Blue Drop
In case anyone is wondering, no it wasn't on purpose that I scheduled two anime reviews with some yuri tones to them (undertones in Uta-Kata's case and overtones here) back to back, I'm I'm 90% sure that next week won't be continuing this trend. For those wondering why I'm even bringing it up, Blue Drop strikes me as the kind of show where the writers had two ideas, a really basic idea for a science fiction story and then a slightly less basic, although more cliched, school girl lesbians story and decided to put them together. make no mistake, if you took one of these halves out you wouldn't have nearly enough material for a full show and as it stands the show is paced pretty well so they succeeded there but I can't really say the writers and director succeeded in any other way.
This series was, in a nutshell, rather dull. There is nothing new about it, we've had every kind of alien invader you can think of before, even including those who for some unknown reason become sympathetic to Earthlings and fight against their own forces (although the guilt at having caused a natural disaster on Earth seemed like a new idea at least). And we've had plenty of stories of girls in all girls-schools who develop anything from hero-worship to close friendships with the other girls, although by the end it felt like Hagino and Mari had something much closer to an actual relationship than most characters in those shows do. To make it clear, I'm not raging against the school-girl lesbians trope here since it is fairly low-key, what I'm unhappy about is just how dull the show is.
There is nothing in the story, setting, characters, or themes to distinguish this story from half a dozen other ones out there and the ending is rather forced. Heck, when I was double checking character names on tvtropes I found out about the manga I mentioned in the intro and realized from those that Earth is actually conquered at the very end of the series and I hadn't realized at all. True things didn't look like they were going well but I interpreted a few scenes quite differently it seems and, well, if you can't make it clear that the fate of the Earth is at stake and instead spend too much time focusing on an amateur play production featuring a really strange, bad fan-fiction story about Joan of Arc that perfectly encapsulates the characters FEELINGS for each other, well, I think your story and your character development are in even more trouble than you'd care to admit.
