go through an anime burnout about once every five years, but since anime is an entire medium, I go enjoy something else for a while, then come back and expand outside whatever narrow subgenre I was inhabiting that I’d grown tired of, and that usually does the trick. Recently I got burnt out on moe, and I stopped watching anime and sought out other things, like superheroes and My Little Pony, as a change of pace. Now I’m starting to get back into anime a little, with shows like One Punch Man and Little Witch Academia and Last Exile that are a little different from the stuff I’d gotten sick of. (I have also enjoyed some moe shows—Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka? and Gabriel Dropout, for example—but I don’t have the energy to sit through the ones that aren’t good anymore.)

A lot of My Little Pony fans online are showing signs of advanced burnout. They get hypercritical and turn minor storytelling inconsistencies into world-ending flaws that shoot an episode down into negative ratings. They complain that the show should be dark and gritty (Mare-Do-Well: The Dark Pony Knight Returns? Ponystar Equestria? Game of Pones?), or that it needs more worldbuilding (The Ponymarillion?), which would effectively turn it into a different show. Their most common complaints are about the characters, though, especially the Mane 6.

The Friendship is Magic staff are weirdly active on Twitter, and I imagine they see these complaints constantly: Twilight is too boring now that she’s an alicorn, Fluttershy learns the same lesson all the time and just needs to be assertive already, Pinkie Pie is just a dumb joke character who adds nothing to the story, Rarity is annoying and should go away forever, Rainbow Dash is the awesomest perfectest pony and doesn’t need to learn anything because she already knows everything so fuck you for writing an episode where she isn’t treated as the paragon of perfection that she is, and Applejack is there. In Season 7, they chose to write an entire episode addressing these fan complaints. It’s called “Fame and Misfortune”.

I didn’t put this episode in my favorites section because it’s not one of my favorites. The conceit they used of having Twilight publish the friendship journal from Season 4 is clever, and it has parts that I like a lot, and I think its message is important: no one is flawless, and no one can change their personality forever after suddenly seeing the error of their ways during a 23-minute storyline—even when you “fix” issues in your personality, they’ll keep recurring in different ways throughout your life. Before I saw it, I was planning an essay that would have made a lot of the same points it does about why some of these complaints sit on invalid premises. But it’s an “interesting” episode, not a “good” episode like “Rock Solid Friendship” or “A Royal Problem”. That’s why I gave it its own section.

I haven’t looked very closely at how fans reacted to it yet, but the reaction I’ve seen has mostly been negative, which makes sense since it’s an entire episode directly disagreeing with their complaints. I’ve also criticized some of the episodes and creative choices of the show. There is no such thing as a perfect work of art. Even if someone can come along and say “Such-and-such is a perfect show”, someone else can always come along and say (genuinely, not just to be disagreeable) “For me it had x-y-z flaws.” In the next sections, I’m going to criticize some more things. To me, the message of “Fame and Misfortune” was not “Don’t criticize us”. It wasn’t as broad as that. It was narrowly directed at a specific set of criticisms, mostly about the way the Mane 6 are written, that seem to come from an implicit belief that the characters should not have flaws, should always behave correctly (according to some measure of correctness), and should always learn their lessons for now and always after one 23-minute episode in which they learn how wrong they were. I’ve seen other instances where fans seem to think this; ask me about the roasting “Filli Vanilli” gets for how Pinkie Pie acts in it sometime.

At the end of the day, there is a difference between constructive, well-meaning criticism, and misguided or destructive criticism, and the creators are not obliged to take criticism to heart if it would, in their opinions, make the show worse. If they had written episodes like “28 Pranks Later” or “Filli Vanilli” the way some of these angry fans had wanted, the episodes fundamentally would not have worked as narratives. It’s not good storytelling to write an episode where Rainbow Dash’s awesomeness gets praised for 23 minutes. Just as Batman needs to keep feeling angry about his parents’ death, Fluttershy needs to struggle with assertiveness and Pinkie needs to have trouble being serious.

At the end of “Fame and Misfortune”, the Mane 6 find out that two young fillies resolved their differences and stayed friends thanks to the friendship journal, and the Mane 6 decide to be satisfied with that and ignore the riot going on outside. Combined with some statements I’ve seen some of the staff make on Twitter, it seems like they’re implying they’re sick of dealing with the adult fans and have decided to take the attitude of “Fuck you guys, as long as the little girls like us we’re fine”. That’s an understandable attitude to take, especially after they did episodes like “Slice of Life” just for adult fans and are still catching heat over everything. I also sometimes make things, and I totally get how tempting it is to only show things you made to people who will like it no matter what. I totally get how exhausting it is to argue with people who don’t understand what a work was trying to do, yet think they’re the world’s next Derrida and want to “well, actually” the creators on the symbolism, or people who blast the creators because after calculating the length of the Equestrian solar year it turns out there should be a leap second every three and a half seasons but they missed it, or people who will never be satisfied with anything because they’re actually burnt out on the show and would rather be watching Westworld but haven’t realized it yet. I see all these types and more. I struggle with the thought of putting my work out there for all of these reasons and more. But adult fans didn’t start watching Friendship is Magic because it was aimed at them; they started watching it because they found it good, despite not being aimed at them. I don’t know about all the adult fans, but for myself, I don’t need anything special from the staff. I just want them to keep making the best thing they can. Things have changed a little from Season 1 to Season 7, but in my opinion, every season has had more good episodes than bad, and the good episodes have been brilliant, and the bad episodes have been more “Eh, there was this small story element that kinda didn’t work for me, it wasn’t awful but it could’ve been better.”

“Shadow Play”

“Shadow Play” is like the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice of Friendship is Magic season finales. It’s a huge, sprawling, ambitious story that maybe, kind of, juuuust a little escaped the capabilities of what could be told in the time it had with the amount of backstory that had been established.

I was genuinely surprised and genuinely delighted that all the episodes we’d seen across the season about legendary figures of Equestrian history were actually leading to something. I liked the concept a lot. I also liked getting to learn something about how the Elements of Harmony came to exist. This was a very continuity-heavy, lore-heavy episode by MLP standards. I like the show we have and I definitely don’t want it to turn into the aforementioned Ponymarillion, but it’s nice sometimes to learn that these things have a history in this world and aren’t purely plot devices.

Part 2 of the episode, once the story has been established, was really good. Twilight is torn between listening to her idol, Starswirl, and her student, Starlight. She knows Starswirl’s path goes against her own beliefs, embodied in Starlight’s presence among them, but she listens to him because she spent so long idolizing him that she has a hard time accepting he’s also a pony and isn’t perfect. It was a great conflict, and all the more powerful because of what we saw in the movie with Tempest Shadow.

Unfortunately, the wind-up in Part 1 is where you can see the seams showing. It’s way too abrupt. They squeezed five scenes of the Mane 6 minus Twilight retrieving their legend’s relic, each of which probably could have been an episode concept all on its own, into about ten minutes. I wish this had been structured more like the story arc in Season 4, with each pony getting her own episode to establish her relationship with her legend and finding the relic at the end, then realizing in “Shadow Play” Part 1 that the relic could be used to summon the legends back to Equestria. At least setting up enough in the episode so that retrieving the relic didn’t require so much context would have helped; Fluttershy’s and Pinkie’s missions are the shortest of all, probably fitting into about 30 seconds apiece, and that’s because they each had entire episodes–“A Health of Information” and “Daring Done?”–to set things up beforehand. The season was pretty full of great episodes, but if I were supreme pony story dictator, I would’ve cut “Hard to Say Anything” and “Marks and Recreation”, along with “Campfire Tales” itself, so we could fit in episodes about Applejack and Rockhoof, Rarity and Mistmane, and Rainbow and Flash Magnus. (Rainbow and Spike’s race with the jerk dragon Garble, which ends with Rainbow tricking and robbing Garble to get Flash Magnus’s shield, would’ve made a perfect ending to the episode, teaching kids the lesson that it’s okay to deceive and rob someone, as long as they’re a jerk and deserve it and you really need what they have.)

Among all the two-parters in the series, I’d probably put “Shadow Play” in fourth place, behind “Twilight’s Kingdom”, “A Canterlot Wedding”, and “The Crystal Empire”. It was about as good as “Princess Twilight Sparkle” in the end. “Princess Twilight Sparkle” was a less ambitious story that stuck its landing, whereas “Shadow Play” is big and ambitious and doesn’t quite make it, but I’m giving it extra points for its ambition. It’s also interesting how “Shadow Play” is a total brony-bait episode, even though there’ve been signs from the staff that they’re sick of catering to bronies and want to focus on their original target audience of children. I’m sure children will also like the episode–I know when I was a kid I was capable of appreciating ambition in storytelling–but this is the sort of thing bronies online are constantly asking for. Stop sending us mixed messages!

Random Observations

“Fame and Misfortune” is the most obvious example of the rising number of meta references in Season 7 compared to earlier seasons. My favorite joke of the season from “Triple Threat” is another example: on one level, it works because Ember isn’t used to looking at ponies, so it makes sense that she’d have some trouble telling Twilight and Starlight apart. But out of universe, Starlight is intentionally similar to Twilight, so the joke also has an extra meta level to it.

I went back and forth on Starlight in Season 6, but she’s really come into her own in Season 7. Even though she’s superficially similar to Twilight, her arc as a character has interesting similarities to both Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash. Pairing her up with Trixie and Maud and Thorax helps her a lot too; while I’m a little disappointed that we never get a really strong connection between Starlight and any of the Mane 6 other than Twilight, I’m glad they found characters to mix her in with that could create an interesting dynamic. It’s no coincidence that two of my four favorite Season 7 episodes had Starlight in a major role. She’s not going to blow up my character rankings, but I’ve enjoyed watching her a lot.

Pinkie Pie has surprisingly gotten some good material in too. Her funny scenes at the start of the season weren’t that great, but she had a great subplot in “Rock Solid Friendship”, and she actually got to be a serious character again in “Not Asking For Trouble”, where she becomes the first pony to go inside Yakyakistan after reaching its gates in “Party Pooped”. Then we got another funny episode in “Secrets and Pies” towards the end of the season. Overall, Season 7 was a good season for Pinkie, even if we don’t count the movie.

I disagree with other fans who complain about Fluttershy in Seasons 1 through 3. I feel a strong personal connection to Fluttershy, and that has dwindled a little in Seasons 5 and 6 as she got more assertive and less shy and quiet. (There’s a scene in “Fame and Misfortune” where an angry pony in the crowd outside the castle yells “Fluttershy is just so painfully shy, it’s hard to relate! I mean, come on!” and another pony in the background wearing a Fluttershy T-shirt and hat, named White Lightning according to the wiki, looks down in shame and slinks away; White Lightning is me.) So I’m not thrilled with the direction she goes in Season 7, starting with “Fluttershy Leans In”, which seems to have the narrative message “This is Fluttershy now, she’s assertive”. I didn’t list it under “bad” episodes because it’s not bad. Nothing about the direction the writers have taken Fluttershy is bad or wrong; it’s a valid decision, even if it’s one that has made me feel less close to the character. What I’d like to see, now that “Fluttershy Leans In” has firmly established her new assertiveness, is some episodes that focus on her gentle and quiet side again, and show that it still exists even though she’s now assertive. “Buckball Season” did this really well (for Pinkie as well). Some of the other Season 7 episodes—“Discordant Harmony” and “A Health of Information”, for example—show her being kind in an assertive way, which isn’t quite what I’m talking about, but I’ll take it. Another nice direction would be to introduce another character who is as shy and quiet as Fluttershy used to be (White Lightning?), and let Fluttershy teach that character how to get by in life without giving up her self, the way Fluttershy has learned to.

Thorax has turned out to be a surprisingly good character. He didn’t get much development in Season 6, so I didn’t have a real opinion on him, but watching him in Season 7 has been a lot of fun, both paired with Ember in “Triple Threat” and paired with Starlight and Trixie in “To Change a Changeling”. It would’ve been way funnier if his brother was named “Abdomen”, though.

I still don’t quite get the fascination with background ponies, but I do now appreciate the “cameo” ponies, the ones that appear for one or two episodes or a few scenes, like Coco Pommel or Cheese Sandwich. Season 7 has been more focused on existing characters and less on new characters, but it does introduce Strawberry Sunrise, a pegasus who shows up to go “Strawberries are best fruit, fight me mf”, for a memorable scene in “Honest Apple”.

It was fun to see Iron Will again in “Once Upon a Zeppelin”, and I liked the joke where he says he’s learned from last time and satisfaction is not guaranteed.

Conclusion

Season 8 is coming next year, and apparently Hasbro is happy with all the bucketloads of money they’re still making on the show, so it’s entirely possible there will be a Season 9, and it seems they’re even talking about a second movie. Even though I’m slightly concerned about that mindset, the fact remains that Season 7 was on the whole extremely good. So far the staff has managed to consistently bring in strong writers who understand the characters and are able to bring them in good directions that keep them interesting without changing who they fundamentally are. I have a feeling some of what I consider missteps from Seasons 4 and 5 happened because the fandom was at fever pitch and the writers were trying to do what they thought the fans wanted, whereas their current disillusionment with the fandom may have actually helped them get back to basics in Season 7 and deliver a run of great character-oriented stories. Whatever the reason, I have high hopes for Season 8 and I’m looking forward to it.

The “Last Exile" Diaries

I first watched Last Exile back in the early 2000’s when it was on Anime Unleashed on TechTV (even before it became G4). I thought I had watched the whole show, but when I thought back, all I remembered was a bunch of scenes of Claus, Lavie, and Alvis being suddenly interrupted in the middle of a conversation by the commercial break bumper, and then a really loud commercial for The Screen Savers or some sort of credit adjustment service. Now that it’s on Crunchyroll, I figured I’d revisit it, especially since I’ve heard it gets really good later.

Thoughts on Episodes 1 - 8

Last Exile might get really good later, but my goodness, does it start out slow. The story pacing for the first eight episodes feels really strange. First we spend two entire episodes watching this huge ritualized airship battle while the main characters, Claus and Lavie, try to deliver a message to the airship fleet’s commander, Duke Mad-Thane, from his wife and daughter. After this, the pacing suddenly becomes really fast. Claus and Lavie return home and then, during a vanship race, run into a dying pilot, Ralph Wednesday, who hands off a little girl named Alvis to them for delivery to the Silvana, a legendary ship captained by Alex Row, a tall and dark man of few words with a cool cape. Claus and Lavie’s home is destroyed by star-shaped ships from the mysterious Guild, and they run away and manage to deliver Alvis to the Silvana, but then aren’t confident in how she’ll be treated on board and decide to force their way onto the ship to see her. The ship comes under Guild attack and Claus impulsively asks to be allowed to take out one of their specially modified vanships that has a machine gun, where a Guild noble named Dio observes him with interest and eventually goes out to fly against him. Lavie passes out from the g-forces of one of the crazy maneuvers that Claus goes through to evade Dio, so Claus isn’t able to shoot down Dio because he’s out of ammunition and needs her to reload. Finally, after the battle, the Silvana docks at a floating casino and Lavie and her new friend Mullin Shetland, who helped her and Claus back on Mad-Thane’s ship (the Claiomh Solais, just like the wand in Little Witch Academia) in Episode 2, ends up clashing with the captain of another ship called the Goliath, which brings them into a ship-to-ship duel that the Silvana easily wins, despite the Goliath’s attempts to cheat.

Whew! After the really slow first two episodes, the pacing for Episodes 3-8 goes breakneck, and you just sort of get swept along by it. That means the show stays exciting and made me want to keep watching, but at times I was really unclear on why things were happening. Claus almost seems like a stoner most of the time; he’s half-asleep, barely reacting to anything, doesn’t seem all there, and yet he very suddenly develops a deep and abiding attachment to Alvis, to the point where he risks death and gets the tar kicked out of himself all so he can see her and make sure she’s being treated well. Lavie at first is the more sensible voice of reason, who advises caution, but after acting standoffish towards Alvis, she also suddenly decides that she really wants to get on that ship and find out what’s happening. It also isn’t clear why the mechanics crew decides to beat the crap out of Claus when they later suddenly decide to be kind and helpful. (Tatiana’s influence, maybe.)

I do understand why it’s written like this. The writers needed to set up the world, which is actually pretty complicated. So far it seems like each nation has a ruler, with nobles who finance gigantic airships, and they go to war with each other, but the Guild, which seems to have highly advanced technology and live in the upper atmosphere, prescribes a set of rules for warfare. The nobles also live on floating cities, and the commoners all live down below on the ground, where it’s apparently hard to find good water or decent food. (Though Claus and Lavie’s food looks fresh enough.) The first two episodes are mostly setting up the world by showing us a battle, the rules, the Guild allowing infractions of the rules for mysterious reasons, the Anatoray nobles’ suicidal devotion to chivalry, and other foundational concepts. And with Episode 8 finally stopping and giving us a chance to breathe, I’m hoping we’ll get to learn more about the characters at a slower pace and maybe get some insight in hindsight on why they did certain things that they did.

Aside from the story, I absolutely love the art style. The CG used for the ships is really terrible (I’d like to blame the show’s age–it’s from 2003–but the CG in Fate/Zero looked just as bad, unfortunately). But I loved the steampunk art design and the sepia tone over everything that makes it look like an old photograph. There’s an artist named Range Murata who worked on this that I used to be a huge fan of, and now I remember why. Last Exile is from the early digipaint era, and some of the shows from that era look really awful today, flat and garish, as if they were done in MS Paint. Even Love Hina looks pretty bad compared to more modern shows. But Last Exile, like Haibane Renmei, overcame the pitfalls of early digipaint with an amazing art direction.

Episodes 9 - 14

Things continue moving at a fast pace in these episodes. Claus and Lavie enter a vanship race where they have to fix up a wreck and fly it. Dio enters just to fly against them, but through a series of circumstances he ends up on the Silvana with them just messing around. Lavie decides that she can’t be Claus’s navigator if he’s going to fly a fighting vanship since she doesn’t want to be involved in such a thing, and retires to join the mechanics group. Meanwhile, Alex Row enters into some intrigue against Dio’s older sister, Maestro Delphine, and bids in an auction on a relic known as the gate to EXILE, one of four mysterious items known fittingly as mysterions. Someone threatens his life over this, and he just barely makes it back to the Silvana with the gate.

The emperor of Anatoray demands that Alex surrender Alvis to the captain of the Urbanus, but Alex refuses, so they fight. Meanwhile, a little drama is going on between Claus, Tatiana, and Tatiana’s best friend and navigator Alister, who is getting disenchanted with Tatiana’s constant grumpiness. (She really is a grump.) Alister volunteers to be Claus’s navigator when Alex picks him to fly escort on a parley mission to the Urbanus, and Tatiana gets her back by picking Claus as her navigator during the battle. They end up crashing their vanship in the desert, and we find out that Tatiana graduated top of her class from the military academy and has apparently been lying to her parents about what she actually does, telling them she’s on a normal ship where everything is hunky dory instead of a weird black ops rogue ship that seems to be working to overthrow the government and establish a new world order.

Meanwhile, Lavie has a flashback while lying unconscious in bed, showing us how she and Claus learned to fly from their fathers. Claus’s father was a noble who decided he liked slumming it with the ground peeps, and came down to live next door to Lavie’s dad, who looks like someone you’d find in a sports bar yelling about the Browns on a Wednesday night. They were tasked to deliver a peace treaty to the Disith, but were killed. The episode hints that the Guild killed them on purpose so the war would go on. It also hints that Alex Row knew them and that he was the one who gave Lavie the goat toy that she later gives Alvis.

The show is still refusing to really explain anything, and the shine is starting to wear off. I’m still with the series at this point on the strength of its world, but I’m finding the characters are underwritten and the air battles aren’t nearly as exciting as someone thought they were. I had a rough time with Episode 12, where the Silvana and Urbanus fight for the entire episode. Every battle pretty much comes down to ships rendered in terrible CG flying around a snore-inducing sky filled with grey smoke and fog and clouds. Too often, the show substitutes vagueness for real story and character dimension. Even though Episode 13, which is just Tatiana sleeping in the desert having flashbacks and feeling sorry for herself while Claus actually tries to get them out of there, doesn’t tell us a whole lot about Tatiana; it just gives us random tidbits of her life before the Silvana, without enough details about the world to really understand the import of most of them. The show keeps on doing the same thing with Alex; everything he does is cloaked in a guise of mystery, and yet people keep following him blindly while he does weird, self-destructive things with no explanation. Someone on the writing staff seems to have thought they could make contrived backstory dumps more subtle and interesting by making them incredibly vague, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.

The relative bright spot when it comes to characters is Dio. He at least is fun to watch, and mysterious in a more organic way, because of his weird behavior. Lavie, who was my favorite of the earlier episodes, has pretty much been demoted to side character. These two are the only characters with real panache. Claus is lifeless as a lead; he’s constantly half asleep, drifting through life without really driving the plot forward, no magnetism or ambition or determination or anything else that would make him interesting to watch. Tatiana is constantly grumpy for no good reason, and Alex is always being mysterious with his awesome cape. Personally, I think Mullin Shetland should’ve been the lead. He’s more lead-like than Claus is.

I really wanted to see more episodes like Episode 8 going forward. That episode was a lot of fun, showed us more about the world, and let us get to know Lavie a little better as we saw her unleash her rage and break a chair over a guy’s head. There haven’t been any more episodes like that. I’m still sticking with the show. 26-episode shows almost always start to drag around this point, near the Episode 12 - 15 mark. Little Witch Academia, which I loved, started to drag around this point. Evangelion had “Weaving a Story”, aka the most boring clip show imaginable, around this point. The problem is that those shows had some amazing self-contained episodes in the first half, like “Orange Submariner” for Little Witch Academia or “Both of You Dance Like You Wanna Win!” for Eva, that were great character episodes or interesting story concepts or just really funny. Last Exile has been a bit of a slog up to this point. I still don’t feel like I know any of the characters, except for Lavie, a little. It almost feels like the show is so eager to get its continuous plot out that it breathlessly charges forward and never stops to let us really feel like a part of the proceedings. I’m still giving it a chance for now, but the shtick is starting to wear thin. If it doesn’t start to pay things off within the next few episodes, or at least hint at how it’s going to eventually pay things off, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stick around.

Episodes 15 and 16

In Episode 15, Claus returns to the ship and everyone assumes he and Tatiana had sex. Lavie can’t look at him and won’t talk to him because, as is becoming increasingly clear, she’s in love with him. (Hoo boy.) Tatiana becomes all lovey-dovey and starts blushing and looking away whenever someone mentions Claus, the exact opposite of how she was before. (Kuudere.) Alex comes clean with Claus and tells him that he knew their dads and their vanship was actually his vanship, not their dads’. Sophia, the motherly first officer, is revealed to be the princess of Anatoray, daughter of the emperor. She is called to take back her position and tries to get Alex to ask her not to go, but he doesn’t care and tells her to leave, so she does. Before she leaves, she randomly kisses Claus on the lips (isn’t he like twelve years old?). We are also informed that Disith has fallen. I think the weird scene at the end of Episode 13 where sticks fell out of the sky was supposed to represent the fall of Disith.

In Episode 16, Sophia returns and becomes princess again. Her father tries to kill her, but her guardian, a former Guild member, stages a coup and kills the emperor first, allowing Sophia to take the throne with the support of the former captain of the Urbanus. They fight off the remnants of the Disith fleet, and the Guild decides to destroy Anatoray. Meanwhile, Alex decides he’s going to go off and kill Delphine finally since she killed his girlfriend / wife Euris, who it seems was also a princess. He gives Claus a chance to leave, but Claus says he’s saying. When he tells Lavie she should leave, she says she’s also staying, because he is.

I said last time I was going to stick with Last Exile, but I honestly don’t think I can do it anymore. The world and art are still amazing, but I can’t beat around the bush anymore: the story structure and character writing are absolutely terrible. I’ve given up the idea of the show actually becoming good; its sins run too deep at this point. The show keeps on dumping all these major events on us in quick succession without motivating any of them properly. Making Sophia a princess all of a sudden comes off as a bunch of writers who have no idea what they’re doing and needed something to happen so they could fill up another 12 episodes. And that’s how everything that happens in the show comes off, at least the things that aren’t needlessly mysterious. Now that we know what Alex’s motives are and what he plans to do, all the mystery seems totally wasted, because what he wants to do and why he wants to do it isn’t interesting enough to warrant all that mystery. If the Guild had actually been set up as a real power, that might have helped, but we know pretty much nothing about them except that they have advanced technology and white hair. We don’t even know what they supposedly did that made Alex hate them.

The way the characterization was handled in these two episodes was inexcusably clumsy. There was no slow build of respect from Tatiana, no decision to start treating Claus a little better; she goes straight from scorn to sopping puppy dog eyes. Since we’ve never seen any kind of relationship between Sophia and Alex, his refusal to ask her to stay has no weight. We don’t know what he’s denying or throwing away by letting her go. We have no idea what they’ve shared or suffered together, what their history is, and so it means nothing that Alex lets her go to us, because their relationship is nothing, and he’s not giving up anything. Subjectively, I also found the payoff incredibly uninteresting: all the female characters are in love with the male characters, and the male characters are oblivious. So we’ve spent 15 episodes of boring air battles and badly motivated plot happenings, watching a lifeless protagonist with no charisma, and in the end what we get is the first five minutes of every harem anime ever. This isn’t something they can just recover from by throwing in a flashback later. You can’t flub what should be large, profound moments in a character arc like this and then make them suddenly work by filling it in later. It doesn’t seem like they even intend to; the summaries of the next few episodes sound like action episodes, with Sophia and her fleet helping out Alex in his fight against Delphine.

I’m trying to remember where I got the idea that this show was good, and it’s not coming to me. If this was the first anime I’d ever seen, I might be transfixed by the art alone, but even that has its warts, with the awful CG ships mixed in with the 2D animation. The only character I was ever interested in was Lavie. I liked her spunk and her slightly cynical attitude. I liked being able to relate to her frustration in Episode 8 at the constant escalation of events. We’ve lost that at this point. There’s no one I can identify with, not even at a general human level, because everyone’s emotions change on a dime, no one has a clear motive for anything they do, and Sophia is suddenly making out with Claus. The story just keeps galloping along, and there are too many times I find myself asking what the hell is even going on. That makes it a struggle to get myself to watch this show anymore. I don’t think I can do it. I’m dropping the show.

“Is the Order a Rabbit?” Quick Thoughts

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a purebred, dyed in the wool cute girls doing cute things show as much as I have while watching Is the Order a Rabbit? recently. Gochiusa is pretty formulaic, but it has enough charm points, including beautiful art, likeable characters, and absorbing atmosphere, that I had a ton of fun watching it.

The show follows a standard cast of five girls, who live in a town that looks Central European despite being also sort of Japanese, and all work at coffee shops. Chino is an expressionless loli whose father owns Rabbit House and employs the ditzy Cocoa (who also lives with them in their house above the shop) and Rize, a military otaku whose father is super rich and an old buddy of Chino’s father. Chiya is the offbeat scion of Rabbit House’s former rival, a Japanese tea and sweet shop called Ama Usa An, and her childhood friend, the serious and ladylike Syaro, works at Fleur de Lapin, a cafe that specializes in herbal teas. Supporting characters include a novelist named Aoyama Blue Mountain, Cocoa’s older sister Mocha, and Chino’s middle school friends, the tomboyish Maya, and Megu, who takes ballet. There are a few random supernatural elements to the world, mostly revolving around Chino’s grandfather and his Angora rabbit Tippy, which is reminiscent of Aria along with the European-inspired architecture of the town.

I saw Series I back when it first came out, and in my memories it sort of dragged its feet for seven episodes before getting its act together and serving the same kind of dorky but inexplicably funny humor as K-On, as well as amazingly drawn backgrounds and atmosphere that rivaled even Aria, for its last five. That was pretty much how I felt about it this time too. The first seven episodes are pretty and full of anodyne cuteness, but most of the jokes just don’t seem to ever land and the characters don’t develop a whole lot. Then we finally start to learn things about them, starting when Chino gets annoyed at Cocoa for finishing a jigsaw puzzle that Chino wanted to finish on her own. After this, the stories become a lot more character-driven. They’re still slow-paced iyashikei slice of life to the core, but they’re things that happen because of a character’s personality being a certain way, or because of the characters reacting to situations they’ve been placed in, instead of just scenes of the characters doing things the writers have decided would be cute. They’re still cute–painfully adorable, even–but the characters’ parts in the activities feel more distinct in later episodes than in the first seven. I wasn’t sure it would be able to continue into Series II, but it did; while not every episode of Series II was brilliantly paced or written, and some of them had noticeable story problems, they were all at least fun and presented something interesting about the characters.

In my review of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I mentioned that I have a type when it comes to characters in cute girls doing cute things shows: I tend to like the weird ones, then the earnest and serious ones, then the shy ones, in about that order. This pattern holds again for Gochiusa: my favorite is the weird and spacey Chiya, followed by the serious and misfortunate Syaro, and then the shy Chino, with Rize and then Cocoa bringing up the rear.

That said, Chiya never quite reaches her potential as the weird character. Even though Gochiusa doesn’t need to have character arcs to do what it does, Syaro, Chino, and Cocoa actually have small character arcs anyway, but Chiya doesn’t. (Nor does Rize.) I would have liked to see her behave like the sort of person I imagine when I hear the over-the-top poetic names she gave to the items on Ama Usa An’s menu, but she doesn’t live up to that very often. Her other primary role is embarrassing, worrying about, and generally mothering Syaro, but the show is never entirely self-aware about this. I liked the joke in Series II where she wanted to be cuddled by Mocha, but I would’ve liked it more if the show had pointed out that Chiya has the same kind of motherly presence and gone somewhere with the idea that Mocha considered her an equal in some sense as a big sister.

I do like the characters, but none of them are as well realized as the K-On or Yuru Yuri cast (let alone MLP), which meant even though I had fun laughing along with their lives, I didn’t feel as attached to them, and when the show ended, I was pretty satisfied to leave them. Well, I do feel like I might want to check in on Syaro every so often, just to make sure she’s doing all right. Between her poverty, frustrated crush on Rize, bizarre fear of rabbits, constantly having people get her drunk on coffee just because they think it’s fun, getting perved on by Aoyama, and general misfortune, I worry about that girl.

Gochiusa is also really good about making sure everyone gets paired up so we can see how they get along. We see a lot of Cocoa with Chino and Cocoa with Chiya and Rize with Syaro, but we also get to see Chino with Chiya and Rize with Chino and Syaro with Cocoa. Even Maya and Megu and Mocha get to pair up with almost everyone in the main cast for a scene or two. The only character I didn’t find surpassingly adorable and charming was Aoyama Blue Mountain. She’s not that interesting and doesn’t do much of note, and she’s responsible for some of the worst jokes in the show. In general, anytime the show tried to do a sexual joke, it didn’t work for me, and Aoyama looking up Syaro’s skirt was the worst. It was also the only sexual joke that continued past the first seven episodes, and it made me feel a small dread every time a scene would open on the interior of Fleur de Lapin, where Aoyama did her perving. I wanted to see Syaro quit Fleur de Lapin and go work with Chiya at Ama Usa An, where she could wear a nice concealing kimono, but that unfortunately never happened.

On the big scale of cute girls doing cute things shows, Gochiusa doesn’t reach the top tier of K-On, Aria, and Yuru Yuri, and it’s not revolutionary, but I enjoyed it for its cute characters, charming atmosphere, and beautiful scenery. It was good to know this subgenre can still deliver.