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Girly Air Force (TV).




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Stark700



Joined: 30 Jan 2012
Posts: 11762
Location: Earth
PostPosted: Wed Jan 09, 2019 10:51 am Reply with quote


Girly Air Force (TV)

Themes: magical girl

Plot Summary: Mysterious flying creatures known as Zai suddenly appear, and in order to fight the creatures, mankind creates fighter aircraft called "Daughters," as well as the automatic fighting mechanism "Anima," which are shaped like human girls. The story centers on a young man named Kei Narutani, who yearns to fly in the sky, and an Anima considered to be humanity's trump card, a girl name Gripen.
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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
Posts: 15576
Location: Brisbane, Australia
PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2019 7:10 am Reply with quote
Episode 1

Even though credits seem to point towards fully Japanese, apart for the names of the characters, why does this feel so Chinese. I hope that I am not simply showing some sort of prejudice from watching really bad Chinese stuff, but this felt to me like it had the same sort of odd tone deafness that I have seen in some. The position of the main male character feels really forced, not as organic as I can see in other shows, with him kind of coming across as annoying regardless of the set up of being a nice guy. The exposition at the end of the episode felt clunky, and not set itself as interesting at all. If he had an interesting effect on the plane, why did they not just contact him, saying something along the lines of seeing something confidential and has to be monitored? Him turning up like he did really meant nothing but circumstance.

It otherwise looked nice.
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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
Posts: 15576
Location: Brisbane, Australia
PostPosted: Fri Jan 25, 2019 5:24 am Reply with quote
Episode 3

Man I find this show to be crap. In saying that I can see that I am possibly being a bit harsh, in the scheme of things it really doesn't always look so bad. And I sound a bit like the people that are over harsh on something that they do not like, while it might be perfectly watchable, and plenty of things of value.

What I am finding so inexcusable so far is that something is seriously wrong with the writing. While normally I can be pretty fine with even horribly cliché writing story if the way it comes across feels like it can draw me in and make it feel natural, but does not at all feel like what is going on here. No, this really feels like someone has an idea for what plot points are meant to be happening, but does not know why it might be that way, and give proper weight.

An example for this episode would be when the soldiers finally have at it towards the clearly non-human girl, which we had hinted to their feels from earlier on. But I really don't buy that these pilots whose lives are most at risk for battles are pretty much at a level of assaulting her as a threat, when she is supposed to kind of. The main guy then finally finds out she isn't human, but made of salvaged parts of the enemy, which I call total bullshit that he could not figure this out. Did he think some random girl that he got told could be scrapped for parts and flew a plane much like the enemy was made within normal human means and not from the aliens? It is a joke how quickly it then goes in him apparently being so conflicted over his feelings of the Xi that he cannot stay near her, before it is test day and he reads a letter of her feelings to then run to her. I have seen many shows that I might not have had any problems with some similar things, but here it just feels awfully done and makes me not at all sympathise with the main character. It was also meant to be built off an earlier scene in the episode where he found out his hometown was completely decimated, and while that should feel easy to do, again it feels like it fell totally on its face.

A lot of other factors really make me think of complaints people had for Darling in the Franxx, where lots of people seemed to have a big problem about the scientists not knowing how the mechs worked despite making them. I really had no problem with it in DitF, but in this show it really feels like the scientists both know and don't know important things over what they made, that they either should or should not know. DitF felt easier to believe because it future sci-fi time, where it felt believable that the spoiler[crazy scientists were somewhat throwing a dart at things they did not really understand, with a kind of good reason why the Klaxosaurs could be easily adapted for new mechs]. In Girly Air Force the scientist guy is incredibly boring, that he feels like he was just made up of some otaku guy, and it really does not feel like it makes sense that they went through all the work to create her while they knew so little, with her apparently being a prototype, yet they have weird expectations of how she should work if they really don't know anything.

If she was really so important, then shouldn't she have had some really controlled environment to work in? But by her recounts earlier her days were spent randomly going around a base and doing butt all. We were kind of meant to believe that the scientist is just that kind of quirky that this was his idea that was totally going to work in making her better, but again the supposedly quirky scientist just feels like some cranky otaku man. The most of his more recent acts have felt like he is just aiding in romcom shenanigans, which can be fine as something like Date A Live can lean into that to absurd levels, most of the people in that show have personalities that feel like the warrant such an absurd direction. Date A Live already knows that sort of thing is silly, and knows how to balance between the silly stuff and when things need to be serious, and felt like it shift between the two, which I can't feel like this one can.

I will continue to watch this, and who knows, maybe I will find myself drawn in and start enjoying it. But at this point it is feeling really flawed, that I will compare to other shows that actually could do things well.
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SomeHero



Joined: 29 May 2018
Posts: 53
PostPosted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 6:15 am Reply with quote
it had some nice Moments, like the ,forced Romance Plot`; but now im sort of dislike it, too. The Planes are old stuff (hey, how about at last an MIG 31 or Lockheed Stealth yadda yadda?) Gripen Girl started strong but is now annoying. More worse is cheating Introvert Phantom. And how the guy suddenly become ,Top Gun Star´? pff… If you an plane fan, i recommend those koya no kotobuki Girlys. You cant go wrong with Pancakes!
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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
Posts: 15576
Location: Brisbane, Australia
PostPosted: Fri Mar 29, 2019 2:38 am Reply with quote
Episode 12 (finale)

*cracks knuckles* Alright, lets get into this. I don't like this show. I kind of get the impression that some people do, but this show gives me a really bad taste in my mouth. For starters it does a sort of having a cake and eat it too, where it wants the girls to be jets, but it also wants the main character to be a badass wish fulfillment, getting kind of awkward where the attention is taken away from the girls, and placed on him. He is a total ordinary teenage boy who is just a bit of a fan of jets, but somehow with almost no training he becomes amazing at flying that he outdoes the being literally built for the job. They try to make it that they are partners, and he is there to support her, but it really kind of feels like if she is the plane, he is just so much better at piloting her that she is a body for him to use. A little early for how I want to go into the show, but I see the improvement with their character dynamics should have been that she stayed the really good pilot of the plane as he gave moral support and feed her other information, instead of turning it the other way around where she became the support. That part just feels really wrong.

To just focus on the last episode a bit, I have a bunch of problems with how it all went down. For starters, if Rhino was being controlled through it all, then why did she actually let him refill the plane, and I think actually even fixed it. Makes no sense why the villain literally did things to help them escape. Mixed with if the bad side thought that it could try and persuade him to stop and see things from its point of view, then why did it have a gun pulled on him followed by acting super evil by covering everything in crystal, shooting him, and doing evil laughs. At the end he said that he does not know what the enemy, the Xi, want, whether taking over the world or destroying humanity, but the possibly possessed character straight up said what the reason was. The Xi strongly pointed that they are mostly worried about the environment and want to return things to a natural state, that was the find out the motive part. Gripen already pointed to it in the earlier episode where she beat the simulation by making humanity go out of the major cities, hinting that it was the cities and people in it that the Xi had a problem with. That simulation being another thing I had a problem with, as logically it can only be made of data they have, not just say "I have made a simulation, and it will magically know how things will go", the simulation somehow knowing that humanity could live while without destroying the Xi. They thought that the Xi were only interested in killing humans, that is what their data said, so how could a simulation of said data be able to know things the expert working on it would not know? Logically they would just see the results as a glitch of incomplete data.

A couple of the characters were charismatic and interesting, but as a whole I think characters were awful. Especially the main character. He just felt like the worst combinations of being a bit clueless, yet good hearted, and also somehow having all the answers for things. The traits of such have started to grind on me, where someone like Touma, just feels like lazy wish fulfillment of somehow being an instant badass, and supposedly grounded in the wrong way where he is just that innocent, and either people don't know how good he is, or he is just silly too innocent to see how much someone likes him. Of course there is a tsundere childhood friend. But there is no interesting character there, sort of like that thing where they ask someone what their weakness is for a job interview and they say they work too hard, like the things that are meant to be a weakness are just thinly applied positives. And I want to mention the professor again, who I still think is the most piss poor attempt of trying to make a character appear badass, and just like the pulled some dude who is grumpy done with things and smokes.

For the plane girls, you have act likes a robot actually quirky girl, manic pixie girlfriend girl who acts like Japanese idea of an American, carnivorous girl who is super dominating but just needs a man in charge of her to help, and the mysterious girl who literally has no definitive form. If I was to pull from another series that has something like these blatant character tropes, I could think of Date A Live, yet that series actually has a sense of irony when it pulls the junk moments, not taking it seriously, and actually goes out of its way to try and be surprising in taking unexpected turns. There isn't really anything deep or surprising in Girly Air Force, where it tries to maybe do a commentary and make fun of its own setup.

I give a rating of Weak (3/10), I almost feel happy at being able to see through that it was not worth it to the end,
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