This wasn't my first time watching Blue Gender - I remember watching it as a kid some time in the mid-to-late 2000s. For some reason, my kid self wasn't as shocked by this anime as my present-day 30-year old boomer self. Maybe I watched a censored version, or maybe I just couldn't conceptualise and comprehend all the violence and gore as a kid, but... I dunno. So basically, this was my second time watching Blue Gender.
Where was I going again?Right, so Blue Gender. Great anime, but absolutely not for the faint-hearted. It contains a ton of violence, gore and even sex, so if you find those stuff yucky, or are easily traumatized by character deaths, then this isn't the anime for you.
Let's start by facing the elephant in the room right away: to say that it was heavily influenced by both Starship Troopers and Neon Genesis Evangelion would be a huge understatement. It's practically a perfect marriage of those two, just without the humour - it is much more serious and deeper than either of those. The way the anime casually kills off named characters without any mercy reminds me of Game of Thrones (though we all know that the main protagonist and his love interest had the benefit of Plot Armor).
The animation is so good that it makes me want to cry - they sure don't make 'em like that anymore! I liked the intro song too. While there are several things I object to in this anime, if there's one thing the creators got right, it's visual storytelling: show, don't tell. And that is precisely what they did. They sure showed us. Sometimes, still shots tell more than even a thousand words of exposition, and the creators of Blue Gender understood that arguably better than anyone.
And here's where this review turns somewhat negative: plot, or rather, lack thereof. Spoiler alert, but here it goes: our story begins with Yuuji awakening in a world that is completely different from the one he slept in. He gets rescued, but things don't go according to plan, and he becomes part of a Starship Trooper-esque crusade against TEH BUGS... sorry, I mean, the Blues. Lots of characters die, and then the plot eventually turns into a copy of Neon Genesis Evangelion, just with a green, environmentalist message - a message I disagree with, by the way. Basically, things progress from bad to worse, and we end up with our main protagonist living as a Neolithic primitive, rejecting any and all technology more advanced than the wheel.
The way I see it, it was good(ish) until around the 20th episode, when it kinda began to turn downhill - I liked Episodes 1-12, I kinda liked 12-20 too (just less so), but it really started going downhill at 20 with the forced message. I'm still giving it a 7/10 though.
I don't want to get political at all on an anime review, but the idea that technology is evil is just silly. The role of technology is to reduce the impact each individual has on the planet - do you have any idea just how much land would be needed to sustain 8 billion hunter-gatherers? Do you have any idea just how many species of megafauna were driven into extinction by our Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors? With this knowledge in your head, the notions of technology being "evil" and making Gaia sad or more primitive peoples being "more in tune with nature" and having less of a harmful impact on Earth just seem laughably silly and blatantly false, and rightfully so.
I loved the anime, but I strongly disagree with its Luddite message. But hey, it's just an anime, no need to get myself so worked up over that.
It's an otherwise decent anime whose last episodes and ending are ruined by a forced message delivered in a ham-fisted way.
