Ep 05, "Big Girl, Little Heart"
[These observations assume you have seen the episode, so there will be spoilers. This is not a summary, just a listing of points of interest.]
I knew it was too good to be true. Finally, a silly episode. Not without its moments, mind, but essentially silly.
Confirmed: Charlotte's combined four girl harem is her Arm. At the moment of Drive, they form a cocoon, which then opens into Charlotte's Butterfly. I note that there was something of a whirlwind effect the first time Mirei Drove Mamori.
Kasumi is indeed blocking some of Charlotte's more petty actions. So does the Governor, whose Arm we get to see, though not very clearly. Who the Arm is, is as yet unknown.
Lady Rein, in Ep. 03, identified the Governor as a "hypocrit" for her speech promisi…
Translations: Ecsta & Waerter
I prefer the Commie fansub group's transliteration of the title given to girls like Mamori, "Ecsta", over Funimation's, "Exter", because it shares a root with "Ecstasy". ("Exter" could be either "exterminate" or "external", neither of which fit the context as well.)
Also, in the comments to their release announcement for Ep. 3, Commie seems to have decided to go with “Wärter” or “Waerter”as the name for Gov. Akira's little band. It's German for keeper/guard/warder. Everyone else is saying "Welter", which makes almost no sense in this context; it means "to move in a turbulent fashion".
Don't know what the original script says, but since these are both words with foreign roots (foreign to the Japanese), I wouldn't be at surprised if they thems…
Valkyrie Drive: Subverting Perversion
Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid. I'm actually going to have to watch this monster, aren't I?
I came to mock. Yet another fight school anime, one where lesbians make out to become weapons? It is to laugh! Plus: Nippies!
I left in horror. These girls are in sexual slavery!
I came back for the politics, the characters, the actual dad gum story. And the nippies.
This is a story about a tyranny based on perversion, the ugly things it does to its victims in the name of protecting them, and the troublemakers who fight against it using its own tools.
Where many anime use a checklist of fan-favorite tropes to build puppet characters and plotless stories, VD:M tells a real story using the same check list to dark and twisted ends.
It then dips the resulting hand gren…