Genre – Anime Something
Movie Total Runtime – 1 Hours 1 Minute
Spoilers – ??? Maybe, but not really

A Rightstuf Blind Box acquisition this is Episodes 5 and 6 of Gunbuster 2. I have never heard of the Gunbuster franchise, and being some arbitrary way into the second installment, this is going to be a difficult show to step into. Especially since I’m going back to my “No research” approach.

So we start in space where a ship in “Mars Orbit” is approaching a comet. They blast it and it releases some glowy object which turns out to be a woman with flame hair. Roll opening credits.

I admit, I was not expecting that. The credits have upbeat music and intermix between domestic scenes, explosions and giant things that might be robots. The fast editing makes it hard to extract any info from the credits.

The opening dialog from mister muckitymuck talks about past use of a “black hole weapon” to deal with “invading gravity wells”. This is going to be on the stupid end of anime science, isn’t it? Apparently the black hole created is spawning kaiju. He then talks about a speculative automated defense system of unmanned “buster machines” that is hypothesized to have been built. How fragmentary is their historical record of this mega kaiju war? Well, apparently the humans sealed away warp technology and bottled up in the Sol system. I suppose this means the automated defenses were keeping the kaiju at bay? It’s only three and a half minutes in and the expodump hurts.

So the hypothetical automated defense system evolved as it fought and came to resemble the kaiju, and decided that humans were as much a threat as the gravity well forces it was fighting.

After the title screen we switch from the meeting of Admiral muckitymucks to where some girls in odd-looking “corrective gear” are silently unhappy with the food in the facility they are in. Apparently they are something called “Topless” which has nothing to do with a state of undress, but does have something to do with either the automated defenses or the Kaiju. This facility is on the “New Tenth Planet”. And they are lamenting at how the real Kaiju were much more powerful?

We get a new expodump from the Surgeon General that these “Topless” have abnormal frontal lobe activity and tend to be younger. But the condition is “treatable” in the early stages. So it’s regarded as a disease but gives them powers?

Honestly the subtitles whip by too fast and I have to keep backing it up to see what’s being said. Someone wants to negotiate with the Kaiju? Or is it the automated defense network? Maybe skipping episodes 1-4 isn’t helping. Anyway over-apologetic girl brings girls in corrective gear a big bag of what look like peeps. I’m not sure. However, there are giant machines, which are also staged on planet ten in a defensive posture. But they might not be entirely mechanical? So, the “Topless” can pilot the machines which are centuries old and have accumulated experience the pilots can’t compare to stored in their AIs. And over-apologetic girl is one of these machines?

New character creepy dude pushes his way into over-apologetic girl’s apartment and menacingly asks for a going away present. They’re still struggling when security arrives and seizes him. Creepy dude apparently used to be “Topless” and reached his “expiration date”. So I suppose he lost the powers? His rant I can’t make heads or tails of riles up one of the girls in the corrective gear. While the girls sulk, the navy gets news that the gravity wells are about to attack again. They burn towards it, and bring the machine girl along. She does not look too confident.

The kaiju fleet is found to number in the tens of thousands and is still mustering. But machine girl gets them allowed through and as the musical score goes bombastic we get a wide shot of “New 11th planet in the solar system – Black Hole Exelio”. It’s not a planet.

At this point it’s clear the science of astrophysics means nothing to the writers. the Kaiju fleet is apparently there to keep something even bigger inside this supposed ‘black hole’ though it is on the verge of climbing out. I unleashed frustrated cries of “Make Sense!” at the screen. It declined to do so. Machine girl and the fleet attack the entity trying to get out of the ‘black hole’. The navy kicks pilot girl off the bridge because she has no combat role there. The soundtrak tries to imply we’re supposed to be outraged at this, but it’s perfectly rational. Even if they brought her giant robot thing it wouldn’t be usable from the bridge.

The Navy manages to screw things up so that the gravity monster begins fully emerging with full boss monster music.

As the flagship gets wrecked, pilot girl has a breakdown and spills inferiority complex all over the subtitles before machine girl comes to rescue her with what I suppose is inspirational dialog. Machine girl removes the limiter from pilot girl who summons her giant robot and does an Anime Escalation move to throw a planet at the gravity monster.

Okay, I can’t prove it’s Anime Escalation, but when you’re pulling fucking Jupiter out of the Heavens to throw at an extradimensional monster climbing out of a black hole, I took an educated guess.

And that We hadn’t previously had a good idea of scale before, but here’s an idea of how big the monster is. That brown circle is Jupiter.

When that attack fails to kill it, they come up with a technobabble suicide plan that Machine Girl would really rather not go along with. Gravity monster warps away to who knows where as we get hit with a to be continued.

How did we go from extended expodump in a hospital to “throw a planet at it” in under half an hour?

When I had first thought of the idea for these reviews, I had thought these fragments would be fonts of amusing content given the need to piece together information from context. I had not counted on my own frustration at not being able to follow what was going on. Let see of Episode 6 is any easier now that I have watched some of the series.

We open to a traffic jam among air cars. Or space ships. It’s unclear, but it’s bumper to bunper and apparently 600,000km long. How? The further from the ground you get, the less constraints there are on redirecting traffic. Or is there one tiny gate they are all trying to get to? Well, the camera angle changes and nope, they literally have traffic lanes in outer space running like clogged highways. Suspend your disbelief man, Last episode they threw jupiter at a wedge of rainbow cheese that crawled out of a black hole. This traffic jam was all just an establishing shot for the Moon, from which everybody has or is evacuating. Among the people still on the Moon, we get our first line of dialog. “It’s almost time for Earthrise, it will be beautiful”.

*facepalm*

The Moon is Tidally locked to the Earth. Unless you yourself are moving from the dark side to the light side of the Moon, you won’t see anything that can be described as “Earthrise”. The relative position of the Earth in the sky will stay the same. Reminder to self – in this series, Astrophysics is like, just a suggestion, man.

A bunch of old gnomes are having a meeting about the strategic situation. I guess these are supposed to be elder statespeople in the extreme “anime old person” stage of art style. So the meeting is suddenly talking about how sacrificing the Earth is the only way to survive and that these now some risk that humans will become “fluctuating gravity wells” in this plan? I have to ask – how many drugs were involved in writing this? My confusion can’t possibly be from loss of earlier context. There is no coked out way that this possibility would have made sense from earlier episodes being watched.

So the council of old Gnomes gives pilot girl the key to a superweapon and the drug-induced dialog isn’t extrapolated upon. Then we start getting flashbacks. In the flashback pilot girl goes to visit the guy from the pre-credits sequence of episode five talking about finding machine girl. I suppose we’re supposed to be melancholic about machine girl having run off after refusing the suicide mission. We get trite psuedophilosophy. I get the impression that this should would have fit better in nine or tweleve episodes and been slightly decompressed from the rush-rush-rush pacing as we snap back to mustering of an armada for the unspecified plan.

Apparently there is still something they can attack as they assail a bunch of space bugs, until the rainbow cheese wedge screeches in. So, after throwing Jupiter at it didn’t work last time, the plan is now to fire Earth as ammunition from the superweapon, hoping added velocity will make up the the lack of mass? We have other rocky terrestial bodies besides the ancestral homeworld, why Earth? Is it just so chock a block full of mystical energies that nothing else would do?

So they fire a planet at relatavistic velocities at the rainbow cheese wedge as music plays, but the effect causes some sort of giant machine girl to start to climb out of a crack in reality who starts to tear apart the superweapon to protect the earth from this plan. This is apparently the same machine girl as before. Pilot girl and machine girl bicker over the situation, but I’m just annoyed at the sounds of their voices. Pilot girl’s ‘Topless’ ability expires mid fight just before the Rainbow Cheese Wedge shows up. Gaint Machine Girl starts fighting the monster as it seems rather unperturbed by her efforts, throwing her into the Moon and seriously cracking it.

Rainbow Cheese Wedge starts kicking Gaint Machine Girl’s ass and pilot girl starts crawling through the guts of the superweapon to do… something. It’s unclear. Superweapon wakes up of its own accord and allows expired pilot girl to trigger the next anime escalation sequence to transform into a Gaint Machine Boy. Pilot Girl lectures Machine Girl of the meaning of being human, and Giant Machine Boy along with Regular-sized Machine Girl attack the Rainbow Cheese Wedge in a super-new technique ultimate attack kind of way full of flashy effects that finally crack it open. From the dialog this might just have triggered Big Bang 2.

But, what I have to assume are the hands of God close over the fractured core and close it up, ending the threat. We go into a sequence which quite possibly written after freebasing psychadelics and watching other Animes.

Pilot Girl is recovered from the broken remains of the superweapon as Machine Girl and Rainbow Cheese Wedge’s Singularity disappears.

Ten years later, we have a phone call between Earth, where someone is studying birds, and Pluto where someone is excorting diplomats to Sirius. Bird researcher turns out to be Pilot Girl. There’s a big celebratory moment for the return of… Buster Machines #1 and #2 with their pilots… who we don’t see and never met in these two episodes. Maybe they were involved in the first series or something, because the show acts as thought it is a big deal.

Roll Credits.

Some of my confusion is self-inflicted from watching what appears to be the last third of the sequel series. Some of my confusion is from the showrunners being on enough drugs to make musicians freak. I stand by my previous claim that the pacing needed some decompression, as the running from pillar to post for plot points was causing me more difficulty once I’ve gotten my bearings.

Though I can’t help but feel like I’d developed Aphasia in my plot summary.

Hold on a second.

What’s that?

At the end of the Credits.

I see now.

I had never before encounted a Gainax Ending in my forways into the world of Anime.

I understand at last.