Vividred Operation is a weird one for me. The first time I tried to watch it, I quit part-way through Episode 2. The reason for this is probably the reason it’s got a fairly poor aggregate, and why a lot of viewers will also be dissuaded from getting through the show: The fanservice is intense, and if that doesn’t bug you on its own it’s worth noting that it’s mostly loli fanservice. Like most Magical Girls, the leads in Vividred Operation are in middle school, and unlike a lot of Magical Girls (especially ones that get fanservice-heavy treatments) at least some of them, notably the main character Akane, are drawn to look on the younger end of that and still get a lot of shots focused on their rear ends.
To be fair, the show lets you know this pretty much from frame one, when one of the first shots of the show does the James Bond style “Scene between the legs” shot with one of the girls. The show does, frankly, tone it down a little over time (I guess they assume they’d hooked the audience they wanted to hook) but it never goes away, with even that particular shot coming back a couple times.
If that’s going to filter you, you can stop now. If not, what do you actually get for going through the whole show? Honestly, a very heartfelt, legitimate, and well-constructed Magical Girl show.
Vividred Operation takes place in the near future, where a powerful technology called the Manifestation Engine has ushered in an age of utopian plenty by providing for all of Earth’s power needs. The inventor of the engine lives a fairly simple life with his granddaughters Akane and Momo, the former of whom is looking forward to the arrival of her friend, Aoi, who’s coming back to the island.
Before, that, though, we get a series of troubles. For one, Grandpa makes an explosion in his lab, finishing his project but swapping his mind into a plushie as a side effect.
This one baffled me at first. I know the point is to get us the mascot critter, because Vividred Operation is a Magical Girl show even if its girls technically use superscience, and magical girl shows “need” the mascot critter, but it’s so sudden and so jarring that it gives you the idea that the show is on thin ice, forcing square pegs into round holes to finish some kind of checklist. Mercifully this element seems more quirky than anything else but it’s still a kind of odd decision.
In any case, the final project is a special key that, given to Akane, allows her to transform, donning her “Pallet Suit” and with it the power to be a fairly super-hero-tier Magical Girl. It’s just in the nick of time, too, because a giant alien mecha thing (one of the force known as Alone) has appeared, and is making its way towards the Manifestation engine, shooting down Aoi’s plane in the process. Akane rushes to the rescue, and is able to manifest a second key for Aoi, who then gets her blue Pallet Suit and giant hammer to match Akane’s red suit and boomerang.
They fight the Alone and make some progress against it, but then we cut to our mysterious black-haired girl who has the Homura Akemi look and feel down. She draws a magic bow and fires an arrow into the Alone, which regenerates it and causes it to become much more powerful, turning red and taking on a new form. Akane and Aoi have one last trick, though – after doing a bit of ‘overcome their issues’ they’re able to perform “Docking”, a process by which the girls temporarily fuse into an even more super-powered woman and, together, take out the empowered Alone with an overpowered ‘Final Operation’ hit.
The Docking is an interesting device. Technically, it explains why we’re using these little girls, and Akane in specific, since to take the docked form the component individuals have to be in mental synch, and Akane is so bloody friendly that it’s easy for her to form the base. The conceit of two characters fusing, however temporarily, into a single body is one that you hear about more than you see it, to the point where I had almost considered it a dead unicorn trope (that is, something that would be like beating a dead horse if not for the fact that, like a unicorn, it never existed in the first place) until I saw it here in Vividred, proving that it does come up in more than one famous instance. The fused character seems to have both minds and not exactly either body, but takes a different form depending on how the docking arrangement goes, including different capabilities and weapons. In particular, Aoi docking with Akane produces Vividblue, and a turbo-charged rocket version of Aoi’s hammer.
I actually really like all the docked forms. One thing this show is very good at is its visual design. Say what you will about their choices, the director and the artists knew their stuff, and very intentionally executed the visuals they wanted to create. This includes the loli fanservice trick shots and ass-camera, but also includes the designs of the Alone, which are all unique and creative as well as stylish (not as good as Madoka’s Witches, but probably better on the whole than Yuki Yuna’s Vertex), the machines and environments of the near future Japan we find ourselves in, the flowing motion and well-choreographed action, and perhaps most critically for the show’s themes a bold and impressive use of color.
Color coding is a high-variance choice. It can come across as training wheels a show doesn’t need if it’s used poorly and in a ham-fisted way, but if it’s used with skill it can create an interesting visual experience, and that’s just what Vividred Operation does. Because the show as a whole is in bright colors, with a lot of whites, the extremely high saturation colors of our Magical Girls don’t stand out in a bad way, but do pop in a good way. To bring this back to the Vivids, each of the Docked Forms lives up to its name. Vividblue is vividly blue, but instead of being a washed-out mass of a single color, there’s a clear distinction of light and shadow, and multiple tones of the still extremely saturated color, giving depth and complexity to the docked form’s design while still holding powerfully to a clear theme. This is perhaps the most bold with (at the risk of getting ahead of myself) Vividyellow, whose use of honey-golds and near-orange shadows alongside your traditional buttercup yellows, particularly in her extremely styled hair, is very striking… but they’re all good, as they should be as the ‘reward’ at the end of most episodes of a show that is in general very good when it comes to the visual department.
Again, you can judge what the creators chose to do with their art, but you can’t deny that they applied a lot of skill to it.
In any case, the Alone is defeated, displeasing our Homura wannabe (properly Rei Kuroki) and bringing everyone else to celebrate, but Grandpa warns that defeating one Alone won’t be the end of the crisis, entering us into the basic rhythm of the show: Develop the characters, an Alone shows up, they fight it, Rei powers it up, Docking happens to defeat the monster, rinse and repeat.
That said, it’s a skeleton on which the show builds a lot. Vividred Operation never once felt bloated or repetitive despite the fact that several Alone get taken out. Rather, more like Neon Genesis Evangelion each encounter is interesting enough that even if the emotions are the same (which is itself rare) the episode feels fresh and engaging.
In the next episode, Akane and Aoi head to a new school because their old one got blown up by the Alone before they got into battle against it. There they run into Wakaba Saegusa, or rather Akane, using her Pallet Suit to avoid being late to school, quite literally runs into Wakaba. Wakaba is deep into kendo, with a familial sword fighting method, and attacks Akane thinking she’s some kind of suspicious ruffian which, to be fair, magical flying loli is not the most trustworthy appearance. Akane manages to parry and disengage, but Wakaba fairly quickly noodles out that the transfer student is her foe from the morning, and chases her around demanding a rematch. After a fairly nice talk about the nature of strength, she gets her rematch… or would if not for the arrival of an Alone. Wakaba ultimately asks for the chance to fight alongside Akane and is rewarded with her own key and a quick docking into Vividgreen to take down the beast after Rei (who is also their classmate) empowers it.
During that day, we’re sort of introduced to another classmate: Himawari Shinomiya is part of the class, but only attends school via a little camera robot sat on her desk. In the next episode, it turns out that her surveillance has started to get her hints as to the truth, and she even spots grandpa (who came to school to do a little snooping. Recall, still an animate plushie) before her camera gets accidentally taken out by a baseball, courtesy of Akane.
They go to Himawari’s house, and she’s at first reluctant to let them. When they relent, they see that she’s been living as a shut in, tucked under a kotatsu in her PJ’s, with her computer for company. Himawari, it turns out, is quite the science nerd, having a deep interest in emergent technologies. In addition to returning the camera and promising to get it fixed, the other girls do their best to make friends with Himawari, including dressing her up and offering to take her on a tour of a substation linked to the Manifestation Engine, which is something that quite excites her.
However, an Alone attacks while they’re there, damaging the substation in a way that will be quite dangerous if the automated facility isn’t shut down. Himawari rushes to do just that as the others transform to fight, with Akane promising she’ll be back to help. As Himawari goes on, she gets trapped under rubble and, there, thinks back to the incident that caused her to withdraw from society, when a friend broke her promise and in doing so got Himawari bullied. Just as she’s about willing to give into despair, abandoned again, Akane returns and frees her from the rubble. This also causes Himawari to manifest a key, letting her join the fight (her signature weapon, the collider, seems like a quartet of little shield-generating drones that can also form some sort of railgun or particle cannon) and ultimately dock with Akane to form Vividyellow and burn the Alone away. After the beast is defeated, they go back to Himawari’s apartment where she says she doesn’t need the camera anymore, because she’ll be returning to school from then on. She also properly meets grandpa in his mascot form, and it turns out she’s basically his biggest fan while also being able to talk technical details well over the heads of the other girls and the audience.
Finally, we get more focus on Rei. At school, Akane is aggressively trying to befriend her, unaware that she’s part of the force behind the Alone. On Rei’s own time, though, we see she lives an extremely spartan existence (with basically just her clothes, the key to her old home, and a pet bird) and is on the hook of higher and darker powers. You see, Rei’s not from this world, and the world she is from is otherwise gone. Through their herald, which takes the form of a raven, the Outer Gods (usually just referred to as “Them” but described variously in Lovecraftian terms as beyond-human intelligences that exist outside time and space, hence why I’m calling them the Outer Gods) have promised to restore Rei’s world if she can destroy the Manifestation Engine in Akane’s, and to this end Rei has been granted a finite number of the arrows she uses to empower the attacking Alone, as represented by a tattoo on her neck. The Raven is not particularly friendly towards Rei, torturing her with supernatural pain when it thinks she might be straying from her purpose, giving us the picture of a girl whose conviction comes from a very honest placed, trapped in an awful situation.
Also, The Raven insists it’s the will of the Outer Gods that Rei continue to attend school, even though she’s not to bond with anything in this world. It seems kind of arbitrary and while I can think of better reasons with how the series ultimately pans out, it’s kind of funny to imagine that Yog-Sothoth (again, not literally) and his feathery representative here are just real sticklers for academic excellence.
Not entirely content with how the Alone have been faring, Rei decides to go try to mess with the engine herself, like a ninja, only to get in some trouble with security drones. She does a number on them, but ends up falling in the water herself to be found by Akane the next morning on the beach. Akane nurses Rei back to health, but has to run when an Alone shows up. This also gets Rei’s attention, but she collapses before she’s able to give that one the empowering arrow treatment.
In the mean time, there’s also the matter of Rei’s key. The connection to her home world, it’s very important to her, and she asked after it when she woke up at Akane’s place. After the Alone is defeated (with both Akane and Rei still ignorant that the other has a part in the Alone business), Akane returns with the key, having combed the beach for it as a token of friendship to Rei. Rei tries to remain standoffish, but after a pep talk from her mother (who she goes to visit) Akane remains resolved to reach out to her.
She gets something of an opportunity when we have a downtime/swimsuit episode with grandpa trying to train them and make them bond more deeply during a summer incursion, involving lots of hare-brained schemes with mechanical traps and obvious fake alone. In the process, Rei stumbles on their setup and gets ‘captured’ before breaking out of Grandpa’s little base and rescuing the other girls from machines gone awry on her way out.
And really, Grandpa didn’t exactly need to promote more unity in the band. One of the things this show does really well is utilize its downtime to build up our characters and the honest friendships between them. Akane, Aoi, Wakaba, and Himawari have great chemistry as the band of friends they are, and you totally believe that they feel for each other and would stick with each other through thick and thin.
It’s interesting because Akane is the crux of it (as she’s the center of her circle of friends) and she really does walk a thin line between being a believable girl who’s positive and friendly, and being too much a perfect saint. In a sense, you empathize more with flawed characters because you understand them better, so for someone like Akane, she has to ultimately fall on the side of the line that’s a normal kid rather than the side that’s a little angel and… it’s really close. I have a hard time identifying, specifically, any of Akane’s flaws. She’s quirky, smothering everything in mayo and singing a really dopey song while riding her hover bike, but that’s not flaws I felt like she was a legitimate character, but she does the routine where nothing really seems to hurt her most of the time, which is often a red flag.
I think, to an extent, the fact that the animation is so good really helps. You can see fear, pain, and even anger on Akane’s face even though she largely tries to hide her troubles behind an unfading smile. Other than that… there are small moments. In the episode after the island, Rei ends up being tempted to visit Akane’s house for a study session (telling herself it’s because she learned that Akane is the granddaughter of the Engine’s inventor, which might give her an in to it) and is offered a tomato from the garden. Rei ends up having a horrific flashback to the end of her world and squashing the tomato, and Akane actually kind of snaps at Rei for wasting the food. We know that Akane would bounce pretty quickly, but the fact that she’s capable of getting angry in the moment rather than just laughing it off does more than you would think to make Akane seem human and build her relationships with her friends as bright without being cloyingly over-sweet.
Because, as I may have mentioned earlier, Vividred Operation is a very bright show. It’s visually bright, and despite Rei having her very tortured origin and difficult position, it’s tonally bright as well. There’s some temptation, given the structure of the show and the threatening enemies in all their forms, to compare Vividred to Evangelion, Yuki Yuna, or Madoka Magica. But the tone is a compete 180 from those shows, to the point where Vividred is one of the most positive Magical Girl show’s I’ve seen, possibly the most positive if you limit it to ones where the girls do a lot of fighting. Madoka is dark and psychological. Yuki Yuna hides it, but also has the horrible truth. Sailor Moon falls on the lighter end, but more than anything is operatic and bombastic, with huge swings to both light and darkness. Cardcaptor Sakura is closer, but Cardcaptor isn’t an action show the way that Vividred is. In Madoka Magica and Yuki Yuna, being a magical girl is suffering, and the light moments exist to make the darkness more painful and oppressive by contrast. In Vividred, the darkness is a passing thing, that’s there to make the positivity of the universe more pointed and precious. The bad things pass, and the show’s general optimism and love for its future where science has brought humanity to an age of abundance shines all the brighter for it.
It really is refreshing to get a well-constructed show like that, something that’s not pandering fluff but still has an irrepressible optimism. Not that there’s anything strictly wrong with pandering fluff, but it’s still nice to see this in action.
In any case, as I mentioned Rei ends up fairly forcibly invited to a study session at Akane’s, which is being held because Akane’s grades are slipping what with hero time, and Rei comes largely hoping to learn something about Grandpa and the Manifestation Engine or so she tells herself. After the incident with the tomato, she excuses herself, and so doesn’t get to see the girls responding to the call of another Alone that’s appeared over Tokyo. This one projects a strong electromagnetic field, disabling electronic devices around it and making it particularly difficult to fight. Vividyellow is called on to deal with it, but Rei, racing to the scene, manages to catch a fragment of it with one of her arrows, revitalizing the Alone and causing it to take on a new form, a cocoon attached to the Tokyo Sky Tree. Akane tries to follow up against it, but it gets a clean hit on her, shorting out her Pallet Suit and sending her tumbling out of the sky.
As the next episode opens, the Alone is still dormant in its cocoon, but Akane is also out of commission in intensive care at the hospital. Aoi, Wakaba, and Himawari have to come together to figure out what to do without Akane there in person, while the Military, at their wits end, considers a massive nuclear salvo to take it down before it hatches. Eventually, the trio, supported by grandpa, come up with a plan in the “so crazy it just might work” spectrum. As they attack, Rei wakes it up early with an extra arrow from her dwindling supply, but Aoi manages (with a little extra boost from Akane’s boomerang) to power through and deal the death blow to the creature. After the battle, it seems like Akane is out of the woods and sure to make a quick and full recovery for the next time we need her.
The next episode is also fairly light on Akane, being instead focused on the friendship between Wakaba and Himawari and how, even though they like different things, they still value each other as friends. Most of the episode is dedicated to the two of them going together as Himawari indulges Wakaba’s interests by agreeing to model for a magazine Wakaba likes. Both kind of overstep, with Wakaba’s insistence that Himawari take the second shoot costing Himawari a factory tour they were to take together, and Himawari making Wakaba (who’s oddly cool with it) wait on her hand and foot for the duration of the shoot. At the end, though, each of them holds the other girl as more important than any activity or trappings they’re involved with. The episode’s Alone is practically an afterthought: it’s attack pattern is going to be to drop from orbit and impact, so the run-up and fight can’t really be protracted (similarly to the Angel that tried the same thing in Evangelion), and Rei doesn’t get a vantage point until it’s too late to give the thing an Arrow power-up, which frustrates her to the point where she demands the Raven give her intel on the next Alone’s approach, since the Raven knows when and where they’ll appear.
Rei plans to stake everything she has on the next Alone, expecting to feed it all four of her remaining arrows in the hopes that it will be overpowered enough to win. However, Rei’s interference has been noticed and between Himawari and Grandpa crunching the numbers, they think they can find the source of the power-up arrows the next time one fires. Before the critical final battle, though, Rei visits Akane to apologize for her behavior the previous time, and ends up roped into dinner and a sleepover, ultimately promising to stay friends with Akane, which comes of as emotionally legitimate even though Rei expects she’ll have to break that promise once the Engine falls and she can go home or she dies trying to make it happen by spending all her arrows.
The next day, the next Alone appears. Rei is in position, and powers it up with an arrow as soon as the fighting starts. She gets one off, but then the trap is sprung, and the security bots are on her, preventing her from even getting off a second. She tries to give them the slip, but it’s no use, and soon enough Akane shows up.
Both girls are shocked, horrified, and betrayed to see the other on the opposite side of the fight. Akane because she liked and trusted Rei, and Rei because she feels like Akane was lying to her and using her the whole time, like she knew about Rei’s involvement. Rei’s feelings of anger are reinforced by the fact that she did earlier ask if Akane knew anything about the colored lights seen fighting the Alone, and Akane had said she didn’t. So it’s not entirely unusual that she might think Akane’s offer of friendship, which did mean a lot to Rei, was a lie as well.
In any case, Rei doesn’t actually have any superpowers of her own, so she’s taken into custody. Over the next episode, the authorities unravel a lot of who and what Rei is, finding out that she’s not just an impostor from another world, but is being used as a beacon to draw in the Alone, suggesting that the enemy will keep coming as long as and only as long as Rei is still alive.
The girls, meanwhile, all want to see Rei, reconcile with her, and learn the true and full story. They feel so strongly about this that, ultimately, they suit up and go against the military to break into Rei’s maximum security prison. Wakaba, Himawari, and Aoi bleed off at first, holding the door against reinforcements the girls don’t want to hurt so that Akane can go on. She reaches Rei’s prison and really strains herself battering her way through the containment cell, much to Rei’s shock, and the two get a teary reunion as Rei realizes that she has a true friend willing to help her in her time of need, despite the terrible things she’s done. The other girls show up, as do Grandpa and his inner circle, who kind of let the out-of-control rampage get farther than it should have.
Then, unfortunately for everyone, the Raven also appears, showing itself to everyone involved. It laments Rei’s failure, and also the fact that it overheard Grandpa’s plans, revealing that he stood firm that, whatever it would take, he’d not let a little girl be executed just because it seemed like the most convenient way to stop the Alone.
Why is that a bad thing? Well, as Grandpa (who had an encounter with the Outer Gods five years earlier, in an accident at the Manifestation engine, hence his knowledge of the Alone and preparation for them in the form of the Vivid system) had alluded to before, the onslaught of the Alone is a test sent by the Outer Gods to determine if their world is worthy of using the power of the Manifestation Engines. And, the Raven reveals, Rei is part of the test, and killing ‘the girl who controls the Alone’ would have been grounds for an instant failure.
Wait, if killing Rei is the failure, why is the Raven sour that they’re helping her instead? Because, it turns out, the Raven has overseen testing and judgment for countless words before Akane’s, and all of them had failed, leading the Raven to believe that the test was meant to be unwinnable, and that its Outer God masters simply want worlds that dare to grasp the Manifestation Engine technology to be annihilated. So it’s quite troublesome, as the Raven sees it, that this world seems to have both the strength and compassion to pass. Before anyone gets a chance to argue about why there would be a test if it was supposed to be unwinnable, the Raven decides to get business taken care of herself. It swallows Rei whole (in a beautifully grotesque animation, considering the Raven had until that moment been a normal-sized bird), and absorbs the power of her remaining arrows to become a fairly impressive gigantic monster, and the final boss of the show.
Thus, we enter the last episode. The Raven, in its final form (like a tree with two giant displayed raven wings instead of branches, and a giant red eyeball floating above the top of the ‘trunk’, between the raised wings. Seriously, this monster design is Eva-tier and that’s awesome.) makes ominous progress towards the Manifestation Engine, with which it could annihilate the universe. Along the way, it babbles about how glorious it’s become, drunk on power and declaring that its new self is above even the Outer Gods, the Supreme being of all creation. It also no-sells everything the military can throw at it, and trust me they try an impressive battery of everything worthy of the greatest kaiju.
Akane and friends are at first devastated, having seen Rei gobbled up before their eyes, but it turns out her energy signature is still able to be detected within the transformed Raven, revealing that she’s still alive. And sure enough she is, as we see her in a harshly-lit red space within the Raven’s core, where the Raven shows her visions from the outside world to gloat about how strong it is to someone it pretty clearly doesn’t like.
Galvanized by knowing their friend is alive, Akane, Aoi, Wakaba, and Himawari fly out to face off against the Raven, even as it lands atop the Manifestation Engine and begins to drain the Engine’s power. Since the Engine is what powers the Pallet Suits right along with the rest of the world, this means that they’re on a harsh clock. We get to see every Docking fire one last time as Akane takes the power-up to fight back against one of the Raven’s attacks or break through one of it’s defenses, only for the other girl involved to have her suit bottom out (not counting whatever failsafe lets them drift gently to Earth rather than plummeting to their deaths), removing her from the fight. Vividyellow and Himawari fall out, followed by Vividgreen and Wakaba and Vividblue and Aoi, leaving Akane alone to reach the Raven’s body and break through, into the dark space where Rei is held.
Once Akane reaches Rei and takes her hand, it’s triumphant music time. Everything is going to be okay as they do a role-reversed Docking and emerge from the darkness as, at long last, Vividred. Fighting together for this world in one body, Akane and Rei take on the Raven, who gives a top-tier “how could this be?!” sort of reaction before getting finished off with a punch to the eye. The girls reunite atop the Manifestation engine with the Raven destroyed, when the Outer Gods appear again.
Just like in the flashback to Grandpa’s encounter, the mysterious otherworldly forces manifest as a glowing red Möbius strip looped into the likeness of an infinity sign, and speak telepathically in a way that the audience isn’t privileged to hear. Their verdict is clear, though: the girls have passed. That is, both the native defenders who’ve proved their world worthy, and Rei, who will have her own world restored by the Outer Gods, allowing her to go home at long last. Rei and Akane say a tearful goodbye, unbelievably happy for the second chance and yet sad to have to part right away. However, they manage to work up some hope that they’ll see each other again.
I would have believed it on my own, given Himawari, Grandpa, and the Manifestation engine, but sure enough a final stinger shows Akane encountering Rei’s (released, before the last Alone showdown) pet bird and then seeing Rei again, since she’s apparently figured out how to cross dimensions.
The ending is honestly great. It has a monster that’s threatening enough to get suspension of disbelief going about how much of a danger it poses, great choreography, good emotion, and an extremely happy ending that actually feels earned with what the girls went through over the last two episodes in particular and (especially in Rei’s case) the whole show overall. It also doesn’t explicitly resolve this, but does kind of provide an easy answer for why the hell Rei was ordered to go to school: in order to give her a chance to bond against her stated mission and create the chance for a pass.
Going after Vividred Operation my second time and getting through the show to the end, I was absolutely floored. The show has so much going for it: the choreography is excellent, the designs of the monsters and powers are great, the plot is tight and strong without feeling rushed, the conflict is legitimate, the characters are hugely likable and memorable, the upbeat attitude is a joy to watch, and the direction and cinematography are honestly brilliant. The only thing that really detracts from it is, as completely filtered me the first time, the fact that its brilliance in direction and cinematography is sometimes (fairly often) used (intensely) to produce a very specific vision of a realistically underaged girl’s ass in short shorts.
How much do I have to count that against the show? It’s strong, and it’s effective, and while it never hit real masterpiece territory, I do think it was fun and strong and well-executed, certainly worth a flat A. I really was impressed.
So, how much is the final grade brought down from that? And should it be brought down at all? When you get down to it, the aspect that was ‘the problem’ for my first viewing is just appealing to a specific demographic, one that I wouldn’t be a part of. I don’t knock down shows that aim to appeal to girls and women like Sailor Moon or The World is Still Beautiful for their Shoujo elements, so is it fair to knock down the score of Vividred operation for its loli elements. It’s a smaller demographic, to be sure, and one that’s going to bug a lot of people, perhaps terminally, in a way that basic Shoujo/Shounen material isn’t going to. In a sense, I had this same problem with one of the shows I reviewed for Magical Girl May last year, Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka, which leaned heavily into exploitation and torture-fanservice that, similarly to the issue here, absolutely is going for a particular audience and could really alienate people outside that audience.
But, in the end I graded Spec-Ops Asuka as pass-fail for exactly this difficulty. I feel like Vividred Operation deserves a letter grade, partially because it shouldn’t just squeak by and partially because it’s not consumed by its fanservice to anywhere near the degree that Spec-Ops Asuka was defined by it. In the end, I took a while and thought about the target audience. The target audience, I believe, is more teen girls watching the show unironically than it is older folks who are here for the lolis; the loli material is hooking in a secondary demographic, so what would it do to or for someone Akane’s age who’s watching?
Sadly, I don’t have an easily-accessible tween girl to have view the show and ask her opinion about it, so I have to go out on a limb and guess that while some shots, especially the “between the legs” shots, are going to be composed noticeably weirdly, the degree to which Vividred Operation likes to cut to Akane’s (or Rei’s or to a lesser extent Aoi’s, Wakaba’s, or Himawari’s) behind probably isn’t really going to register. The fanservice isn’t the point, and plot attention isn’t drawn to it the way that the typical “Fall into boobs” joke draws attention to the fanservice, it really just is the way the show is shot, which in a sense makes it a lot more artistic than it could have been.
So, if it’s not going to be a problem for the core demographic who probably isn’t thinking “What was the filmmaker intending with this and are they being creepy about it?”, I don’t think it can be a problem for the final grade. Vividred Operation gets an A. It just also gets a great big asterisk next to that A where I say that you must be able to at least tolerate fanservicey shots of tween girls if you’re going to get through this. It’s more than worth it if you can, and I’d absolutely recommend trying to get through the first couple episodes because if you can do that much you should be fine, but know your own tolerance and tap out if you absolutely have to.