An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 10

What a way to enter a hiatus.

Because, yeah, in case you hadn’t heard, Episodes 11 and 12 of Azur Lane will be delayed… to March. The reasons given for doing this seem to tie back to the animation quality. While I’ve been more interested in the plot and story structure, I have alluded to the state of the animation and… you know, I’ve seen worse telling better stories, but I can’t say I don’t understand having a desire to submit better work. When we get the remastered rerun (assuming the full run gets touched up), I’ll be watching it, but I won’t rerun an episode-by-episode look through. If there are substantive changes, rather than it just looking better, I’ll cover them in an article before Episode 11. Otherwise, this series will just enter hibernation and return when Episode 11 actually debuts.

That out of the way, let’s talk about our last episode for a while.

Basically, I consider Episode 10 here to be something of a companion to Episode 9. While Episode 9 was focused on the Starter Squad with only a little treatment Enterprise and the Sakura Empire, Episode 10 here is mostly about Enterprise and the Sakura forces with only a little material for Ayanami and company. Makes sense to have this one go second, since it’s the one that advances the main plot.

Speaking of which, what is our main plot exactly? I’ve been kind of letting it reveal as it comes, but right now I’ve got to question how many times I’ve been saved by my game knowledge. Because when you really think about it, the world of Azur Lane is a kind of out-there premise. In Arpeggio of Blue Steel, the shipgirl concept, and what it means in Arpeggio in particular, is discussed enough that you have a solid feeling for what the Mental Models are. Some things aren’t quite answered, like where the Fog came from or what the Admiralty Code actually is, but other things are answered, like what if anything sets Mental Models apart from humans (at least humans with superpowers or technological toys), where their identities seem to come from, and what it means for them to be the kind of existence they are.

Unless you know a few things about the game or maybe unless you’re particularly perceptive, I don’t think Azur Lane would have even given you that many answers. Are they ships first, or are they humanoids? In this episode we meet Orochi (sort of), who exists as a ship but doesn’t yet have her own shipgirl form. But at other times, the ship seems to be fairly non-vital. Enterprise’s human body isn’t in nearly as bad a state as you’d expect from her ship damage in the early episodes, and all of Belfast’s care advice is about caring for herself as a human. And on the funny side, San Diego can get wrecked twice now and wail about it like you’d expect from her car getting totaled, not a major injury. What about their personalities and histories? The ship girls seem to exist both with their own personal continuities, like Enterprise’s memories of the bedridden Yorktown or Kaga’s recollection of the past between herself, Akagi, and Amagi… but at the same time they also lean on distinctions the original ships would have earned in World War II, like how many battle stars Enterprise came away with, or Yukikaze’s status as a lucky ship. Except this world isn’t Earth as we know it. World War II didn’t happen here, and in fact the closest equivalent to it seems to be happening right now.

The immediate elements of the plot, I get. Orochi is a Siren megaproject, therefore it’s bad, the foxes got all tricksy to see it done, kicked off the war because deal with the devil, we need to take it out before Very Bad Things happen to the world. But the deeper implications just aren’t addressed particularly well. There ARE answers to all the issues I brought up in the previous paragraph, but I have most of them because I teased them out of the game, not because the show provided them.

I guess there’s an extent to which the immediate plot is kind of all you need. There’s action, and reasons for that action, motives for our antagonists (kind of. The Sakura ones at least.) and stakes in the outcome. But this episode in particular I can’t help but thinking that both Belfast and Observer have scenes that would suffer from a lack of understanding of the matters at hand if I were restricted solely to the information in the show.

We see, this episode, Observer first managing to charm Akagi to the Siren side by (as we kind of knew by now) telling her that Amagi can be brought back to life. There is a good moment here, where they don’t stop at just saying the dead can be brought back, but actually debate what that would mean, whether an exact duplicate with the bodies and memories of the original would actually count. Observer invokes the Ship of Theseus and seems to win the debate (at least over Akagi), but if we knew more about what it meant to be one of the shipgirls maybe we’d see how the argument was wrong (or right).

Meanwhile, and more critically, we have another round of Belfast and Enterprise butting heads over how Enterprise sees herself. I know we’re supposed to support Belfast in the “Lovers’ quarrel” (as one of the onlooking shipgirls calls it) but honestly it’s actually kind of hard. Not because Belfast is strictly wrong when she’s implying that Enterprise should regard herself more as a human. At least coming in with game lore, that feels right, but because of how Belfast approaches the topic. She means well, but just like the first episode where she worked on helping enterprise she’s talking about having breakfast. Meanwhile, we know Enterprise has been having fairly real visions of Ash/Amagi/Orochi. She goes through some seriously chilling supernatural events that would shake anybody, and Belfast still treats it as a matter of lifestyle because that’s the body of the story Belfast sees. She’s not wrong that the lifestyle and self image issues are a problem for Enterprise, but… Watching Belfast this episode is like looking at someone on the deck of the Titanic trying to keep the ship afloat by bailing. It’s well-meaning and technically more helpful than doing nothing, but all the same I’m not sure you’re going to get anywhere with that technique. Breakfast might be the most important meal of the day (citation needed), but it’s not going to fend off mental intrusion by nefarious powers from outside time and space.

And, to circle back to my point about not having enough lore, Belfast challenges Enterprise on the statement that she (Enterprise, but by implication the other shipgirls) was made for the purpose of fighting. But if that’s wrong we don’t know how or why it’s wrong. We don’t see any humans, and the shipgirls do seem to have a lot of leeway to dictate their own war policies, but all the same they are supposed to be human-produced weapons for the purpose of fighting back the Sirens. We don’t know what is or isn’t included in that, how the girls come into being, what makes them unique, or anything like that. Is it possible to learn such facts? Not from the show as we’ve seen it. We have to take it on faith that the unique personalities of the girls and their individual existence is more than that of war machines, and we do have the evidence in front of us to believe it, with the tragic loves of the Sakura Empire, the deep friendship that forms with the destroyers (however randomly), and even arguably Enterprise’s own fear that would set her against her “purpose”. But it’s still hard to really be 100% on board with Belfast when she presents the humanity as though it were something self-evident.

Big lore dumps can be a pain, but I can’t imagine it would have taken more than a minute or two to get the pencil sketch of what we (the players of the game) know about the still fairly enigmatic Wisdom/Mental Cubes. We really only need the idea that the personalties and knowledge inherent in the shipgirls is encoded from some otherworldly source to both have a better view of Belfast (as we would have reason to believe that the shipgirls would possess something we might properly call a soul, rather than simply being machines) and a clearer view of Orochi and what Orochi implies.

Because we actually get a good deal of Orochi this episode, and the answers are pretty good and compelling if you’re following along enough for them to really land. Orochi, when appearing to Enterprise in a vision, declares herself essentially to be the incarnation of warfare, the human desire and wish for conflict and destruction. It’s… interesting, and would be more relevant if we were let in that Cubes in general (not just the black cube) were like that, and Orochi’s nature, therefore, would not be too much different than that of the other Shipgirls… just one skewed towards the dark and destructive side of existence.

All of this said, the actual plot motion we get this episode is fine. It’s the autopilot setup for the big climax we’ve got to wait until March to get, but even if that’s true that still means it’s a very functional one. On the Sakura Empire side, Nagato orders Orochi mothballed, infuriating Kaga and setting the bulk of the Sakura Empire who had been deceived Akagi and Kaga back on the right path even if they don’t realize it. On the other side, one of the elite Sirens (Purifier, the most often fought of the lot in the game and in my opinion the fun one) gets into the Azur Lane base and steals the charged black cube through some of, sorry to say, the least dynamic action in the show thusfar. Kaga, in desperation and despair, reactivates the Orochi ship and sails it on out, much to the horror of the other Sakura Empire characters, beating out Prinz Eugen and the Ironblood’s one-line attempts to steal its secrets. (Hope for Episodes 11/12: May the Ironblood please matter to this show…). Kaga seems to control Orochi at this stage the way most girls control their own ships, so has she become one with it? We’ll see… but not for a while. The episode ends with Orochi setting sail and Enterprise joining the fight against the overpowered Purifier, leaving us a long wait to clean up a lot of stuff in just two episodes.

Now, I do still think it can be done. We are a little late in the game for Belfast to really feel like she helped Enterprise through her problems, but when Enty does inevitably manage to achieve epiphany superpowers in the end, I won’t totally reject it. She took two steps forward and something like three steps back, but she does seem to be the kind of character who could have a big breakthrough. Observer’s recovery of Akagi needs to pay off, as does the Ironblood’s kinda scheming behavior (as represented by Eugen). Orochi and Kaga, which may or may not be the same thing at this point, need to be dealt with, and we need to get some context for what this means to the overall conflict against the Sirens. Does War finally change? And we need to have some followup to the visions Enterprise has been having, both of Ash handling dead Sirens and of an Amagi (with child versions of Akagi and Kaga) who she recognized as different than Orochi wearing Amagi’s face. Ayanami and the Destroyer brigade need to help save the Sakura Empire from itself (and probably turn them into the cavalry against Kaga and the Sirens) and… yeah, I think we can get that done in two episodes. With three months of extra work, I really hope they can get it done in two episodes or if they can’t then that they can get the OK to get it done in the time it takes.

And when we see how that does or doesn’t work, I’ll be back to report on it, probably with a “War never changes” counter and maybe with a new outlook thanks to the hiatus. Hope to see you all then, if not sooner.

Game Lore: https://harperanimereviews.com/how-much-lore-does-it-take-to-justify-cute-ship-girls-a-prelude-to-azur-lane/

Previous Episode: https://harperanimereviews.com/seasonal-selection-azur-lane-episode-9/