Senki Zesshou Symphogear episode 1

We want to be Macross so hard it burns ussss!

Good lord this was hil­ari­ous. Where to begin, where to begin? So the main char­ac­ter starts off dead. Not in itself unusual, as they are nor­mally spir­ited back to life again. But this is in the future, com­plete with char­ac­ter col­lapsing at her grave cry­ing “why did you have to leave us, wwwhyyyyyyyyyy!?!”, so it adds obvi­ous ten­sion when the main char­ac­ter hap­pens to be alive in the present day. She was going to attend a Sheryl X Ranka con­cert, but the tick­ets were sold out, so she instead had to go some shoddy rip-off band with music not com­posed by Yoko Kanno. Cue incred­ibly dull con­cert scene with awful pop music that doesn’t even have the decency to be iron­ic­ally bad like the music in Uta no Prince-sama. Thank­fully, some giant ali­ens attacked, end­ing the con­cert sequence there.

What this scene reminded me of was when I’m listen­ing to music, I like to pre­tend they are back­ing tracks to some ran­dom anime play­ing through my head. This isn’t a par­tic­u­larly good way to cre­ate a story, as you’re left to the wild whims of a song end­ing halfway through a scene, or per­haps play­ing music that doesn’t fit with what you had ori­gin­ally envi­sioned. But Nym­pho­gear runs with it any­way, pris­oner to the shuffle playl­ist on their ipod, and stops the song and starts with the alien inva­sion. The two pop idols (col­our coded for your con­veni­ence) don’t seem to fazed by this recent devel­op­ment and instead turn into robots and start singing while fight­ing the aliens.

Mean­while, ran­dom back­ground char­ac­ters are being crushed and killed and gen­er­ally not hav­ing a very nice time, some­thing that seems to fly straight over the head of our female lead. Per­haps she’s embraced the idea that she’s going to die, so she stays com­pletely still while the evil ali­ens attack. Even­tu­ally one of them does attack in her gen­eral dir­ec­tion, caus­ing her to scrape her knee. This grave injury has inca­pa­cit­ated her, but thank­fully the orange col­our coded pop idol noticed her in dis­tress. Com­pletely ignor­ing the vari­ous people being slowly crushed to death under fallen debris, she rushes to the girl with the hor­rific injury to pro­tect her. Fat lot of good she does though, as the ali­ens then cause copi­ous amounts of pomegranate juice to spew out of her body.

Oh dear, a little girl has a scraped knee and spilled some juice. We can’t let this hap­pen can we? Never mind all the hun­dreds of other civil­ians being crushed and zapped and gen­er­ally in much worse off situ­ations, our orange col­our coded pop idol can’t let this girl die. So she sings a song that kills her­self. Yes, these ali­ens are caus­ing them a bit of trouble, so the only option is to use the one attack that causes her to dis­in­teg­rate. Fant­astic tac­tics there. Appar­ently it was done to help the girl recover from her life-threatening scraped knee. Yes, let one of the only war­ri­ors who can fight the ali­ens charge into a wild kami­kaze song to save one little girl.

Any­way, fast for­ward to the future, the ali­ens are still attack­ing. The mil­it­ary are appar­ently still sent out to fight them, wast­ing what must be hun­dreds of thou­sands of Future Money on expens­ive weaponry that have no effect on the ali­ens, who are called Noise (oho I see what you did there. Music is the oppos­ite of Noise so you fight Noise with Music). Thank­fully the blue col­our coded pop idol flies in and saves Japan’s budget by killing the ali­ens. Mean­while, the main char­ac­ter has appar­ently recovered from her scraped knee, but the spilled pomegranate juice has left a nasty stain on her chest. After a day in school where she cli­maxed 100 times, the anime reminds us that CDs are status sym­bols and that you have to buy them or else you will be shunned by your peers BUY OUR CD SINGLES NAOW!!!

Unfor­tu­nately, on her way to the CD shop to buy stu­pidly over­priced singles that she could just pir­ate any­way, our main char­ac­ter is attacked by those nasty Noise again. Well, she’s less attacked and more walks straight into the war­zone, appar­ently being so gorm­less that she only notices the destruc­tion after she has wandered straight into the middle of it. Her sur­vival instincts kick in again when she turns a corner and is con­fron­ted on all sides by Noise, who are appar­ently so flab­ber­gas­ted by her stu­pid­ity that they fail to scrape her knee before she escapes. Then, some­where off cam­era, the main char­ac­ter picks up a little girl and starts drag­ging her on top of giant build­ings. This was ser­i­ously baff­ling. I mean, it quite lit­er­ally went from one scene of her run­ning away from the Noise to another when she had a little girl in her hand. No scene where they met up. No explan­a­tion as to where she had come from. She was just sud­denly there.

Any­way, main char­ac­ter hauls the little girl on top of a build­ing where sev­eral Noise had stopped for a pic­nic (main char­ac­ter dis­play­ing her remark­able sur­vival instincts yet again). Thank­fully at this point, the main char­ac­ter real­ises that the only weak­ness Noise have is singing. The clue was the only estab­lish­ments not touched in the recent alien inva­sion were the karaoke bars. The scene then cuts to the bridge of every single war­time gov­ern­ment organ­isa­tion ever, com­plete with a raised bridge with man pulling Gendo Ikari eyes and a harem of women whose job it is to push flash­ing but­tons and spout tech­nobabble. Ger­man tech­nobabble as it turns out, one of the girls say­ing “This couldn’t be…Aufwachenschlagen!?!”. Clearly it is Aufwachensch­la­gen. How could you mis­take it for any­thing other than Aufwachensch­la­gen? Google trans­late tells me this is Ger­man for ‘wake up hit­ting’, which is exactly what the main char­ac­ter does. She wakes up, turns into a giant robot, and I sup­pose the next epis­ode will kick off her her hit­ting the Noise while singing ter­rible jpop.

I can’t fuck­ing wait for the next episode!