Putting humanity on the brink is nothing new in anime. Threatening our species with extinction at the ends of the various appendages of some menace, alien or otherwise, goes back a lot farther than some people seem to think. As evidence, I recommend breaking out the bug spray, turning on your CRT TV, and preparing to watch anime like it’s 1999 with Blue Gender.
Blue Gender follows Yuji Kaido, a guy who was put into suspended animation so a disease he was grappling with, B-Cells, could be handled in the future, but who is rudely awakened being dragged through darkened and decayed hallways in a future where Earth has been overrun by giant killer insect-like monstrosities, the creatively and horrifically designed and blandly named Blue. He’s rescued, not that he realizes it at first, by a squad of soldiers (who of course have some big humanoid robots among their kit) as a valuable sample to be transported to humanity’s last great stronghold, the space station known as Second Earth.
The attempt to get him out goes well at first, other than his volatile mental state, but that’s a fairly short “at first” when the Blue unexpectedly attack an airport that was supposed to be safe, causing the gruesome deaths of some of the hilariously fragile side characters (dashed to twisted bits by an undersold jostling of their slow-moving truck) and otherwise making a mess of things, ensuring the trek across the Blue-infested Earth won’t be brief.
Of the soldiers with Yuji, we focus on one in particular: Marlene, a young ace fighter who seems to be a master of all combat scenarios, but indifferent and heartless when it comes to any sort of emotional affairs, a stark contrast with our lead, who is mostly driven by his feelings of grief, fear, and pity. Mercifully, Yuji does decide fairly quickly he doesn’t want to be helpless, and gets a military crash course from Marlene and to a lesser extent the other soldiers.
They make their way to a Korean city to access a radio tower and call home, in the process encountering a colony of survivors. Yuji befriends a little girl from the colony, but naturally the entire area falls under Blue attack, and when an elite Blue with an armored “core” (vent on their face that seems to be instant death if struck. They can be killed by massive damage otherwise) shows up, it turns into a massacre that Marlene, Yuji, and nobody else survives, leaving a bare-bones cast of two heading to their next destination, a spaceport in Russia.
In the freezing mountains, where Blue aren’t in evidence save in nightmares that torment Yuji, we learn more about Marlene, how she was rescued to Second Earth at a young age and knows only the war against the Blue and the way of soldiers, hence why she holds no romance and the chivalry of former ages is alien to her.
The next episode, with no transition, we are in the desert where they’ve picked up a car and a local guide called Dice. Yuji gets separated from the other two and falls in with a group of nomadic goat-herders, particularly a local girl called Elena, who moves rather fast on the affection. To be fair, he does manage to protect the camp in general and Elena directly from a group of local military thugs by hijacking their mecha, but that doesn’t seem to win him any points with the other nomads.
Marlene and Dice find Yuji, but he protests that he wants to botch the mission and stay with his waifu of the last 48 hours… at least until, after they part ways, he sees the telltale signs that Marlene and Dice have fallen under attack, and tears off to recover the big robot and help them take out the sandworm Blue that went for them. This means, apparently, he can’t go back to Elena and instead is pressing on to the launch facility, which they actually reach.
There, they rendezvous with another recovery team that has a sleeper, though she remains in her pod. The tech of the lot, though, has become dangerously obsessed with her, and as the fighting side of the team fends off both Blue and rogue automatons to get a shuttle launch, he tries to backstab everybody and take off with her for parts unknown.
This backstab is stopped by a power outage, resulting in crazy’s capture. Fixing it reveals an unknown form of Blue sucking up electrical power, which eats the face of the yandere traitor before being killed. Two episodes after trying to run away with the native girl, Yuji decides that he’s desperate to go to space specifically with Marlene, and leads an effort to recover her from the dying rear guard before takeoff.
Oddly, this all seems successful. Marlene is saved, and charmed because Yuji seems to have the same aura as Captain Kirk, and the two of them plus the remainder of the other team and the sleeper in pod launch into space.
This is episode eleven of twenty-six, it can’t be that easy of course, as a small Blue (the electricity-sucker, seemingly merged with the jerk) stowed away, killing the sleeper and injuring Yuji before being put down. This leads us to Second Earth in a bad state, where as has been hinted not all is well nor kind. Since Yuji is out of it, we focus on Marlene, who gets a major dressing down and is sent back to basic training for reeducation on the grounds that she didn’t achieve the mission the way top brass at home wanted it achieved.
In basic, she starts to do poorly, marked down for having developed a pesky thing called empathy. The officer in charge of simulator training even cheats to “kill” her when it looks like she might make it through helping a wounded squadmate rather than leaving him to die.
Both before going to training and after that bout, Marlene checks on Yuji: the first time he’s in the midst of a mysterious operation, about which threatening things have been said. The second time, he’s missing. Marlene gets captured and subjected to a round of training that borders on psychological torture, and thus finds the resolve to track down and get to Yuji whatever it takes. After a long escape and chase where she slips the rest of the military at every opportunity, she finds him being taken care of in a secret lab. Her cries for him seem to rouse him from his torpor, and the two, reunited, are brought before Second Earth’s high council.
There, we learn that Sleepers are important because they have the potential to be obscenely good mecha pilots, good enough to rid the world of Blue. How this is supposed to work when supposedly all forms of conventional weapon were ineffective at preventing the growth of the swarm no matter how many they killed, I don’t know. It would have made a lot more sense if a biological agent were to be developed from their aberrant hyper-immune cells rather than having some “immune instinct” fighters, but then I guess we wouldn’t have the rest of the show. Though Marlene would normally be punished harshly, Yuji and the head of the science division both speak up that, since there’s a bond between them, it would make more sense to keep Marlene on as Yuji’s partner, so no horrible punishment for her today!
After a little time meeting and training with the Sleeper brigade (in the process meeting Alicia, a younger female Sleeper who of course gets the hots for Yuji), it’s time to go down to earth and kick in some bugs. The operation goes well, but there’s a curious inversion: Yuji is now the one to be heartless and absolutely mission focused, going so far as to ignore groundling survivors, while Marlene begs for him to come to his senses. He also becomes friendly yet extremely competitive with another Sleeper, Tony, and the two of them have the absurd performance the brass wants.
This is revealed to be due to the activation of their B-cells (the McGuffin “disease”), which are also said to be the origin of the Blue, those having come from lab animals poorly disposed of from B-cell testing. Thus, while the Sleepers (somehow) present the opportunity to wipe out the Blue with their connection and heightened abilities, they also present the risk of metamorphosing into new Blue. The Science Director, going against the High Council, thinks this risk can be inhibited by the likes of Marlene, whose human emotions should keep Yuji more human.
It would be easier if she didn’t miss the shuttle for the second deployment to Earth due to getting this exposition. She can catch another, though, by claiming the shuttle dock as part of the science team’s coup against the high council. She manages to find Yuji and successfully raise a romance flag to bring him down from his crazy high, but in the meantime Tony has taken Alicia to the heart of the local Blue hive for what is implied to be nefarious purpose and, with both their aces acting up, the rest of the assault force was beaten, a few haggard survivors launching their way back to space, leaving Marlene and Yuji to scavenge the next one.
In space, the Science department holds the military station, while the medical station (also containing residential and sleep blocks) is under the control of the High Council. After the main survivor shuttles offload to the military station, Tony arrives in a shuttle of his own. The scientist panics and rejects him, but the High Council sees their trump card… only to get slaughtered because he’s brought along a shuttle-load of Blue (soon to become an army as they feed) and Alicia as his seemingly mind-controlled queen. His plan, then, is to crash the two stations that make up Second Earth together and thus wipe out humanity as some kind of holy mission or whatever his crazy link with the Blue hive mind is interpreted as.
Marlene and Yuji show up shortly after, as the remaining rebel troops fail to challenge the Blue-infested station, making the two of them the last, best hope to stop and/or kill Tony. They first face Alicia, who is just a little too deep in the crazy to be saved before she has to be shot. Despite characters in this show normally dying pretty horrifically, her injury is supposedly nonfatal and just puts her out of the action.
As other teams try to mitigate the damage, Marlene and Yuji find their way to Tony. He jabbers on about great wills and messiahs and cleansing the Earth. Yuji takes him out… surprisingly easily. Sure, he does fight back some and even threatens Marlene, but somehow more was still to be expected. They flee the station in victory as the overrun sections separate and explode.
And I guess the writers decided Alicia needed to redeem herself, because she wakes up as her medevac out gets chomped and comes across a not-quite-dead Tony, holding him back from attempting any further evil as he’d like to. Exit both of them, leaving us with a distinct question: how does this show have three more episodes? It’s a number that seems either too much or not enough.
Well, we start off with the expected: the loyalist survivors (at least the ranking ones) are set to be punished. At the same time, Science Boss announces his new policy for the future, Alternative V! Or, at least, staying in space forever rather than trying to recapture Earth. He also spouts a lot of babble about apoptosis (or “planned suicide”) essentially supporting Tony’s insane ramblings that the Blue were somehow meant to wipe out humans, viewing the Earth as an organism that can make choices like that.
Yuji and Marlene have their H-scene (it’s very tasteful), and in the penultimate episode, they’ve gone to Earth rather than accepting rotting forever in orbit. Technically, they are on a supported mission to find out what’s up with a mysterious mass Blue migration. They discover, inside a strange new Hive, that most of the Blue have died, seemingly turning to stone. However, the “planned suicide” isn’t over, as all that power seems to have been rerouted to a single, new, Final Boss Blue.
The Final Boss shreds the help and almost Yuji as well, before being made to drink bullets in a last glorious display of the show’s gore. Therafter, Yuji announces he’s going on alone. He and Marlene have a long conversation in which she reveals she’s pregnant, with the ultimate conclusion being that she’ll head back to wait for him while he enters the mysterious glow sphere that spawned the final boss in order to commune with the Will of the Planet or something else that will supposedly be useful for humanity’s future and only he, with B-Cells, can do at all safely.
Yuji descends into the sphere by way of goo doppelganger, and the show throws us some imagery not quite as incomprehensible to the average viewer as the end of Kubrick’s 2001, descending through golden light to some kind of crystal flower that shows him scenes from earth past, present, and maybe future to which he says he understands.
The second verse of the intro song plays during a montage where Marlene is sad, Yuji returns to her through mechanism not announced, and Second Earth mutinies against the science boss and then self-destructs for reasons not announced. Finally we cut back to Yuji and Marlene as they agree to live together on Earth and kiss, hives in the background still sending up magic pillars of light.
I’ll be honest right now, it feels like the writers had no idea how to actually conclude the show. They clearly wanted some sort of vaguely green messages so the bug war couldn’t be “won” conventionally but there were too many loose ends so they went esoteric and blew up everything that couldn’t be waved away with magic.
So, first, I’ll follow up on my intro. Blue Gender, coming out in 1999, is hardly the first story of its kind. But it is older than the ones a lot of people cite these days. I’ve seen the phrase “Attack on Titan clone” thrown around way too much, ignoring the longer and broader heritage.
And to an extent, what if there are heavy inspirations from a predecessor? Blue Gender also provides a great example that sometimes the new one isn’t a knockoff, it’s the upgrade. Specifically, Muv Luv debuted a few years later, and I would be surprised if the creators weren’t aware of Blue Gender, since quite a few BETA-verse designs and movements in Unlimited and Alternative resemble ones here.
But pretty much everything Blue Gender and Muv Luv both try to do, Muv Luv does better. The fish out of water landing in with military forces as a civilian? Got it covered. The scheming scientist and political power struggles taking place behind the scenes? Way more compelling. The bits about abandoning Earth and what that would mean for people, down to the question of what to do with the leading couple? Unlimited’s bittersweet ending blows Blue Gender’s esoteric one out of the water. Actual bug war action? Nothing in Blue Gender holds a candle to Sadogashima or Operation Cherry Blossom in Alternative.
But, I’ll step away from Muv Luv for a minute. I took a long and deep look at those games a while ago and made my positive regard for them quite clear. How does Blue Gender do on its own?
Well, the characters are… a thing. Yuji and Marlene are well-rounded and dynamic characters… for the most part. Yuji does have some sudden shifts, but those are explicit and so I don’t really count that against the show. Marlene, on the other hand, goes from a badass soldier who cares only about the mission to the satellite girlfriend a little too easily. Still that’s not the worst sin in terms of character writing, and she still has enough toughness that I can overall forgive it with only a slight mark against.
The problem comes with the side characters. There are a lot of them, and they’re pretty much all transparently there to get killed or abandoned in an episode or so. The few that recur regularly also don’t have a lot of meat to them. Alicia was probably the best of the lot, and she only had two notes, both of which were fairly generic: she was the squad screwup and she had the hots for Yuji making her a rival with Marlene (who still didn’t “get” her own feelings at that point).
On the other hand, there’s the art. Blue Gender’s animation is, overall, fine for its day, but credit must be given for this show’s gore. When I reviewed Elfen Lied, I talked about what would make good gore. The details, the gribblies, the creativity, the uniqueness – they’re all here. Blue Gender really could be Exhibit B to show the difference. It might not be quite as blood-soaked as Blood-C but it makes up for it with humans and monsters alike showing all sorts of squishy internal parts and how best those parts can be ruptured.
I wouldn’t typically call myself an aficionado of gore, but when you do something you get points for doing it right.
Also of note are the monster designs. The Blue are quite creatively horrific. They’re not just giant insects, they have various aspects from across nature and some that just come from what I assume to be their designer’s nightmare fever dreams. I think there might have been some H.R. Giger on the brain too, because they go in on the suggestively psycho-sexual imagery. Except, while the Xenomorph of Alien fame was a phallic image with extra phallic imagery to spare, Blue Gender flips the sex around with lots of close-up shots of the extremely yonic maws of the Blue.
Which lets me segue into a little side note: I get the Blue part – it is the name of our monstrous foe even if we’re never given any reason why they’re called that – but why did this show decide to put “gender” in its title? Some ad copy for it describes Marlene as someone who “doesn’t understand the difference between male and female” but there is all of one scene where Yuji’s talk of “I want to protect you because I’m a guy” gets a “The hell are you talking about?” sort of response. She really just does feel like a poorly-socialized soldier. It feels like a poor stretch by someone official or otherwise to try to cover for the title. And for all the feminine sexual imagery the Blue bring to the table, nothing is actually done with it, even on the level of implication or metaphor. It’s just one bit of creep factor among plenty of other bits of creep factor that were thrown in to create the Blue.
This is especially odd since the show kind of giftwraps a few opportunities for itself and then doesn’t open them. The Blue don’t properly eat humans, mostly, they wrap them up in these weird green balls of twisted limbs and agonized expressions and then just sort of leave that laying around while they go munch infrastructure. These are described as “meat dumplings” and supposedly they do go back and eat them when they feel like it, but especially given where the show goes with the Blue being a means of culling an out-of-control humanity for mama Earth, you’d think you could get some birth/unbirth imagery in there if they actually did anything with the tightly coiled humans they acquired. But no, it’s just there to look creepy.
Given Yuji’s near-constant interactions with girls of the week or close enough, there could have been a smart metaphor here between different interpretations of masculinity and femininity: Yuji’s traditional values, the appeals of the various side-girls like Elena or Alicia, Marlene’s unfeminine soldier ethos, and the distinctly feminine monstrous nature of the Blue… but it’s not there. It’s just left on the table.
Back on track, the viewing experience of Blue Gender is… scattered. It has its good moments and good movements, but it’s not woven together very well at times. I already mentioned how the last movement, especially the last episode, feels like it’s spinning its wheels in a “what now?” scenario, but it’s not the only one in the show. Once Marlene and Yuji escape Earth the first time we putter around with Marlene for a while and then segue into super mecha pilot training. It’s even brought up in show that the reason the Sleepers were being collected should have been announced, since they’re not just lab rats but hopes for the future, and the question gets brushed off by the brass, like the writers knew that where they decided to go their setup was retroactively extremely stupid.
The inconsistency and poor flow is patched over by action and gore, but in my mind it’s not enough. Is Blue Gender really awful? No. I would even argue it’s not a bad show. But it’s not a good show either. Parts of it also come off as extremely dated, even more so than the much older Armored Trooper Votoms.
Thus, for my grade, I’ll give Blue Gender a C-. But while I usually provide a recommendation or passive indifference to shows above a D, I would recommend leaving Blue Gender behind. It’s a weak entry in a clogged genre, so unless you’ve watched and played your way through a ton of media and are still hungry, I think you can find something better to do with your time.