Anime HanabiAngelic Layer Episode 18!
I’ve already watched this series plenty of times, so there will be no surprises for me, but this will be my first time reviewing the whole series episode by episode. And I’m sure there will be some fine details that I’ve forgotten or never noticed in the first place. It has been a few years since I’ve seen this anime, so maybe it will be a little different from what I remember.
A quick run down of the series. This is a slightly futuristic anime by Clamp, the creators of Card Captor Sakura, XXXHolic, and Magic Knight Ray Earth. The story begins with a country bumpkin moving to the big city to go to middle school. The main character sees a robot fight on TV and immediately becomes a fan and buys her own robot to join the battle competitions too. So, this is a fighting robot anime like Metabots or Gundam Build Fighters, only with a Clamp flare.
Last Time On Angelic Layer
Last time on Angelic Layer, the national games kick off! Unfortunately they don’t start without a few hiccups. First, Misaki’s mom was supposed to do a presentation to start the games, but she had over trained the night before and over slept that morning and showed up late! Misaki and her friends are all excited and nervous. Are they ready for the big league? We’re going to find out. In the first match Sai is up. Of course, Shirahime wins, but Sai and her Angel win with the help of their second Katie. After Katie teaches Sai how to do Blanch’s signature move Hyper Mode, Shirehime is almost unstoppable!
Episode 18!
In this episode of Angelic Layer, there’s a ship at sea, there’s a storm, there’s technical difficulties, and there’s the horror of being tall! Lol. This episode definitely emphasizes that different cultures see beauty wildly differently.
The episode starts out featuring a girl in the waiting area of the tournament struggling with the costume of her doll. A boy stops by to help her out. They get to talking, and it ends up the boy is there with his little sister and both siblings are fans of Misaki. The boy starts gushing to the girl with the costume issues about how much he adores Misaki because she’s just so cute and tiny. The girl is clearly crushing on the boy, but when she stands to leave, the boy comments that she’s really tall and that she’s the exact opposite of Misaki. Wow, that’s more then just thoughtless, that comment was kind of rude. Not surprisingly, the girl is hurt and runs away.
Later Misaki is with Hatoko and the fan boy soaking up his praise, when the tall her spots them and makes a nasty comment that Misaki is lucky, if she loses she can just blame it on being tiny and everyone will cheer for her anyway. I mean, yeah it was a kind of snotty thing to say, but not as bad as what the boy said. Though he seemed to be a lot more angry about what the tall girl said than Misaki was.
Of course, in the next scene we see that the tall girl is Misaki’s opponent. The terrain is a pirate ship and sea and if the Angels are knocked off the ship into the water, it is considered a knock out! And if that isn’t tricky enough, there’s a real life storm brewing outside of the arena that keeps messing with the electricity! As the match starts, there’s plenty of smack talk from the tall girl. She claims repeatedly that short people are envied and adored by everyone and it’s so hard being a tall girl! That she’s going to win to prove that tall girls can be cool too!
This is definitely a Japaneses thing. I was a dinky kid growing up, a shrimpy teen, and now I’m a full grown puny adult. In all my years, no one was ever envious of my height or (cough, cough) lack of it. On the other hand, my sister is my exact opposite. She is tall. At 5.10 she towers over me. And growing up I heard nothing but praise for my older sister. She’s so elegant! She looks like a model! She looks good in everything! Okay, part of it is that my sister is very beautiful and as a teen she literally was a runway model, but still, no one cut her down because of her tallness. And I think that mostly comes from culture. The culture in the US says that tall is good, short is bad. Just look at how many mocking words we have for someone that is short. Lol, I’ve probably heard all of them. In Japan, short is not so bad? Or maybe it’s just that it’s good for girls. Hmm, I wonder if it’s not so bad being a short guy in Japan? I’ve heard it can be pretty rough being a short guy in the US.
Anyway, back to the match! As the electricity glitches out, causing problems with the layer, Ichon and the technical team tries to spin it as if it’s all part of the show and extra challenges they built in to add excitement for the competition, but really the projection kept having problems. So as Misaki was battling the tall girl, Ichon and the research team was battling the power outages and programing glitches. At one point the glitches were so bad, nearly the whole pirate ship had disappeared! Thankfully, Misaki managed to save the tall girl’s Angel from falling into the water as the ship disappeared and they rode out the programming problem in a crow’s nest together. The tall girl was shocked that Misaki would save her doll, but Misaki reminded her that age and size don’t matter in Angelic Layer, and she just wants to do her best and have a great match!
The tall girl realizes that Misaki is right, their match continues without all the drama, and Misaki wins. The tall girl is okay with that. They both tried their best, and Misaki won fair and square. And in the end, the boy the tall girl had a crush on came up to her after the match and told her that she had looked really cool. So it was good feelings all around.
Nothing ground breaking in this episode, but all around a nice feel good addition to the series!
#anime #Japan #angelicLayer #JapaneseCulture #clampAnime #episodeReview #robotAnime
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