Xam’d Episode 5 - Boy Love, Old Maids, Man Eaters
Ugh. I had pictures and all! All ready to be posted last night! But alas the technical difficulty and sleep deprivation monsters struck in tandem, rendering me helpless. I’ll try to (but probably not) put up some more pictures later today [edit: updated!], but I think Nakiami “Don’t Cry” Cloud Rider will have to do.
Some notes:
1. PSN Video store was late with this episode. I went to bed Tuesday night (ugh long tuesday was long) at the usual time and this episode was not up then. Episodes 2-4 were up well before 10pm Eastern time the previous weeks on Tuesdays. As a result I wasn’t able to pull the file until Wednesday night after I got home.
2. With these massive downloads, it would be great if there was a “shut down PS3 after download finish” option so I can leave the thing for overnight downloading. The PS3 draws a lot of power, so they say, so it’s not something I want to leave idle over a long period of time.
3. I decided to keep blogging Xam’d. It seems over the course of years on the internet I’ve slowly lost my skill in writing expository stuff. If you told me to write about a rock I would write about my own notion of what that rock is, and not so much what it really is as communicated from a neutral and helpful perspective. It’s boring, but I figured this is one way to practice paraphrasing the plot. Another big reason is that how I’m watching this show as a 24-hr rental is playing a part with my overall experience, and I suspect I’ll write more on this later.
4. But I’m not going to go do what you can read off RandomC or Star Crossed. That’s just too much. Because someone has to go pop all those juicy Ishu jokes! That woman is really the LULZ. I don’t know how many more pan-up shots of her they can do.
5. In this episode, what is notable is that the “free zone” people are experimenting with their own humanoid weapon technology, creating the Shidara monster who can throw those little green balls. It makes me wonder if Akiyuki can do the same thing. Who is Shidara? She is that crazy girl who went off the deep end after having her family killed from the various air strikes from the North we saw last episode. Monster? The wheelchair guy experimented it on her. It seems that there are things like war crimes on this world, and it burdens the stereotypical military wise guy Kagisu just that little more.
6. The narrative continues to split between the Senkan Island thing and the Mailman Airship thing. With all the bait they are throwing out about the past history of Akiyuki’s dad and what happened to the Island so many years ago, Xam’d is totally setting us up for a fateful reunion. In this episode Akiyuki mails off his letter to Haru, so we’ll see where that goes.
7. There are two action scenes in this episode–the one with Akusihba running and the one where Kagisu’s crew put Shidara down. Well, just one if you discount Akushiba’s running, but from an animator’s perspective it is a very neat scene with a lot of moving parts. What I don’t get is, yeah, the guy can run fast and that is always good setup for action scenes, but how is this talent going to be helpful as a plot device? Yeah he delivers a letter but it’s only because Akiyuki forgot… and to me that seems more like a part on the writer giving Akushiba a moment under the spotlight for character development.
8. This build-up episode is much more pleasant than the previous ones partly because moments like those spotlights on the secondary cast, but also there were some very nice shots. The coda segment that took place after the ending, for example, had a few of those–the Samurailittle girl that smells like sunflower, the rising clouds, the teaser shot of Haru in a robot. But also some of the usual good stuff that the previous episodes was littered with–the shot of the stuffed bear, the various raining scenes, more sunflowers, and I guess even Ishu can’t really ruin a nice night sky.
One thing I’ve been doing with this show is taking photo shots for caps, and it forces me to go through the episode almost scene by scene, and there are some very nice shots every episode. Props to whoever is doing storyboarding… Production value is definitely holding up on this flaming Bones production.
