Rinne no Lagrange is a show that dips its toes into a lot of genres. It’s kind of a super robot mecha show, but more weight is given to more classical space sci-fi than you would expect. At the same time, it’s got a heavy dose of slice of life, which really is the “meat” of the show in a lot of ways.
The main character of the show is Madoka Kyouno, your ordinary Japanese high school student for this outing. Madoka is decidedly less “average” than the common fare. Sure, she’s a well-meaning dork, but in her case that’s more than just a small quirk; she is the only member of the “Jersey Club”, an organization started by her big sister dedicated to helping whoever needs it. She’s also the right kind of crazy to be wearing a swimsuit under her uniform and dive to the rescue the instant she detects that someone might be in trouble, getting to school on time or in any fit state be damned. Yeah, it’s absolutely a good thing to do, but it is still a very telling moment as to what kind of person she is out of the gate.
However, we can’t really have this sci-fi mecha show without some aliens and robots. So, it turns out that the person Madoka saved is Princess Fin E Ld Si Laffinty (Lan for Short). She’s not exactly from Earth (though she is human – this show goes with something of a reverse of the typical “ancient astronauts” story, where advanced human civilization fled Earth eons ago rather than advanced aliens coming to Earth). Lan is here to help and protect Madoka because Madoka is the chosen one, able to pilot a very cool super robot (Vox Aura), which is kept at a special floating base just offshore. In fact, that’s where Madoka’s big sister happens to work.
Madoka gets in the robot in more or less the nick of time, though, as a space rebel attacks. Madoka manages to beat him with some wrestling moves – you know a show is at least trying when a mech gets suplexed in the first episode – but more are inbound fairly shortly after, and the next episode (and change) see her going back into battle against two more space rebel type people in their own mechs. The 2-on-1 is harsh enough that Lan decides to protect her new friend, Madoka. Therefore, she gets in her own super robot (Vox Lympha) and helps fight back. These two escape, suggesting they’ll be back for further villainy.
This is about where the breaks are put on the action side of Rinne no Lagrange. We introduce the thrid main character, Muginami, a young lady who is secretly affiliated with the rebel faction. She transfers into school and quickly forms a rivalry with Lan. She doesn’t seem like a bad person, but eventually Villagulio, the boss of the three stooges from earlier, comes knocking, and Muginami chooses to stand with him, since he’s her adoptive big brother. She even claims the third and final super robot (Vox Ignis) for herself. Villagulio isn’t pleased with this, and this ends up with Muginami getting in the robot, after seemingly being kicked to the curb over the whole Vox thing.
Villagulio withdraws, thanks in part to Muginami’s interference, but the clash causes something else: the appearance of phantasmal flowers, referred to as the blooming of the Rinne. This is apparently Very Bad News.
After giving the girls some time to work out their differences, we pick up with the arrival of a little blonde girl who is really ten thousand years old, and who seems to control a lot of the earth-side stuff and know much of what’s only been hinted about the Rinne and the apocalyptic doom the Vox mechs are supposed to herald. She takes charge and bans Madoka from piloting.
This is fine, giving us enough downtime for the obligatory school culture festival. Even Villagulio and his underlings seem content to chill for a bit, though he does have plans waiting to be enacted. This comes with the arrival of his fleet, belonging to the planet of De Metrio. Lan and Muginami are initially prepared to intercept, and after a great deal of convincing, Madoka is allowed to join them in battle.
Villagulio wants the Vox in his possession or destroyed, though, and his second-in-command, leading the battleships rather than in a robot, is much more ruthless, willingly bombarding Madoka’s home town and even her school. This leads to a freakout in which more Rinne flowers bloom, Madoka speaks to a mysterious voice in some sort of mental space, and there are a few turnabouts before the final answer: the arrival of a second alien (human) war fleet, belonging to Le Garite and Lan’s brother Dizelmine. Their arrival fights off De Metrio and also reveals the existence of extraterrestrial humans to the world. We even learn that one of the base staff, an oddly wormy dude with perpetually closed eyes and a constant smile named Moid, was one of Dizelmine’s agents, helping establish good relations.
After that, though, it seems that everyone must go their separate ways. Lan and Muginami will be heading back off into space, but they promise with Madoka to meet again. As the world reels from being opened to interstellar humanity, the first season ends with more of a time-passing montage, showing what it would take to get there and that the girls are doing alright.
The second season ends up picking up the pace a little. It starts with the war between De Metrio and Le Garite continuing in space, Muginami and Lan caught on opposite sides. A peace conference is to be held on Earth, but ahead of it Muginami comes around, hoping to stop Madoka from risking everything piloting again. Lan gets in the robot to protect Madoka. Madoka re-awakens Vox Aura after a long between-seasons of being incapable, and does her best to smack some sense into her friends.
Ultimately, Madoka manages to hear their thoughts through the Rinne, and that neither wants to fight the other. They go to ground as Le Garite secures the area, which leads the three to meet up in the Jersey Club room, where Madoka makes them make up, after which they are all set to seek asylum on Earth.
We do also finally get the technical root of the conflict: it turns out that De Metrio and Le Garite are on a collision course. Disaster isn’t coming soon (in fact, it’s more than a lifetime off), but if something drastic isn’t done then both worlds will be destroyed. The Vox units have the power to act as a planet buster, and it seems like at least the Le Garite forces believe that Dizelmine is intending to secure them in order to blow De Metrio to smithereens and secure Le Garite’s future.
The little blonde girl hopes to defuse this situation by demonstrating peaceful applications of the Vox, reckoning that power sufficient to destroy a planet could also (relatively harmlessly) deflect orbital mechanics so as to save both worlds. The first test… doesn’t go so well, with Madoka being teased until her embarrassment at all the dirty thoughts planted in her head seems to (temporarily) summon the End Times as a voice (and a brief glimpse of a young woman) warns her that the Rinne must not be opened.
The next bit comes out in a fairly confusing, mystery-style way. The potential peace conference is interrupted by what looks like the girl from Madoka’s visions, only far less mature as a person. This is Yurikano, Villagulio’s sister (biological, unlike Muginami) and possibly Dizelmine’s old flame, who was believed dead in a disastrous Vox test. She actually survived (a fact kept secret by Dizelmine), but has total amnesia for the incident and everything before it, hence her childlike behavior and negative reactions to her real brother.
Madoka, Lan, and Muginami, in order to investigate this further, sneak aboard a transport to the Le Garite fleet. Once in orbit, they get more of the story, with Dizelmine saying he wants Madoka’s help to get the real Yurikano back. Madoka agrees (while Lan and Muginami deal with a quite awkward welcome) and gets strapped in for a crazy experiment. The intended result, by Dizelmine, would have killed off Madoka and essentially replaced her with Yurikano. Instead, thanks in part to the ship being overwhelmed by growing otherworldly crystals, what we get is Yurikano (real) in Madoka’s body while Madoka spends some time in Yurikano’s body. At the same time, a rightfully enraged Villagulio launches an attack on Dizelmine’s forces, which goes better than it might have due to the command ship being overrun by crystals.
In the chaos, the two non-Madoka leads get in their robots (which come to save them) and Madoka-in-Yurikano’s-body temporarily ends up in an escape pod. Yurikano takes this opportunity to show off her stuff (in a stock mech, Aura leaving her when it realizes she’s not its bonded pilot) and also basically tell everyone off. At the end, she’s switched back with Madoka, warns everyone to not open the Rinne and not seek her again. She then dissolves entirely, leaving no body behind this time.
In the wake of that tragedy, Dizelmine and Villagulio actually agree to peace terms, and to look for a way to save both their worlds… with about half a season left to go. Rinne no Lagrange may love its Slice of Life, but even this show doesn’t love it enough to dispense with the plot when so much running time remains.
While Madoka and friends will largely be having fun for the next few, we do get a turn soon enough where it turns out that the blonde loli was responsible for the ancient Vox-related tragedy, and despite some loss of memory is trying to keep her mistakes from being repeated. It also turns out that Moid and Dizelmine are jerks, as Moid steals an ancient tablet of important truths and delivers it to Dizelmine in secret. Moid becomes a wanted man, though with Dizelmine covering for him, an interstellar manhunt will of course turn up nothing. However, this really matures at the end of the next episode after Moid’s sinister nature is revealed, when a going away party for two of Villagulio’s three henchmen (who have been working as waiters at a cafe run by Madoka’s uncle for most of the show now) is capstoned by the Le Garite Fleet making a full attack on the De Metrio forces in orbit.
Thus begins the grand finale: the peace talks were a total sham, Dizelmine is going back on any deal he might have made, and he’s gotten enough stolen Vox data from Moid to have his own brand new Vox-type mecha, so plan planet busting is back on schedule, as long as the original Vox and Villagulio are dealt with.
Dizelmine comes to Earth and battles Villagulio, seemingly to the death. Now, it’s revealed soon enough that Villagulio is injured but alive, since this show doesn’t actually want to go that dark, but as the moment goes? It would be pretty darn effective as a character death.
All this battle and strife fully opens the Rinne, blanketing Earth in a black storm of doom that turns anything it touches to disintegrating crystal and dragging the Vox units into that weird extradimensional space Yurikano inhabits. Moid watches this with delight, revealing his motivation: he was also there in ancient times, and when the Rinne opened to disaster levels, he experienced something more or less divine, which he has been working to recapture ever since.
In the Rinne, Madoka and pals fight back against Dizelmine in what’s actually a fairly good final battle. The real war is in the emotions, though and Madoka, Lan, and Muginami ultimately manage to get through to Dizelmine and convince him to give up on being evil.
As the Rinne prepares to close, the group finds Dizelmine and Yurikano. They both seem prepared to remain in the Rinne realm to pay for their crimes, real or perceived, but Madoka says “Screw that” and arranges to haul them both back to the real world, singing the Jersey Club anthem as the world-consuming darkness is dispelled.
Some time after, Yurikano is re-integrating with the people who cared about her, Dizelmine is a shota (the same thing happened to him that created the ancient loli string-puller), Madoka has some meaningful conversations with her big sister, and Moid, being driven insane by the jersey club song stuck in his head, jump-cuts out of existence in the middle of raving about how he’ll achieve his goals in the future even if it takes another twenty thousand years and so on… you know the speech, he doesn’t get to finish it, someone just highlights him and presses ‘delete’.
Finally, with peace secured between Le Garite and De Metrio (the orbital problem solved), Space is open, and Madoka and her friends (including extended friends like Villagulio) are steadily turning the Jersey Club into an interstellar service organization. The end.
This description, covering the plot, ignores the fact that this show has a Story to Slice-of-Life balance similar to Yuki Yuna is a Hero (LINK AND DELETE) or even more balanced towards the fluffy stuff. It is a show about Madoka, Lan, and Muginami becoming friends first, and a story about an interstellar war or mechas or alternate dimensions a distant second.
Which is not to say that the stuff isn’t in there. At first, Season 1 of the show didn’t totally hit me the right way because I wasn’t expecting the pacing, and it suggests a bigger plot without doing all that much to realize it. Season 2 is much more like a conventional mecha-drama show, but looking back on it having digested both halves of the story, I’m not sure that’s entirely to the show’s benefit. There was a warmth to the first season slice of life that doesn’t quite stand as tall in the second season when things are turning into crystals or blowing up or we’re exploring the dark and twisted existence of Yurikano. Things that seemed too slow or like they were puttering at first in retrospect are what really made everything work.
Which is not to say that the second season is bad, mind you. I probably enjoyed it better by a hair, even if I can analyze it and say that it may have missed the point somewhere along the line.
As an example, in the first season we spend a lot of time with Villagulio’s henchmen. The trio are both the first enemies we fight and later are treated as more complex characters. For instance, during the inevitable culture festival, one of them visits Madoka’s school, hoping to challenge her to a duel. He’s mistaken for her boyfriend coming to ask her out and gets sat down by the Kendo Club, where he learns all sorts of things about Madoka’s background and who she is as a person and the bonds she has with her friends and peers. This forces him to introspect and saps him of the will to fight, so that he ends up making an exit before Madoka can be retrieved and brought to him, resulting in the two of them not meeting that day but the henchman coming away with a very different impression of someone he just saw as a foe.
It’s a very good sequence that does a lot for the henchman character, showing that he has more than just hot-blooded aggression, and also does a good deal for Madoka. Sure, the standard advice is “show, don’t tell” but we are shown from the very first episode on what Madoka is like and how she acts, so it’s okay to tell us more of why and hear in clearer words what the general reactions to the material we’re shown is. All throughout the show, Madoka is kind of a positivity elemental, so getting an outside perspective on her, especially seeing how it works on someone who actually starts out disliking her is good.
This adds essentially nothing to the plot. A character who frankly doesn’t even rate in the first half starts out chilling on Earth, and ends the episode chilling on Earth with a slightly different perspective to not take a fight he wasn’t liable to get the chance to take anyway. But it lets us experience the characters and their world in a way that justifies the time taken for it (which needed to be a good deal).
This sort of thing is all over the first season. Rather than having someone spout off exposition while we rush headlong into the next big event, it’s more about a leisurely stroll from plot point to plot point getting to know the individuals that are with us along the way. The second season doesn’t exactly ‘take off’ but it does start power-walking, and which balance you personally find to be more engaging is going to be a very personal matter.
That said, when the second season had the plot really kick in… I liked the plot, and how it presented a problem that set a lot of basically decent people against each other because there wasn’t a clean or pretty answer. Dizelmine is pretty clearly in the wrong as far as the show is concerned (and dips his toes into evil as well), but his technical motivation is to, as king, ensure the future of his people against an existential threat. Villagulio comes off as a kind of fun big brother or uncle kind of guy through most of Season 2, but it would be best to remember that he was also a terrorist willing to hunt down third parties and disinclined to listen to much reason at the outset. But, again, he has something he desperately wants to protect and it’s not unreasonable to do so.
While other characters, even arguably the leads, fall by the wayside in Season 2, the interplay of Dizelmine and Villagulio makes a lot of scenes really work, because there’s this tension where they used to be the best is friends, possibly even to the point where they would have become family through Yurikano (who, unrelated to her exile to the Rinne, was once arranged to marry Dizelmine and then the arrangement broken off). Yurikano provides an extra puzzle piece, being both the link that continues to bind the rival kings and at the same time the source of a good deal of their interpersonal bad blood and continued friction. Yurikano, for her part, seems to be the anti-Madoka in that she’s gruff and has trouble being honest with and about her feelings, but they have some deep similarities in how they care about others. Madoka goes through a great deal to make her friends stop fighting, while we ultimately get out of Yurikano that she trapped herself on the other side hoping that her ‘death’ would shock her brother and former fiancee back to their senses and stop their fighting as well. They have very different manners, but their goals and interests are in sync.
I also do like how the second season challenges Madoka’s optimism. While Dizelmine and Yurikano are ultimately turned around, they both repeatedly shoot down olive branches held out to them. Madoka tries several schemes, some more competent and others, to rekindle the friendship between Dizelmine and Villagulio, only to fail utterly because it turns out that he’s not just being a prisoner of circumstance, Dizelmine really does hate Villagulio now. Similarly, Yurikano repeatedly shoots down the idea of shipping her with Dizelmine, and Madoka seems to be more off-base than you might suspect when she suggests that Yurikano is just a tsundere – the bad blood is real. More in abstract, Dizelmine’s betrayal of the peace terms is a pretty major blow, and while the show does not wallow in it (to the show’s credit) it does have some nice hangtime where the audience knows that Madoka’s happiness at the state of affairs is a castle built on sand.
On the whole, Rinne no Lagrange does what it sets out to do very well. What it sets out to do is just to be a rather warm, rather fun lighter space opera. For all that we see in screen, I think the show is worth a very fair and solid B. I recommend it with caveats avout how the pacing is probably going to annoy you a little in one season or the other or that you can’t expect an Evangelion-style mecha drama like you might want to after the first episode or so, but I do think that what we’ve got is well-written and entertaining and certainly worth the time.