Muv-Luv Alternative

Episode 11

My initial response to this week's episode of Muv-Luv Alternative is to chock it up as another example of elements of this story working better in visual novel form than anime. There are huge swaths of discussions between people, calling up multiple conceptual components that really would do better to give a reader time to marinate in. But as has been the case with the show in recent weeks, I feel it's settled in enough to its presentation to be eminently watchable in its presentation, if not the optimal version of the material. We're nearly a cour into a show that's gotten a bit better now at playing the hand it was dealt, and if there's some informational overload among all the dialogue trees adapted in this episode, it also has enough of those more profound, conceptual moments land just as well. Even with some necessarily forced-feeling swerves in the plotting itself coming in at the same time.

Muv-Luv's ruminations on the nature of country, patriotism, and loyalty therein can seem fascinatingly intersectional at times. This one opens with Miki, everyone's favorite tiny pink member of the flight team, bumping into Irma, a Finnish refugee enlisted with the American military. It's a meeting that results in a layered discussion of the characters' priorities, with Irma not serving simply to earn her family's citizenship into the States, but to have the opportunity to accomplish the long-term goal of rebuilding Finland itself. Any American-serving patriotism is seen as mostly mechanical, with the flip-side of one of Miki's takeaways being that her father's courting of American interference in Japan may have been borne out of his own misguided agenda for his country. As well-publicized as criticisms of Muv-Luv's shades of Japanese nationalism are (with me having thrown out some observations on it myself), the framing here in the anime at least seems to be trying to walk more of a tightrope between what some would see as that nationalism and what the writing clearly wants to generalize more as 'patriotism'.

I admit, the show's argument does seem to be trying. It's focused on via our reliable POV character, Takeru, who directly questions if his less-nationally-devoted beliefs let him match up to the 'patriotism' perceived in his comrades. Thing is, Shogun Yuuhi, and the writing behind her, ends up directly acknowledging that the other characters 'coincidentally' all feature connections to political and military leadership that's resulted in their ingrained sense of 'loyalty' to the country. Not content with just having been a better vehicle for Meiya's character context than Meiya herself, Yuuhi in this episode calls in all the cadets and just has this little sequence where she goes through and congratulates them for those connections to the broader scope of the leadership in the conflict so far. Yes, the clunkiness of that writing strategy continues to be chuckle-worthy, but the example of the two-way-street that is devotion to a nation she's overall making to Takeru still works: "People should do what they can for their country. And a country should do what it can for its people." Damn but if so many so-called 'Patriots' these days could understand that definition.

There's still plenty of awkwardness in the ideas being espoused and the format in which it's doing so. Yuuhi's plan to verbally negotiate with the rebels and Meiya's insistence that she be used as a body double in the case necessitates another round of logistics negotiation we have to spend time on. It is funny to see Walken acknowledge he got played on this once before, but he also (rightfully, I think) brings up the point that such a ruse really isn't in the spirit of what the Shogun first suggested. They try to write around this seeming contradiction with some nicely superimposed editing while Meiya ends up giving the speech, making clear that, through whatever exact methods we're not quite privy to, these are still Yuuhi's words and ideals she's communicating. But then the writing also zig-zags a bit on the subject of how much distrust we're seemingly supposed to regard the Americans and their agenda-driven interference with. Meiya/Yuuhi calls out Naoya's suggestion of their behind-the-scenes interloping as a distraction in the face of the damage the rebels have done, but then we find out our new Finnish friend Irma has apparently been Manchurian-Candidate'd into sabotaging the negotiations after all. I do understand that this is probably in service of illustrating a larger threat to the union of humanity against the BETA than any petty country-based motivations. But it still comes off a little darkly ironic, after that categorical compartmentalization of patriotic national loyalty, to tell us that we really should have been looking out for that European refugee serving under the American military. She's foreign twice, that's how you know she's suspicious.

Perhaps it's a blessing that the conflict turned out to not be that easy, anyway, since as much as I can appreciate the ideals being espoused by Yuuhi's negotiation plan ("You claim to be fighting on behalf of your countrymen, yet you've killed many of those countrymen in your campaign. Curious!") it's clearly the biggest casualty yet of the visual-novel adaptation necessities. A too-noticeable portion of the conversation is represented with the same scrolling cuts between Meiya and Naoya, in what's supposed to be a dramatic clash of articulated ideals. Though I did have to laugh when, even as awestruck as he was in the moment by her words, Takeru still thought to move the robot hand carrying Meiya closer for dramatic effect. But as much as I don't mind escalation as a storytelling tool here, it almost feels like a cop-out to have the insurgents thoroughly convinced of their own hypocrisy, only for things to go awry anyway because of yet-unseen, third-party interlopers. I understand that the Muv-Luv anime adaptation might not feel it's the right time or place to densely explore the hypocrisies of a nationalist agenda, but that just makes it a bit more disappointing when it gestures in that direction, and even makes a couple of good points, before backing out to say that it was some frightening, unknowable outside force that was responsible for conflict within the country after all.

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Muv-Luv Alternative is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is a freelance writer who appreciates anime, action figures, and additional ancillary artistry. He can be found staying up way too late posting screencaps on his Twitter.