In the two episodes of the first OVA it’s clear that the smoking man is more influential than he seems to be in the first TV series. For one thing there was some sort of data which had to be retrieved from Orbital Base 7 which was important to him. And he recruits the 4 otaku to work for him on something.

There are other things in the first OVA which seem inexplicable. But from things I’ve read, I doubt I have any interest at all in seeing the second OVA, or the third one. The second OVA ended with a cliff hanger (which they lifted from “Dallas”, of all things), and the third OVA, another two episodes, picked up from there.

For me, it was watching the four girls become competent pilots, and the excitement of the “year of many comets”, that were the story I was interested in. But the year of many comets ends with the TV series and it’ll be 7 years before the next one. So the OVAs and the continuation of the series had to be about other things. The X-files aspect of the series was what I disliked the least — and that dominates the sequels.

And I agree with that assessment.

Putting her in a Meteor Sweeper base on an obscure tiny island was about the best they could do.

Hmm. I never really thought about it that way, but that indeed makes sense.

The guys who showed up and took over the base, and tried to prevent the intercept mission, weren’t actually trying to prevent intercepts. It was just a case of a stupid bureaucrat flexing his muscles and saying, “You can’t do anything unless I give you permission.” There’s nothing more to it than that.

That would be rather spectacular stupidity, though. One would think the merest hint of a comet hitting a highly-populated area would send an “honest” bureaucrat into full ass-covering mode.

Wasn’t the whole purpose of showing up and taking over the station to track down Mikaze and Shizuha and stop the attempt to rescue Karin, too? I suppose I could buy that they were just trying to track them down because they were seen breaking into a secure facility where a known infected was broken out of, and CEMA was afraid that they were infected, but I’m not sure that fits with everything. Hmm.

Whether or not those particular guys were part of the conspiracy, though, there definitely had to have been a groundside infected-friendly or infected group to gab Karin and shuttle her up to the orbital station, and the series could definitely have used some more exploration of that. Maybe in the stuff that hasn’t been brought over yet, I suppose.

And now that you’ve seen the four otaku’s in the interrogation room, tell me you don’t have a soft spot for them.

Yeah, that was indeed a nicely done scene.

Those guys are nuts, but they’re my kind of nuts.

I never said that this series was top drawer. My review goes out of its way to say the contrary. But I do like it, mostly because of the characters and the flying machines.

In the last episode, the constant “Give up and stop” calls were genuinely stupid. There was no tomorrow; they had to do whatever they needed to in order to stop that particular comet, and the injured Comet Blasters back in the base should have known it. I think it was intended for dramatic emphasis even though it didn’t make character sense.

I’ve never figured out what it was that Shizuha flashed to the guard that affected him that way.

As to Karin, it actually makes some sense for her to be in that base. In the OVA it comes out that the base commander and the old lady at the restaurant both knew about her. She was an experiment to determine if coexistence was possible, but they didn’t want to release her into the general public, since if she started assaulting people and kissing them you could soon have a pandemic, and lose it all. So they needed to put her with normal people who didn’t know about her, but in a relatively guarded situation where damage could be contained if the experiment failed. Putting her in a Meteor Sweeper base on an obscure tiny island was about the best they could do.

The guys who showed up and took over the base, and tried to prevent the intercept mission, weren’t actually trying to prevent intercepts. It was just a case of a stupid bureaucrat flexing his muscles and saying, “You can’t do anything unless I give you permission.” There’s nothing more to it than that.

Now that I’ve seen both series, Ayamo always reminds me of Kiri in Divergence Eve — except that Kiri is much more real of a character to me, and one I care much more about. But DE is also a much more intense story.

There are a lot of stupid things about Stratos 4. One is that Mikaze should have died at least three times. She should have drowned in that pool, and she should have died in a landing accident on Guam, and of course she should have died in the last episode.

I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out that the Stratos 0 (renamed Stratos 4) wasn’t involved in saving the day at the end. It would have been too corny if it had been.

If I were making a fanfic, I’d go for Tsubasa or adults, unless we’re talking a lesbian lemon.