Broken Blade (Break Blade) episode 2

I’m quite dis­ap­poin­ted and a little bit baffled by how little love Broken Blade is get­ting. It doesn’t do any­thing par­tic­u­larly new, I’ll give it that. But it achieves what it sets out to do with an extra shine that other shows of sim­ilar ilk fail to achieve. The detail gone into the world con­struc­tion is clearly well thought out and the intric­acy and sheen to the mecha battles far out­does any other mecha series I’ve seen, even Evan­gelion. We have char­ac­ters that aren’t ste­reo­types and have real­istic char­ac­ter devel­op­ment that don’t annoy the audi­ence but also aren’t rushed for the sake of appeal­ing to the audi­ence. Most of all, it’s ambi­tious. It’s set its stall out to become an epic and hasn’t yet tripped over itself in any way yet.

So yeah, you guys suck. Broken Blade is awesome.

“Hey cap­tain, that sword is too big for your robot to handle”

“No way, I can handle it. And don’t you dare say the word ‘con­pens­at­ing’, got it?”

Inter­est­ing look­ing back at the epis­ode was how most of it occurred in a very short space of time. Think about the time dif­fer­ence between when Zess and his crew were spy­ing on the town through their teeny weeny tele­scope while hid­ing in the moun­tains and the end of Rygart’s fight against the sui­cidal mecha pilot Lee. It was sun­set when that fight ended so when Rygart delivered his mes­sage to Zess, it must have been only a  few hours before. It was all one con­tinu­ous battle of mechas, or golems as we should be call­ing them. I always like it when an epis­ode is as self-contained as that. It makes the escal­a­tion of events feel more real when you’ve gone through all the same details at the same rate the char­ac­ters them­selves has gone through.

Zess was the standout char­ac­ter this time around. Queen Shiny Bum didn’t get much in the way of eye-catching  fanser­vice this time around, of even any screen­time in which she did any­thing par­tic­u­larly use­ful, so instead I had to awaken my inner fujioshi side that grew inside me after watch­ing 70-odd epis­odes of Hetalia. While Rygart, Hodr and Queen Shiny Bum got their intro­duc­tions in the last epis­ode, Zess was still a bit of a mys­tery fig­ure in the friend­ship so it was nice to get his char­ac­ter fleshed out a bit. There’s a great dynamic to the three men, and you can feel the pres­ence of the third per­son when only two of them are actu­ally in pic­ture. They fill up each other’s thoughts in that same way most fujioshi pair­ings seem to occur from. To use our favour­ite sushi chef’s iconic, squee indu­cing phrase, they have a com­plex about each other. Well, not quite, but I’m sure it doesn’t stop fujioshi from ship­ping them in threesomes.

Queen Sigyn really didn’t do a whole lot in this epis­ode, which is a shame because she’s fuck­ing hot err, an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. She was reduced to pan­icked observer in clas­sic anime female role style. But that’s not really a prob­lem when the bat­tle­field is littered with more than enough other female war­ri­ors. It’s a rather nice change to see as many female pilots in this series, often just as odd-bit char­ac­ters who spout a few lines and are only seen every now and then going ‘oh no, look what’s hap­pen­ing’ etc. Nor­mally there’s one female pilot who’s given a lot of atten­tion because she’s the female. Admit­tedly they all fit into typ­ical sol­dier female arche­types so far. There’s the busty loli, the crazed, battle hungry scary bitch, the stern older women with a sal­low face and the black girl who I can’t fit into an arche­type, although that’s simply because we haven’t seen her do any­thing as of yet.

This is my mecha, this is my gun. This is fight­ing, this is for fun.

I could spaz out and write all day about the mecha battles in Broken Blade, although most of my thought would look some­thing like gjold­f­skb ovk onsakn sbibv iwa;orghb win­j­gin and so on and so forth. But they really are the best done mecha battles I’ve ever seen. I do hold a little grudge against per­fect fly­ing of over­powered mecha as they dodge in and out of lasers that they couldn’t pos­sibly dodge because noth­ing can dodge bloody laser beams. None of that rub­bish in Broken Blade. These mecha are clunky. They’re ungainly. Each move take effort and will­power to shove it through the motions, get­ting thrown off bal­ance when a hit is blocked. The  instead of lasers that seem to do any sort of dam­age the writers feel like stick­ing in, these bul­lets do notice­able dam­age with every hit. If your massive Clay­more sword gets hit by a bul­let, there’s a notice­able mark left. The only other anime I can remem­ber that has such clunky, uncer­tain move­ments in Evan­gelion, and even that doesn’t come close to Broken Blade’s level of intric­acy which each move­ment. It might seem like an odd thing to spaz out over but it’s what gets my blood pumping.

Rygart’s paci­fism being shoved back in his face was prob­ably my high­light of the epis­ode though. He didn’t do any sort of big speach to con­vince the guy not to shoot. He just tried to get him to stop, but as soon as he tried to search for a reason he was being so paci­fistic, it was instantly shoved in his face when the guy got shot. In turn, the fol­low­ing scene, in which he tried to con­vince him­self that was a once off, his paci­fism is shoved in his face once again with the girl shoot­ing her­self. Never once was all of this said out loud. Never once did Rygart say he blamed him­self. It was all implied and all left up to us to work out for ourselves. Thank you Broken Blade for hav­ing faith in our intel­li­gence as an audience.

And so Rygart returns, gets an over­powered, over armoured mecha and the war begins for real. I can’t fol­low the polit­ics of the anime at all. It really doesn’t help that I don’t know which coun­try is what on that map they keep show­ing. Thank­fully the char­ac­ter dynam­ics between the 3 blokes and Queen Lumin­ous Bot­tom is more than enough to keep my interest. 4 movies left but I am start­ing to won­der what on earth do they plan to do with this. The manga is still ongo­ing so I guess it will be an anime ori­ginal end­ing. They clearly haven’t shoved this much budget into 6 theatre releases just to be an advert­ise­ment for a manga. We’ll see I sup­pose. The next epis­ode I think is out some­time in Novem­ber. ’til then~