Anime: Blue Drop: Tenshi-tachi no Gikyoku 2y5p33

Note: This review is filled with spoilers, to explain how bad the anime is.

Blue Drop is a lesbian show where one of the main girls and the first interaction they have in series, but not chronologically, is the former strangling the latter, and not because of a kink. This would be more than enough for me to say that this anime is not worth watching but there sure is a lot more to criticize it for.

The series is about an amnesiac girl who goes to a prestigious girls only high school and ends up sharing room with another girl who strangles her at first , and is found out to be an alien from an all-female race that wants to investigate Earth for plot reasons. It immediately tells you that the main character has no backdrop, or that it remains a mystery throughout most of the show, and based on the very typical setup and setting, you just know these girls will end up as the main couple of the show.

Even though it combines slice of life and sci-fi action like Figure 17, the last show I covered before this one, Blue Drop really doesn’t focus on any of them, or at least, not in a way that feels well written, it’s even hard to tell what part is prioritized in it, because, really, it’s none. Scenes transition from the school to a space ship (as in, a spaceship that’s underwater, it´s a spaceship, but it’s a space ship), without a solid reason, they don’t do much in it during the initial episodes.

Eventually it turns out that this spaceship is a traitor, or suspected to be a traitor, again, for no clear reason, yet. It’s not a complicated show in the least, but since stuff just happens for the sake of happening, it’s hard to even tell why or how something just kind of happens. Heck, it’s even hard to say that stuff just happens, things are shown on screen but nothing is progressing any of the two main genres of the series.

When the girls are in school, they just goof around, when the space ship is shown, the dialogues are something like this: “Commander, I kept investigating, we need you here to do that thing”, “Understood, I will keep investigating here, so keep waiting for me there, I will go soon to do that thing”. The show desperately tries to build a mystery but there´s no mystery because nothing is happening.

So, inevitably, the focus ends up shifting to the school setting. Normally this would be to flesh out the cast and build character dynamics, but here the two main characters just flicker and makes fun of the other. The show dedicates screen time to other girls they interact with, but it feels like it’s just there for the sake of being there, it doesn’t really show much of the girls in question besides one or two things about them, and since those characters are ultimately irrelevant to the plot or the characterization of the main characters, it is just a waste of time.

The plot points never connect with each other, each one of them is there just to take screen time from the other. The school life portion just have the girls doing typical stuff, with more drama than deserved and needed, is just there to fill episodes, and eventually it doesn´t even gets a closure. When the stage play that they built for half the show is about to happen, a space invasion kicks in and the play is cancelled and you never get to see it in the show.

The sci-fi portion of it has the actual protagonist being attacked by her alien race, seemingly for being suspected of being a traitor, and she and her friend keeps taking down everyone that goes after them, even when there are more than one. How can a single ship take down a whole fleet, and later on a whole army? Well, you better believe it because it happens.

And it doesn’t stop there. Everything regarding this part of the show is horribly written and it doesn’t even connect with the main story. Unfortunately, to explain this, we have to step into spoiler territory.



And these are just the instances of horrible writing I off my memory at the moment of writing this, imagine how many more I could write about if I were to do a quick rewatch of sorts.

As for the characters, as you can tell by me never naming them, these are the things that I about them as well, characters, besides their roles as plot devices in the show:

-The main character, she is amnesiac, the plot somehow seemingly revolves around her, but she takes no part in it. At least she is willing to throw some punches when she needs to, I’ll give her that.

-The actual protagonist, she is unexpectedly a prankster.

-The infiltrator, she is resentful for having lost her ex-girlfriend, ends up becoming an ally once she finds out the truth.

-The teacher, she sucks at both of her jobs and ends up having no part in the plot nor any meaningful dynamic with any other character.

-Tall fat girl, her older sister has two babies.

-Cool girl, is the daughter of the school principal.

-Glasses girl, always liked fairy tales when she was a child, after a lot of drama she ends up writing the stage play that is never shown.

-The antagonists, they exist, they are cannon fodder and their reasoning is completely forced by the script with no explanation or logic whatsoever.

I can’t even say that the visuals are good even with three main studios working on this show. I’m sure they were innovating by 2007 standards, but by now they come off as, at best, painfully average and dated. The character designs are simple, generic and forgettable, the artwork is very inconsistent, the motions aren’t very good, the special effects and the backgrounds are not bad actually, but both are filled with very dated and crappy CGI made by Gonzo, a trademark of the studio for a while.

So in the end, Blue Drops ends up being a sci-fi show about an alien invasion that doesn’t go anywhere for most of its screen time, and with a single ship defeating a whole army, with absolutely no reasoning nor logic to unfold the way it does, and with one of the most illogical writing I have ever seen. It is also an empty slice of life series with no fleshed out, memorable nor likeable characters whatsoever, and it never manages to connect its parts together. It is also another nonsensical and quite toxic anime about lesbians, and even a visually very dated show.

But I still have two positive things to say about it. One is that it has a good sound department, very impactful and very well mixed sound effects both during battles and during slice of life moments, and also, very good soundtrack, even a very good opening, which sounds almost elegiac, too bad it ended up in this anime, and a very good ending, although not as good as the opening. Check out the full versions of both, because they are even better. The voice acting is not the typical voice acting I expected, but it is still not that special and not on par with the rest.

The other is having a very important death in it, which remains permanent, the character that dies isn’t magically brought back to life.

And even these two things are still only semi positives, since the volume in this anime randomly goes up and down for no reason, and that ends up being a bit annoying, and a character staying dead should be the norm anyways, and even then it’s weird because you wouldn’t expect this character to die throughout the whole show, it kind of happens to end in a dramatic way, in an attempt to finish with a somewhat bittersweet ending, and as far as I’m concerned it failed because I never cared for the character, and the scene afterwards has a comedic tone to it, ruining its impact.

It is far from the worst anime I watched in my life, and is not the worst nor most toxic, nor my most hated Shoujo Ai anime I watched, since I consumed both Kannazuki no Miko and NTR: Netsuzou TRap, but it is still a very terrible anime and one of the worst written anime I have watched in my life. Aside from listening to the very good soundtrack, I think that the best thing that can be done with this anime, is to stay the fuck away from it.