That brings me to one of the biggest issues with this show: this "romance" is basically the driving force of everything in the show after the first couple episodes, and it SUCKS. Yuji sucks, Marlene sucks, the two pining for each other sucks, and the amount of ways the plot has to warp and bend to get them apart then bring them back together then take them away from each other then bring them back together over and over again is excruciating. I would suggest you grab a spoon if you wanna watch this with which you may gag yourself. The major conflict of the first quarter of the show is Yuji being torn between Marlene or some nomad fling he meets on the way to the next story beat. It is so ridiculously contrived, and the writing is so sloppy that only that aforementioned double-duty plot armor can keep them from meeting the same fate as the rest of the meat puppets the show throws into harm's way to give the illusion that life in Blue Gender is fleeting. Going by the quick departures for the rest of the cast, with particularly gruesome and unceremonious deaths early on to this end, you would think that life is extremely fragile and death could come at any moment. Yet after the first episode, you can't ever fathom that Yuji or Marlene could ever die. They will always be the last ones standing in the face of wave after wave of endless (and purposeless) bug attacks. The grimdark tone the series wants is entirely undermined by how hasty the writer is to throw Yuji and Marlene into peril and how half-assedly it bails them back out. There's no tension for either of these fuckheads but everyone else in the show is so throwaway and doomed from their entrance that there's nowhere in this to place your concern. The major conflict of this show isn't pragmatism vs idealism in wartime, it's not man vs nature, it's not even man vs man, it's "when will Yuji and Marlene get together?" Gory deaths for the side characters, dismal outcomes for everybody not in the starring roles, frightening stakes for those not graced with plot armor all give the illusion of a serious, mature world and story, but this is a juvenile romance novel for tweens at heart. And to make it clear, I'm not mad that it's a romance. I'm mad that the romance is ass and all other aspects of the show are undermined by it, not that any of them fare much better in terms of quality of the writing.
The show is split into basically two halves, the first half being Yuji and Marlene's meet-cute on Earth and ensuing romantic escapades, and the second half being Yuji and Marlene being kept apart by a comically incompetent evil government in space and tying up (poorly) all of the underdeveloped story threads that aren't the romance. What's going on with the blues? What does the goofy ahh government want Yuji's ass for? Well, you'll get your hand-wave answers but you'd probably be more satisfied if you got your answers from chatgpt. The story is loose and only there to facilitate the cheesy action-adventure-romance, the action is exceedingly dull, similarly perfunctory. Waves of mooks, stormtrooper accuracy and cartoonish bad-guys, the bugs are flip-flopping between unstoppable terminator-ass forces of nature and squishy mindless walking corpses, the action is under-animated and veiled in darkness and often occuring entirely offscreen or on radar screens and there's a lot of standing around gesturing while nothing is happening. Even when it's just combat, no bawdy kissy kissy garbage involved, it's rather dull. Throw in the unwelcome, misplaced, and overemphasized horniness/loneliness and it's just a puke-inducing drag. There's no moral conflicts to chew on, there are no characters or plights to get behind, the only thing keeping you watching will be to find out if it gets on the rails and ever delivers on what the first episode made it seem like it would be, but rest-assured, it doesn't. Nothing but moaning, groaning blah awaits.
