#we see wheels rapidly trundling across the ground

[not-the-state]

Ok yeah the Minecraft movie trailer came out, but here's the real question:

When is the Hermitcraft movie trailer coming out???

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Girls und Panzer, Episodes 10-12

In which we reach the end, and despite a handful of complaints, it still manages to blow my goddamn socks off.

Demolition Derby

There have been more than a few times over the course of writing for this blog where I’ve been forced to eat my words. I do my best to keep my analyses up to snuff, cycling through my thoughts and considerations at a rapid-enough clip that I can reach a definite conclusion once it comes time to put pen to paper and get my thoughts down. That way, I don’t have to waste paragraphs upon paragraphs recontextualizing and reconsidering things I’ve already said and can just expand upon my previous thoughts in a forward direction. But every once in a while, I’m forced to reconsider a previous point I’ve made and acknowledge that I got it wrong, or at least that I was over/understating the impact it had. Just last post, I levied a criticism against Girls und Panzer; that it didn’t really have good tactics and was just deciding its battles based on what would lead to the most dramatically interesting outcome, as opposed to natural outgrowths of the situation at hand. And while I was still definitely enjoying all the pell-mell tankery madness, I couldn’t help but wish there was a stronger sense of grounded strategy to the proceedings. After all, this show as a whole has been really good at grounding its world and characters in a sense of lived-in reality, so it was a shame that the big entertaining center of the whole affair didn’t quite feel up to snuff.

Well, butter my biscuit and call me Jared Leto, because I could not have been more wrong.

The final clash between Miho’s team and her sister’s team, stretching across the final two episodes and change, isn’t just the best battle of the entire show, it’s easily one of the most absurdly entertaining spectacles I’ve gotten out of anime in a long time. And it reaches those heights not in spite of its tactics, but because of them. The finale of Girls und Panzer is a drop-dead fantastic smorgasboard of action spectacle exhilaration that soars as high as it does only because of the incredible level of thought going into how this battle should play out. I don’t know what gremlins took the wheels for the Russia fight that made it feel so occasionally unglued from sense, but they’ve been handily shaken off just in time for a blow-out of epic proportions. See, one thing I’ve always loved about this show is how well it took advantage of the fact that its primary combatants were tanks. They weren’t just pawns moving across a chessboard, they were these big, lumbering chunks of heavy machinery that reacted to gravity, momentum and positioning in vastly different ways than normal people do. So many of of my favorite moments from across these battles have been when the girls at the helm used their tanks not just as fighters, but as part of the battlefield makeup. There are so many cool things you can do fighting in tanks, so many cool ways you can shake up the strategies used and plans enacted, so many cool daredevil stunts you can pull off. And here in the final stretch, Girls und Panzer pulls out all the stops and does just about every conceivable thing with a tank possible.

And it. Is. Fucking. AWESOME. Using gravity to influence an elevated standoff as tanks trundle up a hill to face an enemy squad firing down upon them. The Student Council taking advantage of their small size by getting right up in the enemy’s tits, shaking their formation by getting too close to be safely fought back against. The split-second save across the river right as we see the bombardment fired in the background, smashing down in the foreground a moment later. Using a heavy tank to torque a goddamn bridge apart and keep your pursuers stranded. Rapidly adjusting tank speed to get in too close for your opponent to shoot, using momentum to slip through their blind spots with ease. Rail-grinding on an elevated slope to get around a massive, street-blocking convey. Using the surrounding buildings to trap larger tanks into place, making them sitting ducks. Or, alternatively, using a larger tank to block off a narrow passage, so that it remains an obstacle even after it’s taken out. And Christ on a cracker, everything about the battle with that massive super-tank was the stuff of legends. The way it tore through our heroes’ defenses, they way they adjusted to its massive size, the attention to detail in how it maneuvered its massive bulk around, and then, just to put the cream on the cracker, they finish this seemingly indestructible colossus off by literally dogpiling it with smaller tanks and trapping it in place with their bodies while they pinned down its weak spot and finished the job. And by that point, I was already cackling with unadulterated glee at how ridiculously awesome this all was. This was a pitch-perfect example of how to make the most of your premise: using nothing but tanks and terrain, these final episodes pushed their imagination to the limit and brought this story to a truly epic conclusion. That, my friends, is how you end an anime.

Trim the Fat

What’s kinda bizarre about the whole thing, though, is that when I look at Girls und Panzer from a broader perspective, it really does become clear how little there was to it besides that sense of fun. There’s not much in the way of thematic depth or character arcs, and most of the conflicts raised in earlier chapters get resolved without so much as a single punch being thrown. Hana’s estranged mother welcomes her back easily upon seeing how much she’s grown, Mako’s grandma is doing perfectly alright by the series’ end (even going so far as to tap-dance to prove her virility, which cracked me up), and the only real lesson Miho learns by the end is to believe in herself and carve her own path. Hell, I ended up getting kinda confused as to what the point was about the event that put her off Sensha-do in the first place. It seems like it was trying to raise a conflict between her family’s rigid, the-win-is-everything practices and her far more altruistic, every-teammate-matters mindset, but I don’t really get how saving her friends from drowning was supposed to represent that? Like, those girls would’ve died otherwise, wouldn’t they? How is this supposed to be a balanced moral choice?

I think this goes back to how loose this show plays with the consequences of tankery in its overall world. For the most part, it treats it like a totally safe, if risk-prone, sport where you can just go hog-wild and fight however you want without worrying too much. But now we’re presented with a situation where s group of kids were actually at risk of dying, and yet the show still treats that situation like a fairly balanced moral choice. The way everyone, including Miho herself, views the situation, leaving that overturned tank to sink into the flooding river would’ve been just as valid a choice as saving the people trapped inside, and choosing to save them was somehow a deviation from the norm that marks Miho out as a unique thinker. But again: they were sinking into a raging river. Am I supposed to assume they weren’t at risk of dying? I know we’re playing fast and loose with the consequences of fighting in tanks for the sake of the plot, and I can accept that this is a world with special tanks that fire non-lethal shells and the girls are never in any real danger fighting in them. I can absolutely suspend my disbelief far enough to accept these weapons of war being used as fodder for sporting matches. But I can’t suspend it enough to accept that a metal deathtrap in a raging river was in any way safe, and I can’t believe that any respected sport in an otherwise grounded world would be this lax about endangering students. So the moment in episode 11 where Miho again chooses to rescue her teammates and forge ahead with everyone by her side can’t help but ring a little hollow, because it’s about her overcoming a struggle that doesn’t feel like it should be a struggle in the first place.

Perhaps it’s a minor thing, but considering that Miho’s re-acceptance of her love for Sensha-do is the only real continuous character arc in this show, the fact that it feels so awkwardly constructed definitely stands out. If Girls und Panzer wanted to tell this story, it needed to be a lot more specific about the potential consequences that can result from poorly managed tankery. It needed to be clearer about what, exactly, went down that rainy night, how it was taken, and what that reaction says about the world at large and Miho’s relation to it. Perhaps one more episode wouldn’t have gone amiss in fleshing that out in more detail (it also might have allowed for the cool otaku girls to have more to do than introduce themselves just to immediately be taken out, because man, that was a weird superfluous wasted opportunity). As I always say about shows this purposefully simple, it’s those details that separate a good show from a truly great one.

Photo Finish

And yet, for all my complains, this was still, hands down, easily one of the best conclusions to an anime I’ve had in a while. It was soaring, it was epic, it was exhilarating, it was awesome, it was creative, it was bonkers, and above all else, it was smart. It took advantage of the tools at its disposal and pushed them as far as it possibly could, resulting in a rip-roaring action setpiece that I’m going to remember fondly for a long time to come. And it was still jam-packed with this show’s signature attention to understated detail, like that “last night” montage showing the entire cast preparing in their own little ways, or the unique cheers everyone sends up upon their victory as they race to meet their captain, or the central five wordlessly putting their hands together as the pre-battle music swells triumphantly, or the way certain still shots in combat linger comedically after a failed tank shot, soaking in the post-failure stillness before the action heats up again, like an awkward pause in the conversation except the conversation is in the language of battle. And the stunning one-on-one duel between Miho and her sister that finished it off, pulse-pounding and frenetic, climaxing in that giddy rotating shot that finally slammed the momentum to an explosive halt in a photo-finish moment of fist-pumping triumph, was just the icing on the cake. Take that massive bow, Girls und Panzer. You’ve absolutely freaking earned it. 

Odds and Ends

-”Just so you know, I’m not frustrated by this loss at all!” If you say so, boo.

-Oh my god that poor tank. What an excellent use of static shot as visual comedy.

-All those freaking chicken puns, man.

-It’s interesting that this show is decidedly more “no homo” about ships between its central cast than most. These girls definitely feel far more like friends than, say, the girls of Konohana Kitan or Princess Principal.

-”Leopon, go on a diet already!” pfft

-”Operation: Teasy Tease!” As always, I love her sense of nomenclature.

-American girl is me with the popcorn. Good lord, I’m so glad she’s back.

-Dat heroic jumping animation doe

-”Okay, not letting that happen a third time!” StuCo’s great, y’all.

-”Actually, I’m not sure what to make of the fact that I can recognize a tank at a glance.” askdjashd YOU’RE JUST NOW REALIZNG THIS

-”WE WERE HIT!” The president’s having far too much fun with this.

-”THANK YOU, SODOKO!” Ship ship ship ship

Good lord, this show was fun. Expect my closing thoughts later tonight, as well as what show will take its place!