Vividred Operation ep1: I literally hope this shows runs out of a budget.

My head hurts. I don’t even know why I’m diving into so many new anime this season. Especially when, like most any anime fan whose been watching shows for more than a year, for every show that comes out, there’s generally four or five in my backlog in that same genre that I should’ve watched first. Vividred Operation looks like an interesting little project.  But the first episode didn’t prove that. It just showed me the near limits of what I’m willing to put up with in order to learn about a new anime.

So Vividred starts off by setting off all my alarms. The main character, a little girl by the name of…. it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to remember it. The main character rides around on her hover bike and internally monologues on and on about how wonderful the age she lives in is. She talks about how conflict is nonexistent thanks to some magical science (in anime magic and science can mix) that allows energy to be beamed throughout the world via an ellaborate satellite network from some giant powerplant in the ocean that has like no security and is the only thing of its kind in the world. Essentially this thing is the on/off switch for the entire world. So I automatically know that something is going to show up and try to have sex with it. And by having sex, I mean destroy it.

This magical technology that the show is going to use to fuel the plot was also invented by her grandfather. And as anyone who has watched their fair share of anime knows, if you parents or grandparents did, or do something great, you’re gonna pay for it later. Though it looks like she’s already paid the price. Her father is long dead, and her mother is in the hospital. It’s just her, her sister and her crazy-ass inventor granddad who live in the same shack together. Pitiful.

During all these introductions, the show seems to plod along at a pace that made me consider taking a nap. And this was while the evil (very reminiscent of Strike Witches) monster-of-the-week showed up to have sex with the very important and vulnerable thing in the middle of the ocean. There was just a lot of anime quirkiness for its own sake in this episode. The worst example being the granddad completing (or botching, I can’t tell the difference) an experiment that ended up flinging his mind out of his body and into the body of a stuffed ferret. I don’t understand. The girls are already cute, half naked shiny things to be gawked over. Why do they need a cute mascot with an old man’s voice? Tradition? Does someone at the studio really, really like Nanoha?

*sigh*

By the time we get to the end of the episode I’m already half out of it. As the show does nothing really exciting, mysterious or even remotely unique. I can see an angle where there’s an organization controlling a magical girl and giving her support like they would a giant robot from the super robot genre, think Evangelion, RahXephon or Gao Gai Gar. But that’s not really unique either since I’ve seen at least Symphogear do it.

The only positives I can pull from this first episode were that it reminded me that I needed to go back and finish watching quality mahou shoujo, and that I’m not a slave to any anime that comes along flashing shiny panties at me.