モーレツの茉莉香！！ / yamatoba

With the summer anime season closing in, let talk about something fitting for the end of a season…..about a show that ended last season, namely Mouretsu Pirates, aka Bodacious Space Pirates, of how I was totally thrilled about the show when it first aired, but was bored by it as the show progressed.

The first few episodes showed great promises for the series, which made me very interested in the show by the end of episode 5, they were:

• The setting. Having the result War of Independence ended with the introduction and dominion of a third party and the continued legalization of pirates, all makes a very unique political environment. Having such an environment, surly the series would take advantage of it and mess it up even more so that Marika and co will be caught in some huge battle or war because of the different parties’ falling relationships.
• The details gone into the whole battle that the Space Yacht Club had with the unknown ship for their first travel. While the strategy is nothing compared to what LoGH can provide, it is always good to see that the characters aren’t stupid. Additionally, as I was still taking Computer Security and Cryptography when the show aired, it was a joy to see how much detail was given to hacking part of the battle.
• The presence of both the Space Yacht club and the crew at Bentenmaru. From the battle, it was clear that most of the members in the space yacht club (or at least the important members) had the talent to man the ship, but obviously they lack the experience that the people at Bentenmaru had. So I thought it would be pretty cool if the series at some point did a direct comparison that contrasted talent vs experience.
• The characters, especially with Marika. Honestly, Marika is one of the best character I have seen recently, courageous but not foolhardy, willing to stand by her decision and accepting the help of others, and most of all enjoys what she does even though of how much work she had to put up with. This is also true with the Space Yacht Club, based on their performance from their first battle.

For the setting, aside from the Serenity incident and the pirate killing incident, none of the other arcs had any thing to do with the political environment of the universe. Even in both incident, the issue was less severe that I thought could have happened, which is rather sad, since they just basically tossed away the whole built up that they had from the setting. While the details to the battles are still there, and is always cool to see all that details when they fight, it would also be more interesting to see how Marika and co would carry out in a more massive battle (not 1v1 or 1vfew), which the last incident did show, but it was a bit too late.

As for the comparison between Bentenmaru’s crew and  Space Yacht Club that I wished for, the series had that perfect opportunity when Space Yacht Club had to man Bentenmaru, but sadly, I came out of that arc unsatisfied, since the whole Space Yacht Club just fooled around way too much, and at large the whole issue of talent vs experience kinda just got resolved with how the club needed help from the crew to solve their problem (experience rules). Despite that, it was good to see the two group interacting and working together. Lastly, as much as I like Marika’s personality, her personality only really shines during her struggles, and when the whole series was more mild than what I expected, I just didn’t have enough glimpse of her personality at her best.

In short, the beginning of Mouretsu got me hyped up for the show, which never delivered and ended up rather boring. Good thing that the last arc ended up pretty good, as the conflict was actually rather important, and might hint to something even bigger later. Hence, despite all my disappointments, I’m still looking forward to the movie.