Media
Essentially seasonal anime impressions. Some I may finish, some might get dropped. May contain some spoilers
Winter 2024
Bang Brave Bang Bravern!
I knew going in that this was going to be a goofy mecha anime, and I've had some mixed feelings. The plot is that troops from various countries are all in Hawai'i performing training drills in their underwhelming low-tech mechs when aliens (probably) suddenly attack. In the midst of the armies being decimated, in comes some random mercha of the smart variety arrives, hones in on the MC, Isami, who he is evidently already familiar with, and who is press-ganged him into being a mecha anime protagonist: he's going to shout attack names whether he likes it or not.
The first episode bored me, but the second surprised me as we see that in the aftermath of Smart Mecha Bravern and the little guy he's obsessed with defeating all the enemies and saving the day is that the military's waterboarding Isami for his apparent connection to this random robot from nowhere. I'd expected the entire thing to be handwaved away for the sake of getting on with typical anime shenanigans, so this backlash combined with Isami's subsequent trauma, unwillingness to get out of the mech, and the fact that he then spends an entire day completely silent in the mecha was surprising but intriguing to me.
If anything, the series felt almost horror-adjacent - this childlike but incredibly powerful mecha is the only one capable of fighting against these aliens, but his unexplained insistence that Isami *must* be the one to pilot him and *must* be enthusiastic about the whole thing felt more like the cast was being accidentally held hostage by a powerful child who has to be appeased.
But instead of exploring that, it looks like the show is taking a turn and focusing more on another character - Isami's "friend" Lewis, who he hadn't even really met until the start of the episode, who finds and rescues a mysterious young woman who's probably an alien (though no one is particularly concerned about that) and ends up babysitting her as she goes from a hypercompetent fighter trying to kill Lewis to a toddler-like figure who mostly clings onto Lewis, babbles in baby-talk, and lets out the occasional ear-piercing shriek, a change that seems to be completely unprompted by anything. This might be less weird if she didn't look the same age as most of the grown women in the show.
This anime makes some...interesting...choices, with Bravern's dialogue talking about his dynamic with Isami being nothing but over-the-top innuendo, but I had known about that going in. What surprised me was the ham-fisted attempt to make it seem as if Isami and Lewis have any dynamic at all instead of just being two guys who've known each other less than a week, with an ED that consists of a duet between the two where they randomly take off their shirts. Baffling, but at least if there are going to be shirtless anime men they're not twiggy little waifs?