With EVOL in the trash can, I decided to view another shounen/seinen anime.

Brave 10, so called that because there will be ten people with magical powers too… save Japan or something. I’ve heard it’s based on a specific historical event, but forgot which one. You can be assured that history didn’t play out exactly like this.

This anime feels like one of those anime they are making that’s targeted at men, but women are supposed to secretly like it. However this just feels… boring. The character designs are more like what you’d see in an otome game or a shoujo anime, which makes this feel like a ‘for women’ but targeting men anime.

The whole point of the anime is to show how awesome these men are and how sexy and awesome and… yeah. I don’t mind if characters get that crowning moment of awesome, or even if there’s a fight. Here’s the but, when the whole anime is crowning moments of awesome, it kinda dulls the feeling and makes me go “Yes yes he’s awesome, get on with it!”. More than “Squee, he just awesomed those ninja to death!”.

Another drawback is of course the maiden in distress. Izanami doesn’t really do much UNTIL she’s put into extreme danger, then she faints out and this hair ornament does some explodey zappy thing and everything is withered and decayed instantly. Yay passivism. While she seems to be a more active hero in that she knows she needs help and seeks it out, she’s probably never going to be given her moment to shine like the other heroes will.

I’m going to watch a few more episodes to see if they get better, get horrible, or stay the course. Right now I would give it a 5 on a 1-10 scale. Average as average can get.

is a steaming pile of gender essentialist misogynistic bullshit!

That’s just the summary.

The anime starts off rather good, with Amata at the theater watching an old movie which seems to be an exaggerated one based on the original Sousei no Aquarion. Then we see Mikono. I wouldn’t say she started to ruin the anime here, but it was a wait and see what happens. I kind of expected her to be the reincarnation of Silvia (maybe she is, or maybe she’s Apollo har har) and when the whole fight breaks out, she and Amata become pilots of Aquarion together, and plot ensues.

NOPE! She’s.. completely…useless. She’s only there to inspire Amata to show his wings and save the day. Most of that time she’s spent crying. The only thing she has is this “cat” creature that will probably be some super awesome key thing that unlocks the whole riddle of who, what, why. Kind of how Makona was from Magic Knight Rayearth.

What happens next is that we see the women singing and the men doing men things. One of the women is dressed scantily for the male viewing pleasure and one of the men is whining how he can’t have his way with the women on the other side of the wall and generally objectifying them as usual.

Then Kagura appears, which is one of the.. Shadow Angels? New evil bad people that trashed their own home and probably want ours? OH HEY they might even be humans and Amata and crew are the Shadow Angels or something . Anyways, he has a thing for Mikono and calling her a “kuso onna” which roughly translates to “shit/ty woman”, the fansubber went with “filthy bitch”. Because gendered slurs YAY. (Really Japanese doesn’t have ways of saying ‘bitch’, it’s usually ‘adjective’-woman which DOES NOT translate to bitch as it is a gendered word by default.)

Now this is where it gets silly. The men are getting their asses kicked so we send in the F-BOT! *TABOO* And we get to hear how everything is OK because… *drumroll* THERE IS A CHASTITY GEM ON THE FEMALE ROBOT THAT PREVENTS FUSION (complete with locks and chains). I’ll let that sink in.

Of course Amata and Mikono get inside a Vector aaaand, Mikono whines and cries about not wanting to fight and Amata says some essentialist bullshit like girls need to be protected. Also all the women have large breasts and we are going to take our time showing them naked and having their breasts wobble in the fusion scenes. We only get one shot of the guy and he’s not posing and making gesticulations like the women are. Yay, this just turned into an ecchi anime.

Really this show looks like propaganda from some Japanese MRAs that don’t like the state of women in Japan. Really. They are to be chaste and not chaste, they are “shitty women” who do nothing but whine and cry if they aren’t piloting a giant pink robot with a chastity belt on.

A successor to Sousei no Aquarion? No this isn’t it at all. Sousei had it’s share of problems, but overall it was a decent watchable anime. This just takes horrible and turns it to 11!

I was going to do a series of videos for a “Let’s Hate”, where I take a look at problematic games and point out every problem in it.  Ar Tonelico was the first on the chopping block after The Border House article about the III game and that one person forgot all the misogyny until it was pointed out again. I was actually watching a Let’s Play on the game, where I got some scenes from however the let’s player went on hiatus. I’ll probably put Ar Tonelico II on the block afterwards followed by either Mana-Khemia or another title.

I have decided also to expand into anime, as many times there are games based on anime and anime based on games, so I’m going to do some anime reviews for anime that truly are good or truly fail.

Also, I’m going to tweak the theme by A LOT, I’m getting tired of broken CSS that seemed to work in  theory under Dreamweaver. WordPress is.. different.

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