Blue Gender

I'm not really a big anime guy; in fact, the genre as a whole sort of repulses me. Blue Gender really only piqued my interest because it was on Adult Swim's lineup around two, three years ago (back when AS was worth watching) and I caught a couple episodes. I'm a total sucker for post-apocalyptic scenarios, and giant, mutilating bugs never hurt anything, so I recently got hold of the series in complete. 36 hours later, I'd watched the series from beginning to end; not so much because it was gripping (that's only partially true), but more because I'm a maniac.

Blue Gender is driven not by the prototypical giant robot action Japan is (in)famous for, nor the horrendous monsters, nor even, for that matter, the dialog. The viewer is compelled through Blue Gender by the characters and their subsequent emotional arrangements, more specifically the leads, Yugi and Marlene. It's basically an epic, sci-fi soap opera with heavy metal and big bugs.

Marlene is the ideal woman. (Yeah yeah, she's a cartoon, "ew gross", get over it: that's not the point. The point is the idea being conveyed by whatever layered ink it travels through:) Marlene portrays the aesthetic of an ideal woman: strong, self-sufficient, but irrevocably feminine. I'd argue that she's more of a focal point for the viewer than Yugi, but Yugi is also a necessary component.

Yugi is a bumbling, sometimes whiny character that often accomplishes incredible things. This the viewer can appreciate and identify with; his relationship with Marlene, because of the viewer's identification with him, is the key in the ignition for this work. The audience is propelled through the series hoping intensely he'll get himself together and snag this pristine idol of a woman.

The interactions that follow the setup between these two are worth the 500-whatever minutes of moderate quality animation and dialog.

The other characters, for the most part, are semi-interesting. Some, however, are notable (eg, Dice). The atmosphere and setting are kind of cool; the creators do a pretty good job of portraying an insect infested planet Earth, but again, this is mostly beside the point.

In this ultimately lonely life, people often underwhelm us. I'm constantly disappointed by the trite selection of people placed before me. Fiction provides a remedy to this, allowing us to construct a composite ideal of characters we'd like to know within the stage of our minds. After all, the only difference between memory and reality is the level of detail.

Anyways, philosophic drooling out of the way, I'm glad to say that this series instilled in me memories of a character I appreciate, and I'd endure double the length of these episodes, spotty details and all, just to glean what I have.

On an end, this series has softened my harsh glare towards cartoons. While I doubt I'll be browsing the Anime section anytime soon, I'm a bit more open to taking animation for the ideas it's portraying as opposed to the raw, intrinsic value of the animation itself.

Oh, also, keep a keen eye out for the hilarious Engrish used in the animated computer interfaces... "Meesuement Impossibility!".

This anime was rather good, it really pulled you in the first few episodes, however at a point it loses some of its steam and is just not the series I was expecting it to be. Basically, the story starts off great as this dude with some mysterious illness is put into cold storage so that one day he can perhaps be revived when a cure is found. He is awakened, but not to a bunch of doctors saying "We did it!". No, instead he is awakened in a nightmare as the earth has been overrun with giant insect creatures, his only chance of survival a mysterious girl using some type of robot vehicle to fight off the many different creatures now seemingly intent on killing people. This part of the story is great, seems they have some plans on using the dude to stop the creatures, his illness being the key. A lot of people are now living in space and this is where the girl must get the boy so they can begin setting a plan of attack against the bugs in motion. It is a really good series up to the point you sort of find out what the people with this illness are needed for and you ask yourself "what"? I just never got what was so special about them, seems like they really had no special ability to me. The series once it reaches the go back to earth phase kind of loses its luster that it built up in the very exciting escorting kid back to the spaceship part of the show. I also never saw the last episode of this series so while I saw all the others I still feel incomplete when discussing this start with a bang series. Just needed work on the second half of the show.

This series despite being less than perfect has it's share of moments. The premise of the series is much like Robotech perhaps in the Invid storyline where a bunch of mysterious bug monsters have seized control of earth. The monsters are truly disturbing and there are some heart wrenching moments in the series. The truly spectacular part of this series is the emotional journey of the main character as he awakens in the future to find the world he knew destroyed and his desperate fight for survival. Where this series is very different from Robotech is that it treats it's subject matter in as gruesome and horrifying a way as it rightfully deserves to be.

I'm not a big anime fan, and I only put this on my watchlist because YouTube randomly recommended me a video list of gritty/gory anime featuring mechs, and this was on it. So it seemed like it was worth checking out.

The first two or three episodes were really good, and set the tone of how dreadful the world is within this anime series, but the entire middle section of the series has way too many filler episodes. Even then, I could have tolerated that had the continuity of the series been much better.

In some episodes vehicles and mechs were heavily damaged, but in the next episode (or even later in the same episode) the vehicles and mechs were restored. Later in the series they were better about the continuity, but early on there were a ton of issues like this, which made it hard to get immersed in the series, since moments that should have and could have had more impact were lessened due to immersion-breaking incongruities.

A good example is that characters seem to have infinite amounts of ammo just until the story doesn't need them to have infinite amounts of ammo. Mechs are highly capable just until they're not, and they become cannon fodder for the bugs.

I didn't have any problems with the over-arching story and what the series was trying to get across (even though it was wrong in its assessment of what's happening on the planet). But the continuity didn't improve until the second half of the series.

I think from episode 14 or 15 onward things really ramped up and improved greatly. Also there's a much stronger focus on the consistency of the characters, battle damage, and the war effort. So it made it feel much more grounded in its depiction of the world and battles.

Characters regularly repairing their mechs, and the damage they encounter makes more sense later in the series, which, again, makes the story flow and action scenes mean a lot more.

For this reason it's a difficult series to judge. A lot of the filler episodes are insufferable and mostly pointless, and some episodes seem to be filled with the two leads constantly just yelling out each other's names (especially on the space station).

But the back-half of the series really picks it up and is quite impressive. You can tell a large portion of the budget was put into the first half of the final episode with the big battle scene, which was really well done. And again, there was consistency with the way the battle played out. It's just a shame that there were so many wasteful episodes getting to that point, as well as a lot of ridiculous plot contrivances for certain characters as well. I think if the first half flowed better and they weren't so quick to kill off certain characters within the first handful of episodes, it could have been a much better series.

Still, the premise is awesome. The first two episodes are intense, and the back-half of the series really improves the flow and storytelling pacing. It's just a shame that there is a lot of filler getting to that point.

I've seen a lot of anime, this is by far the darkest, most disturbing anime I have ever seen. It's great!! When I first saw the trailer for Blue Gender I got goosebumps. It's really a fantastic series that has twists and turns around every corner that leaves you wondering what's going to happen next. The voices are dark and haunting, the music is dark and scary. FUNimation did a fantastic job with this. With the voices of Eric Vale (DBZ's Future Trunks) and Laura Bailey (Kid Trunks, Keiko Ukimura). Word to the wise: Don't get too attached to any character, because there aren't any Dragonballs to bring them back. I got attached to a few characters that were killed off pretty quick. I wasn't happy. Also, the voice actors speak very low, so you might need to turn the volume up, but that captures the darkness about it. All in all Blue Gender is a very unique and dark series that any anime fan would love.