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I personally, and I believe most folks coming across this today, first discovered this show as a comparison to Madoka Magica, which happens to be one of my favourite anime. Looking a bit more upon it, I saw tags on anidb such as "Rotten World", "Deconstruction", "Tone Changes", "Gore", "Horror", and "Angst". That was enough to get me hooked.

Alas, this anime was not what I was advertised. Which would be fine if the plot was decent, but it's not.
If I had to keep this short and simple, I would say that Alien 9 has a lot of ideas that could've been great but execute them ... extremely awkwardly, resulting in a frustrating viewing experience and overall a pretty bad end product.

Ootani Yuri is a terrible protagonist and extremely annoying. All she does is cry, and not much else. I don't want to hear a single soul shit talk Ikari Shinji again. Now, I do understand that this is likely how an actual 10 year old would react when placed in this situation, and you do feel really bad for her, but she doesn't learn a single thing at the end of the story and doesn't change at all from the same character she was at the beginning. I don't think this is a bad idea in concept - humans are flawed and some don't learn from their mistakes. But I'm not sure if that's the angle Tomizawa Hitoshi was purposefully aiming for, and I am reluctant to believe that it is as it's unconfirmed and if I believe something based on my gut I might as well project literally anything into this show. And even if it was intentional, it didn't work and Yuri fucking sucks.

Secondly, too much goes unexplained, in a bad way. I love open-ended and confusing media, but certain basic concepts that should be set up to have a believable world are tossed aside, and I personally was unable to suspend my disbelief. Why can only these little girls fight the aliens? Who the fuck knows, it's certainly not something they bother to explain. Why are kids going to school a day after this big frog-whale thing landed on it? Do the parents give a single shit about their children, not to mention the parents of the girls in the Alien Party? The ending is also fucking atrocious. I can't describe it in any other way than it just "happening".
It might be a result of this show getting discontinued, and the manga might answer these questions, but judging the anime on its own, it ends up being almost schizophrenic (and not in a good way) and extremely unsatisfying. I wonder if this would've been any better if it had a regular, 12-13 episode runtime. No point in engaging in hypotheticals, though.

That being said, I did like certain aspects of the show. I enjoyed the contrast between the simple Tsukumizu-ish cutesy wide girls and the oddly realistic and detailed, almost biopunk design of the (big) aliens, especially the big eggplant-looking thing they look into. The OST was good and the animation surprisingly fluid. The one thing I can praise the plot for is that the ambiguity of the teachers and their intentions was pretty good, but I'm not sure if that was done on purpose.

I give this a not recommended because almost everything it tries to do ends up failing, and it's not even a so bad it's good show like High School DxD. But if you, like myself, is a weirdo who enjoys seeing anime girls undergoing psychological torture, and are a few drinks in, you might have a laugh.

Why this is above a 7 is beyond me. Starts off strong with a theme of mortality and the passage of time, and loses sight of that and devolves into standard fantasy schlock with nothing new about it. I assume fellow zoomers think it's a masterpiece because the characters don't have cartoonish overreactions and expressions. People praise the character development, but I saw Frieren and Fern devolve into trope characters with their entire backstories disregarded and only reused when relevant to plot progression - they do not feel like real characters, but instead like caricatures,"hehe Fern likes food", "hehe Frieren is so silly", which increased ... as the show progressed, though I think straight up calling it Flanderization is too much. I didn't mention Stark because calling him a main character would be disingenuous given the fact of how he's not in half of the show.

I understand that modern anime is shit and it is indeed great in comparison to some of its contemporaries, but you are probably not viewing this anime in the vaccuum of solely modern releases, there are other, older stuff to compare it to, and in which case this is nothing special. Its lackluster plot is a shame, considering how gorgeous the animation, character designs, and soundtracks are.