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[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Goes All Ham: Why Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 is Bad

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. Here we go.

Yeah. It's real Salty Fanboy Hours, except I'm a zoomer born-and-bred, too young to have known either Bubblegum Crisis 2032 or its hard reboot 2040 during their respective points of anime-culture relevancy. So I hope I don't come off as entitled-sounding as those dudes I described in that kotaku article's comments in an older post, the kind who refused to let Samusina Von Metroiddereich have a personality of any sort besides 'stoic' and presumably 'sigma female'.

But I've got a gripe, you see, a real stone-cold gripe. For MAL still has a great many positive written reviews of 2040, most surface level cheers for 'girls being cool' as though 2040 invented that in anime, and the other suggesting that 2040 has more character development and nuanced plot than 2032 (which is half-right. I'll get to that). And though no one I know well, physically or digitally, seems to labor under the conception that 2040 is worth a rewatch or whatever, I think it's time I conjure my bile into a ball and Linda Blair it out on this here keyboard, and in so doing settle what exactly it is that makes Crisis 2040 an anime I truly despise.

Button your butthole, bucko. We're about to go deep.

I should probably say right off the bat that I don't like Crisis 2040 solely because it is different than Crisis 2032, that I think Crisis should be this way and 2040 is that way and therefore it is bad. It would be so easy to pin such reasoning down on one being super 80's cyberpunk and the other being super 90's cyberpunk and then it just being a matter of preference which kind of cyber-nostalgia you prefer or whatever.

(And, well, I think a great deal of 80's cyberpunk has aged better than the stuff from the decade following it. If Blade Runner inaugurated the genre and defined a good chunk of its look in the 80's, the bland-ass hero's-journey grind of The Matrix was the culmination of 90's-era cyberfuturism trying so earnestly for the mega-mainstream that I think it just kind of buried the genre in its own way, a genre that's now unable to be revived without occasionally valid criticisms that the genre is itself now retrofuturistic and too obsessed with its own legacy, unable to find again what made the genre connect to the concerns of the future so well. New novels push boundaries, try to do things similar to cyberpunk while being more contemporary, but that's no guarantee they're good.)

But I can recognize that Crisis 2040 is trying to do something different with the core concepts of Crisis, modernize them, see them through to a completed story. Much praise is heaped on 2040 simply because it ends where 2032 and Crash do not. Only - it fails to do, at the broadest level, what it is trying to do. If it is modernity, I would like something a decade older, thanks. Shit, what it's trying to do, be a Highbrow Sexually Troubled Mecha Show just like Evangelion, is something that feels like it's aged poorer than the Girls-With-Guns-Make-Things-Go-Boom ethos of 2032's OVA-era sensibility. Sekaikei, I’m told it’s called in Japan.

Look - just - let me split my criticism into three big chunks. One for production quality, one for characters, one for the plot these characters inhabit:

1. BAD PRODUCTION QUALITY

- ANIMATION QUALITY: POOR

Oh my god. Jesus dick. You can tell this was made on a budget, because AIC has always been terrible at making full-length TV shows - even in the 90's, at the top of their game, their strength was OVAs like Tenchi or El-Hazard. Not - this.

Like, there's a scene I think as early as the end of episode 2 and start of episode 3 where it's a sort of cybernetically-enhanced flashback, Linna moving in Priss's place. Priss fights a Boomer, and backflips like eight times in a cheap-looking loop where we only see her bottom half as she spins around. It's just inexcusably bad.

Still shots with maybe some moving tentacles (more on the Boomers later) saturate this anime. Moving shots are single ones, simple grab-n'-go kind of shots, or they just lose a background as the fight happens. We are a long, long way from the excellently paced and placed Razordoll fight from OVA 2, and goddammit I wish we at least had competent 'bareskin' animations, where people actually moved around a bit more, like, oh, the steak dinner from OVA 4. Or at least, uh, more of them than the few we have.

Why would you watch an inferior copy of an original, guys? Because the plot's more complete? Somehow? People like 2040, but oftentimes they like it for things that 2032 did better, the robot fights and the kick-ass girls and things like that. And when pressed as to why 2040 is better, it's something to do with the plot. Well, fair enough. You sure as hell didn't come here for production quality.

- MEGATOKYO: STERILE

I think this was by design - a utopian, if relentlessly dull, city on the verge of destruction. Easy on the budget, too. Only the entire city looks dead on arrival. That sort of 90’s TNG-looking design. It’s not as bad as Crash, but it’s getting there.

Okay, so only the first 4 OVA's really kept the idea of Megatokyo as a cyberpunk city filled with grit and grime, and design focus gradually shifted to something brighter and more liveable, especially OVA 8 - but was that just because of perspective? Focus on Nene, and the city becomes nicer. Or - no. OVA 5 looks just a little less gritter than before, but it's still half-ruined, like those old vending machines Priss and Sylvie just find along the coast. But that's kind of a Priss episode, so... Where was I going with this? Oh, right.

Shots are reused constantly, like the one which shows the split from the Quake, how the city is split in two by height (Or we're just looking at a really big part of the Fault? Admittedly the OVAs did this too, but they didn't reuse their shots so many times that it feels just kind of annoying.)

- HARDSUIT DESIGNS: SIMILARLY UNINSPIRED

I could talk about blocky, ugly cars, or fairly dull-looking ADP mecha like the K-suit redux and the aerodyne copters they have to replace the FireBees from OVA 1. But that’s fine, the ADP’s hardware was designed mostly to be blown up. It’s the hardsuits, man.

Not just how they function in combat - that’s not one, but two separate gripes. But, it's like... Look. For the first half of the series, the Sabers use what are mostly minor recolorings of the second-generation hardsuits from OVA 8, similar more in shape and color than anything else. They do seem a bit less detailed, but that's the low budget rearing its head again. It's fine, really, because the OVA 8 designs are probably the best realization of hardsuit design, because they throw out the blockiness of the first-gen while still keeping the general body shapes we're used to. These ones don't look great, the colors seem either more severe (Priss) or more bland (Linna, Sylia), and their feet use that stupid little sound effect from Crash!, and they still move in high heels (this is a more feminist anime how?). But it's all - passably good-looking.

And then comes their second generation, made to be even lower-poly for the budget, and made to be even less interesting in terms of tech. The continuous thread through the Boomers and the hardsuits is bullshit liquid-metal morphin' powers, not even nanotech per se, just 'voodoo organic metal' or something (they call the Boomers Voomers here, I guess). Because, again, morphin' metal a la Terminator 2 looks cleaner, is easier to animate, then the grotesque fusion powers of even OVA 1.

So the hardsuits are all clean lines and joints, no real indication of them being more than a drawing, no sense that they're machines. And what does this bring us, anyway? Well, their weapons are the same, so... oh, right, the fucking battery problem is solved. Whoop-de-doo. More on that idiotic plot device later. Also, they don't get them for six or seven episodes after their first-gen suits are destroyed, which strikes me as missing the point of what BGC is about. Again.

- BOOMERS: SOMEHOW EVEN WORSE

One of the things I really like about 2032's Boomers, especially the 55C, is how they're neither machine nor monster. The 55C and other quasi-covert ops Boomers burst out of a fairly convincing human disguise, skin and flimsy flesh flexing, boiling, then bursting away not to reveal a Terminator-ish skeleton, but something with interlocking armor, bulging synthetic muscles, dead red fisheyes, and a snarling, aggressive look to them that just makes em' look ferocious on every level. They're the Boomer we see the most of in the mainline series, and it's good because they look at once like machinery - albeit very advanced, very organic machinery - and yet still demonic and monstrous and unrelentingly nasty. Same with other truly non-human Boomers: the 12B looks more crustacean-ish, but somehow the chunkiness of its design and its heavy-looking armor plating still convey the sense that this is something new and futuristic and you do not want to fuck with it. Even Miriam's Saber-hunting custom Labor models might look sillier, a little punier, but they still look distinct and uncanny, the more generic-looking Labor Boomers we see him work with then pimped out to an outrageous degree. Again - they always look just on the boundary between machine and monster.

The 2040 Boomers, though? Well, by default either they're big masses of colored blocks stapled together for maximum ease of animation, with the usual synthesized voices we expect from robots ever since Forbidden Planet, or they're waitresses or secretaries or bosses of human workers with grey-white skin and little tendency to emote except when told to. (Okay, so there is one scene where Mason tells his secretary Boomer, the one he keeps on creepin' with as well as a handy-dandy audience proxy so he can explain his evil plans, to just laugh. For no reason. And she does, at the same pitch, at the same tone, for a good long while until Mason tells her to stop. Some say it's creepy - I didn't really feel anything from it, though. More on its possible thematic significance later.) And then when induced into madness (no really the JP dub uses the word 'mad'), they mutate in the same way the one in 2032's first episode did - into roiling masses of cyber-flesh, sprouting teeth and tongues and other instruments until they end up looking like poorly-designed kaiju, or just straight-up zombies.

You can see what they were going for - turning what look like home appliances with legs into Resident Evil-style monsters. So I would forgive the boring basic designs if their other sides didn't, again, look like rejects from a Godzilla flick. Look, it's a design failure Crash! succumbed to as well, where the civilian-use zombie Boomers eventually mutate in Melt Down into that one Big Chungus which warbles about needing 'moto data yo' in a nigh-incomprehensible filter, and neither is particularly interesting.

It would be tricky, mind you, but I don't see why 2032's hybrid aesthetic couldn't be extended to the labor Boomers we almost never see in that series. The human-facing ones, the 'service industry' ones in other words? Uncanny valley: Eyes too big and fishlike, voice warbling up and down off-tempo the way real-life text-to-speech does, seemingly always reading from a script. The rest of them? Model them off of animals, give them the shape of things we know then plaster the elements of things we don't like on them. Fahrenheit 451's Mechanical Hound is a robot dog with the head of a mosquito, a massive steel injector needle its killing implement. That's a good example of how a Boomer could seem familiar, and yet designed as a machine to not ever try to look natural to us.

But that would be expensive, and 2040 has something of an aversion to budget, doesn't it?

- SOUNDTRACK: WORST TECHNO EVER

I have said to friends that one of the things that annoyed me greatly about The Matrix once I finally got around to watching it was its lack of kitschy late 90's techno beatz, the kind of thing supposedly in line with the anime and other cyber-y pop culture it was cribbing from. Seriously, the whole thing sounds so goddamn generically orchestral, and it really does give away the fact that The Matrix is just generic Star Wars-y action-romance with black and green smeared on top.

So let it be said that I don't have a problem with much of 2040's sound track sounding somewhat of its time. Yoko Kanno working on Stand Alone Complex had techno-y bits in her soundtrack and I would be hard-pressed to call that bad. But Crisis 2040 ain't got the stuff to succeed. It doesn't just use the same few bits of music over and over again for vaguely similar dramatic beats, it uses them in a way that brings nothing to the show itself. It doesn't enhance moments of tension, but even the first time the techno feels out of place, too slow for the drama it's trying to create. It just kind of... throbs and beeps and bleats and doesn't do much.

The rock is even more grating, somehow, because it's so goddamn slow. Okay, maybe not slow, maybe just lacking in flair. Mad Machine was slow, but it had a good beat, a drum-crashing march, a mechanical rock-grind that still had room for an epic guitar solo right at the last part of the song. You can hear tones of the kind of rock 2040 was cribbing from in Cowboy Bebop and FLCL to an extent, they're all drawing from roughly the same well, more post-punk than the Meatloaf-y arena rock 2032 cribs from. So why doesn't it work here? Probably because, like the action-techno, it feels like it's applied everywhere, all the time, with little emotional flair for what's going on. It is in perfect sync with a great deal of scenes where nothing is happening.

- PLAINCLOTHES CHARACTER DESIGNS: KINDA MEDIOCRE

Really, what gives away how little effort was put into this series is that a) Sylia's new design is a straight lift from Ifurita of El-Hazard, and b) Linna's new design is a lift of sorts from Afura Mann of the same series, except somehow even more dull. Linna in 2032 might have not had a whole lot going for her as a character beyond being the relatively normal one, but she still had a sort of athletic yuppie flair to her design and dress. Linna is an office lady, now, and not a very exciting one at that. But we'll get to that later.

One article from a site called The Anime Feminist insisted that because Priss didn't wear her lewder stage outfit, instead opening with Linna chasing after Priss for the sandwich thing, that the show was more feminist. (It also misread pretty rote yuri-baiting as genuine poggers lesbian character development, but that's to be expected.) But if Priss wearing her street clothes is good, why are the midriff-baring second-gen hardsuits an improvement?

It's weird, too, because no one would accuse AIC of dull character designs, except maybe in similarly cyberpunk-y anime Armitage III - well, okay, the titular android girl has a fairly fanservicey outfit there, but think of how the designs in El-Hazard or Tenchi have just enough flair to them without being fanservicey. It ties, I think, back into this sense that 2040 had to be dark and gritty and realistic and exactly like Eva (which doesn't have dull designs, so...). That all the flair the 80's version possessed had to be edited out to be... something.

Or maybe it was just they thought using Armitage III's character designer was a good idea? Hey, they got Chiaki Konaka to write both, why not just super-commit? Only, Armitage is its own sort of cyberpunk (more pretentious mid-90's-y stuff, but it does try, sometimes, to do interesting things) and it is not BGC's type of cyberpunk.

So you've got both budget too low to work with even interesting character designs, and artists who think that reskinning a very different anime as BGC will somehow work. That's not good.

Oh. But it gets worse.

2. ACTUAL CHARACTERIZATION (THEY DID EM' DIRTY FOLKS)

-PRISS ASAGIRI, THE STRONG SILENT TYPE

One of the great shames of 90's BGC fandom, I think, should be how people thought of Priss. So many wrote her off as a perpetual rageaholic stupefied by the cleverness of their cool new Self Insert (Twisted Path), or openly just said they hate her or that she's a bitch. It's... kind of disgusting. It might not be helped by how she behaves in OVAs 2 and 3, getting in tangles with Boomers way stronger than her. You know what I'm talking about - it makes her look kind of dumb.

Except - I don't think Priss is dumb, per se. She's the one who single-handedly figures out what's going on with the Gryphon in OVA 4, right? Her rage rises up for OVA 6, but wouldn't yours if you had to gun down your best friend / potential waifu to stop a bomb going off? She might barge into things really fast, but I never felt like she was characterized as dumb (except maybe in Crash?)

Hang on, let's get back on track here. 2040 Priss ain't dumb, but she strikes me as empty. Okay, she's supposed to be the brooding, silent type, here. I don't really like that she is that, now, because, again, it sucks a lot of the fun out of her character. Priss, here, doesn't have half the emotional range of 2032 Priss, and I don't even think that's the voice actress's fault. This is Yuu Asakawa we're talking about, here, best known for being Medusa in Fate, a real pro compared to Kinuko Oomori.

Then again, Yuu does do more monotone characters most of the time... Fuck, I'm back off topic.

Look, you wanna know what Priss's secret is? Why she hates the ADP in this timeline? It's not some dead boyfriend, it's not about the ADP being a bunch of assholes like they were in Files. No, it's that when she was a kid her residence was blown up and they destroyed her mega-hot mixtape.

That's the kind of characterization we're dealing with. It's not like Priss gets to make attachments besides one with Leon (she finally tsundere-blushes and kisses him after he saves her from small Boomer clown dolls I am not making this up), it's not like there's a sense of camraderie with the Sabers. Priss is just... Priss. She's just there.

-SYLIA STINGRAY, VICTORIAN-GRADE HYSTERIC

Jesus Christ. They did my girl dirty.

Look, I think of 2032's Sylia Stingray as grade-A waifu material, and that may cloud my judgement, but this is the internet, where hurricane-grade clouds over judgement is the perpetual logic-weather forecast. And now that I've beaten that metaphor into the dirt, let me explain why I simp Miss Stingray unapologetically: She is 100% leader material.

The other Sabers in 2032 are good at what they do individually, but Sylia's very good at being personable, keeping the girls all together and ready to face whatever crazy cyber-bullshit the Sabers are fighting that week. She's sleek and sexy and stylish, sure, but she's capable of stabbing Mason in the throat without making a big deal of it, capable of keeping what I assume is an intelligence network that expands well beyond Fargo fed and loyal, capable of designing those hardsuits herself to emphasize good tactics against tougher, bigger opponents like Boomers. Fanfic makes her a little stoic and unemotional, but listen to the series and there are so many times when Yoshiko Sakakibara, truly a pro voice actress in whatever she does, matches the wry little smile playing across her character's lips with a smile in the voice. For all that she is managing humanity's last hope against a corporation hellbent on world domination, she still manages to have joy in her life. (I also like the headcanon that she's a huge sentai geek, which is how you get her claiming her aim is 'to protect peace and justice and rid the world of evil' in OVA 1 with no detectable sarcasm.)

2040 Sylia is... Fuck. Jesus. Kind of pathetic. They tried to give her flaws, insecurities, instabilities - they basically made the fan theory about her enhanced brain from Daddy Stingray canon - and in the process made her unable to function. They went, as much late 90's melodrama which assumes overwrought pain equals character development, way too far.

Like, just the most basic shit - we don't see her in action, on the field, at all. 2032 Sylia was good at fighting alongside her comrades - proved that she was just as invested in fighting GENOM as they were by hacking Boomers to bits with arm swords, blasting them with laser guns, taking hits but still going. 2040 Sylia doesn't show up until episode 7 or so to bail the other Sabers out. Buuuuut she can't do it again! Because she's too old for the hardsuits to synch with her! So we've basically taken one member out of the fight on-and-off - why, exactly? Because she's a Christmas Cake? What is the point of this? She does come back for later fights, but can't go to face down her doppelganger in what would ideally be a satisfying conclusion to her character arc?

She's a bad team leader, too, hysterically angry (I swear she breaks a shotglass while getting a debriefing from some contact of hers like three episodes in a row), terrible at communicating with her team - or at least making it way too obvious that she hides stuff. And when she tries to be friendly it always comes off as kind of perv-y. Perhaps she is a lipstick lesbian - supposedly her reason for only employing women in the Sabers is that she, as a fashion designer by day, 'only understands women's bodies' - but the way she keeps on trying to get Priss and civilians to wear fairly racy fashion, it all feels like she's leaning too close to the Carmilla stereotype of lesbians, elegant and fashionable and all too willing to suck little girls dry.

Also! She's terrible at threat management. She doesn't realize her contact in GENOM is on Mason's payroll. She doesn't realize Mason is using her to trace her doppelganger Galatea (more on that later!). She can't get Mackie to stay away from the dormant Galatea long enough to kill the cyber-messiah like she intends to. She doesn't even go to space in the finale to fight her own doppelganger, denied of a proper climactic character arc because her having fits of weakness as Galatea builds power becomes a consistent plot point. And, uh... she isn't even the one who designs and builds and maintains the hardsuits. Her daddy-complex lover Nigel is.

And 2032 Sylia kept Fargo, the one dude we ever see in her life, at arm's length, and she was able to do Mason in with little fuss the first time, more difficulty the second time, and just dissed him, broke free of his mental lock, then wrecked his ass again the third time in Crash. Why can't that be the Sylia here? Why are there no layers to Sylia encasing the scared, neurotic little girl she may very well be even in 2032? Why is there nothing to her here but uniquely feminine weakness, and not feminine strength?

-LINNA YAMAZAKI, WHO EXISTS

So one of the things 2040 lovers advocate as a quality of the show that makes it better than 2032 is that we open with Linna as this normal office lady who gets sucked up into the Knight Sabers after getting her lunch knocked over by Priss on her bike. Yes, Linna chases after Priss and it's kind of badass, and so she's inducted into the Sabers... over the course of three episodes. This show is like that a lot.

The thing is I'm not entirely sure why we needed to see the induction phase for only one character. Yes, yes, normal-joe-discovers-a-fantastic world, but 2032 opened very differently. It opened loud and proud and explained itself visually, in a burst of unadultered Konya Wa Hurricane, and then the Knight Sabers show up, and it's in medias res but who cares? Crisis OVA 1 gets us in the world. It gets us in the mood. A gradual explanation of what is going on in terms of GENOM and Boomers and all that generally wasn't super needed.

Worse still is that because Linna is now the normal one who's just, you know, 'strong' because of a decent character moment or two, she's got even less personality than 2032's Linna, who at least had some moments where she was money-crazed, or boy-crazed, or whatever. Maybe people didn't like her for those moments, but there was enough foundation to build some good fanfics about her (I direct you to my Dance of Armor review to see what I'm talking about). Linna here... well, I'll just say that most 2040-inspired fanfics channel her more as Priss's lesbian buddy and leave it at that.

Christ, she barely gets to be the protagonist for like the first ten episodes or so, and then it's Priss and Sylia's game. It's not like I mind those two in 2032 (I mind them here), but if Linna was supposed to be our anchor in the Sabers' world then she can't even do that.

-NENE ROMANOVA, MARGINALLY LESS USELESS

Nene gets more screentime here. She's also arguably less moe. Fine. She's still cutesy as hell. Okay. I don't like her character design half as much, but it is a design which requires less animation work be done - her hair's less complex and all. Again, god forbid we spend more money on this show, eh? Yeah, it's hard to get a read on her. She's got a thing for Mackey, but it's never really paid off beyond a 'just because he's a Boomer doesn't mean he's not a person' shtick.

She's not exactly more useful in combat, though. The one time when a plan to take down a Boomer hinged on her, she was literally ripping wires out of a power box to rewire the Boomers power source to starve it out. (Electrical power, abstract energy fields, very un cyberpunk-y plot devices, these are all a recurring element in this show and I despise it.) Which isn't just kind of a dull way to hack, but she takes a really long time to do it, too, and even lifts her hardsuit visor to do it (that's an annoyance I have with the series in general - don't lift your visor unless you absolutely have to, girls - so we'll let that slide) That dartgun thing she has, supposedly a 'railgun' - it doesn't do jack shit except when popping off a weakpoint on a non-Boomer monster. But that's a problem a lot of the other Sabers have, too. More on that later.

-MACKEY, PLOT HINDRANCE

Mackie with an -ie sounds better. Fight me.

Anyway, yeah, the dub has him voiced by Spike Spencer, and that's all you really need to know, isn't it? Mackie in 2032 was kind of a non-presence except when he was lusting after his sister. He helped around, built the highway star, was just kind of there. Whatever plans there were to make him more of a POV character for the male audience fell by the wayside probably even before OVA 1's pre-production.

So Mackey here is... uh. He walks in on the girls changing and there's a Tenchi Muyo-esque 'it's not what it looks like I swear' moment with Nene? In, like, the first six episodes or so? Oh. So... they didn't change jack shit. When they probably should have.

Well, they kind of did. Spoiler alert: Mackey is actually a Boomer prototype derived, as all Boomers are, from Sylia. As such, he's vulnerable to the Big Bad Galatea's mental influence, who is the same sort of thing. It's he who stumbles into Galatea's chambers just as Sylia's about to kill her loli doppelganger off before she awakens; it's he who is constantly mentally manipulated to hinder the Sabers; it's he who sacrifices himself to save the Sabers from... nanomachine walls? in episode 23 (I wish I was making that up)... and then it's his 'death' which so traumatizes Sylia that she fails to kill Galatea when she uses his voice, and then basically bows out of the show for the last few episodes because she's so fucked up.

In other words... he's a plot contrivance to make things worse that Nene just happens to have feelings for, for reasons unclear to me; in classic Tenchi styling the boy has about as much personality as a dishwashing rag. So without Mackie the plot doesn't really happen, and without any redeeming qualities to justify him holding up the Sabers so much, I'll now forever write him off as an annoyance. Sorry. Not sorry.

-NIGEL, HAREM PROTAGONIST

OVA 4 gave us Dr. Raven, who was, at most, a plot point of a character, a grouchy-ass Einstein-lookin' mechanic-y boy who built the Motoslaves and not much else. Raven's Garage, when we see it again in OVA 8, has no Raven present, just the Sabers doing training. So 2032's staff decided the character wasn't really an essential element of the series. 2040, on the other hand, decided he was, and turned him into Nigel Kirkland.

Priss seems to be carrying a torch for Nigel. Sylia fucks him on the regular, because she can't get over her father-figure issues. He's pretty much the one who designs the hardsuits, because he worked with Sylia's father on the Boomers, and the hardsuits are essentially Boomers with no brains. Cool, eh? It's almost like he's more important that Sylia when it comes to getting shit done.

Maybe it's not his fault, you know. He's just an expression of how dearly they did Sylia dirty, how they couldn't imagine a woman being as capable as Sylia without overloading her with mental problems that slip out every episode. They needed this incarnation of daddy issues with no personality of his own to be the new boss.

It's like... People gave Other M so much shit for undermining Samus, why is this allowed to pass? Why did those dinguses at Anime Feminist seriously think that in the end he's unimportant, and that's somehow a girl empowerment thing? I... don't know. I don't fucking understand the positive reviews on MAL, either, since most of them are gibberish, so there we are.

-LEON, GROWLCOP

Is it weird that for all he's meant to be a side character in 2032, I like Leon? He's voiced by Ataru Moroboshi, for godsakes, so there's this internal dynamic where he's clearly thinks of himself as the Cool Cop, a Loose Cannon Who Doesn't Play By The Rules - and certainly he has those moments, he has his fights with the chief just like a Real 80's Cop Movie - but he's also a massive goofball. Even if he's the equivalent of Comissioner Gordon to Priss's Batman, unable to totally crack a case himself, he plays the part with aplomb. I keep thinking of the scene where Lisa's trying to spy on Nene, Leon catches her, she lies that she wants to play a trick on the pinkette, and then Leon just spidermans along the floor to surprise Nene himself. He's so... earnest.

This Leon, on the other hand, is perhaps a better fit for the Priss of 2040: stout, gruff, constantly shouting around to figure out 'what the hell are the Knight Sabers up to this time? Daley gets off even worse, being the guy who exists solely as a foil to Leon, whereas in the OG series you felt like the two could exchange role of bokke and tsukkomi pretty freely. Here, though... I guess the Leon x Priss thing is a lot clearer? That both develop feelings that the other Isn't So Bad After All?

It still doesn't feel earned, though.

-QUINCY, SENILE CYBER-MANDARIN

You know how Quincy in the original was like eighty but still cut a pretty imposing figure? Okay, we don't see him all that often, but he's always clearly the man in charge. Mason takes orders from him, gets his last-chance warning from him in OVA 3, scares the bejeezus out of him only after he's torched multiple cities and even then he doesn't give a shit 'cause he was a decoy the entire time, learns from that experience and shows up to Reika trying to kill him as a decoy because he's already figured out who was going after McLaren after the first 15 minutes of the episode, and he only bothers to show up not because he's concerned with losing a scientist (Kill him, stick him in a pot and boil him, do whatever, that's literally the line) but because he can't bear to lose a good project - yeah. Stone Cold Killer, this dude.

Aaaaaaaaaand contrast that to 2040 Quincy, who wears this dress and sits on this throne in GENOM Tower like he's some sort of Chinese emperor, but never moves his mouth to speak, is wired up into the chair, and as such can be disposed of the minute Mason decides it's time for him to unplug the old bastard's life support. And his philosophy's all janky, too. He seems to think that Boomers should be loved by humans, wants to capture the Knight Sabers to see why they're so annoyed by the great things he's doing for the world, which - not the vibe I got from Quincy in 2032, who literally called them 'foolish rabble' in OVA 7 in a fairly scenery-chew-y rant. Like, that version of Quincy, he did not give two shits about the welfare of other people.

So Mason is able to work on his own sinister plans independent of Quincy without his boss ever finding out, and when he's no longer useful Mason just unplugs his life support and that's that. Dumbass in life, dumbass in death. Pity that.

-MASON, MIGHTY MASTERMIND AND PROBABLE PEDOPHILE

Shuuichi Ikeda, of Char Aznable fame, played Brian J. Mason in 2032 with not much aplomb. He's got few if any lines and honestly sounds like he doesn't give a shit about his own evil plans, but I'm never sure if that's the fault of the writers or the fault of Ikeda. Certainly VA's who had made their careers at the dawn of the 80's were still able to win me over here in Crisis all the way in 1987. Leon and Sylia, for example. So I think it's more that Mason never had any room in the original OVA trilogy to be anything more than a Slick Evil Corporate Bastard who may or may not have killed Sylia's father. As Largo, with a different voice he's a lot more of a rote megalomaniacal villain, but at least he has some hammy presence.

I wonder if the AIC holdovers who made 2040 decided to have Mason be the main villain for pretty much until like 2/3rds of the way through because they wanted a second chance at making him interesting. Except, well, he isn't, not really. His ultimate plan is to promote the robot apocalypse via Galatea for... what purpose? To watch it, apparently? Just to see the whole thing take place? Galatea straight-up exposits that he was a sickly boy who had his organs cyberized when he was little and is bitter because of that, which is a) a weak-ass revenge-on-humanity motive, and b) just told to us almost as a throwaway line.

For all his planning and plotting, Galatea pretty much gives him what he wants when he's absorbed into GENOM tower to become a human gargoyle, because his organ transplants were Boomers too, he literally put a little bit of her inside himself, it's kinda gross. An MAL review said the show is better because now Mason has a motive, but, uh, no. Just because you have a nonsensical and convoluted motive for a character does not mean that they have somehow now become better than a character with no motive at all. And we keep coming back to this, this assumption that just because 2040 has more of a plot that it must be better, even though that plot is so stupid-people-trying-to-sound smart that it makes the whole show worse.

Someone on reddit noted that, just a few episodes in, the anime felt hornier than 2032 despite all the claims it was more feminist (It really is hornier, especially during the final battle where the Sabers end up Akira-mecha-tentacled in Galatea's clutches, or just because there's a goddamn Mackey-walks-in-on-girls-changing scene in like episode seven), and Mason is... well, kind of a walking embodiment of that. His sexual relationship with his Boomer secretary - his sinister monologues he shares with her (doing this pretentious tracing of Hebrew letters golem-style is the cringiest, 90's-ass-I'm-12-and-this-is-deep thing I've seen in a long-ass while) - the man loves Boomers so much he wants to be mommy-dommied by them. It would be pathetic were it not for the fact that, in raising Galatea (he keeps her in a cutesy little room in GENOM Tower and everything), he largely succeeds, the Sabers don't even slow his plans down. That's what I liked about Mason - he got out of the way real fast, and Largo was infinitely more fun (and so were the villains in the non-Largo, non-Mason episodes). Sylia stabbed him in the throat and that was that, but she doesn't even get that here, does she? Fucking hell.

(Hornier still: Priss, Linna, Nene, all ending up nude in obscure parts of the world, the plot largely unresolved.)

-GALATEA, PLOT DEVICE

So... Galatea. Sotai. The genesis of all Boomers, built off of a neurochip modeled off of Sylia's brain (and I guess daddy Stingray killed his wife to make the chip, too? Why? Who cares? Sylia's mother is the 'Boomers are against God and should not be made' type, and every flashback scene where she shows up just annoys me, because they're trying to make us care about this woman and they can't seem to pull it off). Due to that origin she... has the power to infiltrate inorganic objects through some kind of bullshit energy field that warps them to her will, just like the fusion with the other Boomers. It makes no sense. But then again Mason accesses Galatea's chambers via a hologram bridge. So even the vaguest sense of not just being straight-up science fantasy is chucked out the window by episode fifteen. Or maybe episode one. Fuck.

Anyway, what is Galatea's personality? Well, when she really starts to do stuff for Mason she's cutesy, quiet, but keeps going on about how she wants to play. You know, like every other creepy ghost girl in every other piece of media. So that's hardly interesting. She grows up, exceeds Mason, turns him into a gargoyle, turns into GENOM Tower, and somehow turns that into a space rocket so she can boomerify the entire planet, every inch of mankind's cities turned into her gooey morpho-magic tentacle paradise. She's not a personality, or a person, or anything with an explainable motive so much as she is one of those force-of-nature villains... except the show seems to think she's a bit of both, neglected as a child, wondering why she exists before settling on the reason that she must become God so that humans can be forcibly fused with machine-flesh. Which... eh. Largo was the same sort of thing, but the show takes her Deeply and Philosophically Seriously here, whereas Crash's Largo delivered his lines in so hammy a register you couldn't take his lust to fuse with all Boomerkind very seriously... and 2032 Largo didn't believe a word of his own liberatory rhetoric. So she comes off as a budget Eva villain instead.

So we've seen Galatea before, except not so bullshit fuck-you all-powerful, and not so rote in her execution. Wot a pity.

I feel is as good a time as any to mention that most of the fights in the second cour, where Galatea has woken up, are very... bondage-y for the Sabers. It's a lot of dodging tentacles, getting grabbed by tentacles, screaming each other's names, etc. Towards the end the Sabers also have to contend with their own hardsuits being fused with Boomer goop unless they fight with the strength of their emotions and willpower, further compounding the how-in-god's-name-is-this-feminist factor. It's such a boring way to have fights play out, too, in sharp contrast with awesome heavy-weapon slugfests like the one in OVA 7 where Priss goes toe-to-toe with Reika's spidermech. It feels more demeaning, more grotesque but not in a good way.

3. THE ACTUAL GODDAMN STORY (WEIRDLY PACED, POORLY CLIMAXED, BEAT-TO-BEAT BORING)

-THE OL' WAIT-A-COUR-FOR-THE-PLOT-TO-START CONUNDRUM

Oooh, the MAL reviews say, the plot gets dark in the end, as there's a - zombie-Boomer apocalypse in the ADP HQ? And then all the Boomers eat Megatokyo whole basically? Bitch please. None of this was dark per se. Edgy and melodramatic in presentation? Sure. But they manage to evacuate the entire city offscreen, as they always do, because they can't exactly have the liquid-metal fusion apocalypse occur with people in the city at the same time, that would cost actual money. And it's not like the Sabers even beat the big bad at the end: Sylia doesn't get to go to space (why can't her character arc be resolved, AIC? Why is she always done dirty like this?), they try to fight Galatea, it goes miserably, Galatea decides she's God, becomes God, disappears in a shower of neutrinos, the non-Sylia Sabers drop to earth, Priss sings again, that’s it.

But before we get to any of that we have to deal with Monsters Of The Week. Mad Boomers, controlled by Mason for his own ends, except when they aren't (Why is Sylia so shocked that this is a thing? There's one episode, again, where she drops a shotglass and freaks out about GENOM doing Bad Shit With Boomers as though this is some sort of novelty). Also, the existence of such things is somehow kept a secret from the public? Like, Priss literally says to Leon that people are starting to realize that Boomers can go mad after the first cour.

I could get mad at the fact that they made the fan assumption that Boomers just rampage (which in 2032 is not true) canon. I could. But that's creative liberty. No, what I'm complaining about is that none of this shit advances the plot in any way. Eva kind of gets around this by having equal parts a-plot and b-plot in a given early episode, so we learn a bit about Misato and Ritsuko and the rest bit by bit, and also by having fight scenes that are actually good, and then the plot kicks in the second cour but we don't mind because we're already having fun. (So many eva-alikes don't get that, I think, that things have to move somewhat even while you're in MotW mode.)

2040, on the other hand, does not have interesting fight scenes, so that's right the fuck out, especially since it likes to stretch what could have been a single-episode fight into two (more on that in a bit), and the character development is glacial, at best. Actually, let's just get into that right now..

THIS SHOW COULD HAVE BEEN HALF THE LENGTH IT IS

Anyone who has seen this show knows what I'm talking about. There's so many still shots, so many conversations where information is hinted at but withheld, and so much stretching.

So, so, so many times we're faced with a problem the Sabers could solve in an episode, but don't, because a bunch of other stuff has to happen. Quincy and Mason comment on the action, there's some character scenes that you forget the minute they happen, some forced tension with battery problems or something... every single goddamn time in this first cour, and then even after that, the show refuses to resolve a plot arc in one episode, except for one or two times that are somehow even worse (Priss races after a car Boomer a la Revenge Road and it's the ugliest little shit I've ever seen, that guy). The Sabers fight a Boomer and are cornered by the ADP; they hunt a monster GENOM is also hunting; Linna goes on her first outing and almost gets a Boomer but runs out of power (battery metal). Those all sound like single-episode arcs, but no, there has to be build-up, and de-escalation, and an episode split to up the danger, and all this bloat. That's the right word for it, really, bloat.

-THE FIVE-MINUTE-BATTERY HOEDOWN

Yes, you heard me right. They ripped off the 5-minute battery from Evangelion. Which ripped it off from Ultraman. They understood nothing about why it worked in Eva and copied it for contrived suspense. Okay, so they threw it out once they got rid of the old hardsuits, but were the new ones an improvement in spite of that? Up for debate, folks.

Like, there's literally a bit in the 1996 BGC RPG, the one by RTAL, who knew a new series was coming but (probably) not anything about it, where a possible mission for player characters straight-up has the hook be "While the players break in their new powered armor against a rouge Boomer, they find that their power cells only last about five minutes in real combat. This is bad." And you know damn well why - the Sabers can't afford to have that tight of a time limit to enter and exit a combat zone by whatever means (Does the timer start the minute they launch out of Sylia's mass driver? Does it keep running after they've beat the Boomer and have to go home? How do they go home? I seem to recall them literally yoinking up into the night. Why the hell are their jetpacks so goddamn powerful and everything else is absolutely broke?). It's a design error that the showrunners should have ignored had they given their own show some thought, but they didn't give it some thought. Multiple times.

Evangelion could compensate for this because they're essentially playing Tower Defense with the Angels. Tokyo-3 is a combat arena built to favor the mecha, because all they have to do is ask and a charging umbilical or a skyscraper-sized weapon cache will pop out of the ground. Even if it is a dramatic conceit to make the fights a little more high-stakes, it communicates those additional stakes by cutting away to the pilot's own timer every so often. 2040 does not have the former - which makes the idea of having these suits be what they but having this flaw strike one as a forced contrivance ever more obviously - and it does not convey the latter, diminishing the effectiveness the viewer's ability to figure out what the fuck is going on. You have no way to count when the timer starts or stops, so in the end it just comes down to the timer running out whenever the showrunners feel like it. For example, when Linna goes out on her first hardsuited excursion, she is inches away from overcoming her fear of combat, having a moment of triumph, finally whooping a Boomer's ass even if she has to do it alone (since Nene is still combat useless), and it's good for her - except then she runs out of power, because the writers don't want to give her a moment where she wins, and instead want to drag this subplot out for another episode. But we've been over that already, the impulse to take one episode's worth of content and make two or three episodes instead.

-A POOR CHOICE OF ARMAMENTS, MISS STINGRAY, NOW YOU SHALL DIE

So all the Sabers now have one weapons system per suit in 2040. Nene has a dinky-ass flechette gun that she cribbed from 2032 Priss (where it could do some amount of damage), Priss has the Knuckle Bombers, Linna has those impractical-ass head ribbons, Sylia has arm swords. Three out of four melee weapons - for Boomers that are pretty good at melee themselves because they can do the low-budget morphin' metal-tentacle thing. What the fuck. Shit, a good deal of the time those weapons don't do proper damage without figuring out some gimmicky weakpoint or another.

The Sabers manage to compensate by being able to jump and run with capabilities far beyond the 2032 hardsuits, but even then it feels like the Sabers can never quite gain an edge. There's no tactics, they just get thrashed and then somehow figure out where a given Boomer's 'core' is. Christ, they don't even upgrade once the new hardsuits come into play - all that happens is that the battery thing gets dealt with and that's it. (Also the new suits are even more ‘low-poly’ than the last ones to be easier to animate and whatnot, the truth that they’re actually psychic Boomers aside.)

-THE ROBOZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

So you know how Boomers being like human beings was a theme played around with in Crisis and Crash? And even to a lesser degree in 2040? Well, by episode 16 all that goes out the window, because Galatea is the Boomer God, and all that is cyberflesh has no will but to obey her.

Yeah, so Mason releases Galatea's energy (???) through the GENOM-controlled power grid (the 'Dragon Line' centered around the Tower), which causes all the dead Boomers kept in the warehouses underneath the ADP warehouse to reactivate just as most of the cops have left on a strike. Of course Nene and the chiefs of staff are stuck in the building, with Nene trying to coordinate moving the boys around so they can get to safety, because the Boomers are essentially now a few hundred zombies. Their eyes glow red, they shamble forward, they clutch, they reach, and eventually they fuse with the building. This is what kicks off the Boomer plague eating Megatokyo whole mind you, but still, it's so fucking stupid. Not only have we destroyed any sympathy for Boomers that stuff like the waitress Boomer might have incurred, it's just... rote. Cliche. It was bad in Crash OVA 3, it's worse here: the ADP Tower even becomes a cyber-flesh monstrosity which grows a face just like 'moto data yo'.

I have to ask: Who thought taking anything at all from Crash 3 was a good idea? Because, evidently, someone did.

Did I mention this takes like three episodes to get through, Nene and the officers scrambling all over the building bit-by-bit? It took twenty minutes to resolve the ADP invasion scene in OVA 8, and it felt like all the events in that moved at a nice brisk clip where more and more scrambling against endless hordes is the default here. But we already talked about langorous pacing, let's not repeat ourselves.

-WHAT EVEN IS THIS LAST ACT?

So Megatokyo's been colonized by Boomers. Quincy's dead, Mason's fucking around with Galatea, and it feels like we should be moving the plot somewhere. Only we don't for the most part. But... eh. You know how it is. It's not until like episode 21 that we get to see the new (ugly!) suits in action, and even then their assembly is just fucking weird: a given operator is covered in 'inner metal', basically Boomer goop which looks too much like semen for its own good, and they... focus? On their heart? They must communicate in clear mental language to articulate the metal into a cohesive shape and to... oh fuck it, it doesn't matter, because then the girls are all bondage-d by a giant worm made out of power line (that's another thing that I hate about this show, its tendency to reduce all fights to 'who can dodge the grabby tentacles until the plot decides it's time to kill the beastie'), and so the new suits barely get to do anything interesting and they have to call on Priss's Motoslave to kill it (in what appears to be a callback to OVA 1 where she flies down the thing's throat... only there she shot the inner Boomer to bits so it vomited circ fluid, and here we just get a shot of her punching and then the thing explodes).

We don't actually get to the assault on GENOM Tower until episode 23, and it's grossly unsatisfying, with the Sabers fighting first sticky bondage nanowalls (this show has an obsession with restraining the Sabers so they can't fight, in case you haven't figured that out by now), and then magical zero-gravity fighting. Probably the only place where the show gets interesting, at least visually, is when the Sabers sans Sylia go to space via the skyhook and attempt to cut off Galatea's ability to beam magical boomerifying energy across the planet (it really is magic, I have no other way to describe it). They fail, of course, because this show won't give the Sabers a single success to take home. Galatea gains control, bitching about how annoying mere humans are, and...

-THIS IS WHAT YOU CHUCKLEFUCKS CALL A SATISFYING FINALE?

People say 2040 is better because it ends? Dude, what the fuck. It ends in the worst way possible. OVA 8 was ambiguous but at least was self-confident in a cuter, cheesier tone, ended, seemed to imply that the adventures of the Sabers could very well continue.

But let's look over the ending of Crisis, it's very last minutes: The Sabers except Priss (Not Linna, she's not the protagonist anymore) are incapacitated in space. Galatea has hooked up with the bigass space station, turning it into her body. Priss's hardsuit turns into a tentacle-tastic bondage monster, because that way of putting our heroines in peril hasn't been done already for every fucking episode. But she mentally overpowers the thing, fuses with her Motoslave by accepting it as a Boomer, rides it into the core of Galatea's operation, and Galatea is just like - yeah, okay, I'm done. She stops being a robot apocalypse, bursts into neutrinos that illuminate the world. Priss falls back to earth, Nene and Linna turn their Boomer suits into dolphins (fuck what?), everyone lands safely, but, uh, now what?

Why did Galatea stop? I barely remember. Her motives were the usual 'Boomers are a superior race who have been oppressed' shit, she must transcend normal life, and Priss comes in there, and turns Galatea into God. Because they... fuse? Reproduce? As life surely must... FUCK YOU HIROKI HAYASHI THIS IS JUST THE ENDING MONOLOGUE FROM GHOST IN THE SHELL!

And GITS did it better, too! Because Motoko was looking for meaning in her existence for most of the movie! This is just whatever psychotechnobabble they could come up with! Fuck!

Okay, so, it ends. But can you call that a satisfying ending? The Sabers got their asses kicked multiple times, and failed to really stop the Big Bad, who just sort of gave up and yeeted out of this universe. Mason got what he wanted, Galatea got what he wanted, did the Sabers really do anything except get bondage'd by various ooey-gooey-boomeys? Can you really call this a girl power show if so little proactive action is possible?

Apparently there was a sequel series planned (what would it even be about? You've stopped an Eva-scale apocalypse, where do you go from there?), but I guess AIC wasn't happy with its reception, they moved onto other things, and anyway the other big sponsor ADV Films went belly-up around 2008. So the chances of this happening are slim to none, which is nice, I guess. If more Bubblegum Crisis comes out, I'd rather it aim low and just try to ape the 80's vibe of 2032 than go shoot for the fucking philosophical moon... but then again, I just might get the worst of both worlds, there...

4. HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN?

I actually have no idea.

Like, AIC finally secured the rights around 1996 or 1997, and supposedly during preproduction they got the last of their problems out of the way when Toshimichi Suzuki showed up with Yakuza in tow and demanded royalties - and then one of the Yakuza admitted who they worked for, which in Japan is Not Done Among The Criminal Classes, and Suzuki spent the rest of his life hiding out until he died in 2019, the poor bastard. So they had 2 years or so of turnaround time to make this show happen from late 98 to early 99, and they were co-producing it with ADV Films, who were at the time the richest American licensors of anime out there from having licensed Eva. And even if Hiroki Hayashi’s directorial claim to fame from the original BGC was OVA 4, and even if his claim to fame proper was Tenchi Muyo, I don’t think the man lacked talent - El-Hazard, a later creation of his, is quite good, if a bit simplistic and PG-ish. He might not have done most of the episodes here, but still.

But as far as I can figure out most of 2040’s history is much more buried than anything regarding 2032. I ain’t got shit on this one, fam. The ADV cofounder was the executive producer, but he was attached to plenty of things that seem to have turned out okay. Chiaki J. Konaka did the ‘screenplay’, I think he landed the gig after Armitage worked out well for AIC, but he’s hardly bad at what he does - Lain, The Big O, stuff like that. Sadayuki Murai did the ‘script’, okay, that’s weird that sounds like two different dudes in the same role, but his other writing credits aren’t bad either. Shinji Aramaki’s back for mechanical design, but he was on that duty on 2032 as well. Ikeda Shigemi is art director for both, and yet… What happened?

Budget woes I can guess at - the 1997 East Asian Financial Crisis compounded the woes of the Lost Decade I assume, and maybe ADV was stingier with cash than the money-hose from Youmex last time around. But I keep seeing little JVC logos on various ancient advertisements for 2040, and the Victor Company has money to burn. It may not always burn it even on its own anime through JC Staff, but if AIC had not one but two sources of income, surely two halves could make a reasonable enough whole?

I think what probably did happen was ADV said 'we made a gajillion dollars off of Eva, make us another Eva', and they did not understand what made Eva work, and so tried to replicate Eva with a lower budget and a belief in their own infallibility that failed to understand that Crisis was not and really should never be Eva. Plenty of mecha shows in this era tried to be Eva, yes, but does anyone remember RahXephon? At all? God, am I really chalking this bad anime up to Western meddling? I think I might be.

2040 was the beginning of anime getting really, really edgy and pretentious in the aughts before swinging back to flat-out retarded with endless harem light-novel adaptations, and now we've got the isekai boom, and what isn't isekai is either Shonen Jump or mindless rom-coms or mobage tie-ins. The aughts might have produced some good stuff, but after that it's just... ugh. I don't know anymore. Even ufotable has been chained to the shitty-ass mandates of Shonen Jump, because Mugen Train was the biggest anime film ever, and I just - I fucking hated it. I won't deny that the OVA era produced a great many disasterpieces, but here I am and I'm having good clean fun watching the Dominion Tank Police OVA's, and all I can think of is that I want more stuff like this even though I know I'll never get it.

2040 is the epitome of that disappointment in anime - the tail end of an era when girls had guns, mecha were painstakingly designed, and things exploded relentlessly. To see a show I want to be that way, turn out to be another way - it's the saddest thing I ever did see.