Kakumeiki Valvrave 2nd Season

Valvrave: The Liberator is an alternate history philosophical mecha melodrama set a thousand years into the future. They say time mends all wounds and indeed, in this future, Germany and Russia have united into a single country. The show follows a bunch of ordinary space students turned immortal vampire mecha pilots for the army of the Independent Highschool Moon Colony as they wreak havoc thru the dyson sphere surrounding our sun in an attempt to reestablish the Russian monarchy.

The show is insanely deep with symbolism and meaning, tackling various high concepts and taboo subjects. It tries to reconcile Plato's world of Ideal Forms with sub-atomic ... particle physics, postulating the existence of the smallest information particle which draws unimaginable power from cognitive meaning. The show goes even further by showing us how these particles could power fighting robots. Indeed, it shatters all physical paradigms. Not to slack off on the question of morality, the morally gray world of Valverape: The Penetrator asks us the question - what is the line separating sexual violation from consensual rape?

As I watched L-Elf single handedly crash the whole Germano-Russian army in an attempt to free a captive alien princess and take down the Führer so Russian monarchy loyalists can reinstate their emperor, I knew this anime was something truly special. I mean, I thought this was supposed to be about proclaiming a school into an independent country? No wait. Was it actually a romantic comedy primarily? Huh.

In any case, Vulvarape is a must see. A true patrician's work and a true masterpiece.

10/10

Sometimes, a work is just too ambitious for its own good.

'Valvrave the Liberator' has an awful lot going for it from the start. The story is a hodge-podge of genres, mixing mecha with vampires to surprisingly interesting effect. The tone is fairly dark most of the time, but also absolutely lets itself have lighter moments, small victories, bits of fun, especially nearer the start. The first season is pretty fantastic, and I have little bad to say about it, other than the point it stops is a bit clunky when you bear in mind the two seasons were split by a few months. The ... mecha elements are consistently top-of-the-class; the CG is good and even has a decent weight to it, the action scenes are fantastically put together, and the titular Valvraves themselves are some of my favourite designs in the genre; I've never come across mecha that do such a good job of looking like they were made for one thing and one thing only; destruction. The cast is well-balanced, with a good variety of personalities and designs, and as far as the characters that get proper focus, decently complex and interesting. The soundtrack is great, the art style is conventional but generally looks smart and tidy (apart from one episode, weirdly; I guess they were saving budget for elsewhere), the direction is strong.
From the start it makes, it looked like it could have easily, in another life, become one of the biggest vanguards in the return of the mecha genre to being a huge part of anime culture. It's so ambitious, it had such a monumental amount of potential and such a fantastic start, it felt familiar enough to be immediately engaging to a fan of the genre yet unique enough to feel like a refreshing change of pace.

That's an awful lot of weight to carry for a 24 episode series.

I'm going to be honest here, the second season of 'Valvrave the Liberator' gets more depressingly disappointing the longer it gets. It's just trying to do too much, and it just runs out of time to do it all. It needed another episode, at the very least; arguably, it needed a whole other season. The pacing gets weirder the longer you get into the season, as it just has too much to do to slow down as it gets to the final few episodes. The real start of the climax involves a sequence that is certainly affective in its own way; it's incredibly tough to watch, but I can't say it wasn't having the intended effect, but with so few episodes to go, it's also the point where you start to realise that it can't possibly wrap everything up. And it doesn't; once we get past the climactic fight that takes up the majority of the finale (and don't get me wrong: it's a phenomenal battle), we cut to the credits, over narration telling us an awful lot story that would have been incredibly interesting to actually see. When I say this either needed another episode or another season, this is why; there really is at LEAST another season's worth of development and story just within that final credit sequence, and it's baffling that we don't actually get to see it. It's not even like G-Reco; it's a sloppy ending, but where everyone ends up is more or less where you expect. There are multiple characters who are in places that they absolutely weren't moving towards when we last saw them, and there's probably an incredibly interesting story getting them to that point.

I don't think I've ever seen a show buckle under the weight of its own story this harshly, that does such a good job setting up so many interesting ideas, that if they'd all worked could have created a genre-defining work. Instead, we have another show with a very strong start, that tapers off as it draws to a close, until all I can really make in response is a vaguely bemused, somewhat disappointed sound that I'm not sure how to write down with letters. Maybe there are reasons, the machinations of the capitalist machine that didn't give the creators enough time to tell the story right, maybe the writers were being rushed, maybe it just failed. We'll never know. All I know is that I feel genuinely a little bit sad that this show, that early on had a universe of potential to create a really unique and fantastic story, and ended up being another rushed footnote in the history of a genre that's still searching for its next big revival. I think this show could have been that. But it's not.

Sometimes, a work is just to ambitious for its own good.

The show is a lazily written, jumbled mess of plot points that go nowhere, details that end up being irrelevant, characters that are shallow, and graphic scenes that are just shoved in for shock value. The writing of Valvrave is just shallow in general. The writers tried to come up with all these deep thematic conflicts that are supposed to be super emotional, but they never actually flesh out any of these ideas, to the point where the just seem like they're just thrown in there for no particular reason, leaving the show as a cluttered mess of barely half-baked eye-candy.

One example of this ... shallowness surfaces in one of the causes of conflict in the show, which is the kids becoming nearly immortal from piloting the Valvraves. When you get right down to it, there was no actual reason why the Valvraves had to turn their pilots into basically vampires. The only reason this becomes relevant to the story at all is when the other governments to to kill them because of it, meaning that the only reason the writers made it this way was so that there would be something to fight about later. We're told that the other governments out there view this as becoming "inhuman" and decide to commit genocide on them, but we're never given any reason why they think this. This is a universe with all kinds of super advanced technology like Dyson spheres and advanced space travel, but suddenly superhuman regeneration is crossing the line. It's frustrating to watch because the people in this show just come to the stupidest conclusions and make the most braindead decisions every step of the way.

This show was all style and no substance, and I would never recommend it to anyone. The plot just gets more and more nonsensical as it went on, and some plot threads that are set up to be important early on just end up becoming pointless in the end. Preserved Roses is a killer opening though.

TLDR: The show looks good, but that's about where the positives end.