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!
“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
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.