So, there's Sara Crews, Cruz, Werec, whatever. She wants to be a strain pilot. Her dream is dashed when her batshit crazy brother, Ralph, steals something from a research facility, pwns her and starts off a rather amusing trend of killing off characters you've just met. So Sara goes into space, now piloting a more ghetto cannon fodder robot, because she can't use her black box thingy, in search of her brother for revenge, reconciliation, big brother complex, whatever.
What's more to say.
There are stock characters with names from the Little Princess who otherwise share no commonality with the book, unless the part about giant robots was left out by my mother when she read it to me. There's an entire lesbian episode that does nothing to further the plot. Sara is obsessed with a mysterious doll she finds, which along with a superpowered Strain collecting dust in the ship seem to be the most coveniently placed deus ex machina elements in the story.
The plot is clumsy and vascillates between people hating Sara, Sara being emo and withdrawn, pining for her brother, obsessing over her doll, and of course space battles which rely on a creative misiterpretation of time dilation. We're supposed to care, but with the throwaway chracters, lesbianity and streaking coming out of nowhere in a "serious" anime, and the critical plot "twist" of why Ralph went batshit insane in the first place which is poorly paced and thrown in near the end, and the show all falls apart.
Sara and Ralph, and the rest of the cast, are terribly one dimensional. Oh, yes, and then there's the lolis.
Without adding spoilers, there are these mysterious space lolis and how the show deals with that element is also cliched and tries to teach a lesson about humanity that is an overused and recurrent theme.
This is a casual space robot jockey anime pretending to be serious. It'll make you laugh at all of the wrong times. It's beautifully drawn, tho, and the Strains are a strange and new mech design.
