Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory Episode 12 Discussion

I think it's safe to say that, Fumoffu aside, I have fairly conflicted about every season of FMP so far.

For season 1, I thought the comedy was great while the serious plot was thoroughly mediocre and clashed too much with the comedic tone (not helped by the show constantly jarringly switching between the two tones on an episode-by-episode basis).
For Second Raid, I thought Sousuke's character arc was great and I loved the way his relationship with Kaname continued to develop, while also generally thinking that the serious and comedic tones were better balanced than season 1. However, not perfectly so, as the villains were comically terrible (somehow even worse than the already-lame Gauron, who of course somehow returned briefly) and the love triangle stuff with Tessa was nothing short of embarrassing.

And then we come to Invisible Victory. I thought the first arc was an excellent way to set the tone and raised the stakes higher than ever before, and separating Sousuke and Kaname made for a bold change. Stripping Sousuke of everything was an idea that had plenty of potential, as did putting Mithril on the back foot against a genuinely-threatening enemy force.

But then the second arc happened and basically did nothing with any of that. It's basically a filler arc, almost entirely disconnected from everything else and introducing a whole new cast of characters only to get rid of them just as quickly. Like, thinking about this arc, what actual impacts did it have on the overall plot? Kurama was killed off, but he was always the lackey to Leonard anyway. Other than that, all we got was Sousuke getting seriously injured to feed into the start of the final arc and the introduction of Lemon, who's basically a plot device with all the connections to get Sousuke back into the field without delay. Other than that, you could take this arc out of the story entirely and change nearly nothing. Hell, in doing so you could probably find more logical ways to connect the first and final arcs of the season to each other.

As for the third arc, here I am also pretty conflicted. Sousuke goes through a little bit of a training arc as he rebuilds from serious injury, then he rejoins the fight and defeats all the grunts at Leonard's base with ease. In fact, the turnaround between how Amalgam utterly decimated Mithril in the first arc and how easily Mithril counter them here is kind of baffling and somewhat undermines that first arc too. Kalinin's betrayal comes completely out of nowhere and feels completely contradictory to his entire characterisation so far, while also being thoroughly unexplained. It's just a betrayal that's done for shock value and forced drama rather than because it actually makes any sense for the story as presented so far.

And then there's Kaname's charactersation here. After being entirely absent during the filler arc (not even so much as mentioned until the arc's final episode after Nami's death), we get to see what she's been up to in the meantime. And it turns out that what we've basically got here is what happens to Asuna in Sword Art Online's Alfheim arc: a strong badass girl character gets turned into a blubbering damsel in distress with no agency, locked in a bird cage (albeit metaphorical in this case rather than as unsubtly literal as it was in SAO) by a lame male antagonist. Kaname was always one of the series' biggest strengths, so to see this happen was nothing short of a colossal disappointment. That said, this finale does go some ways to undoing some of that damage with her scene in the helicopter when radioing Sousuke: now that was the Kaname this series has built up from day 1.

With all that out of the way, now for some more general thoughts on Invisible Victory. I feel like Sousuke's character arc kind of stands still here, not really changing all that much from his starting position besides perhaps reinforcing his already-established convictions about doing everything to protect Kaname. Even with that being the case and even with almost no comedic moments to work with, Sousuke still remains one the show's strongest elements in this season. As is his and Kaname's relationship, even though they've been apart most of the season and even though they end the season still apart. I also liked that Tessa was almost entirely sidelined this season and that the terrible love triangle subplot that bogged down TSR in places was completely abandoned too: this season definitely showed that FMP doesn't really need Tessa to do anything but military commander stuff to function as it does.

The production values are conspicuously worse than previous seasons, though not outright terrible besides that awful CG car chase in episode 2. The CG mechs were fine, not as distracting as others made out but not necessarily great. Tonally, the complete and utter lack of levity in this season was an interesting choice when I feel that one of FMP's defining traits has always - for better or worse - been its mix of comedic beats and serious mecha action: taking the comedy out entirely does reduce the overall charm somewhat, but at least the serious beats were mostly handled better than a lot of TSR was (besides the character development Sousuke got towards the end of that season).

All in all, I'd certainly welcome more of this series if we ever get it, because despite its faults it's always perfectly watchable at least.