Let’s continue our journey through the strange and fascinating Simoun! Last week offered our first Floe-focused episode of the show so far, and it certainly didn’t disappoint. Floe has always been one of my low-key favorite members of the cast, not necessarily because she herself is charming (I mean, it’s obvious she’s kind of a pill), but because she’s willing to be expressive and needy and petty and generally a full-fledged person in a show where so many of her compatriots work hard to maintain their above-it-all priestess persona. The cast of Simoun are teenage girls who’ve been taught to present themselves as flawless religious icons, and Floe refuses to stop being a teenage girl.

Of course, Floe’s actions aren’t some thoroughly intentional choice designed to undercut the sanctity of her position – she simply does what she wants to, and doesn’t really consider the consequences. It was thus the same qualities that make her such a welcome antidote to the usual priestess image that also put her in a terribly vulnerable position last episode, where she was forced to reckon with the immediate consequences of what priestesses do after developing feelings for an ordinary soldier. Floe has been able to maintain a certain distance from the reality of her situation, but having now destroyed her lover’s home town, I’m guessing she’ll have to finally reckon with her unconsidered feelings on the nature of priestesses. Floe is certainly headstrong, but I feel that her act first, think later philosophy could actually help characters like Neviril, who have many of the same disagreements with Simulacrum society, but less willingness to break protocol in order to voice them. And with Kaimu also being shaken by last episode’s violence, it seems likely the whole team will have to question how they feel about their own work. Let’s dive right back into Simoun!

Episode 12

A very abrupt shift in this episode’s opening scene. Without any resolution of last week’s battle, we jump directly to Dominura putting Kaimu and Airi together as a Simoun pair. The two sisters – we’ve gotten some focus on Kaimu regarding her relationship with Para, but haven’t really had that much focus on Airi yet

“No more disgraceful conduct will be permitted!” But… what are they even referring to? If they’re still just echoing the failures that led Chor Tempest to this overall situation, this segment all feels weirdly flat

And now we jump to the canteen, where Floe seems totally oblivious to the horrors of last episode. Are they actually going to treat that as an utterly episodic vignette that’s now somewhere far in the past? That seems like a huge waste

Floe up to her usual tricks, pointing out Yun is carefully pushing aside all her onions. Floe highlights the often concealed humanity of her teammates

Okay, here we go. Now Kaimu is actively calling Floe out on how she seems to have already forgotten Mastif

This birds-eye shot as Floe marches out does a very nice job of emphasizing the division lines within Chor Tempest

Morinas seems to have become relatively close friends with Wapourif, the head engineer. This story really hasn’t given Morinas much to do – she was initially presented as a rival for Aaeru, but Aaeru isn’t the type to care about rivals, and Morinas is no match for her anyway

Alti comes to apologize for her sister

Oh man, Floe gets a wonderful little monologue there. “Your sister has a point. That night… I thought my heart would stop. But it didn’t. I don’t ever want to forget what happened that night.” Floe herself is alarmed by how quickly her time with Mastif became “something that happened in the past.” All those feelings, all that suffering, and yet she was somehow able to emotionally just pass on by. And that genuinely scares her, and she’s already worried about forgetting what she learned from the experience. Floe articulating a poignant feeling that demonstrates she can be just as thoughtful as any of them, and is conflicted about her identity as a soldier in her own way

The show’s doing a solid job of conveying this dark and stormy night. This short cut of Limoun looking out at the rain is evocative, and these shots of the ship through the trees use the low lighting of the ship’s profile to make it actually feel somewhat natural within its environment

I appreciate that these subbers translated Floe’s “mendokusai” as “what a sourpuss.” Floe is definitely the kind of person who’d use the term “sourpuss”

“No matter how much I wash, it won’t come off.” Yeah, Kaimu’s still very shaken by that battle

Rea invites Limoun to her bed if she’s scared, an invitation Limoun accepts purely because Rea herself is scared. We’re getting a bunch of nice little incidental moments between the cast now

This episode cares far more about maintaining a coherent atmosphere than most Simoun episodes – this whole stormy day maintained its tension wonderfully

Kaimu seems haunted by sexually charged fantasies of some kind

I wonder if her feelings for Para have made her come to see kissing as a sexual act, and not a religious one

And her kiss with Alti… draws blood?

“We’re just ‘praying to the sky.’” Yep. Kaimu deliberately frames their flight in the most staid, neutral way possible

And their simoun spins out of control

Kaimu claims that everything is Alti’s fault. This is clearly a dramatic confrontation for them, but we’re severely lacking in the context necessary to give us much investment in this situation. Our only connection to either of these characters is through Kaimu’s feelings for Para, and that doesn’t seem to have any bearing on this particular argument

They discover an enemy ship in the cloudbank

“Nee-san and I… we can make it work.” This is actually a relatively common style of backstory episode, where the “big grudge” that defined some current relationship is concealed as a late-episode reveal, but it feels like a fundamentally flawed dramatic structure. All I know is that Kaimu is mad at Alti for Reasons, meaning I can’t sympathize with either of them because I just don’t know what their deal is

“We’ll approach cautiously and board the enemy ship.” This seems like an astoundingly reckless plan, but I’m down

This episode is doing a very solid job of mitigating the inherent visual disruptiveness of the show’s CG objects by placing them within compositions that naturally echo their sharp lines and regular curves. Many of the show’s biggest visual problems come from its difficulty compositing the CG against the background – in other words, the difficulty of making both the CG Simouns and sketch/watercolor backgrounds look like they’re all part of the same environment. This episode alleviates that issue by instead placing Simouns against other mechanical objects, placing foreground objects in front of the Simouns to create a greater sense of depth, and avoiding shots where the Simouns are directly contrasted against the ornate hand-drawn backgrounds. Much of anime production comes down to mitigating necessary evils (limited animation, repeated cuts, etc), and this episode is doing an excellent job of rising above Simoun’s natural weaknesses in a visual sense

“Doesn’t it matter to them that they’re outmatched? Aren’t they afraid of dying?” Alti asking questions that simultaneously demonstrate her ignorance and her intelligence. She doesn’t know anything about her enemies at all, but she’s quick to see them as fellow people like herself

Kinda funny that the show is basically just using this enemy base invasion to split the group into two pairs in order to talk about feelings

Oh wow, the two of them actually had sex? I guess that certainly explains why Kaimu feels so awkward

Man, if Kaimu gets herself killed over this crap, I’m gonna be annoyed

“Only when both of you are strong can you really embrace each other.” This episode’s nebulous view of strength, along with its last-minute reveal of tragic incest, really aren’t coming together into a particularly satisfying whole

Aaeru lightly offers to embrace Neviril, and Neviril counters by reflecting on their very divergent life goals. Aaeru just wants to avoid going to the spring, but Neviril is different

And Done

Well, that episode was… kind of a mess? Can I say that? There were certainly strong moments throughout, and I actually thought this episode’s direction was a pretty substantial step up from the show’s usual standard. But the actual main conflict, the resentment Kaimu felt towards her sister, felt far too underwritten to really invest in. Not only were we denied the context and intimate character moments necessary to sell their dynamic, but the episode’s ultimate reflections on “strength” felt too nebulous to really hold onto, either. Simoun is a very compelling show on the whole, but on an episode-to-episode basis it can also be a somewhat bumpy ride. Fortunately, this episode’s failings weren’t load-bearing ones – it was just a lousy character vignette, and those happen. I’m still just as ready for whatever’s next!

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