Thoughts On: Stratos 4 DVD 4

By request, a return to simpler anime… with airplanes.

• Quoth my friend, prior to starting the DVD: “No way they can wrap this up satisfactorily in three more episodes, particularly when they spent the last DVD dicking around with comic relief.”
• Wow, the music choices for the beginning here, where they’re recapping Karin collapsing are kind of… odd.
• Star Seed, huh? Clearly the main villain is Sailor Galaxia! Or something.
• …so during the bit where Shizuha and Mikaze are sneaking into the evil conspiracy lab to rescue Karin, Shizuha flashes a little gold button at the guard, who is shocked and lets them past despite his suspicions. Did my friend and I miss something, or is this completely unexplained?
• My friend reminds me that the stuff about Shizuha and licenses didn’t come out of nowhere, but was mentioned way back on the first DVD. I completely forgot about it, probably because it doesn’t get even a mention on DVDs 2 and 3.
• Quoth my friend again: “I think we’re thinking harder about this show than the creators did.”
• So… what was the deal with the evil conspiracy anyway? They show too much emotion to be infected, I think, but their motivation for apparently wanting the alien’s vaguely defined plot to succeed is never really explained. (They go to the point of trying to stop the Meteor Sweepers from intercepting a fragment that would hit central Japan so it’s hard to see them as anything other than willing collaborators.)
• Incidentally, we finally see a male on the orbital station! Huzzah!
• The attempts to call back our main characters when the comet changes course seem kind of silly. It’s established that if the comet hits it’s the end of human life. Anything is a better idea than just letting it past.
• Quoth Mikaze (paraphrased): “I can’t die here; I’ve got too much left to do!” Quoth me: “Unfortunately, physics does not care.”
• Okay, so I’ve still got a bunch of questions about Karin, namely: Accepting the idea of preserving the one apparently non-taken over infected person for study, and even letting her loose for a better experiment toward coexistence… why in the world would you put her or let her get into a position where she’s given countless opportunities to reveal that she’s a sleeper agent and infect Earth’s defenders and a position where she’s likely to be re-exposed? What triggers the infection flaring up again? How much of her pre-infection persona survives, or are we dealing with an alien that happens to think she’s Karin? Just why do the other infected care so much about recovering her?
• For that matter, how was Miharu infected, and how did she avoid detection for so long? There might be no way to detect infection, but surely the sudden, drastic change in personality would set off a warning flag that would prevent her from becoming commander of an orbital station?
• Unless CEMA is completely under the control of the collaborators, of course, but then they could have been much more effective in general. All the orbital staff could have been infected easily, for one.
• Shouldn’t CEMA - assuming non-complete domination by infected people - have had some sort of contingency plan for the orbital stations getting infected? Even if the non-collaborators had no idea about infection, surely there would have been some sort of mission sent up to investigate the stations.
• My friend mentions that the series was too short for the story they were trying to tell. I think it could have been done in thirteen episodes if they’d been more focused and not packed the entire actual plot into three to five of them.
• It would be really interesting to see a fanfic that told the whole story from the perspective of the orbital station and the Comet Blasters. Lots of nice potential for creepiness as the crew gets infected one-by-one…
• I guess I can kind of see why Steven Den Beste calls this a sports anime, but I’m not sure I agree. Closest to watching sports anime I’ve gotten is watching Prince of Tennis and Hikaru no Go over my sister’s shoulder, but it seems to me that there’s an element of… competition, I guess, that Stratos 4 is lacking. There’s bits and pieces of it, with the girls’ minor rivalry with boys at the beginning and the Meteor Sweepers vs. Comet Blasters thing, but that’s never really the focus.
• Speaking of Steven, a while back I recall he mentioned that one of the most often and annoying “I know you’ve said you’ve considered and rejected, but I think you should try this anime anyway” e-mail types he got was people trying to get him to watch Stellvia. I thought this was kind of odd, since while I knew Stellvia was well-received I didn’t think it really had that much of a vocal fanbase. Having seen Stratos 4, I think one reason for this oddity is that the two are really very similar shows. (Though for at least one stretch, Stellvia is actually way more of a sports anime than Stratos 4 is.) Which isn’t to say Steven would like it, of course - I seem to recall fairly heavy doses of high-school-type angst in the middle of the show, which he’s expressed an aversion to.
• I, on the other hand, remember very much liking what I saw of Stellvia in fansub, and watching Stratos 4 has left me with a strong desire to get the rest of the Stellvia DVDs and finally see the ending to it.
• I was very, very surprised that the ending didn’t involve the girls using the prototype aircraft they’d been rebuilding to take out a comet without Comet Blaster support.
• My final rating on Stratos 4: B- or C+, depending on how charitable I’m feeling. Entertaining, but the general looseness of the plot (in particular the inadequately explained antagonists) keep it from reaching its potential.

And that’s more than enough of that, I think.