Blue Gender

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Alternative Titles

Japanese: BLUE GENDER

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Information

Type: TV

Episodes: 26

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Oct 8, 1999 to Mar 31, 2000

Premiered: Fall 1999

Broadcast: Thursdays at 01:55 (JST)

Producers: Youmex, Toshiba EMI

Licensors: Funimation

Studios: AIC

Source: Original

Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi

Themes: Gore, Mecha, Military, Space, Survival

Duration: 23 min. per ep.

Rating: R+ - Mild Nudity

Statistics

Score: 7.03¹ (scored by 30,505 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #4207²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #2353

Members: 81,505

Favorites: 426

Available At

Official Site

Resources

AniDB

ANN

Synopsis

Blue Gender takes place in the not too distant future in a world where things have gone terribly wrong for humanity. Humans have been replaced at the top of the food chain by the Blue, a race of bug-like aliens that have colonized Earth and pushed humans aside. A space station, Second Earth, has been constructed as a safe haven for humans, with the hope of one day reclaiming the Earth once more.

Yuji Kaido was cryogenically frozen, having been suffering from a disease known as B-Cells. Once awakened, he joins a team of soldiers that have come to Earth to extract him. Unfortunately, nothing goes according to plan as they make their way back to Second Earth.

Yuji will have to deal with the horrors of fighting a bloody war as he and the fighters from Second Earth look to survive. Will they be able to win back Earth without losing their humanity?

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Background

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Related Anime

Adaptation:	Blue Gender
Summary:	Blue Gender: The Warrior

More characters

Characters & Voice Actors

Angel, Marlene

Main

Kuwashima, Houko
Japanese

Kaido, Yuji

Main

Nojima, Kenji
Japanese

Miyagi, Seno

Supporting

Hori, Katsunosuke
Japanese

Heald, Joey

Supporting

Suganuma, Hisayoshi
Japanese

Whistle, Alicia

Supporting

Yasuda, Miwa
Japanese

Kilmer, Rick

Supporting

Itou, Eiji
Japanese

Quaid, Dice

Supporting

Ginga, Banjou
Japanese

Elena

Supporting

Nishimura, Chinami
Japanese

Hendar, Amick

Supporting

Yonemoto, Chizu
Japanese

Bean, Keith

Supporting

Matsumoto, Dai
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Oohata, Kouichi

Producer

Watson, Barry

Producer

Hasegawa, Yasuo

Producer

Abe, Masashi

Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

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Opening Theme

"Tokihanate! (解き放て!)" by Houko Kuwashima

Edit

Ending Theme

"Ai ga Oshiete Kureta (愛が教えてくれた)" by Houko Kuwashima

Reviews

Sep 9, 2023

ThatAnimeSnobRE

Recommended

Well-written

The main themes and story in Blue Gender are grim and handled with more maturity than most anime, and that alone is enough to give it praise. Unfortunately the pacing is also very slow and mostly episodic, thus it’s hard for most to go through it, especially today when most anime fans prefer shameless fantasy isekai over depressing sci-fi.

The art quality ain’t bad at all. The animators went for realism instead of flash thus the weaponry feels fairly realistic despite including bulky mecha. That tends to make most battles to feel slow or simple, although the goal was always a down to earth approach instead ... of spectacle. It depicts better themes of survival and existential horror when the heroes can’t solo armies using broken powers. And boy, does this anime excel at atmosphere.

The setting is post-apocalyptic, with most of mankind having been exterminated by grotesque monsters and their corpses having been turned into big green meatballs, sort of food storages for the monsters. Most cities now look like giant bee hives and the streets are filled with said meatballs, full of faces writhing in agony on them. It will give you the chills. The surviving humans are actually affected by all this. Have you noticed how in most anime the characters act happy-go-lucky no matter how grim their world looks like? Like, there is always a high school and cosplayers and beach episodes even if the whole world has gone to hell? They have no touch with reality. Blue Gender is not one of those anime because all its characters are cynical, pessimistic and do not act like typical harem leads in some school comedy. Their faces are expressionless, devoid of hope, and they even have sex in random moments with random people just to feel they are alive.

Obviously, the number one reason for that is because the demographic the show is aiming for is seinen (adult males) instead of children who still like Naruto and Spy Family. But there is more to that, since most moe anime are also seinen and they are nothing like Blue Gender. There are erotic scenes and numerous gruesome deaths of major characters, and they don’t feel like they are done just for edgy schlock entertainment in the likes of Akame Ga Kill or Mirai Nikki. They mostly respect the viewer and exist to serve the narrative instead of destroying it with crap like fan service or comic relief.

With that said, the grim atmosphere of the setting overlaps most of the appeal of the characters, since the latter are almost average people with no broken superpowers. Even the special ones with the blue cells aren’t supermen. So it can be hard to bond with the cast, especially when they seem to have stopped caring anymore and turned into cynical materialists who just eat, fuck, and die. There is character growth for the major characters, by the way. One learns to deal with reality, another finds hope by falling in love, a third one embraces who he is meant to be, and so on. It’s just that they will be mostly overshadowed by the imposing sceneries of the bug-infested world.

There is also a bit of mystery concerning the origin of the bugs and how they correlate with the once-sick main characters, although the answers will be mostly for the heck of having a twist near the end than for developing the themes any further. The pro-ecology angle of Blue Gender is one of its weakest aspects.

The biggest issue is the run-down budget on animation which makes a lot of scenes to feel stiff and dull to look at for long. It is not something you can’t excuse if you have accepted it’s mostly about the atmosphere than the action, but newer anime watchers who were spoiled by shows like Demon Slayer will have a hard time staying focused for long. That aside, Blue Gender is a good anime that was unfortunately never given much attention because it came out at a time when Cowboy Bebop and Trigun were the gold standards. The industry moving away from dark sci-fi in favor of silly school romcoms and isekai made it even harder to recommend, especially when the plot is slow and semi-fillerish, while the characters are mostly un-relatable. If, though, you are in a mood for super slow and super depressing anime, this one is one of the best B-grade series of the 90s.

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Mar 22, 2024

MacIsHere

Mixed Feelings

If I could describe Blue Gender in one word, it would be "Grim." Contrary to most anime which pop out at the audience with characters with exaggerated personalities, funny moments, and other "tropey" things, Blue Gender is one of the more serious and mature shows out there. Personally, I like anime that take themselves and their world seriously, but this show does have me a little mixed in my opinions.

Things that I liked about it were the creatures (which were cool and terrifying), the world itself, which although bleak, was also mysterious and kept you on edge the whole way through, and various features of ...

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Jun 20, 2023

nozomiEX

Not Recommended

Blue Gender started strong... for 15 minutes. It's all down-hill from there. Despite having a ton of tags & genres, it doesn't do any of them well. Quite the opposite, it manages to do every single thing it attempts worse than if it had just neglected to tackle it in the first place. I honestly don't even know where to start with this, but I guess since he was the first thing you're introduced to, let's start with the main character, Yuji. Awoken to a hectic battle, with the power to simply run away in horror, you can immediately empathize ... with him. He's alone, in the dark, being chased by ominous soldiers and hellish bug monsters, with no clue when or where he is or what's going on. You can understand the angst, the despair, the frustration, the confusion, you can see why he's frightened and jumpy, or to put it simply, this isn't Yuji at his best. However... as the situation relaxes and he gets his bearings, you unfortunately get to see what Yuji is like even when he's feeling better, and it's just as bad. He's sanctimonious, selfish, rash, and his only "good" traits are that he has a basic moral code, and that's it. Unfortunately his more consistent traits, his self-centered impulsiveness means he's always going about doing the right thing in the worst way possible and only the power of hack writing can save his sorry ass. If it weren't for the foot-thick steel plot armor (sometimes literally) around him, he would do more to damage his cause than any mindless bug alien mook or cartoonish evil government asshole. At his best moments, he's tolerable. He's never likable, you will never say "man I can't wait to see Yuji" or "How will Yuji deal with this situation?" An insufferable lead character, and that brings us to his better half (only marginally), Marlene. Marlene is the cool, stony soldier, tough as nails and committed to the mission: except when the author gets horny. Yeah, Marlene is either the stand-in for Yuji, the object of cringeworthy lust or romance-pandering, and basically eye and heart candy, never rising above her stereotype.

That brings me to one of the biggest issues with this show: this "romance" is basically the driving force of everything in the show after the first couple episodes, and it SUCKS. Yuji sucks, Marlene sucks, the two pining for each other sucks, and the amount of ways the plot has to warp and bend to get them apart then bring them back together then take them away from each other then bring them back together over and over again is excruciating. I would suggest you grab a spoon if you wanna watch this with which you may gag yourself. The major conflict of the first quarter of the show is Yuji being torn between Marlene or some nomad fling he meets on the way to the next story beat. It is so ridiculously contrived, and the writing is so sloppy that only that aforementioned double-duty plot armor can keep them from meeting the same fate as the rest of the meat puppets the show throws into harm's way to give the illusion that life in Blue Gender is fleeting. Going by the quick departures for the rest of the cast, with particularly gruesome and unceremonious deaths early on to this end, you would think that life is extremely fragile and death could come at any moment. Yet after the first episode, you can't ever fathom that Yuji or Marlene could ever die. They will always be the last ones standing in the face of wave after wave of endless (and purposeless) bug attacks. The grimdark tone the series wants is entirely undermined by how hasty the writer is to throw Yuji and Marlene into peril and how half-assedly it bails them back out. There's no tension for either of these fuckheads but everyone else in the show is so throwaway and doomed from their entrance that there's nowhere in this to place your concern. The major conflict of this show isn't pragmatism vs idealism in wartime, it's not man vs nature, it's not even man vs man, it's "when will Yuji and Marlene get together?" Gory deaths for the side characters, dismal outcomes for everybody not in the starring roles, frightening stakes for those not graced with plot armor all give the illusion of a serious, mature world and story, but this is a juvenile romance novel for tweens at heart. And to make it clear, I'm not mad that it's a romance. I'm mad that the romance is ass and all other aspects of the show are undermined by it, not that any of them fare much better in terms of quality of the writing.

The show is split into basically two halves, the first half being Yuji and Marlene's meet-cute on Earth and ensuing romantic escapades, and the second half being Yuji and Marlene being kept apart by a comically incompetent evil government in space and tying up (poorly) all of the underdeveloped story threads that aren't the romance. What's going on with the blues? What does the goofy ahh government want Yuji's ass for? Well, you'll get your hand-wave answers but you'd probably be more satisfied if you got your answers from chatgpt. The story is loose and only there to facilitate the cheesy action-adventure-romance, the action is exceedingly dull, similarly perfunctory. Waves of mooks, stormtrooper accuracy and cartoonish bad-guys, the bugs are flip-flopping between unstoppable terminator-ass forces of nature and squishy mindless walking corpses, the action is under-animated and veiled in darkness and often occuring entirely offscreen or on radar screens and there's a lot of standing around gesturing while nothing is happening. Even when it's just combat, no bawdy kissy kissy garbage involved, it's rather dull. Throw in the unwelcome, misplaced, and overemphasized horniness/loneliness and it's just a puke-inducing drag. There's no moral conflicts to chew on, there are no characters or plights to get behind, the only thing keeping you watching will be to find out if it gets on the rails and ever delivers on what the first episode made it seem like it would be, but rest-assured, it doesn't. Nothing but moaning, groaning blah awaits.

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Poll: Blue Gender Episode 24 Discussion Stark700 - Jan 19, 2013	14 replies	by Sahil_K_Chandio »» Mar 27, 4:16 PM
Poll: Blue Gender Episode 16 Discussion blue_hitomi - Jul 31, 2009	13 replies	by Sahil_K_Chandio »» Mar 27, 2:51 PM
Poll: Blue Gender Episode 7 Discussion Stark700 - Jan 19, 2013	8 replies	by Sahil_K_Chandio »» Mar 27, 2:47 AM
Poll: Blue Gender Episode 6 Discussion blue_hitomi - Jul 30, 2009	19 replies	by Sahil_K_Chandio »» Mar 27, 2:37 AM
Poll: Blue Gender Episode 22 Discussion blue_hitomi - Jul 31, 2009	13 replies	by PlasticRobot »» Feb 21, 12:53 PM

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Blue Gender

Alternative Titles

Information

Statistics

Available At

Resources

Synopsis

Background

Visit MALxJapan MALxJapan -More than just anime-

Related Anime

Characters & Voice Actors

Staff

Opening Theme

Ending Theme

Reviews

Interest Stacks

Recommendations

Recent News

Recent Forum Discussion

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