Sanya V. Litvyak flies the night skies, often alone, for the 501st aerial division. She soars between a ceiling of stars and a carpet of moonlit clouds, while tuning in the radio transmissions of the world.

I’ve done a bit of a 180 on Strike Witches. Just a few months ago I would have told you that I found them gross. Cat-girls or any of the animal eared girl things are not my thing at all. Outside of the Strike Witches, I still feel the same way about cat-girls or any other type of animal eared girl. I avoid things like Spice and Wolf. The dog-fights in Strike Witches turned me around as when they do it, the witches look pretty cool, so I can overlook the animal ears.

Photographing this figure of Sanya has led to a greater appreciation of her character. She spends a lot of time alone, so she’s often not with the other girls so she is kind of a hidden character and can be forgotten. I think she represents solitude in a way that some can relate to pretty well. How many of us are still awake long after the rest of the world has fallen asleep?

It’s a beautiful sculpt. Otsuyama Houjin captures Sanya through her facial expression and body language. Very sweet from the front and blatantly ecchi in the rear view. I’m of two minds on that, but it is Strike Witches after all.

Not being much of a mechamasume fan was another thing that kept me away from Strike Witches, but seeing the witches in action did a lot to make leg obscuring striker units visually acceptable. However, her striker unit looks slick. You can also swap out the propellers between the default spinning mode or have it so you see the individual propeller blades. The texture on the striker units looks very good in normal room light, not just in the photos.

The one I bought is very clean. It takes a macro lens to find the two paint boogers on the figure.

I was all done taking shots, but then thought to myself, even though Sanya is nocturnal, Strike Witches fly through these blue skies. Slipped a sheet of pink paper underneath to color the highlights pink for some sense of early morning light or something, which is more noticeable on the first two blue sky shots.

Went with a wider aperture than I normally do for the blue sky shots. The super shallow depth of field gets over used, but then I probably don’t use a shallow depth of field often enough as a consequence of holding that opinion. Every now and then it’s a good idea to tell yourself you’re wrong.

Foo-bar-baz has a comprehensive 360 view of Sanya.

I’m a little surprised that we haven’t seen more Strike Witches figures, after all from what I gather this show is a big hit amongst the types of people who buy figures. Of course, there’s likely a number of other factors involved keeping a flood at bay, or they’re not as popular as I assume. If Alter released one of each witch, I’d likely buy most, if not all of them. I still haven’t bought Yoshika Miyafuji, but that was due to her being released at a time where I wasn’t a fan of Strike Witches.

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Unsurprisingly, most of the figures I’m relegating to living within boxes stored in my closet are from my early years as a collector. Much of the newer stuff just looks better made. Anyone who has been collecting for a while has seen figure quality improve, in spite of the recent grumbling that some corners are being cut now.

Some of these boxed up figures I wasn’t huge fans of to begin with, such as the Aria 1/6 figures from Solid Works, 1/6 Feema Fam Earthlight from Atlier Sai, or the Solid Works 1/8 bandaged Shana. I didn’t even bother to box the truly awful 1/8 Saber Holiday Version from Alter. That was one of their worst figures, her face was just two clicks above the infamous Sader, so I just threw it in the trash.

On the other hand, I couldn’t save Alter’s 1/6 Rin Tohsaka swimsuit version. To clear some space I also retired Alter’s 1/6 Sakura Matou swimsuit, though there was nothing wrong with her. I don’t like mixing scales and I couldn’t squeeze her into one of the other detolf shelves with 1/6 scale figures. Not that much gets made in 1/6 anymore, so that case would be almost empty for too long. For the future, 1/7 Max Factory Ignis and Pachira will probably be retired when I have to do this again, same with their 1/8 scale Van and Wendy (GunxSword). Hime-Kuri girl, Burst Angel Amy, body board Rider, and Simca are also on deck for retirement.

In passing, I did wonder at the waste of it all. But, it really isn’t any more of a waste than any other object one buys and no longer wants because they grew bored with it or the object is done doing whatever it was bought to do. Do we actually plan on keeping all our objects forever? There might be some defense mechanism that causes this sort of reaction when discarding something, like a comforting illusion of having learned from a mistake. Either way, the latest WonFest tells me I need the space.

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What I find amusing about both the 501 and 504 strike witch aerial divisions is those numbers are also designations for brands of Levi’s blue jeans. Given the flight junkie thing about this show, the squadron numbers, if not just some random numbers pulled out of their pants, are more likely related to the air force squadrons of one country or another tied to WWII history. For example the US Air Force has a 501st and 504th that were active during WWII. At least, that’s what a Wipikedia search indicates. The coincidence with the squadron numbers also being model numbers of Levi’s Jeans makes me smile though.

This episode sends Yoshika, Lynn, and Perrine off to the island of an old witch who will whip the three back into shape. Old crone will teach them that the old broom technique will unlock some of the capabilities of the striker units. Don’t ignore what came before, etc., otherwise tech is just a crutch rather than an enhancement of your own ability.

You know when a trio of pants-less witches need to learn how to fly with a broomstick in between their legs it’s going to be all sorts of very very wrong. Welcome to the third episode of Strike Witches 2. Other than the extreme crotch closeups and the weird chafing thing that continues with Perrine, it was a cute episode on the relationships side where the three learn to work together as a team. Not quite as amusing as the broomstick training episode of Magic User’s Club, but quite a bit higher in the wow, I can’t believe they went there factor. Actually, I can believe they went there, but you know what I mean. Perrine definitely made the episode more amusing, she’s a good third wheel character.

The second half of the episode introduces convenient light flares. Almost all of the extreme closeups had flares to obscure some of the details, but this was not so in the first half of the episode or the previous episodes from what I remember. In the middle of the third episode is kind of a funny spot to start that sort of thing, just surprising it took that long.

(screencap grabbed from RandomC)

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When the character sketches for the first four Hyakka Ryoran figures were shown, Senhime was the one I was most looking forward to. For more than I year, I’ve been into the way of the spear. My barbarian in D&D used a greatspear, Moribito had some wicked fight scenes featuring spears, and martial arts movies often feature spears. I think the blind spear fighter in Samurai Champloo kicked off my whole spears are cool thing, though I do remember the spear chicks in The Wheel of Time books had some serious mystique going on, but lost interest in the series halfway through the fourth book and the spear chicks were more talked about as awesome than shown as awesome at that point in the series.

As far as the figure, it’s beautiful except for the face. Senhime, like Jubei before her, rock the curvy thighs style, maybe not as far as the Yamashita based figures rocked the thigh, but those spilled a little over into too much, I think. Regardless, stepping away from the slender and tiny body frame is appealing and seems like we’re getting more of it outside of “office lady” figures, which is a good thing for variety.

The render of her clothing and hair flows very well and has a pleasant amount of detail. In particular the volume of her sleeves seems perfect in how much and how deep the folds would be for that kind of material. It’s not overdone and it’s not vague. Flow carries over to the major body masses and how they line in the s-curve.

For all that I think is so right with the figure, her face is a bit of a spoiler. I’m not sure the expression here works and I keep thinking frumpy when I look at the face, as opposed to serious, or intense, or even grumpy. This doesn’t compute with the rest of the figure. Still, I think overall that the Hyakka Ryoran figure series was a good one and I do like the four that I got.

Tier seems to like her face a lot more than I do, which is my only complaint the frumpy face. I think we both changed our respective opinions on the figure from when we ordered to when we took her out of the box, though we moved in different directions. Senhime is a sweet looking figure, in spite of any of my poo-pooing.

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At the end of last season it looked like Major Sakamoto lost her ability to generate a barrier able to block Neuroi attacks. Just as long as the Neuroi or something worse doesn’t come back, she’d be fine. Bring on season 2 and the Neuroi are back. Oops. Actually, no, not oops, but a sweet opportunity to make her more legendary. This is what episode 2 does. Instead of raising a barrier, Major Sakamoto raises the blade she forged to cut down and deflect attacks. She’s a Jedi now (screencap grabbed from Random Curiosity).

During the first season of Strike Witches I understood Sakamoto’s awesomeness via how the rest of the 501st viewed her, but I kind of felt she was just as skilled as the Karlsland aces. Witnessing Mio slice through a Neuroi beam down the length of it and then through the Neuroi? Magical. I’m with you on that front, Perrinne. Mio using the blade to channel magic was setup well enough to feel natural and cool, instead of isn’t that convenient.

For me, forging the blade and the self transformation from a barrier witch into a blade witch rockets Sakamoto from a character I sort of liked to one of my favorite Strike Witches. I’m so glad they went the find another way to win route instead of throwing her into the despair route. Generally, that’s what I find appealing about Strike Witches beyond the knuckle dragger’s joy of rump, gunfire and demolition in the same frame. The witches find ways to be awesome.

Side note, the battle with the Neuroi re-uses the awesome battle animation from the first episode, putting it into context and caps it with Sakamoto’s finish. I guess that’s how AIC balanced the budget for a very slick fight scene. Use it again. It was just as good the second time around.

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Taking a cue from ANN, the above sums up my impression of Strike Witches 2.

The first episode of season two plays a lot like the first episode of season one, which kind of made it funny to watch. Actually, it looks like Strike Witches season 2 is in good hands with production transitioning from Gonzo to AIC. We’re teased in the first few minutes with sweet aerial combat and then cut to life in peacetime for Miyafuji, so the best stuff is front-loaded. Also, it might just be me, but the lovingly detailed crotch and booty shots work better during combat where it’s all about flash and sometimes awkward when stuff isn’t blowing up, though the show definitely has a sense of humor about it beginning with an up-skirt shot of a discarded doll.

Anyway, if you liked it before, you’ll probably still like it and if you hated it before you can still blame Strike Witches for global warming. Here’s to hoping AIC has a good budget and puts it to good use! If Alter could put out a Barkhorn and a Yeager that’d be good too.

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Posts about High School of the Dead episode 1 are piling up like zombies, and why not? Zombie smashing is fun. Throw in the fan service and this looks like a winner. We need more decently animated stupid zombie violence in our lives, at least I do. Thanks, Madhouse! When this goes to dvd/bd I hope that they kick things up a notch on the zombie thumping front, then again we’re just starting, so maybe it escalates from here. I can only hope the commitment to zombies and tits does not waver. The level of fanservice is about right for a cheesy zombie apocalypse fantasy, any more and it starts to skew toward a fanservice show during a cheesy zombie apocalypse fantasy and that’s just not the same thing at all.

Oh and I love the wicked bits thrown here and there. It’s easy to be friends when there’s no pressure, but once the zombies come you’ll throw anyone under the bus.

I also wonder about the time period this show takes place in. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t notice any cell phones or tweets about zombies as a warning.

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I really don’t know how on-or-off model the figure is and don’t care too much. Probably seen more fanart images than official ones by now. Like any popular character that’s been rendered by many people over the years, her appearance has probably morphed. Still feels like Tamaki though. Her breasts have probably grown. They’re kind of pushing against the border of too far here.

The figure itself is a bit on the ecchi side, but I don’t think it’s too tacky for an anime girl figure. Not that I’ve been online that much this year (so there’s probably a new set of figure blogs I don’t know about), but it seems like this Tamaki didn’t set the figure world on fire, but those who got her liked her just fine: foobarbaz, Exelica-Meteor, and Mukyaa.

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While it doesn’t sound like a normal thing to say about a Mamoru Oshii film, watch The Sky Crawlers for the air to air combat sequence eye candy. They’re cool, worth waiting for, and serve as anchors for the exploration in the film. However, from a director with a reputation of thoughtful films, The Sky Crawlers doesn’t seem that well thought out (or I just don’t get it). It felt like another half-empty bag of cynicism about modern life, which if it believed in it’s own premise, the world within the premise couldn’t exist.

[Most this post winds up being a tangent].

The Sky Crawlers takes the view that people need enemies, that their very nature needs and thus creates conflict. In order to maintain peace that the world somehow achieved, “the world” agreed to let two companies fight a fake perpetual war to maintain that peace. Essentially, these companies are gladiators, or sports teams to sate the masses need for conflict.

As if wars arise from arbitrary human desire and having a proxy war would remove their advent. Wars don’t arise from blood lust and the desire for conflict. Wars are always fought over resources and the reality is resources are finite. No proxy war can supply the resource in shortage that causes war to erupt. Disregard the logistical impossibility of an infinitely resourced world needed for such a unified agreement to exist, the true stupidity of the perpetual war system is it believes one can create an artificial system to regulate peace out of a belief that people need misery and doesn’t address the core driving principle of life which creates those conflicts — securing resources. Even in an artificial and non-essential situation like a baseball game, both sides are fighting over a limited resource. There is only one victory available for both teams on the field and their whole reason for being, including the fans, is to secure that resource. We may enjoy the conflict, but it isn’t what drives us. A never ending game or war would be constant conflict, but would bore or frustrate us right quick, so a fake perpetual war could never keep the peace, because the goal is securing the resource and the conflict is the means of procurement, not the desired result. A perpetual war denies the wanted resource. People fight over real resources and the fake war can never supply that resource. Also, the only way the planet would unite is if there was another faction that was a bigger threat to resources than anyone else on earth.

Actually, all you have to do is look at the Israeli conflict. It’s essentially been a perpetual war. How many wars occurred during that half century plus and counting? We’ve had 24 hour news for half of that time, so we can find outlets for the supposed need for conflict. Also, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t curtail Russian desire to storm into Georgia. Doesn’t seem like war prevents much war. The inane setup of The Sky Crawlers is about as well thought out as Ikki Tousen or Koihime Muso. Pretty much anything you want to glean about human nature with regard to conflict from The Sky Crawlers is about as useful as what you’d get from Koihime Muso.

Fortunately, The Sky Crawlers is not a movie about war. The story uses fighter pilots as interesting office workers to level critique at the emptiness of modern life and us ignorant zombies who grow up in it. Day in, day out, they punch in, do their thing, days blend together as we twitter away. People come and go, and are fairly interchangeable since the new guy seems a hell of a lot like the old guy! This makes sense, since jobs descriptions have requirements and companies look to fill the square hole with a square peg. With few exceptions, it really doesn’t matter who you are in the end as long as you have the skill-set to perform. That is unless you do something about it, which the world doesn’t really encourage.

All that said, I actually enjoyed The Sky Crawlers and found it worth watching and thinking about. Everything in it is so detailed, vague, and applicable to any cynicism we might harbor about present day life that it’s ripe for mental self pleasure trying to navigate through it all. This makes The Sky Crawlers the best gateway into being entertained by Mamoru Oshii. I also found the structure of the plot interesting to see unfold and the aerial combat rocked, meaning it’s possible to be entertained during the film as well as enjoying the afterglow of the mental self-pleasure of sorting it all out. I mean you could really go off for a thousand words about memory and the lack thereof in the the main characters and then try and create a parallel or extract a commentary about our world from it, but it wouldn’t have that much to do with the movie. It’s fantasy service for a different crowd.

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Strike Witches feels a lot like one of my all time favorite anime, Battle Athletes Victory. There’s similarities, a convenient excuse for teenage girls to be the only hope for mankind, an international cast of characters, aliens, the dead parent of the clueless main character as a central figure, and the girls in Battle Athletes Victory were almost as allergic to pants as the Strike Witches. Also, both shows are ridiculous in a good way. Ten years separates the two shows and it’s kind of fun encountering similarities and seeing differences between them as far as characters go, such as the stereotypes that persist or have fallen off.

Strike Witches is girls, guns and propellers. The girls have magical powers, which conveniently seem to fade after the age of 21 and don’t manifest in males, so no crones or dudes with misguided chivalry can save humanity, only cute girls. These magical girls fight alien invaders with the help of striker units, which are leggings that resemble famous propeller fighter planes. The aliens attack without warning, so the girls must always be ready. Every second is critical. They have no time to take off their pants to get into the striker units, so they walk around in their underwear in order to immediately jump into their units. Someone could die while taking off pants.

I guess Strike Witches also reminds me a little of Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 (not seen the original Bubblegum Crisis) with updated character types and fan service. Futuristic science fiction and cyberpunk have fallen out of style in favor of worlds with ambient tech levels equal to a pre-atomic 20th century. Watching cute girls blow shit up hasn’t gone out of style (hopefully never will) and neither has having these girls dress inappropriately, corruption within their own side, and regular guys have no place in these girl’s lives. They’re too busy kicking ass while being oblivious to low camera angles. Strike Witches is great and stupid, like Dirty Pair, except with more factions to ally yourself with than being a Kei or Yuri man. Strike Witches gives you eleven instead of two and oddly each of the pant-less witches wears more clothes than Kei or Yuri. The lines in the sand are panty lines.

Strike Witches is probably one of the best girls with guns series of the past few years, which hasn’t really been that prolific a genre to get an R1 release, even if it’s one of the first things I think about when I think about anime. I’m not a fan of the animal ears and tails, which turned me off on Strike Witches for a while, but girls with guns brought me there. It’s not a bad note for Gonzo to go out on either, probably its third best production behind Gankutsuou and Last Exile. It probably serves as a good signpost for not just the genre, but of fandom, at least the english speaking fandom on the net.

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