Cross Crash

Three more shows I finished in time for another post, Cross Ange, Absolute Duo, and The Rolling Girls. This is probably what I consider to be the middle-tier of the season, among a couple others I have not completed yet, notably Maria and Food Porn. I’m slowly finishing those up soon. But Cross Ange, woo boy. Let’s lead with that.

Cross Ange
“Elliot Rodgers: The Anime”
I’m one of the few people who actually bothered to read the entire Elliot Rodgers manifesto, and the more I think about it, the more I feel they wrote the character of Embryo to be entitled misogyny personified, right down to the ending where he flat-out just says “You should be my woman because I am fucking God!”

But you don’t come to this blog for Polygon-tier opinions about anime, so you’re free to interpret how you think I feel about that on your own.

Cross Ange is exactly the type of series Fukuda Mitsuo likely thought he’d make the next Gundam SEED arc be, except instead of Ange it’d probably be Cagalli as The Fallen Princess ™ even though she pretty much fell already quite a bit in both SEED and Destiny, being reduced to nothing more than BUT CAGALLI IS CRYING in Destiny, despite actually having kicked ass and taken names in Strike Rouge only a series prior. But since no one wanted his fanboy plot armor bullshit, he laid low and recrafted his vision into the song and dance known as Ange.

httpss://twitter.com/HibariStalker/status/582221362904829954
httpss://twitter.com/loligurolove/status/582352481407135744
httpss://twitter.com/sunken_city/status/582377935300108288
httpss://twitter.com/zurairi/status/582409032238911488
httpss://twitter.com/sunken_city/status/582415297652625408

Pretty safe to assume that from a small sample of the hashtag, the general consensus of this show is pretty much “What is this, I don’t even?” It’s bad enough the show’s opening animations and premise pretty much echos SEED, but even King Shitlord himself is voiced by the same VA as SEED’s Rau Le Creuset, which is probably the best choice for any role involving an entitled sociopath. I couldn’t get over Tusk’s VA being the same as Dog Days’ Cinque either, mainly because I was watching both this season.

The thing is, Cross Ange wasn’t completely horrible. When it was just a fallen princess turn mech warrior fighting dragons, it was actually quite good. Of course, this is speaking strictly from the dragon-fight-a-week device commonly employed in mecha series before revealing the real plot, to which the show does masterfully halfway in by revealing Arzenal and the Norma’s true purpose, but from there the show sort of spins on its heels while it tries to decide when and how to end it. It tried to go for way too many TWEESTS in the plot before arriving at the simple fact that this dude figured out how to multiverse and has been manipulating women for a thousand years for fun. Not quite the ending I might’ve envisioned for a show that started out with things that would easily trigger the easily offended on the internet, but I guess that had to come full-circle.

In the end, it is yet again Sunrise doing what Sunrise does best, remixing old ideas and making them absurd with misplaced and unwarranted fan service, too many tsundere-types, not enough battle maids, and very little character development in the second half. It’s a show that is all flash and flair that burns all of its fuel before it has a chance to do any tricks.

To paraphrase the spoken dialogue in the final episode preview, what does Cross even mean?

Title: Cross Ange
Sub Group I Watched: Horrible
Episodes: 25
Rating (1-10): 7

Absolute Duo
“Relative Solo”
I face a difficult task in reviewing this, because on a character level, I actually quite liked this show a lot, but on a story and plot level, it was bland, uninspiring, and cold. Ideally, it’s the sort of show Guilty Crown could have been if it wasn’t going for the Cooly McEgderson Award for Pretentious Bullshit and stuck to a more time-honored school-days plot Duo went with. About the only two things going for this show were Usagi Nanoha, and Twintail Julie. The rest of the cast was better-than-average, but only because the show at least makes a moderate attempt at defining them throughout the series. But predictably, they drop a Mid-Boss with no real connection to anyone other than hating people who protect others (lolwatm8?) in an attempt to showcase the Actual-Boss who just ends up succumbing to Mid-Boss when he upgrades to Final-Boss. Confused? Don’t be. It was pure shit.

This season was chalk full of uninspiring school-days fighters, and Absolute Duo gets points for having some good characters, and some crazy action sequences, but I’d probably put my stock in Seiken Tsukai no World Break having a better back story and more solid characters. But you can do much worse, and that is Juuou Mujin no Fafnir, so don’t feel too bad if you liked this show, because I wanted it to be more.

Title: Absolute Duo
Sub Group I Watched: Horrible
Episodes: 12
Rating (1-10): 6

The Rolling Girls
“Best the Rest.”
If you had told me this was a Trigger show, I’d have believed you just based on the opening episodes premise. Girls fighting each other with crazy powers in a pseudo-gangwar Japan was pretty much Kill la Kill in a nutshell, complete with the weird visuals. Director Deai Otomi’s last director credit was Gin no Saji, which was a very good show, and before that, various storyboard and episode directors credits for a few other shows I quite liked. But throughout the run of this show, something never quite felt right.

httpss://twitter.com/woxxy/status/582673094369771521

No, not Woxxy’s obsession with cameras.

The show just felt painfully slow, like they were trying to combine the premises of many different shows together, but not quite tread down one path or the other, and not marry them together in any meaningful way. You had this open-air atmosphere like Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai, with characters from Tamako Market, and at best I couldn’t figure out if I was watching Yumekai Merry or K-ON!.

The ending though, it felt very Space Dandy in a way, with the entire reason for everything being an alien ship crash-landing. It just didn’t fit. I didn’t need a reason for how the Bests were Bests. I guess I wanted it to just sort of end the way an artsy show would end, just simply “On to another adventure!” and done. At this point, I don’t need nor want another season of this. This can be filed away neatly in the pile of “That Happened” series, to maybe be reflected on again in ten years if my niece digs it up out my my archives and asks if the girls, in fact, roll.

Title: The Rolling Girls
Sub Group I Watched: Horrible
Episodes: 12
Rating (1-10): 6

httpss://twitter.com/CheshireOcelot/status/582608241940541440