The Old School Otaku Lounge

oh god, Girls Und Panzer. I've never seen that series, but I assumed that was exactly what it was just by looking at the promo art. Bleh. How anyone can seriously watch a show like that, I have no clue.

Sentai gave Hulu the first 13 eps of "Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water", so I watched the first episode last night after dinner. It's been SO LONG since I've seen any of this show! It looks pretty good for being so old, too, it makes me wonder if they're using the newer HD re-release that I'm assuming they're using for the blu-ray re-release soon.

Oh, I also watched the first few episodes of "My Neighbor Seki-kun" (aka "The Master of Killing Time, Seki-Kun" as Crunchyroll refers it), which I thought was cute. Basically, it's short little 10 minute episodes about a girl who sits next to a boy named Seki-kun in class who is always goofing off in really over-the-top ways, but no one else in their class ever seems to notice. Since the episodes are short, it's easy to watch and just sort of mindless fun.

And I watched the first few episodes of "Hoozuki no Reitetsu", which I'm enjoying a lot so far. In the second ep they made a reference to Lum, so that won a lot of cool points with me, lol.

Kind of like "Gatchaman CROWDS", "Girls Und Panzer" is better than you think. Don't get me wrong, I am NOT saying that it's a great show by any stretch, but it's not terrible either. I initially dismissed it as "Strike Witches with tanks", but saw several people saying it's actually pretty good. So, I gave it a go. (its only 13 episodes afterall)

To be clear, the show is ABOUT the tanks and is obviously FOR tank otaku. The girls characters are paper thin, the plot nearly non-existent and most of what takes place is just excuses to lurch to the next tank battle. Heck, late in the show they even yank several more tanks out of nowhere to give more types to look over. And in the end, that's what the show is FOR, watching tanks be well animated and having battles. (if nothing else, the girls are not throwing panty/boob shots all the time, in fact, its been noted that in that regard the show has little to no "fanservice" at all)

To me, the entertaining bit is that each team is basically representing a different "country". The primaries battle (in order): Great Britain, USA, Russia & Germany. Again, not calling it great, but it has its moments. (unless you really can't stand the design aesthetic OR really hate tanks, if either of those is true then there's absolutely nothing for you)

greg wrote: I first heard about this at the Shizuoka Hobby Show when I saw the models. At first, I just thought it was just a series of tank models that they came up with some cute girl mascots for. I'm fine with that. Then I discovered that there's actually an anime series for it. There's no way I will rent volume 2 of this crap. The only one this show impressed was my 5 year old daughter. Of course, any anime featuring cute girls doing stuff will get her approval. This is otaku pandering through and through. These students at an all-girl junior high join a tank club (as if any school would have such a club when they aren't even old enough to drive cars). All the girls are typical moeblob-types with no real personality to them.

I haven't seen Girls and Panzers, but K-ON! was basically a moeblob show, and you thought it was OK. I am guessing this is not a good one though. Personally, if I see tanks, I want action. Girls and Panzer didn't strike me as an action show, so I passed up watching it.

In regards to our recent eye patch conversation, one girl wears a single eyeglass. Like she's wearing glasses, but half of them are gone. Not even just a frame with the lens popped out. No, it's half of a set of glasses that by all rights should fall off her face. I couldn't really understand the show much, other than that they're joining a club. The big Shyamalan reveal at the end of episode one is that they all live on a ginormous, city-sized aircraft carrier. Ooooh, deep.

Maybe they should just go ahead and bring back monocles.

Watched the Dragon Quest anime. Nice adventure series...

llj wrote:
I haven't seen Girls and Panzers, but K-ON! was basically a moeblob show, and you thought it was OK. I am guessing this is not a good one though. Personally, if I see tanks, I want action. Girls and Panzer didn't strike me as an action show, so I passed up watching it.

K-on is pretty tame, to the point where I actually enjoyed it (I wouldn't have even known it was a "moe" show if it weren't for a few fanservice-y moments here and there--otherwise, I would've assumed it was based on a shoujo series at times!) But yeah, you can tell that "Girls und panzer" is definitely targeted directly to tanks/military hardware fans who might also want to see cute girls. Which is definitely not very interesting sounding to me.

I think having a mainly female staff definitely helped K-ON! achieve the right tone and sensibility to appeal to otaku and casual female viewers alike. But, it's definitely still a moeblob show. An almost fanservice-free moeblob show (even the major panty shot in the series happens OFF camera!), but the character designs are totally moe. It just happens to be an example that you can do a good, quality show with moe designs that targets the specific audience the genre always should have been meant for: young girls.

llj wrote:I think having a mainly female staff definitely helped K-ON! achieve the right tone and sensibility to appeal to otaku and casual female viewers alike. But, it's definitely still a moeblob show. An almost fanservice-free moeblob show (even the major panty shot in the series happens OFF camera!), but the character designs are totally moe. It just happens to be an example that you can do a good, quality show with moe designs that targets the specific audience the genre always should have been meant for: young girls.

Yeah, definitely. I sometimes feel weird for liking it, esp. when you see all the fanboy merch for it and the VERY AWFUL fanart/doujinshi floating around out there. ;__; I was actually talking to a friend not too long ago and we both laughed at how back in the day, guys would make fun of shoujo/girl's stuff because of the cutesy styles and round eyes & features, but now it's like...if we see a series that looks cute, we're both like "OH, DANGER! It's cute, better Google it before reading or watching anything on it to make sure it's not some weird/gross moe thing." Oh, how times have changed...

AnimeSennin wrote:Watched the Dragon Quest anime. Nice adventure series...

Duuude, what? I love that show! Is it fully subtitled now?

Heero wrote:To be clear, the show is ABOUT the tanks and is obviously FOR tank otaku. The girls characters are paper thin, the plot nearly non-existent and most of what takes place is just excuses to lurch to the next tank battle. Heck, late in the show they even yank several more tanks out of nowhere to give more types to look over. And in the end, that's what the show is FOR, watching tanks be well animated and having battles. (if nothing else, the girls are not throwing panty/boob shots all the time, in fact, its been noted that in that regard the show has little to no "fanservice" at all)

Well, like I said, the tanks were the only cool part of the show. I liked how the tanks were painted up. It's cool. The character designs don't bother me. If they were just thought up to sell tank model kits to otaku who may not otherwise build model tanks, then that's fine with me. Like I mentioned about Hasegawa's Eggplane model kit series, if they're there on the box just to make a sale for their moe appeal, so be it.

But the way Girls Und Panzer turned out, it just seems so dumb to me. Gotta have it set in an all-girls junior high! If there is even ONE boy, it would become a sausage fest! (What I don't get with retarded otaku is that somehow it is forgivable to have a boy as long as he has some gender identification disorder and is a tranvestite "trap" character. How is having that better than just a regular guy?)

llj wrote:I haven't seen Girls and Panzers, but K-ON! was basically a moeblob show, and you thought it was OK. I am guessing this is not a good one though. Personally, if I see tanks, I want action. Girls and Panzer didn't strike me as an action show, so I passed up watching it.

Yeah, but K-On is cool for what it is. It's moe without the blob, IMHO. Even if you swap the realistically-depicted musical instruments for realistically-depicted tanks, Girls Und Panzer still falls flat because of its absurd premise. K-On is more slice-of-life and is intriguing because... for one thing, the characters actually have personality. They can be goofy at times, but they all have some sort of personality to them. These personalities (even if they may seem somewhat almost cookie-cutter) are established in the first episode or so. After watching Girls Und Panzer, not a single girl was memorable at all. I suppose there is one girl who is supposed to be the main character, but there is not a single memorable thing about her at all. I can't even remember what she looks like.

I just remembered an arcade shooter/shmup video game called Progear no Arashi (The Storm of Progear). You choose your plane and you choose your gunner (gunners are all cute, young girls) and sortie against the bad guys. It is pure fantasy, and the kids cheer for you as your plane takes off. It's kind of like this Red Dawn-style "kids against evil grown ups" and even if the girls are moe, the suspension of disbelief is stretched far enough away to make it engaging. This Girls Und Panzer show tries to have it both ways: try to make it a reality-based all-girls' school (like K-On, granted) with Honda Civics parked in the teachers' parking lot, etc, yet have this totally implausible concept of these ditzy teenage girls f'ing around with tanks just because it is a school club. And are those live rounds they are firing at each other? Paint doesn't explode like that.

How would I fix it? Stretch it further and make it more fantastic. Make these girls actually fighting battles and such about goofy badguys. Maybe up the comedic factor a bit, like Yatterman or Wacky Races or something. It doesn't need to be bloody or with lots of casualties. Basically, I think it could work, but their premise is weak. I'd even go so far as to just call it lazy. They could have come up with a better excuse to have a bunch of cute girls driving tanks and blowing shit up rather than just making it a club activity at an all-girls' school, which is the least-likely place to ever have such a club, even if one was to exist. It just seems like a lazy, pandering, cash-grab to me. I could be wrong, but it's not worth my money or time going to Tsutaya to rent more to find out if I could be wrong. There are far more interesting shows to spend my time on.

greg wrote:Yeah, but K-On is cool for what it is. It's moe without the blob, IMHO. Even if you swap the realistically-depicted musical instruments for realistically-depicted tanks, Girls Und Panzer still falls flat because of its absurd premise. K-On is more slice-of-life and is intriguing because... for one thing, the characters actually have personality. They can be goofy at times, but they all have some sort of personality to them. These personalities (even if they may seem somewhat almost cookie-cutter) are established in the first episode or so. After watching Girls Und Panzer, not a single girl was memorable at all. I suppose there is one girl who is supposed to be the main character, but there is not a single memorable thing about her at all. I can't even remember what she looks like.

Full disclosure, I like what is often referred to as the "moe" design aesthetic, so I'll say that going in. That said, I agree that the girls are largely unremarkable and mostly lack personality. Like I noted before, there's a wafer-thin "plot" to the show, but its essentially about the tanks. The main character has an "internal struggle" about living up to the family name, but that's neither interesting nor well executed. The one set of characters I DO find remarkable is actually the 4 history buffs. (One girl dresses like Rommel, another like Caesar (sort of), and the other two like Japanese figures that I always forget) I REALLY wish they were better developed because what little I got of THOSE characters I found amusing. (there's a short "bonus" from somewhere on YouTube where they're doing a production of "Little Women" and they keep catching grief for adding random historical facts to their lines including this LONG injection of US Civil War information)

I think the biggest problem is that the "main" tank team is too generic. (Some of the rival teams are also amusing for what we get, I especially love the Brits (always drinking tea, even WHILE driving the tanks) and the Americans (brash, loud and willing to throw a lot of money around, but generally jovial, good-natured people).

This Girls Und Panzer show tries to have it both ways: try to make it a reality-based all-girls' school (like K-On, granted) with Honda Civics parked in the teachers' parking lot, etc, yet have this totally implausible concept of these ditzy teenage girls f'ing around with tanks just because it is a school club. And are those live rounds they are firing at each other? Paint doesn't explode like that.

I think you're taking it too seriously in that respect. I don't think the show REALLY takes itself seriously. My personal favorite is a battle where a tank breaks down early on (thus, out of competition) and when the opponents narrow the heroes down to just the one lead tank and get it cornered, the tank that broke down appears out of nowhere to save the day. But when it wheels the turret around it COMPLETELY MISSES THE SHOT and gets annihilated. IIRC, they also make a reference to wondering if guys would ever be into tanks. It's not "fantastical in the sense that there's magic or lasers and jetpacks, but I don't think it makes any suggestion that the setting is "realistic", I think it's simply "modern".

The tanks DO fire live rounds, but (supposedly) they are well armored to "prevent injury". That said, I agree that with how it goes people WOULD get seriously hurt if it was real and if that's an issue, I understand. The fact that the commanders often sit outside the tank from the waist up, that alone would get several girls killed with live rounds. But really, my bigger issue for "reality" sake is that a team of complete newbies (never even been IN a tank before) is able to ramp up that quickly and not only challenge experienced teams, but do so with less total tanks is kind of ridiculous. (but if you only saw the first 2 eps, you wouldn't have seen that, although it is admittedly standard "win on guts" sports anime fare)

I think it's similar to Nadesico in that "totally ridiculous premise, but works on execution if you don't get hung up on how nonsensical it actually is".