Anime

Currently working my way through a bit of an oddity - Bodacious Space Pirates.

The concept is a good (at least for my own tastes) combination of intriguing and silly, but it almost immediately went south. But there was an odd thing there.

Okay - so we have this schoolgirl, Marika, who finds out that she's the heir to a pirate ship captaincy, and what's her reaction? Essentially, "Well gee, that's great, but I have to go to my part-time job now." And it didn't seem to matter how much the crew tried to impress on her that this was a serious matter - she was just "Well I have a test tomorrow, so I need to study for that," or "Sorry - I have to go to my club meeting now," or "Well they need me to fill in at the maid cafe, so I'll see you later." It wasn't that she wasn't interested in the ship or the captaincy - she definitely was. She just couldn't manage to keep her focus on that if any distraction came floating by. No matter how serious things got, she'd still spontaneously switch over into being a brainless schoolgirl. And that was really irritating, not least because she did show occasional flashes of intelligence and even brilliance, but inevitably went back to being a simpleton sooner or later.

But just about the time I was ready to drop it, they introduced another character, and in fact another schoolgirl who's heir to a ship, and her role in large part turned out to be a sort of audience surrogate who tells Marika to knock it the hell off. Specifically, "When you act like a ditz, you put people in danger, and it makes me mad, so you need to stop doing it." And though it does take a while, she does finally stop being such an annoying ditz and actually focuses on being a pirate captain, and turns out to be a very good one.

I thought that was odd though. Rather than make her competent from the start, the writer(s) made her irritatingly shallow, but apparently knew enough to recognize that that was going to be irritating, so made it a pose that she was striking for some inexplicable reason, and included an audience surrogate to tell her just how irritating she was being and to knock it the hell off. If I had thought that she was just going to be that way, I would've dropped it, but just about the time I was ready to do that, they introduced a character who called out the exact problem, which is the only thing that kept me watching it.

That's kind of a neat trick really, but seems like a lot of trouble and risk to go to when it would've been easier to just not make her irritating in the first place. I can see writers inadvertently making a character so irritating that they lead to people dropping the series, but deliberately doing that, then saving it at the last minute by having someone in-universe call it out? At the least, I don't see how that adds anything of value to the story.

Still though, now that that's (apparently) a thing of the past, it's settled down into just being a sort of stylized adventure story, and is pretty good all in all.