With all the praise given to classic masterpieces and all the hate thrown around at whatever becomes more popular than it should, it's always fun to go back and take a look at an anime that literally no one gives a flying duck shit about.
Y'know? A series that's not atrocious enough to be called bad, but hardly has enough going for it to even consider it as being "good". Just straight up, no holds barred mediocre. After all, the golden rule of entertainment media is "Be great, or be really bad. Otherwise, no one cares."
There will be spoilers, though you shouldn't care. Really.
Blue Gender is one of those late 90's anime that you see floating around here and there and read a quick plot summary, maybe a brief wiki search, but then you realize that the only reason it caught your attention for even a fraction of a second is because the title is so jaw droppingly stupid that you just couldn't help yourself so you move on with your life. Unless your me, and like me not having a clue what you were doing when first getting into anime, so you watched whatever you thought looked cool at the time.
As my amateur self soon discovered, Blue Gender is a post apocalyptic series set many years into the future when our protagonist, Yuji, wakes up from cryo-sleep to find that the world has been taken over by carnivorous Beatles called The Blue, which is probably the least intimidating name for a race of insects resulting in the extinction of humanity that I've ever heard. Yuji comes across a group of resistance fighters piloting mechs (because why the hell not), who he joins with. And in what is literally the only interesting twist this anime has to offer, rather than Yuji simply grabbing himself a mech and going on many grand and wonderous adventures with his new resistance friends in an attempt to rid the world of the evil space Beatles, episode two has pretty much everyone die horribly except for Yuji and a couple other people.
This leads to some fairly decent next few episodes, as it focuses on the small group of survivors as they attempt to reach a space base to escape to a space station poetically called Second Earth.
So about these characters. Of the four that weren't killed off in the second episode, two of them were likable. Those two die within the next couple episodes. So, we're stuck with GenericMcLameFace Yuji, and AngstyMcMumbles Marlene.
Yuji is an ungrateful pair of ovaries. Scared of everything, and always complaining. Not that this isn't realistic for someone forced into his situation, but we the audience are forced to follow this idiot through the entire series. The only other important character, Marlene, is the exact polar opposite. She has no personality, and is stone cold in everything she says and does. Not the most entertaining lead duo, but thankfully these first twelve episodes are surprisingly well made, with some engaging plot lines and decent character development.
It's nothing special or original, but survival stories have always intrigued me. Blue Gender has a thing for the unexpected, introducing characters, getting you attached to them and then unapologetically killing them off in terribly violent ways. It's refreshing to have a story where you really don't know what's going to happen, where you can't call exactly where it's going to go from the beginning. However, it takes a bit too much pride in its unpredictability, and eventually you start to expect the obligatory tragedy. The enjoyment factor also takes a huge blow due to sub par animation and bland action scenes. The story elements still work though, and carries a good deal of emotional weight.
In those first twelve episodes.
Yes, if Blue Gender had ended with our characters reaching that space station and living happily ever after, I would be praising this show as a solid post apocalyptic action series. But no, of course not. Of course it has to continue. And after they get on that space station and the awfully forced transition to the second story arc is made, the writers ran out of ideas really, really fast.
The second half of the series is boring, generic, illogical, nonsensical, and an absolute mess in every aspect. The plot gets extremely confusing, and the characters become laughable. Remember the decent development from the first half? Well, by a few episodes into the second half, Yuji and Marlene's personalities have completely swapped. A brand new cast of supporting characters are introduced, and every one of them is annoying. The pace slows down to a painful crawl as it focuses on the humans fighting back against the Blue, which is a storyline the show avoided in the beginning and is the exact reason it didn't suck in the first place, and now that's what it's all about. It becomes a huge collection of sci-fi cliches, as well as some tropes thrown in from other genres for good measure. At one point, a horribly, horribly forced love triangle is brought into the mix for no reason whatsoever.
Pretty much everything that could go wrong with the script went wrong, and then worse. The inconsistent characters start throwing out betrayals left and right, a hilariously obvious evil council of shady political figures comes into play, a predictable and unsatisfying twist is revealed, and the ending is so unforgivably retarded that you won't even care to ask yourself what the actual fuk just happened.
On top of all this, there's a painfully obvious feeling that the show is trying it's very best to rip off many greater sci-fi works, in particular Evangelion. It's hard to explain in text, but it really shows when watching. While NGE knew what it was doing, Blue Gender was a sad attempt at trying to replicate the intricate psychological intrigue by throwing a whole lot of completely ridiculous and out of place moral messages at you all at once that seem to come out of nowhere. It's not even close to subtle, and really, really stupid.
I didn't like Blue Gender. I can't recommend Blue Gender. It's too busy putting it's head up it's own rectal corridor to expand on the potential it gives its first half, but then again, those first few episodes are legitimately engaging at times. It's the very definition of mediocre: Not good, not bad, and not worth it.
