T w e n t y S i d e d

Left: Lila the robot girl Humaritt Right: Najica

The big surprise recently is about how well Najica Blitz Tactics turned out. After watching the first disc I was amused at the density of fan service. Now that I’ve seen disc 3, I’m impressed.

In some ways it reminded me of (don’t laugh) the Isaac Asimov book I, Robot. The book started out with a few rules about how robots work – the classic “three laws” – and then explored numerous possible situations that might arise given those rules. The rules here are entirely different, but Najica has a similar approach.

In the first few episodes they introduce us to Najica as she teams up with a robot girl (a Humaritt) named Lila. Their missions involve rounding up other Humaritts.

At first Humaritts have no real impulses of their own. They pretty much just stand around and wait for orders from their master. My own understanding is that over time they learn to anticipate what sorts of orders their master is likely to give them and act accordingly, thus giving them the appearance of independant thought. In effect, masters “raise” their Humaritts a bit like children (ok, very strong, deadly, and overly literal children) through interaction. Depending on how they are taught, a Humaritt may end up acting just like their master, or they may turn out very differently. It mostly depends on what they are taught and how deliberate their master is about it.

Each episode they encounter another master and another Humaritt, and they see another outcome of the Master / Humaritt process. Each situation is different, although some of them can be seen as explorations on the dangers of teaching duplicity to inherantly honest robots. Many problems arise from “do as I say, not as I do” type hypocrisy on the part of the master.

In one episode they must face a general who is attempting to overthrow the government of a third-world coutry. Her aide is a Humaritt. (And because this is Najica Blitz Tactics, the general, her aide, and all of her troops are all female. You just have to go with it.) Her Humaritt has absorbed all of her master’s idealistic rhetoric. She really believes that if you have faith in your cause you can never be defeated. She believes this in the literal sense, as in: faith trumps combat ability and numerical superiority. The general knows it isn’t true – she’s just keeping up morale. The troops know it isn’t true – this is just what you expect from a charismatic leader. But the Humaritt doesn’t know any better, and takes it all to heart. When at last she is confronted with the truth, the results are tragic.

How low can you go? I think the cameraman must have been a smurf. And a sex offender.

This is pretty deep for a show that I thought was a vehicle for looking up women’s skirts.

I actually think the fan service detracts from the quality of the story. I have a few friends to whom I would recommend the show, but I know the overabundant panty shots would put them off. My wife is usually very relaxed about fan service, but even she didn’t have the patience for Najica. That’s a shame, since it turned out to be a good story. Not that I blame her: If the tables were turned and the fan service had been aimed at females, this show would would have been endless shots of half-naked, well-oiled men with bulging crotches, and I would never have been able to make it though that.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

While going through my directory of screencaps from Read or Die, this caught my attention:

This is from the opening. Check out the sign behind Agent Paper:

Hmmmm….

What I like is that I didn’t notice this at all during the show. My eye just accepted this, even though it isn’t even close. There are no gaps in the words and there are an awful lot of less common letters stacked together. I’m surprised it never caught my eye.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This show looked really interesting in the preview, but failed to deliver once I sat down and watched it. I like bond-esque spy stories, and I even like send-ups of those sorts of stories, and the preview made this seem that way. It wasn’t. On the upside, the series is only four episodes and fits on a single disk, so at least it was over quickly.

Read Or… something else. Don’t be fooled by the opening. This is not a fan service vehicle.

There were just too many ill-fitting elements in here. The main character is a secret agent (agent Paper) who is obsessed with books. She has a gift for manipulating paper in combat. For example, she can take a piece of looseleaf and use it like an edged weapon. She can even throw it and stick it into solid wood. This was an interesting ability, but they took it too far.

Just imagine what she could do if someone introduced her to corrugated cardboard.

She goes on to make paper weapons that can cut metal in half, stop bullets, shield against explosions, and do any number of implausible things. I was even willing to accept that for the sake of the story, but they didn’t stop there. At one point she runs around in a swirl of paper and crafts a gigantic paper airplane. Another agent throws it off the roof to get it going, and from there it is able to keep up with a jet and even engage in a bit of dogfighting.

I’m sorry but I am not buying this.

Whatever.

The enemies are strange as well. They are clones of inventors or leaders from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and they have been “given super powers”. They are called the I-Jin. This seems like a lot of trouble for the villian. His plan seems to be:

1. Steal DNA of famous people who are now dead
2. Clone them
3. Convince them to join in his crazy destroy-the-world doomsday plan
4. Teach them to fight
5. Imbue them with super powers and super weapons
6. Send them to fight the good guys
7. Steal some rare books.

It seems like you could skip the first four steps by just using some of your henchmen instead of cloning famous people. What’s the point?

For the most part the I-Jin ride around in ridiculous ways. They have tons of technology, but still they choose to travel using giant insects and other absurd things

Note to evil masterminds: When acquiring rare books, the lunatic-on-a-giant-friggin-grasshopper method isn’t as effective as you’d think.

The bad guy sends his army of goofy clones to collect books which should be more or less easily available. The most important one is actually for sale in an old bookstore. He could have just bought it, but instead he sends some goofball riding a giant grasshopper to steal it. The resulting battle tips his hand to the good guys. He didin’t even need that army of warriors – all he really needed was a library card and a photocopier.

In the opening moments of the show, an I-Jin gets on top of the white house, blows the crap out of it and sets it on fire, and then asks the President of hte United States, “You there! Is this the library?”

So his plan was to blow up a building and then find out if it was the library? Doesn’t that seem to go against the stated goal of acquiring books from said library? Are we to believe the bad guy took the time to clone and train this I-Jin but never bothered to give him a map of Washington DC? If your supersoldiers are wandering around asking for directions to famous locations, you are doing something wrong.

Of course, no evil plan is complete without a gigantic and heretofore secret floating fortress, and this isn’t the sort of villian to forget a detail like that. His base is many times larger than the largest aircraft carrier ever built. It has massive moving platforms and endless catwalks which are perfect for all the final showdowns that need to take place. We learn that the base is really just a launchpad for an orbital rocket. Apparently he’s also completed his own space program in secret, and plans to launch a rocket that will…

Oh, who cares? It’s gibberish.

How could he afford such a thing? Must have used non-union labor. I’ll bet it doesn’t follow OSHA standards, either.

This show had a lot of style, the characters were interesting, and the artwork was great. But all of that wasn’t enough to carry a story full of holes and contrivances, and filled with implausibe things. There is only so much stuff you can put into one story. A movie about vampires is cool. A movie about space aliens is cool. But a movie where the Predator and the Cylons team up to fight Vampire Superman, a clone of Hercules, and Mecha Abe Lincoln is just goofy, and that’s the sort of mess we have here. Too much unrelated and ridiculous stuff to swallow.

Another note is that the writers are not fans of America, or of George Bush in particular. The Americans march into combat time and again only to be slaughered en masse. (As far as I can tell, they are the only ones who die at the hands of the bad guy. A lot of them die. Thousands. Sometimes this seems to be almost played for laughs.) The U.S. president in the show is an obvious parody of Bush. He has a Texan accent and even mispronounces “nuclear”. He’s also a bumbling fool who pisses his pants not once, but three different times during the show. The series is only four episodes, so they devoted a lot of time to presidential pants-wetting. Nobody is going to accuse this show of being overly subtle.

In the end, the whole thing is a waste of time. It’s worse than a waste of time. It’s contrived and clumsy, preposterous and ill-conceived. The climax is predictable and the ending is lame. This show makes me think that an anime-themed MST3k would be a good idea.

One further note is that this show is different from the 7-disc TV series. Steven watched that and his review suggests that the TV version has many of the same issues.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Otaku has a post on the layout of the town of Glie in Haibane Renmei. It seems some people are suggesting the wall that goes all the way around the city is not a circle. This is hard to imagine. We never see any corners. When Rakka works inside the wall, we see it is a steady curve into the distance. I agree that the wall must be a circle, or else there are corners that we are never shown, despite our many views of the wall. In defense of the non-circle advocates, the views from inside the wall shows a much stonger curve than what the outside view suggests we should. Make of that what you will.

As far as part-time jobs go, cleaning the sides of a massive supernatural wall isn’t that bad. Beats flipping burgers, anyway.

Otaku then suggests that the city must be at the center of the circle. I agree this does make things nice and balanced. Certainly if the wall is as dangerous as it seems you’d want people to live as far from it as possible. I’m confident the city isn’t so off-center that one edge of town would be close to the wall. That just wouldn’t make sense and wouldn’t match what we see in the show.

Although you could make the case that the city is a little off-center. The woods seem to be quite big, and are right next to Old Home. You could make the case that Old Home is the center, with town a little off to one side and the woods on the other. It’s also a very real possibility that the fans are putting more thought into this than the writers did…

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.