…what did I just watch? An Orange is the New Black/Gundam mashup? …with dragons? Yes.
Okay.
I think if I had to describe Cross Ange in one word, it would probably be ‘deranged’. There are plenty of anime that walk the tightrope of good taste, but Cross Ange spends most of its 25 episode spinning around the rope like a trapeze artist, simultaneously laughing and pissing liberally over the audience. I very nearly dropped this several times (particularly across the first two or three episodes), but somehow it still ended up at a very solid 8.
…again, what did I just watch?
So, normally I’d go into the things I liked about a show before I get stuck into the issues I had with it, but in Cross Ange the major issue is so egregious that I really want to talk about it first, and that issue is fanservice.
Now I’ve watched enough anime over the years that I have built up a significant tolerance to the ‘standard’ fanservice-ey tropes you’re likely to see in the average male-targeted seinen stuff. I’m also entirely prepared to make a spirited defence of the potentially sketchier scenes in shows like Kill la Kill and Monogatari, where sex, sexuality and nudity is used in very deliberate ways to make a point.
The problem with Cross Ange is that there are several scenes at both the very beginning and the very end of the series that made me genuinely uncomfortable.
I’m not easy to shock or disgust, but I really don’t want or need to see rape shot like porn.
It’s particularly annoying in this case, because there’s not actually anything wrong with the script in principle. To put this into context, the early scenes I’m talking about are all to do with the naive and arrogant main character being unexpectedly thrown into what is essentially a particularly brutal women’s prison. She quickly makes enemies of the wrong people with predictable results, considering the setting. The problem is the direction, which definitely seems to think this is something we should be enjoying instead of appropriately conveying the horror of the situation. Without going into spoiler territory, this again becomes an issue in certain scenes towards the end of the show. The events laid out in the script are hideous, but the ‘cameraman’ is a drooling lech and it makes the whole thing come off as seriously warped.
Cross Ange also has a lot of pointlessly revealing character designs. It’s the kind of thing I would usually start to tune out after a while if I’m getting into the show, but it ends up being compounded by the sketchy directorial decisions, and results in several action scenes featuring unfortunate combinations of sex and violence that again, made me kind of uncomfortable.
In addition to the above, we’re also presented with a major character who seems to be there entirely to run the ‘oh no I tripped and fell on you in this compromising position’ joke so far into the ground that it’s annihilated in the molten core of the earth. I really hated Tusk by the end of the show; other than that one ‘joke’, all he ever seemed to do was undermine the competence and motivation of the considerably more interesting characters around him.
So, if you’ve made it this far, you’re very likely wondering ‘So Starfish-san, why the hell should I watch this show and what were you smoking when you gave it an eight?’.
My answer is that in spite of the many, many flaws, Cross Ange is a fantastically compelling show, with some unusually interesting character development and a hilariously kaleidoscopic mashup of old mecha-anime ideas.
The central character Ange is definitely one of my all-time favourite protagonists. She begins the series as a completely generic stock ‘stuck up princess’, but goes through a really interesting and dynamic cycle of development that I’m really not used to from any character in an anime. There are several key moments where she shifts gears into a new persona, and you get to see three of them right in the first episode. The Princess is then broken by her harsh new reality, but (we know from the initial flash-forward) then hardened into an icy and arrogant ace pilot. This goes on through the show in distinct stages as events unfold, but each stage is deeply engraved with the lessons of those that came before, culminating in a flawed and densely layered character that I felt a real attachment to.
Although I’ve complained at length about the fanservice, I’m going to double back on myself a little bit here. Outside of the scenes I mentioned earlier on, Cross Ange actually goes to some interesting and unusual places with sex and sexual dynamics, all centred around the relationships between a quartet of secondary characters. This is the group of the ‘Alpha’ of the prison; a strong and ruthless woman with a core gang/harem of sexually and socially subservient lackeys that she uses to maintain her status and dominance over the rest of the prison population. Although this is an old cliche that you see in pretty much every prison drama (‘Bogs’ in the Shawshank redemption for example), the way the power dynamic of the group changes over the course of the story and the blurring of lines between fear, loyalty, friendship and romance is really surprisingly subtle and well portrayed.
Once again, Cross Ange makes my head spin; one of my favourite examples of an interesting use of sex in Anime is in the same goddamned show as one of my least favourite, most unpleasantly gratuitous.
I haven’t really gone into the plot, but… …wow. I read discussions online after finishing the show that suggested the plot had been decided based on someone at Sunrise emptying the bag marked ‘ideas we all decided were too stupid and/or crazy to work’ and then hammering them all into one script. I’d say that’s pretty accurate, but somehow it all kind of works? It’s like the plot equivalent of getting into a high-security building by turning up at the front desk with a suit and a clipboard and asking to see ‘Steve’; all the bizarre twists and disparate ideas are presented so matter-of-factly that I found I just kind of accepted them as part of the ride. I won’t spoil the surprise, there’s one utterly, utterly ludicrous thing in particular that happens towards the end of episode 21. Something that in any other show would have completely shattered my suspension of disbelief and yet… After a couple of minutes of stunned silence to appreciate that they just did that, I found myself thinking ‘Well, okay then!’ and moving on to the final few episodes.
For me at least, there was no getting off Cross Ange’s wild ride once it started.
