Cross Ange – Series Review

Welcome to the first Maid Cafe show of the spring!

 Hey everybody what’s up! Cross Ange is finally over mwahahahaha so I was gonna… oh hey Highway, what are you doi mfff wait! wha no stofffff… ~click~

 

 There! Now. *Ahem* Hi everyone, and welcome to the Series Review post for Cross Ange – Tenshi to Ryuu no Rondo, or Rondo of Dragon and Angel. I’ve loved watching Cross Ange for the last season and a half (It feels like it took me half a season to get into it, although I seem to have liked it from the first episode), and wanted to write a post besides Fosh’s normal Mechanorn post just focusing on it. So lets break down some areas that I thought were key in the show. *bangbangbang* Keep it down in there, willya?

Story, or How Did We End Up Here?

Ange and Salako, back to back

I’ve been trying to recommend Cross Ange to everyone I know (as all of you readers know and are probably tired of), and the thing a lot of people want to know is ‘well, what is it about?’ And I find that that’s a really hard summary to come up with. Partly because there are huge developments in the first episode that start the story off but I don’t want to spoil, because they’re interesting plot points, and partly because the story goes all over the place. Princess is exposed as a fraud, sent to women’s prison, tries to escape, becomes best mecha pilot at the prison where they have to fly convertible mechs against dragons, buys a maid, goes MIA, meets a guy on a remote island whose face ends up in her naked crotch apparently unintentionally, is rescued, makes another escape attempt, is rescued off the gallows by the face-to-crotch guy (who does it again), survives a raid on the prison, goes to another dimension where the people are dragons, comes back, fights against main bad guy who wants to make her his bride, and eventually frees the world from the main bad guy with the help of others from the prison. And that’s leaving a lot of stuff out.

Rosalie and Chris find a way to make up, after a save from Hilda

People would be all “WTF?” Just like people watching it were all “WTF?” But to me, the story did the job it was asked to in this show. Usually I like shows that really pile on the story, whether it be stuff from PA Works, or things like Shin Sekai Yori, or Suisei no Gargantia, or Robotics;Notes. And usually when the story is just there for loosely getting the characters from A to B, it’s not going to be satisfying. But I found in Cross Ange it was, much like I felt Girls und Panzer used its off-the-wall story to link everything together enough. Ange’s story had, for me, just the right amount of craziness, without pushing too far, and enough depth to give you something to at least latch on to. Comparing it to other Sunrise mecha shows in recent memory, it didn’t go nearly as far as Valvrave, which was a good choice since one of Valvrave‘s biggest problems for me was that they pushed the “You didn’t disbelieve this, so how about this? Or this? Or even this?” But it also didn’t get so stodgy like Buddy Complex did, where too much of the show was spent with the main character just not accepting what was going on. And a lot of the reason it worked was the…

Setting this up with the prior shot made this work much better

Characters

Go Team Ange!

I liked them all, because I thought they all brought just a little bit more to the plate than you usually get. I won’t deny that some of the characters were fairly one-dimensional, and some were just thrown in as death fodder, like Coco and Marika (each of whom lasted one episode before getting zorched). But when you get to the main characters, particularly Ange, there was something that I just connected with. I found many of the lead characters, not just Ange but also Hilda, Jill, Salia, Ersha, Salako, and even Embryo, to be tremendously authentic. That doesn’t mean that they were based on anyone real, it means that they reacted to things in a way that fit the way the character had been built up to that point. Ange goes through so many phases – Marie Antoinette-style princess, haughty fallen princess, sullen broken teenager, rebel against the worlds who isn’t going to be used by anyone anymore, and finally someone who discovered a purpose and a love in her life – and each one of them felt like a natural progression from the last one, and changed her reactions accordingly. But even with all of that, she didn’t flip-flop or feel aimless. When her outlook changed, it did so with conviction, not with wishy-washiness.

“Do you want to give it one more try? I still love you!”

I really loved the way the story worked to bring her around, too, using the other characters. I particularly liked the way Hilda was used, and the way Hilda herself developed. Going back to look at the first few episodes, it is obvious that Hilda didn’t love Zola, and maybe didn’t even like being with her, but she did have an attachment to her. And she disliked Ange more, and Ange’s complicity in Zola’s death just made something that seemed like an unbridgeable rift. At the beginning of the show I thought that Salia and Ange would become friends, and that Hilda would always be the ‘nemesis’ of Ange. But from a shared animosity to realizing a shared goal, and then a shared fate, the story brought Hilda and Ange together in a perfect way. And on top of that, to allow Ange to be broad-minded enough to accept Hilda’s love as it was offered was a beautiful choice by the story. Yes, she loves Tusk, but she also had grown to love Hilda as well. I’m a big believer in the idea that love isn’t split, love is something that multiplies.

Vilkiss was a character as well, and changed outfits more than most of the others

The rest of the characters were all their own people as well. Momoka the maid who gives up everything because she loves to be with Ange, Salia, so desperate for approval that she latches onto one authority figure after another, finally realizing that she needs to be strong for herself. Rosalie and Chris, fighting out the grudge that Chris had held for so long so that they could once again be friends. And going through all of this, it really shows that the main theme of the show is love. Loving yourself, loving other people, being loved. It was the downfall of Alektra and almost of Salia, their desperate search for love pushing them towards the contemptuous attentions of a fickle Embryo. And it was what led Ersha to also throw in with Embryo, only to push her away when it was finally hammered into her that he didn’t care for the things she loved at all. And it was what brought them all to a place where they could fight for the things and people they loved, even if it was their own self. And that kind of story is one I just eat up.

Finally meeting Dad!

They Didn’t Just Do THAT, did they?

I don’t need to actually ride IN my Ragna-mail

This is the wild card category for me. For whatever reason, Cross Ange just had the moments that came out of nowhere, at least in the beginning, and stamped this series with an individuality, even if the things themselves weren’t necessarily original. Like I said earlier, I don’t think they ever went too far (not even the forcible prison search), and the things always felt authentic for the show. Mouthy princess-claimant gets exiled to a women’s prison / military unit, she’s gonna be in for that kind of treatment. Learning that the DRAGONs are people? Daaaaang, and the reaction by Ange was perfect, her horror at what she’d done while watching Jasmine shovel them into a mass grave for burning. After a while, the moments turned from surprise to just me saying “YESSSS!” when things happened like Ange boosting Salia off the Vilkiss, or Ange figuring out that all she needed to do to get Vilkiss in front of her was just ask it to appear. Those moments kept me on the edge of my seat watching, and this show just gave me a giddy feeling pretty much the whole time.

For old times sake?

Of course, I have to talk about one moment that happened again and again, and how I think it actually fits into the show. That’s Tusk’s face ending up in Ange’s naked crotch. Not once, not twice, but I think it was 5 or 6 times throughout the series, including in the pivotal battle. Personally, I think that this move was pretty funny, and obviously played for laughs. Not going for cheap boob grabs or even trying to portray Tusk as particularly clumsy, like a certain Rito Yuuki. Just going right for the maximum embarrassment, and with repetition it became a great running joke. It even became that to Ange and Tusk as Ange got closer to him, and even fell in love with him. And when Ange’s reaction the last time was to weep with happiness at being rescued, Hilda even took over the chastising from afar, pointing and yelling at Tusk, banging on her Ragna Mail, and giving him a thumbs down… until Ange looks at her and then she gives a fakey wave and smile. I really felt like the whole thing throughout the series was half a laugh at deconstruction of the ecchi trope and half seeing how many times they could pull it off so that it seemed at least plausibly natural. For myself, I just laughed at the absurdity of it each time.

There’s one other of the big things that stayed with me through the show, and that is Ange ‘buying’ Momoka. To me, this may have been the biggest turning point of the show, where Ange finally that she has the ability to help other people, and that she finally wants to help some other people. Up to that point, it had all been about her, her wants, her desires. Momoka, the person so devoted to Ange that she’d come to a prison with a smile on her face to stay with her, is definitely something like a pet that one feels obligated to take care of. But after trying to reject Momoka as part of the past life she had tried to cast off, Ange realizes that protecting the life of this person is more important. I also like the mechanism of ‘buying’ Momoka. As Jill says, anything can be bought with enough money. And it’s pretty clear that everyone involved knows what Ange is buying, even Momoka. She’s not buying a person, she’s not buying a maid. She’s buying a life, not for herself, but for Momoka.

Extra Ange, Maybe NSFW

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When I look back at the comments I left for Mechanorn on Cross Ange, I liked the show from the beginning. I don’t know if I loved it, but I liked the way it started out, and even though it may not have been my favorite at the time, it didn’t take long for it to become one of my favorite shows of the season. And I think the main reason is because they did so much with so many of the characters. Even the supporting characters didn’t get ‘an episode’, they got fairly constant development throughout. Salia, Hilda, Jill, Vivian, Salako, Rosalie, Chris, and even Tusk had significant character movement, and the relationships that formed between all these different people just felt natural. I liked that the show wasn’t about life in the world of The Light of Mana, but about the people who are exiled from it. The inversion of society, with ‘human’ meaning something different from what we would believe, the ultimately artificial nature of it. To me, the worst character was Embryo, and that was mostly because he was such a sleazebucket. But even then, he wasn’t the really awful kind of villain that we see in shows like Sword Art Online, just a stack of awful traits who are written to be as “Bad Guy” as possible. And not because he had charm, but because even he was authentic, I thought. As authentic as a guy who’s lived for 1000 years waiting for someone who is anything different can be, I guess.

And when I looked back on the episodes to write this post, I found myself again drawn into them. Ange and Salia fighting with brooms in the bath as Vivian and Ersha turn a blind eye. Hilda and Ange’s insults of respect after they both were returned to Arzenal, forging a bond that would become something much more solid as the show continued. Salia’s struggle to prove herself to Jill, Embryo, and to herself, and finally realizing that the best you can do is be yourself. Tusk’s change from being the Knight of Villkiss to Ange’s Knight. Sure, some of the show is cheesy and unoriginal. It’s a Sunrise mecha show, that’s what you’re going to get. But it never went too over the top. It never killed off a main character just to prove it could. And I don’t think it ever did something just to shock, although I’m sure some will disagree. In a season of shows that was so good, it would be almost impossible to top Shirobako. But Cross Ange, for me, really gave it a run for its money, from a completely different angle. Two shows, entirely different, but both ones that I’ll evangelize for for a long time.