Infinite Stratos #09 — Elbows in the Crotch, Balls in the Face

March 3rd, 2011

 

And hands in the butt.

Impressions:

Man, Laura. How’d you fall from cold-hearted German blitzkrieg machine into a blushing, stammering moron so fast? I’m okay with the armlock, but dialing up the fatherland… which apparently consists of 100% teenage girls in eyepatches… just to choose a bathing suit and then blue screening because Ichika called you cute? Bring back the cold-hearted naked pro wrestling ‘bridal’ German war machine, damn it. I’m also not a fan of how they’ve completely segregated Houki off from these random nonsense segments to go be the ‘serious’ side of the show, especially since the serious side has an Irisu-knockoff bunny girl running things. Houki in general has just been really poorly handled for awhile now. She just shows up to get lectured by other people and walk in on Ichika with one of the other girls once every week and then disappears until the next foreboding phone call or flashback on a balcony.

It was still a decent comedy episode at least, but it’s still too easy to mock because of how out-of-character half the cast was and how plainly braindead the entire affair turned out. I’ll keep the snide comments about them cramming the OP in as an insert to a minimum along with comments about how quickly Lingyin took the opportunity to cram her hand into Ceci’s ass. Just do each other already! It feels like I’m saying that a lot lately. Anyway, it’s not like any of this episode even really mattered. Brainless episode, brainless directing. Whoopie. At least Sexy-Hair showed up again, although wasn’t she freaking out before because Ichika saw her dressed almost exactly like that? Now it’s what she wears in public apparently. Girls these days. Always dressing like… that… or pokemon. It makes one think. Well, no. Not really. But if it wasn’t Japan, it would.

Preview:

This show’s previews are so pathetic.

Posted in Infinite Stratos | 36 Comments »

36 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Shinji103 says:
    March 3, 2011 at 10:11 am

    Indeed, Germany has gone on the offensive!

    Charlotte and Laura swimsuit editions = HHHHHNNNNNNNGGGGGGG x9000.

  • pata says:
    March 3, 2011 at 10:16 am

    The most fluid volleyball fight I’ve ever seen.
    To top it off, they played the opening in that scene.

    WHY?

    Quality is dropping, did you see Ichika doesn’t have a mouth in one scene?

  • Dual says:
    March 3, 2011 at 10:27 am

    Best beach episode in a while

  • marke says:
    March 3, 2011 at 10:31 am

    I thought Houki would wear a school swimsuit basing on her character…guess i was wrong
    other than that, it’s all cliche.

  • litou says:
    March 3, 2011 at 12:11 pm

    The fan service are getting more and more every episode

  • ryugan says:
    March 3, 2011 at 1:41 pm

    “dialing up the fatherland… which apparently consists of 100% teenage girls in eyepatches”

    best fatherland EVER

  • feal87 says:
    March 3, 2011 at 2:21 pm

    Fanservice…nice and refreshing thing to watch from time to time. :D

    • Aex says:
      March 3, 2011 at 3:46 pm

      I know, I liked how this show did the beach episode a lot more then usual!

      • Pseud says:
        March 4, 2011 at 12:12 am

        Most shows pretend to have a shred of plot in their beach episodes. None of that nonsense for IS though: just wall-to-wall fanservice.

  • Sarukah says:
    March 3, 2011 at 2:47 pm

    Seeing the caps for this episode makes me all the happier that I dropped it back at ep 6. I wasn’t expecting this show to be great by any means, but my gosh, it really outdid (or underdid?) itself.

  • FlameStrike says:
    March 3, 2011 at 3:17 pm

    Gah… so much cliched mediocrity this ep… T.T
    Cecilia’s 180 degrees attitude turn around was still within character, but it seems to me that someone swapped Laura’s personality with some random love struck fool’s. There’s NO WAY you can justify such a random and drastic change. Oh well, at least the awesome Char x Ichika moments sort of made up for it. France-tan is still the best! Now if only Ichika would stop staring at his sister and look at the ripe fruits all around him. I know she’s hot, but she’s his friggen blood related sister. I defended Ichika once saying how his density was in acceptable limits, but now… I’m not so sure. He’s starting to look more and more stupid-dense and less plot-dense.

    • Aex says:
      March 3, 2011 at 3:49 pm

      At least Houki was gone for 99% of the episode. For supposedly the “main” girl, she’s been getting crap for screen-time, impact, or even time with Ichika lately. Not that I’m complaining…

    • Shiden says:
      March 4, 2011 at 7:40 am

      When you consider that she’s getting all of her relationship advice from Clarissa, who’s giving her some pretty strange advice, her personality doing what it’s done makes some sense.

  • Aex says:
    March 3, 2011 at 3:35 pm

    This was an all-out-in-your-face beach episode. No attacks, no death-threats, no nothing, just fun and swimsuits! Been a while since I enjoyed a beach episode this much. Nice to see Chifuyu let loose too, even if it was for just a minute or two. Charlotte and Laura were fun to watch even before they got tot he beach lol!

    Now I wonder what nasty surprises Houki’s sister packed into the new IS?

  • Anonymous says:
    March 3, 2011 at 3:46 pm

    A shallow and a bit mundane episode, but still enjoyable!

  • Anise_Punter says:
    March 3, 2011 at 3:48 pm

    Outside of Houki’s tenchuu scene, I’m just going to pretend that episode never happened.

  • The Deviant says:
    March 3, 2011 at 6:53 pm

    ahhahaahhaah! Beach episode. saw that coming.

  • Tylon says:
    March 3, 2011 at 7:46 pm

    My favorite part of the episode is the telephone conversion between the siblings. In term of personality, they are polar opposite. One of them is 100% serious, and the other is 100% joker…

    Their eyes reminds me of ‘School Days’:
    http://tenka.seiha.org/images2/is9/is9_16_th.jpg

    • chad001 says:
      March 4, 2011 at 2:32 pm

      Exactly what I was thinking! I was screaming “yandere eyes, LOL”, while laughing at this scene…

  • Sporklord says:
    March 3, 2011 at 7:47 pm

    I never realized PI had such anti-boner capabilities.

    Real guy think about sports!

    • chad001 says:
      March 4, 2011 at 2:39 pm

      BEST REPRESENTATION OF PI EVAR!!!!!!! I think I just memorized a few more digits than before…

  • Zel says:
    March 3, 2011 at 11:23 pm

    By the way, anyone else noticed the change they made to the opening of this episode?

  • Bakers says:
    March 4, 2011 at 1:41 am

    for unknown reasons i can’t stand this episode or rather the path of the story since the introduction of rin

    for example the massiv character change from laura
    first hard like a rock typ and now this hellish blushing all the time and airheadness kiddie(yeah I know about the chifu-nee comment from last episode to change …)

    then the charlotte change
    first the really small crush (side-buddy) on ichika and now the heavily fallen in-love-girl
    She my favorite and should get together with ichika but damn you, just fuc*** say cleary to him already you love him many times because he’s the innocent guy and dense and she knew that because she said that many times. If she can get to it revert to the original side-buddy character. But we know that harem animes don’t work like that.

    I know the rest of the girls are also gotten hot for ichika but at least these two should remaind a bit steady
    yeah it’s a harem anime with mecha but god not like that please

    at first i thought lucky one that ichika guy and he is the oaf not to see he can get every girl he wants but now I think he’s not the big idiot
    he only wants a good friendship with everyone but every girl (even teachers etc) in this anime are huge sluts, sorry to say that but its true and can’t say clearly the got a crush on him
    and that he gets beaten everytime for that really makes me more and more angry

    I must say that the animes nowadays are really crap (note: I’m watching since 2006 each season 4-7(9) animes, before 2006 1-2 each season) and even with this 4-5 hardcore-anime-watching-years it showed the only animes your getting now are mainly dumb harem (-beat the main guy because he is present), heavy fetish-stuff such incest, peeing whatever else weird stuff and don’t-get-the-point-(storyline whats that-)animes.

    Don’t get me wrong I love harem/fan-service animes the most but the more and more I’ve got enough of them. At least with a prober good storyline you could watch them but the anime industrie with the not-well-payed-jobs can’t afford good stuff at the moment like it did 10 years ago. The art now looks better but the stories suck and that is vice versa with the past.

    wow thats a long comment
    i make it short i’m not that pleased with this episode
    btw my english is bad as hell and i like it ^^

  • alex says:
    March 4, 2011 at 3:47 am

    “the fatherland… which apparently consists of 100% teenage girls in eyepatches”
    – it was the German alternative to the Japanese Stratos school

  • Anonymous says:
    March 4, 2011 at 1:04 pm

    Germany invades the bedroom. After that scene I don’t care what happened. Butchering her character only made it more amusing.

  • chad001 says:
    March 4, 2011 at 2:29 pm

    First off.. Laura needs to learn Japanese…

    Second: Charlotte’s new name is Char? CHAR? So she’s a blond mecha pilot named Char, and she’s happy about that…

    • Anonymous says:
      March 5, 2011 at 9:41 pm

      My first thought when she called herself Char was “Oh so now she’s a zerg infested planet?”

  • chad001 says:
    March 4, 2011 at 2:53 pm

    LoL after watching the ep, I’d find it hilarious if they pulled TOO MUCH of a Shuffle, and ended up pulling a Da Capo, or a Koi Kaze. Admittedly though, like D.C. they’re not related…

  • Walter says:
    March 5, 2011 at 7:30 pm

    > http://tenka.seiha.org/images2/is9/is9_46.jpg
    Fucking Germans. Nothing changes.

  • jingoi says:
    March 7, 2011 at 1:10 pm

    its depressing that the anime will probably have ichika end up with houki or leave the choice up in the clouds.
    ichika must make effort to ignore all the obvious advances just like shinkurou.
    so damn dense too.
    Denseman Ichika, ready to claim that a girl riding his cock is just her learning the ending blow.

  • Haba says:
    March 10, 2011 at 9:38 am

    Like most light novels in the genre, Infinite Stratos is milking on the harem situation forever. Don’t expect any sort of progress in relationships in the anime either.

    I swear, they wrap up things only when sales start declining.