Otakuism

So you’re an anime director and it’s the climax of the show. The big bad has revealed himself, every thing’s blowing up, the hero got his final power upgrade, punches are flying, everyone’s yelling, but some thing’s missing. It all needs just one more element to kick it up to eleven. Clearly, it needs Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony, specifically the climax of the fourth movent, cause nothing says epic action quite like a string section. Yes, Dvorak does show up rather commonly in anime, or at least I’ve found him in three different shows so I’m going to say he’s common.

I first heard it in One Piece during Luffy’s final fight with Crocodile. The Alabasta arc had already been going on for like a hundred episodes. All of the Baroque Works had been defeated, Pell had just sacrificed himself, and all of the Straw Hat Pirates were trying fruitlessly to stop the mindless bloodshed. And during it all Luffy’s stuck in an underground tomb fighting Crocodile for the third time, with the tomb collapsing around them of course. As soon as the New World started playing I knew it was all over. The scene also sinked well, as the happier, lighter movement started after Crocodile had been launched into the air. Just to note, One Piece isn’t that shy to other classical music. Chopper’s flashback arc makes brilliant use of Mozart’s Requiem, making the scene truly heartbreaking when it didn’t need to try that hard to make you cry even without music.

The New World Symphony is also used as the theme for Proist, the psychotic bitch main villain of Gaiking. Ironically enough she’s trying to destroy Earth and thinks that the New World Symphony is the only good thing humanity as ever produced, so much so that she even names her main mech, a giant self-replicating dragon made of nanomachines, Chou Maryu Dborak. Of course, Dborak eventually falls to the musical might of Gaiking the Great. It’s hard to beat Akira Kushida’s Sono Mei ha Gaiking the Great when it comes to hotblooded music.

And you can’t leave Legend of the Galactic Heroes out when it comes to classical music, since that’s what it’s whole soundtrack consists of. The New World symphony is used here as background for the Battle of Amlitzer, where the Alliance forces are completely crushed by Lohengramm. Rather ironic, since Dvorak composed the New World Symphony after traveling in America, and here it’s being used for a battle where the “democratic” forces are beaten. Then again, it’s better than being the main theme for a psychotic bitch.

Are there any other anime out there that use Dvorak that I haven’t seen? I’d love to know and get a real collection started.

This post contains a ton of spoilers for Blassreiter up to episode 15.

The first half of Blassreiter has been fairly intriguing at best, featuring some pretty cool fights marred by a lot of melodrama and the poor video quality I am forced to watch. So as the mid-season mark approaches Blassreiter follows the iron rule for most tokusatsu (and mecha) series: time for some pruning and a complete change of pace. So the show kills off most of its cast and introduces a tragic background for the rest. And by tragic, I mean incredibly horrible deaths involving many children. I’ll explain.

First off, Wolf finally goes full Demoniac and betrays all of XAT be infecting all its members, except Hermann and Amanda who were in solitary confinement. The new Demoniacs precede to rampage across the city destroying everything. Brad, Al, and the other infected but still human members of XAT fight to get Hermann and Amanda out alive, and the two manage to escape in a helicopter. Everyone else is killed by Demoniacs or Wolf. The worst part of this is that Wolf tries to use Brad’s love interest Lene, who was just introduced a couple episodes earlier, to kill Brad by taking over her Paladin, a transforming motorcyle/robot. Instead of turning her into a Demoniac and saving her Brad instead shoots her in the head with the special bullet he received from her on their first mission. He is then gutted by Wolf. That’s just the beginning.

Elsewhere, Meifing, a minor character so far, reveals she is a double agent with the real organization Zwolf, for which XAT was just a public front (it’s basically the SEELE of Blassreiter, german and all). With her high-tech jet she decides to nuke the city to kill Wolf, not even trying to save the friends she had been working with. Hermann and Amanda’s helicopter is damaged in the explosion and Hermann forcibly ejects Amanda in her own Paladin, while he dies when the copter crashes. A now alone Amanda finds Jacob again and learns his back story.

Joseph was an orphan raised by a church that helped Outsiders, outsiders being any undesirable peoples that are treated like shit. Apparently world war 2 never happened in Blassreiter cause everyone in Germany is still racist. Not the most accurate or flattering depiction of the country. As a boy Joseph allows himself to be beaten up all the time by these really evil kids just so their families will donate money to the church orphanage. Even when a wandering pastry chef tries to help Joseph the kids push the pastry chef into the river with his cart falling on top of him, putting him in the hospital. They then push the blame onto Joseph. If ever there were people you wanted to physically reach into the screen and strangle, it’d be these kids.

Later on Joseph meets Xargin while helping an Outsider community displaced by a flood and also meets his sister he never knew about, Sasha, who originally made the blassreiter nanomachines. Everything is good until the kids in the community get scarlet fever. They have no money for antibiotics so Joseph and Xargin go to steal some and are caught by the police, but let go due to Sasha’s research. While this is going on the kids find out that they’re parents are starving themselves to feed their kids. The kids feel terrible about this and sell the antibiotics for food. Of course, the scarlet fever comes back and since the kids sold the medicine they all die. Yes, every single kid dies. They even show them all being carried away in caskets. Oh, and Sasha is beaten to death by a mob for being an Outsider.

This all drives Xargin crazy, so he takes the nanomachines, blows stuff up, infects Joseph, and then leaves to destroy the world. This leads us to the modern day. The series now takes place with both Amanda and Joseph working for Zwolf. Zwolf has three super high tech mecha, Meifing’s jet being one of them, all piloted by cyborgs. One of the cyborg’s just happens to be Joseph’s sister Sasha, who didn’t actually die. She convinces Joseph to go through excruciating torture so he can get his mid-season powerup. She also promises to kill him after Xargin is dead. And the best part is that Zwolf is actually a modern day incarnation of the Knights Templar, so now we got religious fanatics fighting against Xargin, a religious fanatic himself who is trying to bring about the apocalypse and recruit his own four horsemen.

So, I think Blassreiter succeeded in its change of pace. It will be interesting to see how Joseph evolves now since he’s basically being made to lose control of his blassreiter form. There’s also Zwolf, who definitely have an alternative motive behind everything their doing, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn out to be the big bad boss at the end, with the Director transforming into a hulking monstrosity per tokusatsu tradition. And there’s even more CG galore now, so anyone who couldn’t stand the first episode probably should still stand away. Aside from that Blassreiter is a pretty entertaining, if very pulpy, sci-fi adventure. Can’t wait to see where it goes from here. I did prefer the old OP, though.

And this is a pretty cool MAD featuring clips from the first half of the show. The song is White Night, the OP to Nitroplus’s early game Vjedogonia, which is very similar to Blassreiter: