天下制覇

What's crazy is that they're not drenched in sweat.

Impressions:

No real surprises here, unless you count all the naked boys. Which you probably should. Teenagers being cruelly and unfairly oppressed and tortured by a world/society of adults, who take special glee in it because who doesn't love torturing kids? I think it's the obliviousness that really gets to me, especially through all the info dumping, which made up the majority of the episode. It was at its best/worst when two evil schmucks were on the bridge of a ship, proudly declaring that it is the great duty of mankind of enslave and exploit teenagers, although the excessively random aside where the evil 'overseer' was trying to flee the attack but forgot his password, and thought that the password might be "some bitch I slept with" was also a high point in the field of "Who the hell thought this scene was necessary?" Then again, so was the ridiculous princess. "The base is under attack! Come with me to shelter or you'll die!" "I-I'll die!?" These aren't actual characters, they're ridiculous archetypes taken to an extreme, which, yeah, I realize is par for the course for a series that likes to bring characters back from the dea in opera masks, but it hasn't exactly gotten me on board yet and didn't work here either.

Production's fine, more or less. The 'action' scenes aren't overly impressive, largely because they're kind of similar to the montage of random things exploding and exposition in a futile attempt to provide context that Heavy Object used only not CGI, but at least the whole thing's animated. I did, however, enjoy that a mech flew up with a giant axe in its hand, and just as I was thinking how ridiculous it was, it magically transformed offscreen to a rifle. Again, and like many a things, organic storytelling seems to have gone to the wayside for conversations like "This sucks." "Yes, we are an oppressed population of teenagers to fuel the war machine of the adults who have enslaved us. Grr grr." There's not a whole lot of characterization going on to talk about, and what there is, is so ridiculous that it's impossible to take seriously.

Next Episode:

GUNDAM!?