So, when it comes to the Mecha genre, one subtype I haven’t really addressed is the combining Mecha style. It’s a very classic subgenre, going back to some of the earliest Mecha shows and one that’s fairly familiar to Western audiences thanks to the popularity of Golion, aka Voltron. Yet the closest I’ve come to really addressing a combining robot show is probably Gurren Lagann. Well, that can’t stand! So this week, I’m going after Aquarion.
I’ll say at the start, Aquarion is a show which I ultimately have pretty mixed feelings about. Some of the big reasons why become apparent in just the setup of the story.
Aquarion takes place in a reality where, say it with me, humanity has been pushed to the brink by the arrival of an implacable enemy bent on global destruction, rendering most of the world post-apocalyptic and the consolidated resistance force uses big robots to fight off the incoming horrors. The enemy this time is one of the ones with deeper roots and a more understandable motivation, rather than just being gribbly monsters. In this case, they’re called the Shadow Angels – beings that were beaten back twelve thousand years ago and that have now emerged to steal human souls in order to fuel their big magical ritual.
Hailing from the hidden base of Atlandia (an obvious reference to Atlantis) their various monsters and giant robot things are commanded by a small group of elites, the first and most important introduced at the start of the show being a weird white-haired sorcerer sort of figure… who isn’t Dartz from Yugioh, but you’d be forgiven for getting them mixed up. No, this villain is called Toma. We’ll get more into him later, seeing as it takes a while for him to do anything directly rather than watching events play out and delivering esoteric evil monologues.
The Shadow Angels mostly attack by sending out Harvest Beasts, which hypnotize and absorb humans en masse. At the start of the show, we see an attack by the Shadow Angels on a survivor camp where a feral teenager, Apollo, seems strangely unaffected. Humanity’s defenders are on the case as well, and come in with a trio of mecha fighter jets called Vectors, which should allow them to Merge into the awesome giant robot Aquarion, with slightly different forms and capabilities depending on the configuration of the three vectors. However, one of the pilots crashes after a disrupted merge, which gives Apollo a chance to get in the robot and take control of the situation. Guided by the spirit of an ancient figure who is strongly implied to be his past life from twelve thousand years ago, he successfully forms Solar Aquarion and fights off the Shadow Angels… but not before they make off with a nice big harvest of humans, including Apollo’s dear friend Baron.
This leads to the human resistance, DEAVA, picking up Apollo under the suspicion that he may be the reincarnation of “Solar Wing”, a legendary hero who fought off the Shadow Angels in the past and whose new incarnation, therefore, would be a very important person. This annoys one of the other pilots, Silvia, a mid-tier tsundere, because she’s the reincarnation of Solar Wing’s beloved, Seliane, and strongly believes her beloved elder brother Sirius (Your stereotypical arrogant refined long-haired blonde jerk – you could be forgiven for mistaking him for Judar Harvey or Gai – to be the true reincarnation of Solar Wing.
However, what the mysterious commander Fudou says in DEAVA goes, and thus Apollo is slowly, painstakingly integrated into the military force of emotionally damaged teenagers and young adults despite pretty much just howling about how he wants to run off and save Baron.
So, issues at this stage. First, the reincarnation conceit is… a lot to swallow. I will say that the show wears it about as well as it could, but it’s still not a great choice since it results in a lot of the characters, especially Apollo, living the the shadow of other characters who we don’t know. To its credit, the show does eventually answer why it might matter who is or isn’t the true Solar Wing, but it does suck away some of the drama to have the value of the characters predicated on what mystical traits they have and not what they’re able to accomplish now. I think this is one reason why I tend to gravitate towards some of the secondary characters who don’t have important past lives that get brought up – their accomplishments are at least their own.
Second, Apollo. When I say Apollo is feral, it goes well past “quirky and charming” to a state where he’s barely capable of living like a normal human, much less communicating with anything resembling sense, and it is worst at the start of the show. You could argue that there’s at least some honesty to this, but it doesn’t change how the situation makes Apollo a difficult character to watch. He spends most of his scenes in the early part howling semi-coherently about Baron, sulking that he’s not able to do that, or making angry gurgling noises that even Arnold Schwarzenegger would call strained. What humanity he does get tends to show him to be, what else, a selfish asocial brat, like physically robot-fighting his fellow Vector pilots because… he wants to be the head. There’s some degree of asocial behavior and general childish BS we can take at the beginning because he’s just starting out, and he needs to grow from point a to a better point b… but it really wears out its welcome.
Silvia and Sirius are a little better… but only a little to start out. Silvia is a character who I will freely admit grows quite well, to the point where I liked her towards the latter half of the show, but she is somewhat grating in how obviously she plays her type at the start and Sirius… one look at Sirius and you are waiting for his sudden yet inevitable betrayal. It is hard, almost impossible, to hear him wax on about beautiful things like he does and not assume, if you have any degree of genre savvy, that he’s going to go over to the side of evil. He’s just got that kind of feeling about him. To his credit and the show’s he fights well against the Shadow Angels until the depths of the endgame, but that doesn’t make his scenes any more tolerable. He’s at his best when he’s interacting with the one side character he actually seems to kind of like, but outside that is liable to just needle you.
And then there’s Commander Fudou. I feel like Fudou is pretty core to the show’s bizarre vibe, that you are either going to love him or hate him, and that which you feel about the guy will strongly inform your final opinion of the show. Fudou is the ultimate mentor figure in Aquarion, and he has a habit of spouting the most inane or insane material as absolute fact, presenting bizarre stoned-seeming rambles as deep philosophy. And he says it with such a straight face that the show… just sort of gives it to him and lets his bizarre non-sequitor lesson be key to defeating the monster of the week. Whether you find him funny, find him compelling, or consider his nonsense to be harmful to the show as a whole will vary from person to person or even episode to episode as an experience.
Fudou’s madness brings me to another issue… this show is bloody convoluted, its fiction stuffed to the gills with everything they thought they could throw in. We have the Shadow Angels as this ancient civilization, a twelve thousand year history of humanity that somehow led to something vaguely familiar until the renewed attack, giant robots, world-shaping magic, bizarre philosophical constructs that work just because, and then you add on that most if not all of the pilot types have psychic powers that are treated as just… kind of a thing in this setting. They have common powers like telepathy, and also unique individual powers or mystical/spiritualist traits that are introduced matter-of-fact and never explained other than vaguely gesturing at the body of parapsychology and occult, despite the show’s meat having little to nothing to do with occult matters. And then there are the Shadow Angels whose nature is heavily varied and takes a long time to explore and who have a plan that’s so overly specific and detailed you’d think it was a parody.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that the show actually explains things, and it does so in a way where they add up, but we shouldn’t have to be doing this kind of motivation calculus in a show that is mostly monster of the week combining robot versus mook robot with one new move compared to the last one. I wish RahXephon had been more detailed about who everyone was and where they came from and why they wanted whatever the hell it was they wanted, but I wish that this show was less of that and let us just get to punching our way through the rogues’ gallery with the goofy infinite punch that becomes Apollo’s favorite attack. It’s an imperfect precursor of the drill-fu in Gurren Lagann, but it’s amusing enough.
In any case, yeah… mostly monster of the week here for a while. We have some new event, a new bizarre lesson from Fudou and a fight with a Shadow Angel that shows off a freaky new power that gets countered by figuring out what the hell Fudou was even on about. Many of these episodes actually skew comedic in a way that feels like it’s trying to emulate the DDR episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion and extend that model to the majority of a show.
And, credit where it’s due, that’s a pretty fun episode, and Aquarion wears its look and feel well. There’s also a spectrum between the episodes that go the lightest and the ones that actually turn out rather heavy as we indulge and explore a frankly overly massive cast.
In addition to Apollo, Sylvia, and Sirius we have several more pilots. My favorite of the lot to watch is Reika, which is kind of odd when she’s actually a sour downer. Her superpower appears to be horrible luck, as she continually bemoans. The poor girl gets knocked out and forced to teleport swap out of the robots constantly in the first bit, tries to quit and gets caught in a serious Shadow Angel incident while she’s powerless before the show drags her back into the fight, and even after some effort is done to “break” her curse of ill fortune, mishaps for the purpose of comedy will still tend to befall anybody she’s talking with. This is with the slight exception of Sirius, with whom she has a great deal of romantic tension. He seems to like her and she seems to like him, but this displeases Silva, frightens Reika because of how she thinks she’s a bad luck charm, and… Sirius is mostly a self-absorbed jerk who’s too busy talking abstractly about beauty to be frank with her.
For all that Reika is kind of a downer, though, she’s not really a chore to watch most of the time because (attempted retirement episode aside) she usually tries pretty hard and carries the drama.
Moving on we have a pair of younger pilots – Jun Lee (the nerdy one, with analytical mental powers) and Tsugumi (the nervous, shy girl who makes explosions when she gets too worked up). We also have Pierre (The human version of Cinderace, a fire-aligned soccer player who, of course, specializes in kicking). He’s probably the most common third wheel in the various formations since he doesn’t have Reika’s cruddy luck and someone has to keep Apollo and the siblings from killing each other. We also have a number who normally stay in the control room since there are only three robots, but who can go ahead and get in if the situation calls for it. That includes twins Kurt (the serious one, and a lady despite that name) and Chloe (the earnest one, with feelings for womanizer Pierre). There’s also Rena, a blind, wheelchair-bound albino girl with phenomenal psychic powers who also turns out to be not exactly a vampire and who otherwise plays the mysterious waif. Then there’s dedicated support staff Jean and Sophia, who have to put up with Fudou’s antics. We also technically have the pilot who crashed in episode 1, Glen, over whom the other older pilots all seem to have hangups, but who is in a coma for most of the show.
Pretty much all these characters get one or more focal episodes, and screen time even when they’re not in the limelight. DEAVA is a pretty stocked place. In fact, I dare say that if somebody left a ham sandwich in the back of DEAVA’s fridge, by the time it grew mold it would probably have enough character to get its own episode (though it would tragically die in the comedy episode where the Shadow Angels send magic pests to destroy all of DEAVA’s stored food and the pilots have to fight hungry)
That’s DEAVA. We also get wrapped up in the drama of the Shadow Angels. We start with Toma and his attendant Otoha, but gradually introduce more of the freaks, including either two that look like sphinxes or one that’s two sphinxes (I’m honestly not sure which they’re going for) a tinkerer in a metal chair doing his best Davros impression, the weird purple warrior guy, their boss who looks like a big humanoid with demon wings and a templar helmet, and a weird Hermes kid with foot wings. Let it not be said that the designs of the Shadow Angels are dull but… what are they even supposed to be? They have their own web of interactions, secrets, and drama and I hope you’re keeping notes because the show expects you to follow these jokers as well.
And don’t forget that we have to deal with the ancient past as well, and the love triangle of twelve thousand years ago between Toma, Apollonius, and Selinae, as well as Apollonious’s status as a traitor against the Shadow Angels and savior of Humanity.
It’s a good thing the show is as long as it is because, as you can probably tell, it is extremely stocked with characters to mess around with. Part of me wants to decry just how scattershot it all is, but in context it does work. The characters tend to have very clear themes, the ones that actually matter get reasonably more development, and taking a break to mess with the lower deck characters is fine and fun when we’re just dealing with disconnected crisis after disconnected crisis.
Overall, I think the Monster of the Week stuff in Aquarion is actually really strong. The monsters sadly all use the same few designs (despite gaining different powers) but that’s the only bother; had they looked unique, it would have been total Saturday Morning Cartoon fare, and a good example within its band.
For better or worse, though, there is a main plot. It first really reminds you it exists around the halfway point, where Toma decides to personally lead an assault against DEAVA HQ. He uses Baron as a hostage against Apollo (which gets Baron killed off for real in the end), makes a mess, and outs Sirius and Silva to the audience (and Apollo, who doesn’t care) as having Shadow Angel blood, presumably because they’re the descendants of Selinae and Apollonious… which should be a known factor given a lot of things while the Shadow Angel blood is treated as a deep and damning secret, but that’s neither here nor there.
After that mess, the character arcs all move forward, with Sirius feeling his isolation from others more keenly, Silvia actually being nice to Apollo (mutual attraction was established earlier, but she was too tsundere to go for it… and remains so for a while, but the Dere becomes dominant), and Apollo actually pretending to be capable of rational thought and teamwork now that he can’t tear off on operation Rescue Baron for reason of Baron being a pile of ashes.
We then get a series of episodes where that Hermes-looking Shadow Angel takes the forefront as the one behind most of the incidents. And he is annoying. He annoys the other Shadow Angels, he annoys his enemies, and he annoys the audience. After a couple episodes he is, thank Haruhi, actually captured by humanity rather than being allowed to escape or drop remote control like the Shadow Angels have done for most of the show, because he was an incautious little twerp. The prisoner is handled by forces above DEAVA, and it’s made rather clear that his fate is gruesome, but brief as scientific forces decide to cut him apart to see what makes him tick.
It’s kind of grim, but the show tries to play this up for horror and… it doesn’t quite land. They focus a lot on it being torturing and/or killing a child, and how awful that is, but… For one, this is still a being leading an effort to genocide the entire human species. Lethal force is authorized. Second point, while the characters in the show identify this Shadow Angel as a “child”… it’s still at least twelve thousand years old, dating to before the ancient downfall of the Shadow Angel species. In no sense should this being still be a “child”. It’s a puckish trickster, I get that, but I don’t think it gets a moral pass for its actions at age twelve thousand. Especially not when, point the fourth, said angel seemed pretty sadistic. Fifth and finally… this one was an annoying enemy. Asking the audience to feel more than momentarily sorry for it is like asking an audience to feel sorry for Scrappy Doo. I’m sorry, but we’re just glad the obnoxious little thing is out of the show. Is that cold? Maybe, but we’re on the other side of a screen, and this is an action show where punching out the Shadow Angels is kind of our stated goal that we’ve all been okay with until this point because it’s us or them.
This moves us towards the endgame. Toma comes knocking again, and this time recruits Sirius, who he identifies as Solar Wing (despite it being pretty much beyond a doubt that Apollo is Apollonious. We get a convoluted explanation of reincarnations to reckon that they both count and also both Sirius and Silvia are Selinae and… honestly, if you’re still following the nonsense, good on you. Point is Sirius finally joins team Shadow Angel) There’s actually a really good moment in the turn, where Reika reaches out for Sirius and it seems like she could bring him back to the human side, but she hesitates just a hint when she sees him sprouting his phantom wrist wing and that last hint of rejection or fear, however small, is what seals his turn.
The boss military hasn’t been sleeping either, as they have mass-production Aquarions, led by Glen who has been awakened from his coma brainwashed, crazy, and grafted with Shadow Angel bits. Human forces manage to gain access to Atlandia, and the final battle begins with Glen’s force determined to explode everything and the DEAVA team wanting to rescue Sirius. The Shadow Angels, meanwhile, enter the final stages of their excessive plan, which is something about regrowing the mystical tree of life to restore the world and… yeah, you can follow it about as far as you follow the ravings of old man Barbem in RahXephon. Which is at least some of the way, but not quite enough. According to the Shadow Angels the world itself is doomed without the Tree, but is that just their world, or actually planet Earth? It’s hard to say.
The Shadow Angels almost get there, but enough damage is done in the end that the tree wilts and dies even as it blooms. Most of the Shadow Angels go out like chumps, but Otoha at least gets a cat fight and Toma… Toma makes it to the ending.
So, here’s the setup: stick a fork in the Shadow Angels, they’re done. The tree is done as well, but its violent collapse seems to be causing a ripple effect that could destroy the world, whether that was always going to happen or not. Guided by Silvia’s spirit, the three individuals left capable perform one last Merge – Sirius, Apollo, and Toma come together in order to form the ultimate Aquarion and fix the world by stitching the flaming lava rifts together with infinite length punchy fists. This costs all three their lives in some esoteric sense, though Apollo insists he’ll see Silvia again in another twelve thousand years.
Why is it these huge Super Robot Mecha shows so typically stumble around the ending? Not literally all of them do it – Gurren Lagann has a really good finale and Eureka Seven’s at least holds up even if the villian was a little on the weak side, but a lot of them just can’t seem to stick the landing. I guess maybe these shows dream so big that it’s difficult to actually visualize the kind of scope and scale needed for the payoff, forcing the creators to get esoteric and hope that a smokescreen haze will make it feel as large as it has to.
In Aquarion’s case, I feel like the big sins are twofold. First off, they go for the “bittersweet” (mostly bitter) ending for the characters when the characters were why we followed the show. Far be it from me to say that shows need happy endings. Having an ending where nobody we followed exactly gets what they want works in something like Aldnoah.Zero that established its tone pretty early on as painful drama. Aquarion, remember, skewed goofy compared to the other big Mecha shows. It was sillier than RahXephon (which was basically 100% serious, to the point where I would have taken most of the cast dying in the final battles) and it was more consistently silly than Neon Genesis Evangelion. I’d even say that it was lighter for longer and lighter on the whole than Gurren Lagann. Aquarion was the Saturday Morning Cartoon member of its family. This is the show where we really want at least our main couple, who had only fairly shortly before the endgame managed to establish themselves as a proper couple, to have a future in their current incarnations and not in a twelve thousand year sequel hook. Furthermore, Toma basically gets a “get out of karma free” card by joining the final Merge and, in my opinion, that kind of sucks (again, for the tone of Aquarion). I think I speak for most audiences when I say I wanted a proper boss fight. Say what you will about Dartz, at least that silver-haired Atlantian evil mastermind sorcerer managed a properly big exit by the standards of his show.
Second, Aquarion’s ending suffers from the compounding effect of its rules and setting being so convoluted. If you follow their babble, like I was able to do, then yes technically both the Shadow Angels plan and how the final battles go down makes sense. However, I don’t think many people are actually going to be treating the nonsense spouted about magic trees and sacred rituals and twelve thousand years ago the same way, like you’re in school and there will be a test called the last two episodes, and especially not following the later changes or reveals. Most people are just going to watch the giant robot do punching. I’m not questioning why the characters do what they do when the scenario is set up this way, I’m questioning why the writers decided to make such an insanely specific scenario that gets us a climax that’s conceptually big but not really fulfilling.
So… that’s the story, but I would be remiss if I didn’t include some last words about Aquarion.
Aquarion is cheesy. I’ve said things to this effect before, but it bears mentioning again; most of this show has an energy where things are serious in-character, but the audience clearly isn’t expected to take it entirely seriously. This is usually pretty fun, but means that the heaviest stuff does have some trouble landing.
Aquarion, for all its Saturday Morning feel, is not really one for kids. Perhaps one of the biggest rubs that I didn’t address in the main body of the review is how sexual the Merge scenes are. When the jets combine into big robot, we’re always treated to spirit images of the merge participants, rendered in the nude (and carefully shot and edited to not show anything inappropriate) giving their best exclamations of ecstasy. One of the episodes (where Pierre has become dangerously Merge-addicted) even turns this up to eleven with innuendo where I think Darling in the Franxx was more subtle.
Aquarion, despite the ending being on the lame side, does nicely tell a complete story. There are ways in which, given the breadth of the show, it’s a wonder that it actually manages to progress a main line, and while the results can be questioned I do think it is a feather in the show’s cap that it pulled them off as well as it did.
So, how fares Aquarion? Well, I don’t think it’s as good as its nearest competition: Gurren Lagann and Eureka Seven (A), RahXephon and Evangelion (A-)… they’re stronger productions than Aquarion. As in, seriously, it’s not even close. Even Darling in the Franxx (B) was, in my mind, significantly better constructed, with more to recommend it even looking at objectively than Aquarion has.
The question is, then, how far Aquarion falls from those heights. To figure out its grade, I have to look deep inside myself and ask a few questions. How high was its maximum potential, really? How much did the characters annoying me drag down the first half? How much did the annoying kid angel and the stumbles at the ending drag down the second? There was certainly some good middle material, but it’s hard to start and unrewarding to finish, just how many points does that cost poor Aquarion?
Enough, in my mind, to push Aquarion to a flat C. Even if you took away the fact that there are a plethora of better Super Robot Epics, because maybe you really want to watch another (I know I do), I think I’d still have trouble recommending Aquarion. Half the show wants you to turn your brain off, the other half wants you to study intensely. Half the show wants to have that “not making sense is cool” energy, the other half is convinced that it’s saying the most meaningful things that have ever been said. The viewing experience has its moments, but what it doesn’t have is a solid whole. Aquarion is, I will grant, not a bad show, but despite the fact that it got a sequel if you can believe that, it’s one that I can’t in any honesty say is really good or laudable either.