This was basically the beach episode, because I guess they can’t rely solely on shower strangling scenes to meet the fanservice quota
- I might as well start this off by summarizing my thoughts on the first season, since it was never blogged here and I wouldn’t even have been around to do it at the time anyway. I just finished rewatching it a few days ago, and I think I honestly had less issues with it the second time around? Some of the things that I remember bugging me while it was airing made a bit more sense now that I knew what was going to happen and didn’t have to worry about forgetting minor details during the wait between episodes.
- However, there were still a whole lot of things that made little to no sense even this time around – namely the motivations of the characters driving the story. Inaho’s (mostly unexplained) reasoning for choosing to make Slaine his enemy was still questionable at best, not to mention the way no one even bothered to ask him afterward about what happened to the Martian that had been helping them out. Count Saazbaum’s reason for being evil and stuff I guess had some sort of fucked up logic behind it, but petty revenge for one long-dead person is still a ridiculous thing to invade a whole planet over. Slaine’s decision to save Saazbaum in the end, which predictably resulted in nothing good for anyone, still made no goddamn sense whatsoever. Despite that, it was still fun to watch. It had some pretty solid action, and a premise that had potential. There’s still some mysteries left over from the first season that I hope are finally explored this time around. It’s the kind of show that it’s hard to lose interest in, even if I don’t necessarily think it’s good.
- Anyway, I guess I should probably start by addressing what might be the most controversial aspect of the new season – Inaho is back. It wasn’t even treated as an actual twist – just “oh hey, remember when he got shot, well it didn’t quite kill him and they got him to a doctor so he’s fine now”. Pretty much nothing has changed about his personality or even appearance – except that he now has a fancy robot eye and Aldnoah powers or whatever. So he didn’t even just survive the events of the first season’s finale – he basically got shot in the head and leveled up from it.
Was the floor in Saazbaum’s landing castle his quest bed or something?
- That’s pretty dumb, but I’m not going to waste too much time complaining about it. With half the series still to go, it’s just something anyone watching will kind of have to accept. I don’t even hate Inaho that much, honestly – he was kind of a Mary Sue even before his miraculous survival, but he’s at least a more interesting one than, say, Kirito or the Mahouka guy. What’s important is where they take it from here. If they have somewhere interesting to go with his character, it might just be worth this one significant ass pull. I’m not really expecting that to be the case, though.
- On a vaguely related note, I at least kind of like New Rayet. I hope she doesn’t get sucked into Inaho’s harem, if that’s going to be a thing that exists.
God damn it, he’s dual wielding now. Is his sister going to fall in love with him too?
- In my original notes I ranted a lot about how ridiculous it was that Slaine was just going along with the invasion of Earth while knowing full well that it’s not what the princess would have really wanted, but the twist at the end kind of cleared things up. I’m guessing Saazbaum is effectively holding her hostage in her life support tube or whatever, and Slaine knows that if he stops obeying him she will no longer be kept alive. Or maybe I’m reading too much into this, and Slaine really has just gone off the deep end to the point where he honestly thinks what he’s doing is right.
- Whether he believes he’s on the right side or not, though, Slaine is pretty clearly a bad guy at this point. Earlier in the show, it seemed like Slaine was just starting off on the wrong end of the conflict, and would inevitably end up joining forces with Team Inaho to save the world and stuff. Now, however, he’s kind of beyond redemption. He’s helping with the invasion of an entire planet just to save one person, who may or may not already be effectively dead. And that’s not to mention the fact that it’s his fault Asseylum was shot in the first place – if he hadn’t gone back to save Saazbaum for whatever reason, knowing full well that their goals were conflicting, this never would have happened. Basically, it’s hard to see Slaine as a sympathetic character because all his problems result from the fact that he’s a fucking idiot.
I wonder how the “Slaine did nothing wrong” crowd is feeling after this episode
- Of course, his reasons for fighting on the side of Mars might not be as much of an issue if the Martians weren’t the clear-cut bad guys, but… they really kind of are, even if the show wants us to think things are a bit more morally ambiguous than that. Their desire for Earth’s abundant natural resources is understandable, but there are plenty of other solutions. They’ve only been living on Mars for around (I think?) 50 years – their pride is the only thing preventing them from just moving back if they really want to and peacefully coexisting with the Terrans. The only reason they have to violently conquer Earth is because they’ve convinced themselves they’re superior to the rest of humanity. Even Saazbaum admits that their cause is basically bullshit…but then his entire aim is just to vaguely avenge his long-dead fiancée or whatever, so yeah. If we’re supposed to find these villains sympathetic or think that the conflict is anything less than black and white, the show has done a pretty poor job of it so far. The morality in Aldnoah.Zero is really just a step above something like Akame ga Kill, where maybe mass murderers are not really THAT BAD as long as they have friends and get a dramatic enough death scene.
