Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re steering our ship towards Bodacious Space Pirates, which most recently introduced the threat of genuine pirate hunters to harass our intrepid heroes. This was all quite surprising, considering pirates don’t actually engage in any sort of illegal business; they’re basically a combination of traveling entertainers and high-stakes couriers, with all of their missions approved by a central authority.
As such, it’s hard to say who would have a vendetta against any pirates, much less the concept of modern-day piracy in general. And on top of that, we’ve now got some weirdo warping in while standing on top of his spaceship, in full cross-armed Gunbuster array. Bodacious Space Pirates has generally taken care to partition the tone of its various core elements; the lighthearted high school drama doesn’t undercut the grounded scifi worldbuilding, and vice versa. But a dude standing on top of a ship doing sentai poses feels like a traveler from a more super robot-informed universe, and so I’m eager to see how he slots into our existing configuration. Let’s see how this confrontation plays out in a fresh Bodacious Space Pirates!
Episode 23
“To belong to no one else. To be no one else’s power. To be your own person, traveling space for your own benefit. That is what it means to be a space pirate with a Letter of Marque.” It’s certainly true that the space pirates are an anachronism, and a theoretical threat to full control by governments or private sector interests. It’d be easy to conjure some character who has a personal grudge against pirates, but that seems less in this show’s style than a threat representing the inexorable consolidation of economic forces over time, which would naturally wish to shut down the Letter of Marque program eventually. It’s an odd thing, a story about space pirates that is most principally concerned with human cultural evolution on the macro scale
Given the incredibly advanced nature of this pirate hunter, I’d assume some larger corporation or government entity is backing them
Gunbuster dude’s ship also looks quite advanced, though in a more traditionally angular warship design than the futuristic soft curves and light colors of the attacker
We’re even getting a hint of Spanish guitar in the soundtrack, emphasizing our tonal movement into this larger-than-life standoff
Gunbuster’s ship is apparently the Parabellum, a pirate ship as well. But this ship actually works for the Galactic Empire, rather than existing as an odd cultural artifact like the Bentenmaru
That’s a pretty worrying designation. The only reason the Sea of the Morningstar’s pirates are considered non-threatening is because they’re not unified and not working for a larger organization; pirates that work directly for the empire sound a lot more like secret police
Hyakume provides the necessary explanation for this dude literally standing in space: it’s a hologram, alongside his flapping flag hologram, all designed to impose a strong first impression on their enemies
Regardless, his ship is like ninety percent missile bays, so his first strike is pretty impressive all by itself
“That’s taking the sound effects too far!” “You could really hear the bass!” The show is having a lot of fun with this interloper essentially imposing a super robot aesthetic shell on our existing production, using holograms and sound effects to demand his actions hew to the conventions of his own bombastic genre
Gunbuster dude’s name is Ironbeard. Misa apparently knows him
“We hail from distant seas. Great peril has come upon you.” Ironbeard’s apparently just as much of a performer as Sea of the Morningstar’s pirates, leaving Marika somewhat nonplussed
He states that the pirate hunter vehicle is called the Grand Cross
“Can’t we do anything about those sound effects?” “Parabellum’s forcing it into the sound wave. It’s funny, so I’m leaving it.” Bless you, Coorie. And it’s very in Bodacious Space Pirate’s style to make an extended joke out of all the work you’d have to do to make actual spaceships look and act like spaceships do in children’s cartoons. There’s no sound in space! Lasers don’t make ‘pshew pshew’ noises by themselves!
The team evacuates their sister pirate ship, but the ship itself is lost. Another pirate legacy consigned to history
Captain Stone actually knew the main crew of the Bentenmaru from back in Marika’s father’s day. His words emphasize how a tight-knit community is being undone by these pirate hunters
Back at home, Chiaki has rejoined the class as her father’s representative, who is proposing an alliance between all pirates possessing a Letter of Marque. A desperate play that may invite government intervention, but what other choice do they have? It’s clear that one or two of these aging pirate ships can’t square up against the Grand Cross
And of course, as the one pirate ship to survive an encounter with the Grand Cross, the Bentenmaru is crucial to this alliance
“The gravity-controlling ship may have come from a higher-level area than any of the nearby governments, including Serenity.” “Meaning the Galactic Empire?” Oh, that’s very interesting. So not only does the Galactic Empire control a vast amount of space, its government is also hoarding a higher level of tech advancement than what is available to smaller powers. Another extremely Bodacious Space Pirates worldbuilding flourish; rather than assuming either equal levels of technology or one terrifyingly advanced enemy force, this universe possesses the same smaller yet crucial discrepancies of technological advancement that define our own international relations, except expanded into the fields of interstellar travel and space weaponry
Gruier promises to look into the situation. Always handy to have a politically involved princess on your side
Subtle visual dash of characterization as they meet for parfaits: Chiaki and Marika both finish theirs immediately, while the appearances-bound princess merely picks at hers
Oh wow, what a perfectly cynical yet completely realistic answer. The Galactic Empire is funding efforts to create gravity-manipulating warships, meaning several corporations are working on secret projects to that effect, and at least one of those corporations is using backwater pirate vessels to test the efficacy of their new ships. I should have guessed; no malice or any other emotion in this assault, just the soulless march of capitalism seeing a resource it can exploit
Chiaki states that they need to find “the Legendary Chef”
Classic “old-timey film stock” post production effects as we flash back to the legend of this chef. Black and white photography, specks of grain floating on individual frames, and uneven black lines denoting damage to the film stock incurred over repeated usage. The aesthetic vocabulary of ostentatiously old-fashioned film
It seems like using holograms to project your captain over your ship was more common back in the old days; previous generations of pirates seemed to take the whole “we’re rampaging ruffians” concept more seriously, presumably acting more like poor Captain Stone
Chiaki is trying to monologue dramatically, and Marika/Gruier just keep making jokes and toasting at random. Bless this team
Apparently it’s the Legendary Chef who actually brought the disparate pirates together back in the day
“His many delicious dishes, and above all his sorbets, melted the rough hearts of the pirates.” So he’s basically a living representation of this show’s cross-genre collision
As it turns out, that Legendary Chef is actually the same chef that Marika and her team have been visiting for on-planet meetings
Ah, it was actually that chef’s father. Well, that makes more sense timeline-wise
And so the chef sends out the pirate signal!
But then, the Grand Cross reemerges!
And Done
Oh boy, just one thing after another right at the end there, huh? Every meeting we’ve had with this universe’s other pirates has been delightful, so I’m very much looking forward to this congregation of all the remaining vessels of Sea of the Morningstar. I’m frankly not sure how gathering more pirates is going to overcome the astonishing technological deficit between them and their opponents; this isn’t really the kind of production where “heart and guts” can overcome superior firepower, so I’m instead assuming we’ll need some sort of political secret weapon to outmaneuver the Grand Cross. Even in this time of political-economic consolidation, the light of piracy must endure!
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