Rolling Girls – Episode 11

Welp, at least we’ll always have the fights. This episode really brought Rolling Girls’ narrative failings to the fore, with the busyness of this arc’s storytelling offering pretty much no emotional hooks whatsoever. But yeah. The fights! Plenty of fun fights this week, plenty of beautiful backgrounds, not an ounce of narrative sense. Ah well.

Here’s my full ANN post. Notes below!

Rolling Girls

“Rose of Passion” is the episode title

“I know that you’re strong. But I have to deal with you. For everyone’s livelihoods… so Mom can have it a little easier!” Jeez, I already care about this girl more than the leads

This fight isn’t really the best-looking. Lots of charging at things. But I guess that’s because Momo isn’t very strong

Oh snap, her mom isn’t Haru, her mom is the Best she was fighting

The Okayama Demons are apparently gone. It’s just Ura Kukino now, oppressing the people

And now Haru wants to fight her? Okay

Nozomi back to trying to stop Kaguya from fighting

Nozomi just doesn’t like fighting

And now there’s one of those tax collectors from Okayama here, who says he’s the old Demons captain

His name is Kibina

Ura apparently became a demon to save the people? …somehow?

And Kibina wants to unite the towns with the help of Kuramochi, the old Hiroshima leader

Chiaya flashback: “the president was always so busy because she was trying to return you to your real family.” But Chiaya has a family now?

“They’re both her moms, right?” Go Chiaya. Maybe the most competent of them, actually

This episode really doesn’t look that good. Ai in particular almost never looks right

Ai’s trying to use a stone to become a Best, but it ain’t working

Ai stops the fight by almost sacrificing Momo’s dog

These moms

So Ura is now supporting Kaguya

Yukina bonding with her cellmate over Momi-Ham

Everybody in the cells bonding over Momi-Ham lol

Don’t fuck up the directions, Yukina!

Pirate Queen Shima’s assistant dude is an amnesiac. He kinda looks like Yukina, so…

Shigyo and Ma-chan defeated immediately

Ah, the assistant guy is from the moon

Kaguya arrives to fight. Nice smears

Ah, Kaguya is avenging Okayama’s leaders, who were forced into bad deals by Shima. So they give her the excuse to fight, I guess?

Shima and Kaguya were once friends, because of course they were

More beautiful explosions. Water and light into sharks and mantas into crashing waves, blooming flowers interspersed with colored swords slashes that explode in bloom

Yep, Shima’s assistant is from the moon

And now Shima has a giant robot

This episode has way too much meaningless plot

3 thoughts on “Rolling Girls – Episode 11

  1. I can’t tell whether I think Rolling Girls needed an extra episode spent in each area so it could properly flesh each conflict out, or just a really judicious editor to cut out all the meaningless extra stuff. Leaning towards good editor. Or someone to completely rewrite how each conflict is presented. Actually yeah, the last one might be best. Because I know there’s an utterly superb show in here, but I don’t know how one might salvage it if they were to try. Music is still great though

    • Yeah, Rolling Girls kinda feels like a beautiful jigsaw puzzle put together entirely wrong. It wouldn’t need /more/ animation or art to be a good show – its failings largely come down to the narrative composition, which is a real shame. Even mediocre shows are normally at least coherent in their storytelling.

      • Great way to put it. You know how film fans often make their own “cuts” of films, or even mash films together to make something new? It’d be interesting to see the anime fandom do that with series. Try to fix them, make a new story, etcetera. Heck, you could even change the dialogue in the subtitles- though I’m sure that would mess with anyone who can actually speak Japanese.

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