Today, Sai Saishii learns a valuable lesson: girls are not icky. Good for him. Saishii is my favourite Shuffle Alliance member (mostly because his competition consists of a narmy pirate, Bandit Keith, a Frenchman who might as well be wearing a pink hat, and a bipolar obnoxious samurai), so I was rather fond of this episode- it doesn't quite reach the same level as the later Sai Saishii versus Domon episode, but it's still great. It's also nice to see a comic relief character finally scoring a girl, even though it ends up about as well as you'd expect.
For a very brief period in this episode, G Gundam suddenly goes shōjo on us, complete with fluffy bubble effects and pastel colours. Yes, you read the title right: as difficult as it may be to believe, Sai Saishii has actually fallen in love, and he's not doing any skirt-flipping to the lady involved either. Fortunately for the group of people who break out in hives upon touching Shōjo Beat (i.e. me), the episode is really a sort of half-shōnen-half-shōjo mix. There's a fair amount of material about Saishii and his relationship with the girl, but it ties fairly neatly into the Gundam Fight thread, and the two plotlines finally merge in the truly nifty Fight between Dragon Gundam and Mermaid Gundam. (Don't worry, the girl isn't a Gundam Fighter. That's not till the next episode.)
As the episode begins, Neo-Denmark's Mermaid Gundam chalks up another win. The problem is that it's getting progressively more damaged, and probably won't survive many more Fights, victories or otherwise. Sai Saishii, it seems, is the Mermaid Gundam's next opponent- and unlike Domon "Last-Minute-Notice" Kasshu, he learns about this some time before the Fight proper. However, like Domon, Saishii is not particularly worried about the Fight, and runs away in mid-lecture to good off.
While engaged in this solemn pursuit, Saishii notices some punks who are trying to scam a nearby restaurant owner (it's the classic "bring a bug with you, hide it in your food, then blame the staff when you pretend to find it" one). Even Saishii, who basically grew up in a monastery, can tell that this is a blatant lie. However, the person who speaks up is NPC Girl Cecile, apparently a witness to the "remove bug from pocket" step. One of the thugs tries to hit on her, of all things, which prompts Sai Saishii to develop something resembling chivalry and step in to protect her. What follows is one of the more improbable fights in the series, as it's basically one scrawny kid against three very large thugs; regardless, Saishii triumphs with Secret Monk Power- and of course, every time Secret Monk Power shows up, you know Surprise Cooking won't be far behind. True to form, Saishii and Cecile end up having to work the restaurant together, because the old man they saved has a heart condition. Before long, it's pretty clear that Saishii has it bad for his new co-worker.
The problem is that she's the younger sister of Hans the Neo-Denmark Gundam Fighter, Sai Saishii's next opponent. This means that if Sai Saishii wins the Fight, Hans and Cecile will have to go back to the space colony. Thus, Saishii is presented with a troubling choice: lose on purpose, which is quite dishonourable (to Hans, himself, the Shaolin Temple, and Saishii's father who dreamed of reviving the temple), or win seriously, which would mean wounding his first love in a rather painful way and then making her leave forever. Ouch. The ravages of puberty leave no one unscathed, it seems. In the end, Saishii decides to stay out of the Fight altogether.
Naturally, this seems a worrisome choice to pretty much everyone who knows him, so Cecile mounts a search for him. It turns out that Saishii is randomly moping on the same seawall where he more or less confessed his love to Cecile. She serves him a good helping of Brightslap (hey, this is Gundam, remember?) and scolds him for running away, since to her, that's basically saying that her brother is weak and doesn't stand a chance. Saishii explains that no, he's worried that if the Mermaid Gundam gets too damaged, it'll be eliminated from the Fight and Cecile will have to leave him. Cecile begs him to fight anyway, because she really believes that her brother will win (awww). However, before he can actually answer, he's accosted by the punk guys from the beginning of the episode. For some inexplicable reason, they have their own giant medium-sized robots, and apparently have the intention of putting the hurt on Saishii for beating them up the other day. Thankfully, Domon shows up and agrees to give Saishii a hand, since the latter has things like an imminent Gundam Fight on his plate at the moment. Domon promptly defeats the punk guys by tripping them. Ouch, dignity. (Given that they spout the same "we'll get revenge" line as before, I was hoping that the scammer dudes would show up in another episode, Rocket Gang-style, but no such luck.)
Indeed, Sai Saishii makes it to the Fight just in time, and the battle goes on exactly as planned. The main thing is that Hans is able to trick Saishii into entering the water, wherein the Mermaid Gundam obviously possesses a significant advantage. Saishii seems to be losing, but ends up removing his own arm (well, technically, the Dragon Gundam's arm, but it's clear that he himself feels the same pain and can't use that arm for the remainder of the battle) and eventually triumphs. (The Dragon Gundam has a dragon head on each arm, so Saishii removed one arm and buried it in the sand, in order to trick Hans into thinking he had an opportunity to attack the Gundam head proper.) Of course this means that Cecile will have to leave, so Saishii becomes fairly depressed, despite being one step closer to achieving his father's dream.
The two then have a very brief goodbye at the airport (spaceport?). Cecile kisses Saishii(!), and then takes her leave, calling him by his real name for the first time and promising to cheer for him. He's all smiles until she leaves, after which he seems to slip right back into depression. His two gramps reflect that it was a mistake to have treated him as a mere child, and Saishii decides to redouble his championship-winning efforts, for Cecile's sake. (Yeah right, not even Imagawa is going to throw us a plot twist like "Sai Saishii wins the Gundam Fight and Domon eats humble pie"...)

Nattō

Personally, I find the "Mermaid Gundam is nearly a goner" plot element rather contrived; it was very definitely established that the Gundams can be replaced, repaired, etc. an infinite number of times without penalty, as long as they don't lose the head. Note that the God Gundam was not barred from entering or disqualified, despite the fact that Domon had been using a completely different Gundam up till that point. It could be that Neo-Denmark is too poor to replace the Gundam or something, but that seems starkly depressing in comparison with the rest of the series, and there's never any particular proof of it either. Perhaps Neo-Denmark shares current-Denmark's attention to the environment, and wanted to bow out of the Gundam Fight gracefully before hurting the Earth any further? The worst part, which disproves pretty much any theory that could be constructed, is the later episode where Neo-Denmark unloads an army of Mermaid Gundam prototypes. Yes, they had like several thousand fish-themed Gundams lying around, but didn't have the basic human decency to send one along when their main unit was falling apart. Wow. I guess the space colonies are mostly populated by evil jerks.

It's worth noting that in this episode and several like it, Domon is reduced to what I call the Caped Wall. Without any main-character stuff to do, he ends up wandering around and standing very still while talking a lot; because he usually doesn't need to do any fighting in these episodes, the animators usually render him with him with his cape closed, covering everything but his head (resembling a squarish red wall), since that's much easier to draw than the entire character model. His height is fairly inconsistent between episodes as a result, as it's a lot harder to remember proportions when you're dealing with a giant red square. Note that he only looks a few cm taller than Rain in one scene of this episode, while at other points in the series, he towers over everyone but Chibodee (who, as the resident Eaglelander, must be very tall) and Algo (who is possibly even more worthy of the "wall" nickname). I must admit that I prefer Caped Wall Domon to Horrendously Off-model Domon, but the latter rears its terribly ugly head in this episode too. It's not as bad as Lost Universe's infamous "coconut crab" episode, but it is dangerously, dangerously close.

The outfit Saishii wears while playing hooky BURNS MY EYES. As an aesthete, I could probably write an encyclopaedia about everything wrong with it. The only thing about it that doesn't send me into frothing convulsions would probably be the shades. Shades are cool (unless they are being worn by dogs, in which case they are far from cool). Yes.

The icing on the cake is that while wearing the aforementioned outfit, Saishii describes himself as a bishōnen. That statement has an equally large number of things wrong with it...

I'm not very familiar with what is or isn't an acceptable name in most languages, but I find it extremely doubtful that Chikurin is a real name anywhere. I can only wonder why Saishii considered it an acceptable pseudonym...and none of this is helped by the fact that Saishii, while introducing himself, says all but one syllable of his real name before correcting it, very unconvincingly, to the fake. I guess it's for the best that Cecile ends up going back into space instead of staying with Saishii, since it's pretty clear that she doesn't have two brain cells to rub together. (She remarks off-handedly that Chikurin is an odd name, but seems to be completely fooled by the façade regardless, despite the slip-up with the name and the times when she saw him without the sunglasses.)

Also, this episode's ending is ahuge downer. Uuuuu...first off, Sai Saishii won't ever see Cecile ever again. Second, even if he does manage to somehow, he'll have to content with her overprotective big brother, who apparently is a crazy-skilled martial artist (Saishii admits that he went with the arm-tearing strategy because Hans was too strong to be defeated any other way)- and besides that, Saishii's part of the Shaolin Temple, so he probably has some oaths of celibacy kicking around. Then there's the fact that Saishii was directly responsible for Cecile having to leave in the first place, even though he sincerely wanted to stay with her. And promises aside, I don't think it's really a spoiler to say "the cute comic relief kid isn't going to win; the main character, obnoxious samurai boy though he is, is going to win. Duh." Finally, the ultimate heart-stabbing "IMAGAWA MUST HATE US, THAT'S WHY HE'S DOING THIS" moment: Throughout the latter part of his goodbye, Saishii forces a smile to keep Cecile from being sad. Wow. There's something about that scene that is so fundamentally sad, I- the eternal lover of words- can't even begin to describe it. I will actually have to rely on an "emote-icon" to do so: ;_;. That is an emote-icon of a crying person. They are probably crying because Sai Saishii's pretend smile is so sad.
So sad.

The Moments We've All Been Waiting For

Sometimes off-model art is actually very awesome, but not in the way it was intended to be. This is one such example. (Not even I could suppress a chuckle at the expressions in that shot.)

Humorously, Imagawa-san has actually stated in an interview that he doesn't really know what Matador Gundam's Red Flag Swirl looks like. (In this episode, the only one to really include Matador Gundam, the attack misfires; the most we get is a line from Rain about how it's always impressive no matter how many times one sees it.) He basically offered some terrifically vague speculation about the move's basic nature and left it at that.

I actually find the depiction of Sai Saishii's first love rather refreshing. Despite its apparent frequency in real life, it's rare to see an anime where kids affected by lovesickness act kind of stupid, won't quit showing off, and are really, genuinely happy to be near the object of their affection (and admit such, at least to themselves). Better yet, there's none of the tedious "nooo, she's not my girlfriend, that's embarrassing" stuff here. Compare the relationship between Saishii and Cecile to that of Domon and Rain, the latter pair being only two or three years older than the former. The difference in that case probably comes from Saishii's whimsical nature, but even compared to other comic-relief characters, the whole thing is quite an oddity.

On that note, this picture makes me smile every time I see it. The main phrase that comes to mind is "they seem very happy together".

Also, the scene where Saishii leaps into the air yelling what amounts to "ALL RIIIIGHT!" and the subsequent scene transition is a PINK HEART should win some manner of award. It cannot even be measured in mere love-love levels.

"Followers of the Shaolin Temple will be here to cheer him on" is what Saishii's two grandpas say at one point, according to the subtitles. However, the word they use in Japanese is "ōendan". This really does mean "cheering party" or something in that vein, and is a perfectly normal, common word. The thing is that most gamers (at least, most of the gamers I know) associate the word with something considerably more awesome.

An embarrassed Saishii is fine too. (It becomes abundantly clear in this episode that Saishii is a bit more nervous around girls than one might assume. I guess it does make sense for a guy raised by monks to freak out when a girl touches his hand.)

Sai Saishii really has some lovely friends. Domon and Rain notice him sitting on a fence next to a girl, and Domon's first thought is that he should go over and bother them. Even more strangely, he has this completely bizarre, lecherous, and un-Domon-like tone of voice as he announces his intention to do so. Besides that, both Domon and Rain seem completely shocked and disbelieving at the thought of Saishii having a girlfriend. They really do what they can to boost the poor kid's self-esteem, don't they?

I can't possibly be the only one who had thought "CASABLANCA!" during this episode's ending. A guy letting the girl he loves leave on a plane with another guy, knowing that he'll probably never see her again? And it's probably not a coincidence; Imagawa-san occasionally talks about old American films and how they inspired this or that in the series, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was some manner of homage.

In closing, best alarm clock ever? Best alarm clock ever.

Here's looking at you, kid.

Guide: 04/25/08 | Posted By: Tally Solleni | 0 comments | G Gundam