"The Bewitching Pierrot! Enraged Gundam Maxter"

In this episode, we learn Chibodee's dark and secret weakness. Unsurprisingly, it is something utterly ridiculous.
The show begins, as Allenby's did, with a Shuffle Alliance member being defeated unceremoniously. (These guys are just dropping like flies.) Yes, it's George's turn to feel like a complete loser! Because he's fighting— no lie— a clown. A Neo-Portugese clown. It attacks with balloons. No, I'm not making this up.

It seems that the Clowndam's next opponent is Chibodee. (We've hit the not-Domon arc at full speed, so get used to it.) Yet for whatever reason, everyone's partying at a parade-circus (?). Even Chibodee realises that this is just stupid, and that's saying something. According to his ladyfans, though, they're there to study the clown Fighter guy— who works at the circus as, you guessed it, a clown.
By sheer coincidence, the Chibodee legion bumps into the Domon legion. (No, not literally. The harem antics were last episode.) Domon proceeds to drag Chibodee bodily into the circus tent, mostly because Domon is always somewhat out-of-character in these caped-wall episodes. Remember, kids, good guys use violent force to make their friends do stuff they're afraid to do. The more you know!
The clown Fighter Romario (or whatever his name is) does some fairly generic acrobatic tricks. Everyone in the audience is somehow amused by this— except for Chibodee, who is having disturbing paranoid delusions. Ouch, mood whiplash.

Domon gets disproportionately angry at one of Romario's jokes, and starts fighting him. In the middle of the circus ring. (Yes, this actually happens.) Romario speaks at last to reveal something shocking: he has some knowledge of Domon's extremely well-known and famous special attack! Oh noes! It turns out it was part of a joke, but the fact remains that this clown man can imitate people with rather high accuracy. Chibodee then has more hallucinations.
Chibodee's ladyfans are stumped. Why is Chibodee so freaked out? I blame Hinamizawa Syndrome, but they decide to do some digging. Apparently someone's been accessing vital data on Chibodee's past. Where was this data being stored, exactly? (Wait, does this mean that Imagawa predicted the existence of blogs back in '95? Awesome!) You don't get any prizes for guessing who this "someone" is. While they're busy, Chibodee has even more hallucinations, to the point of running away. The ladyfans stand by and do absolutely nothing as their obviously Brainwashed and Crazy boss walks outside slowly (in his jammies, no less). This is why I call them "ladyfans" and not "bodyguards".

Chibodee wanders back to the circus, and starts having even more traumatic hallucinations. This guy is just a bundle of laughs, isn't he? It looks as if he was kidnapped by a criminally insane clown or something when he was a kid, which understandably led to a fear of clowns in general. Well, I can't exactly blame him. Given the situation, I'd have started "baseball practise" too.
Romario pops up to make things even worse (as if he needed to), and Domon and Rain decide to stop by too. They find Chibodee in the fetal position crying for his mummy. Romario, meanwhile, teleports off. It looks like the ladyfans actually did do something useful, since they were the ones who contacted Domon about Chibodee running off. (It seems like they could have stopped him before he left...) One of the ladyfans tries to comfort Chibodee...and he promptly decks her, then stalks off to Lord-knows-where. What a role model! The ladyfans then ask Rain to examine Chibodee, since they think that he was traumatised by the whole circus-kidnapping thing as a kid. (No duh!) Rain is reluctant (probably because she has absolutely no experience in psychology), but Domon returns home alone, more or less obliging her to help Chibodee.
Meanwhile, Chibodee practises boxing completely at random. I maintain that it's for the sole purpose of Bandit Keith fanservice, since he seems to have misplaced his shirt. Rain tries to speak to him, and eventually persuades him to talk about the whole kidnapping thing. Apparently, when he and his mother were finally about to go to the space colony, there was some sort of riot (started by criminals disguised as clowns) and young Chibodee was taken as a hostage. His mother probably died in the riot, and he never forgot the evil clown men who ruined things for him. Chibodee then asks Rain to sing his mother's lullaby for him; the ladyfans eavesdrop and learn the song as well. Chibby and Rain apparently end up partying all night long. Oh wait...this was a kid's show, wasn't it?
At the actual Fight twixt Jester Gundam and Maxter Gundam, Rain hangs out with the ladyfans instead of Domon. (Their little pals, who ship Domon x Rain, are not amused.) Domon ends up sitting with George, who warns him about Romario's mimicry ability. There's a rather odd bit of logic here. Romario can equally match anyone, and fighting him is (for all intents and purposes) the same as fighting oneself. The Gundam Fights are tests of pure fighting skill, and the effect of random environmental factors (e.g. weather) is negligible. The logical conclusion we can draw from this, then, is that anything other than a draw is impossible; neither side can triumph because they are precisely equal. The conclusion drawn in G Gundam, meanwhile, is that Romario will win. Chaos prevails. *sigh*

Indeed, Chibodee is doing poorly; however, this is completely unrelated to the aforementioned mimicry, and is mainly because Romario is laughing loudly in order to drudge up memories of the riot. (In other words, George's outcome and Chibodee's outcome are based on fundamentally different problems.) Since he is unable to let go of the past, Chibby's prospects are grim indeed. The ladyfans try to get Rain to sing the lullaby again, reasoning that it will recharge Chibodee's spirit, but she declines. After all, at the end of the day, Rain is a woman of Neo-Japan, and the ladyfans are women of Neo-America. It's their duty to help Chibodee, not Rain's. The ladyfans proceed to sing the song instead. Chibodee realises at last that he is not alone in the world, and forges ahead to victory for the sake of his friends.

Nattō

Is this really a kid's show??

No really, this episode was as bad as Golion. I couldn't believe it. The whole Chibodee backstory is completely...completely...completely messed up. G Gundam's target audience is about ten years old or less, yet this episode gleefully throws in hostage situations, domestic abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder as if they were nothing. And let's not forget the paranoid hallucinations! Those are just delightful.

Poor Chibodee. His spotlight episode was basically a narm-cake with narm frosting on top. And narm-candles. Yet for whatever reason, Narm King Algo didn't appear at all. I guess that's a small blessing.

Are we really supposed to believe that the best Fighter Neo-Portugal could come up with was a clown? Seriously? Seriously?

Romario's day job is supposed to be "clown". Thus, I have no idea why he did that little trapeze number. That's, um, just...not what clowns do. The purpose of a Clown is to fail abysmally while trying to make dogs do silly things. That is their role in the natural order. No, it's not particularly funny, but it's their thing.

Speaking of which, where the crap are the other performers? You can't have just one guy in a circus. It's impossible.

Why do Chibodee's ladyfans keep such incredibly valuable information as "Chibodee has no mommy and is scared of clowns" around at all? (It's not advisable to keep something that sensitive in a computer's memory; plus there was no reason to record it anywhere to begin with.) And why didn't they already know it, anyway?
Of course, if the information was stored somewhere else (e.g. on the Interwebs), that only raises more questions...

Going by the flashbacks to his childhood on Earth, apparently, Chibodee's natural hair colour is that weird shade of indigo. This means that the pink parts of his hair have been dyed that colour. I'm not even going to ask why Chibodee dyes part of his hair pink.

I was genuinely disquieted by the scene where Chibodee just smacks the crap out of someone who was trying to help him. (He hit hard enough to send her sprawling.) That was...that was just wrong. Full stop.

What kind of doctor is Rain? At least give some kind of indicator!

When Chibodee is having nightmares, he and his ladyfans are in a skyscraper-type building (probably a hotel). After he leaves the circus, he goes to a building shaped like a giant five-pointed star (which apparently houses Gundam Maxter. Why are the Gundam Fighter and crew staying in a completely different building that's so far away from the Gundam itself? That's just asking for the Gundam to get stolen, isn't it?

"Chibodee's popular with the girls." I guess that's why he randomly hits them?

Why is Chibodee's lullaby in Japanese when he is undeniably not of Japanese ancestry? Was his mum a weeaboo or something?

The Moments We've All Been Waiting For

Is it just me, or does the lower balloon in this picture look a lot like Doraemon?

I love pretty much everything Domon does during the circus scene. First, he loudly points out the truth behind all the tricks, as if to intentionally ruin the experience for the children with him. Then he totally loses it because the clown had started making fun of him. Wow. Domon has rage issues.

Yuri Amano (Rain's VA) also played Etoile in the extremely musical Marl Kingdom games. By sheer coincidence, she spends a suspiciously large portion of this episode singing. Hm.

Sorry, I have to crack a Futurama joke about Romario's mimic skill: "Now, now. Perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything."

It took me this long to notice that the ladyfans wear different colour neckties. They're like Ninja Turtles, or maybe Tally Hall.

Given that we never actually saw her die, and it's explicitly stated that Chibodee believes her to be alive, I was a bit worried that Chibodee's still-living mother would appear to sing for him when Rain wouldn't. I really think that would have weakened the story; the whole point of the episode was that no matter what you've been through, eventually you have to learn to let things go, and holding onto the past for too long will only hurt you more. I'm truly glad Imagawa went with "Chibodee still misses his mum, but he has lots of friends now, so he'll get through all right" instead.

Guide: 08/27/08 | Posted By: Tally Solleni | 0 comments | G Gundam