Oh, this is going to be a fun one. To read, I mean. It's going to be an absolute bastard to write. I still hold a grudge against my friends who followed up Angel Beats with fucking Vandread. I will openly admit that a fair amount of my dislike for this show is based on its place in space for me. The second not-maid anime, following on from an anime I still call my favourite of all time. I can't think of any anime which wouldn't have a tough time living up to that. I probably would have been better off having something irredeemably shit like Vampire Knight or Code Geass fill this slot instead of something with potential. Well, let's get moving.
Plot:
OK, so I'm gonna spoil in this review. Just a heads up. I don't really care for an anime like this, but just letting you know.
Anyway, we find ourselves in a universe not that far away, in which men and women have been divided into two completely different empires. The men are crazy and militaristic, and the women aren't much better, which is a nice touch...I guess. The main character, from the male empire, finds himself prisoner on a female pirate ship. Hijinks ensue.
Normally this is where I'd start talking about characters. I really can't do that with Vandread. Is it too innovative? Too avant garde? To "edgy"? Not quite. In reality, the main characters are just too generic to have anything to say about. Sure, I hate a lot of them, but not in creative ways. Hibiki is generic and does nothing. Dita acts like a child, and that's the joke. There's the pilot. He has that one episode that was sweet. There's Dr. McDreamy, who's the only adult among the males. He doesn't have a story, he just kinda does stuff that doesn't add up to anything. There's the generic inventor. She's alright, if kinda cliched. Erm...the amorous woman who's always after the pilot or Hibiki. She's there, but I don't know what to say about her. There are two characters I DO like, but we'll have to get to them in a while. If I didn't mention a character, presume its because they were too dull for me to remember.
So, instead of character, what am I gonna talk about? Fucked if I know. Let's just see where we end up going.
What I'm gonna start with is the portrayal of gender in this show's universe. As I mentioned, the women in this show are just as horribly violent as the men as a society. The name of the show is a portmanteau of the names of their ships, showing they have similar societies. That's pretty good, considering my first thought was that this was the dream society of one of the angry misogynists who inhabit the internet.
It is, admittedly, not nearly as bad as the Mississippi situation, but there are still a few issues. Women still have stereotypical traits of our society. For proof of this, just look at the clothing. The female cast members largely wear skirts and dresses. How is it that in a situation so far removed both geographically and chronologically from our society that clothing is still so strictly delineated between the genders, who have been cut off from each other for generations? The pregnant woman, in particular, is an outright stereotype in many regards. Dita isn't much better. Just because you have a woman fly a space-fighter doesn't prevent her being a groan-worthy cliche back on the mothership.
Dita is overly sensitive, clingy, emotional, excitable, childish and obsessed with Hibiki. Hibiki is aloof, angry at concepts which are never really built upon, anti-social, pointlessly dickish towards Dita, and violent. It's comforting in a way to see that society will have the same gendered cliches so far into the future. Good to know if I end up like Fry, I'll be able to comfortably slip back into a gender studies course at any nearby university after getting my bearings.
The space-fights are boring and poorly animated. Considering the amount of my time invested in watching lousy CG spaceship shoot lights at each other, I wish there was more I could say. There were half-hearted attempts to characterise during the fight scenes, but they always were too short and insignificant to be worth it. The best episodes were unsurprisingly those that were lightest on fight scenes. Although the "plot" wasn't fantastic, it was always a relief when the battle ended and I could tab back onto the appropriate window to continue.
I would love to be able to say something meaningful and important about the show, but I can't because neither of those words are at all applicable to this series. It isn't the most generic sci-fi I've ever seen (we'll get to that next time), as the premise and the twists at the end both really differ from a basic space-opera. Well, I guess this is going to be a shorter than usual review, 'cause I've got next to nothing to say. But before I finish, let's talk about the two characters I really did like.
First is the Captain. A pirate, and surrounded with the vaguely indigenous American imagery of the ship (which is a really neat touch by the way. The men tend to use an industrial nightmare motif in response), the Captain is the driving force on the ship. I like her because she manages to be commanding and almost sinister while ageing, not particularly tall and in no way conveying menace in her appearance. Her command is clearly rendered from the fact that every single person on that ship is in absolute deference to her. She holds this ship together, and is a celebrity on her home planet. Nothing about her is inherently gendered. She just gets on with the job, taking care of her crew all the way.
The other character is the 2nd in command, BC. BC is a tall, imposing ambiguously brown woman with elaborate silver hair (did I mention this anime has generic character designs a lot of the time? Well, I'll say it again). She is the main force by which the captain interacts with the crew, presumably due to her age and intentions of not wanting to put up with bullshit. The twist, and I spoil with little hesitation, is that BC is actually a man, disguised as a woman, who is a spy for the male empire. The usual conversion and display of loyalty occurs, and BC returns to the fold of the ship and her crew. BC is a fascinating character because she fucking does something and doesn't just wait for the plot to throw shit at her. She fights the empire she's been raised in, and joins the empire she was raised to hate. She just generally takes command and tells Hibiki to get the fuck over himself, which is a stance I support wholeheartedly.
Well, that's it for Vandread. Sorry this review is so short, or I guess you're welcome if for some reason you hate my work but feel obliged to read it anyway. The problem with Vandread is the thing I'm sure every reviewer will attest to: it can be really good or bad, but the worst possible scenario is that it's just average or boring. There is so little to say about something that's dull or mediocre. That's Vandread. It's not so much boring as average. There's stuff I like about it and stuff I don't, but I don't feel passionately either way about anything in particular. It had some sweet design ideas, but some lousy characters. The plot went in interesting directions, but only when not weighed down with seemingly endless dogfights. The idea of a predominantly female cast is really appealing to me as something different, but the spotlight is mainly on a male character, and most of the women become little more than stereotypes and fanservice.
I don't like this anime in total, but it wasn't an easy conclusion to reach. If there was just something that made it more remarkable I could really feel something towards it, but it's just full of little mistakes and little redemptions. I don't recommend it at all, because there's nothing to gain from it. All in all, it may be the worst follow up to Angel Beats imaginable.Next week we move into yet another dangerously mediocre sci-fi anime in the form of Kiddy Grade. I just fucking hope I think of something other to say between now and then except "meh".
Anyway, cheers for reading.
H. Rourke
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