Episode 17 –
Lol, well once again, Aquarion decided to go all out with being super weird. This time around, this episode had a strange combination of bikinis, bananas, onsen hot springs digging, and random onsen-milk-banana Aquarion Unions. Seriously speaking, the episode turned super strange over the span of about 30 seconds, and was pretty darn hilarious.
Anyways, I mentioned last week that Zessica was getting sidelined due to the focus on the Amata x Mikono relationship. Well, it seems that I may have made that statement a bit too soon, where the creators of this show are now going through the trouble of focusing in a bit on her, and her own conflicted feelings over Amata. She realizes her love for him is never going to be requited, yet she seems to get over it and refuses to give up. It’s a cliche plot direction eerily familiar for those that are familiar with love triangles in Anime, and it looks like Zessica will have even more screentime in next week’s episode. On an unrelated note, I seem to have this peculiar feeling that something horrific will happen to Zessica in the near future; I guess it’s just that her confession last week felt like a death flag of sorts. Hopefully I’m just imagining things.
Aside from touching on Zessica’s feelings, this entire episode felt like filler, mainly because of the plethora of fanservice and some really weird fight scenes. The fight scenes were absolutely hilarious, mind you, but it still felt a bit random and pointless. There are some definite hints towards an overarching goal of sorts though, particularly the search for the “Golden Wings”. As to how our cast (Amata in particular) relate to the wings still remains to be seen.
In the end, there really didn’t seem to be any sort of meaningful purpose for this episode. Perhaps it was meant to be a simple breather from the super-dramatic episodes in recent memory; it certainly accomplished that with flying colors. On a side note, I would like to mention how there are strong sexual connotations to this episode, along with some rather sexists lines of dialogue that are somewhat derogatory of women. However, I’d prefer to not to have a discussion over such a complex matter, because then we’d be wandering outside of anime territory and would be discussing the structural problems and complexities to Japanese society, the still male-dominated culture, etc.
Screenshots are later in the post.
P.S. Zessica’s new dress looks plain awkward…
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