Curse you, Marika, and your ability to execute basic strategies using a force of pirates against a single ship!
As expected, Quartz Christie is the shittiest pirate. Disrupting communications and positioning a ship to intercept the Grand Cross when it escapes the chaff field?????? That is clearly some Lelouch Lamperouge-level tactics going on there. How could Quartz Christie possibly see any of that coming?! She’s only one of the original pirates jumping around the galaxy.
It’s not a party without Strider, yo. Also, bonus points for the vampirate who shows up during the montage at the end. He might have appeared earlier in the episode, but I wasn’t paying close enough attention . . .
Speaking of being confused, all my blather about the Kanedroid last week was a result of being confused about just what the hell went on last week with all the robots and sneaking around and whatnot. This episode shows what a dope I am for speaking out of confusion and making assumptions.
This Pirate Hunter is Blue Rose from Tiger and Bunny. Prove me wrong.
So lots of stuff happening in this episode! Let’s start with Blue Rose up here since her screenshot is up there and everything. In the grand tradition of Mouretsu Pirates villains, she’s an arrogant fucking idiot. She’s basically toying with the Bettenmaru, because she has so many advantages that she could crush the ship any time she wants. What we know: 1) Her ship can zig zag like a mofo, although Marika has apparently figured out some sort of trick to avoiding bombardment. Maybe this is one of those dumb ships that can fire only from the bottom. 2) She has stealth and is skilled enough to sneak wherever she wants. She proceeds to use this power for taunting. Very imaginative. And 3) She has a stupid name (Quartz Christie).
Haha, OK, I have to hand it to the show for the silly handwaving this week regarding the Parabellum and its silly, theatrical technology. First off we find out that the image of the captain, who goes by Ironbeard, is actually a hologram. The thing that perplexes me is why the episode went out of its way to hide that at the end. Obviously if you think about it, Ironbeard isn’t actually standing on top of his ship in the middle of space and shouting. The image at the end of the previous episode is clearly different than the image we see here, however. I suppose it’s to make Ironbeard seem even more larger than life; really, though, it made me realize more how silly this show is that I actually thought for a moment it would have a pirate standing on his ship exposed to space and shouting.
Oh, this fucking pirate.
I’m of two minds about this goofball: First, I think the conflict at the end of the episode is actually legit dangerous, even though we have a total “Boy Who Cried Wolf” situation going on with this series. I refuse to believe this situation will resolve itself in any way other than anticlimactically. It doesn’t matter how big and impressive this pirate hunter ship looks while slaughtering pirates. (Possibly for the government? I do agree this is strongly hinted at throughout the episode.) But at least for now there’s some excitement going on, which has been true for basically every storyline so far in the series. It’s kind of like Index in that the arcs start out cool and then fizzle out at the end, except there’s no Touma constantly opening his fat fucking craw here.
Ah, this show. I lost it when those pirates (or whoever they’re supposed to be . . . they’re too worthless to get their exact designation correct) flew in and tried to gun down high school girls left and right, and the main explanation for their behavior is that they’re jealous of Marika’s pirate license and thus wish to violently murder her. Ahahahaha. They of course fail because any adult who is jealous of a high school girl is destined to never succeed at anything. This works even though anime teenagers are the most competent at any activity imaginable.
It’s telling that the only significant damage they do is to the crazy ass chief organizer, who is a rather pathetic figure herself. She’s spent more than half a decade stewing in anger about some high school girls (and their middle schooler accomplice) hacking into her cream puff race course and dialing the difficulty up from Yoshi’s Story to “Rat Race” from Battletoads. It’s not like they swooped in, nuked the race and robbed all the corpses afterward. Not sure that dicking around with a race course merits years of uptight paranoia, but hey, maybe race organizers operate on a different level of reality.
I wonder if this typhoon death laser of doom will have any effect on the local climate? Who cares, though, as long as the high school girls get their sailing training and Marika doesn’t have to worry about the race and her job at the same time? Fuck you, Mother Nature!
After every episode of this series for a while now, it seems as if it would always be appropriate to start off posts with, “This is quite the silly episode.” This may be the silliest episode yet, but not for the reasons one might expect, even though it’s half a beach episode. There are cute girls in swimsuits everywhere; however, there’s not really a focus on them that’s greater than every other episode. Much more focus is paid to Kane’s ridiculously ripped body. Have to say, though, I actually couldn’t stop staring at his hair. It’s weird to see it relatively normal rather than the traditional Spiky Anime Hairdo. Not sure what this says about me.
