Review of Blue Drop

Note: This review is filled with spoilers, to explain how bad the anime is.

Blue Drop is a lesbian show where one of the main girls killed the whole family of the other, and the first interaction they have in series, but not chronologically, is the former strangling the latter, and not because of a kink. This would be more than enough for me to say that this anime is not worth watching but there sure is a lot more to criticize it for.

The series is about an amnesiac girl who goes to a prestigious girls only high school and ends up sharing room with another girl who strangles her at first contact, and is found out to be an alien from an all-female race that wants to investigate Earth for plot reasons. It immediately tells you that the main character has no backdrop, or that it remains a mystery throughout most of the show, and based on the very typical setup and setting, you just know these girls will end up as the main couple of the show.

Even though it combines slice of life and sci-fi action like Figure 17, the last show I covered before this one, Blue Drop really doesn’t focus on any of them, or at least, not in a way that feels well written, it’s even hard to tell what part is prioritized in it, because, really, it’s none. Scenes transition from the school to a space ship (as in, a spaceship that’s underwater, it´s a spaceship, but it’s a space ship), without a solid reason, they don’t do much in it during the initial episodes.

Eventually it turns out that this spaceship is a traitor, or suspected to be a traitor, again, for no clear reason, yet. It’s not a complicated show in the least, but since stuff just happens for the sake of happening, it’s hard to even tell why or how something just kind of happens. Heck, it’s even hard to say that stuff just happens, things are shown on screen but nothing is progressing any of the two main genres of the series.

When the girls are in school, they just goof around, when the space ship is shown, the dialogues are something like this: “Commander, I kept investigating, we need you here to do that thing”, “Understood, I will keep investigating here, so keep waiting for me there, I will go soon to do that thing”. The show desperately tries to build a mystery but there´s no mystery because nothing is happening.

So, inevitably, the focus ends up shifting to the school setting. Normally this would be to flesh out the cast and build character dynamics, but here the two main characters just flicker and makes fun of the other. The show dedicates screen time to other girls they interact with, but it feels like it’s just there for the sake of being there, it doesn’t really show much of the girls in question besides one or two things about them, and since those characters are ultimately irrelevant to the plot or the characterization of the main characters, it is just a waste of time.

The plot points never connect with each other, each one of them is there just to take screen time from the other. The school life portion just have the girls doing typical stuff, with more drama than deserved and needed, is just there to fill episodes, and eventually it doesn´t even gets a closure. When the stage play that they built for half the show is about to happen, a space invasion kicks in and the play is cancelled and you never get to see it in the show.

The sci-fi portion of it has the actual protagonist being attacked by her alien race, seemingly for being suspected of being a traitor, and she and her friend keeps taking down everyone that goes after them, even when there are more than one. How can a single ship take down a whole fleet, and later on a whole army? Well, you better believe it because it happens.

And it doesn’t stop there. Everything regarding this part of the show is horribly written and it doesn’t even connect with the main story. Unfortunately, to explain this, we have to step into spoiler territory.

-The protagonist is suspected of being a traitor because of an accident, which turns out to be something made deliberately by her superiors just to see what effect would have on their race. Imagine killing lots of your own species just for that, and without any anticipation, it is just revealed when the show is close to being over.

-The all-female alien race can create more of their own, but still came to Earth just to investigate about men. Nonsensical writing, they essentially are here just because it’s the setting that the writer wanted them to be. You never even get to see them around men at any point because there are barely any in this show.

-There is a teacher who is actually a secret agent spying on the amnesiac main character, she is found out by the latter for speaking about it out loud, on phone, in the school. Aside from the dumb writing, the show tries to build drama around them with this but this is the only episode that dedicates them some shared screen time and dynamic, their relationship goes back to normal by the end of it and their interactions are as brief and hollow as they were before.

-Characters suspect that the main girl has some kind of psychic powers, it is never explained properly and it ends up not playing a single part in the plot.

-The protagonist captures an enemy and lets her roam around her ship however she feels like it, never suspecting that she might be an infiltrator. Guess what happens.

-Knowing that her prisoner of war resents both her and the main girl, she still takes the latter to her ship, gets the two of them to know each other, and even sends them together to the same room inside the ship. Guess what happens.

-The spaceship has some level of conscience, yet never tells them what this infiltrator is doing.

-At one point the plot or characters progress because of the spirit of a dead character briefly appearing to tell the protagonist to let go, that it wasn’t her fault.

-Fights keep happening between the aliens but no one notices them, not even the spy teacher reports them. This spaceships even fly through the city at some point and people act as if they were planes. And yet, by the last episode, lots of human armies appear out of thin air to fight against them, only to, obviously, get stomped with ease.

-The outcome somehow leads into the very first scene of the show in the future, but it happens out of screen and after a huge time skip, it feels that it came out of nowhere and that it shouldn’t unfold the way it does.

-The protagonist never explains to the main character that she never actually intentionally killed her family nor destroyed the island she used to live in, all she does is apologizing while crying.

-What is the response of the other girl? A slap, but not for what she thinks she did, the expected confession, and a kiss, with even a shared line of dialogue in unison. Aside from being corny as hell, we the audience at that point know that the other girl wasn’t really responsible for that, but since she doesn’t explain it to the main girl, the latter is still from this point on, and for a very short time, going out with the person that, as far as she knows, killed her whole family and destroyed every place she used to know about.

-The protagonist never explained nor even apologized to the main character for strangling her in their first interaction, yet they are girlfriends by the last episodes.

-Her underling, that wanted her Commander to go back to the spaceship the whole time, decides that her being part of the stage play for the school is more important than preventing the invasion on Earth.

SPOILERS END HERE

And these are just the instances of horrible writing I remember off my memory at the moment of writing this, imagine how many more I could write about if I were to do a quick rewatch of sorts.

As for the characters, as you can tell by me never naming them, these are the things that I remember about them as well, characters, besides their roles as plot devices in the show:

-The main character, she is amnesiac, the plot somehow seemingly revolves around her, but she takes no part in it. At least she is willing to throw some punches when she needs to, I’ll give her that.

-The actual protagonist, she is unexpectedly a prankster.

-The infiltrator, she is resentful for having lost her ex-girlfriend, ends up becoming an ally once she finds out the truth.

-The teacher, she sucks at both of her jobs and ends up having no part in the plot nor any meaningful dynamic with any other character.

-Tall fat girl, her older sister has two babies.

-Cool girl, is the daughter of the school principal.

-Glasses girl, always liked fairy tales when she was a child, after a lot of drama she ends up writing the stage play that is never shown.

-The antagonists, they exist, they are cannon fodder and their reasoning is completely forced by the script with no explanation or logic whatsoever.

I can’t even say that the visuals are good even with three main studios working on this show. I’m sure they were innovating by 2007 standards, but by now they come off as, at best, painfully average and dated. The character designs are simple, generic and forgettable, the artwork is very inconsistent, the motions aren’t very good, the special effects and the backgrounds are not bad actually, but both are filled with very dated and crappy CGI made by Gonzo, a trademark of the studio for a while.

So in the end, Blue Drops ends up being a sci-fi show about an alien invasion that doesn’t go anywhere for most of its screen time, and with a single ship defeating a whole army, with absolutely no reasoning nor logic to unfold the way it does, and with one of the most illogical writing I have ever seen. It is also an empty slice of life series with no fleshed out, memorable nor likeable characters whatsoever, and it never manages to connect its parts together. It is also another nonsensical and quite toxic anime about lesbians, and even a visually very dated show.

But I still have two positive things to say about it. One is that it has a good sound department, very impactful and very well mixed sound effects both during battles and during slice of life moments, and also, very good soundtrack, even a very good opening, which sounds almost elegiac, too bad it ended up in this anime, and a very good ending, although not as good as the opening. Check out the full versions of both, because they are even better. The voice acting is not the typical voice acting I expected, but it is still not that special and not on par with the rest.

The other is having a very important death in it, which remains permanent, the character that dies isn’t magically brought back to life.

And even these two things are still only semi positives, since the volume in this anime randomly goes up and down for no reason, and that ends up being a bit annoying, and a character staying dead should be the norm anyways, and even then it’s weird because you wouldn’t expect this character to die throughout the whole show, it kind of happens to end in a dramatic way, in an attempt to finish with a somewhat bittersweet ending, and as far as I’m concerned it failed because I never cared for the character, and the scene afterwards has a comedic tone to it, ruining its impact.

It is far from the worst anime I watched in my life, and is not the worst nor most toxic, nor my most hated Shoujo Ai anime I watched, since I consumed both Kannazuki no Miko and NTR: Netsuzou TRap, but it is still a very terrible anime and one of the worst written anime I have watched in my life. Aside from listening to the very good soundtrack, I think that the best thing that can be done with this anime, is to stay the fuck away from it.


2/10