10 Second Anime - Cross Ange - Episode 25 [END]

Cross Ange - Episode 25 [END]



Tusk and Ange's allies find a way to follow her to Embryo's lair to stop his destructive plot. Season Finale.

Hmm.

Embryo finally told us his origins, at least as much as we needed to know for the story. I don't know if he was always called Embryo, but 1000 years after his space-time accident, I suppose he can call himself whatever he wants. He spent 500 years messing with the world that belonged to the Dragons, then another 500 messing with the lazy mana users. It's unclear to me how long before that new world ran out of dracunium that he kidnapped Aura, but it felt pretty recent.

 

All that time being immortal turned him into a horny old bastard too. He got used to using women, slapping them and raping them. It's not an accident that he made hood ornaments on his Ragna-mails that were beautiful naked women. Well, he got what he deserved and that was quite satisfying. His original Ragna-mail had to be destroyed along with his real body, otherwise he could have kept jumping around worlds and taken time to heal. Well done for Tusk and Ange on that score.

 

 

Heh.

Crotch Ange achieved. This show is now complete!

Not everybody was happy about Tusk and Ange's novel reunion.

Hilda still thinks she has a chance! It's little things like this that made this show a lot of fun and made sure the audience knew not to take it so seriously.

 

Ange and Salamandine sang a duet to save two universes. Naturally!

 

And Vivian had a chance for one more Quiz Time.

We got the totally happily ever after ending. All the Norma ended up on the world where they never had mana, with the dragons of course. Meanwhile, the lazy mana users had to figure stuff out for themselves. Sylvia at least quickly learned to stand on her own two feet and shoot dudes without hesitation. She is Ange's sister after all.

 

The end credit montage had me smiling big. Vivian met her dad. Aw, she has dragon papa's eyes. Well, two of them, instead 8 of them...

Ange fulfilled Tusk's dream from their time on the island. The dog looks happy to be near a constant source of hamburgers. I'm tickled that the bridge crew decided to work there.

Salamandine and Ange couldn't be the kind of friends they are without some competition and karaoke fit the ending perfectly.

What a ride! To go from the shocking ugly scenes of hate, discrimination and violence in the first episode to a feel-good montage in the 25th, I could not have predicted how wide ranging the story had to be to make that trip. I did miss the irreverent preview voiceover for the last episode, but the montage gave me enough smiles.

 

It was a truly happy end. I don't think Alektra could have been happy in such a world, so her sacrifice was fitting, but all the characters representing the future made it out alive, smiling and singing.

Final Thoughts.

This show got a totally undeserved reputation because most anime fans literally cannot understand the images presented on their view screens. When I first started anime blogging and read other reviews from the same people who I had been reading for years, I could not believe we were watching the same show. Most reviewers do not take the time to understand the pictures on their screen or even try to remember dialogue. It's half-assed, and I believe it comes from not making their own images for their reviews. I have to pay attention to almost every frame of the show to make my images, and with that care comes attention to detail.

 

In Cross Ange's case, the main character undergoes a forcible body cavity search before entering prison. She was still wearing the clothes she wore when her mother the queen took a bullet for her and her blood covered those same clothes. After Ange's rough treatment from Jill, she lay quivering and sobbing on the hard concrete floor, and it appeared as if she were bleeding from her crotch. It appeared to idiots not paying attention that she had lost her virginity to Jill's prosthetic hand. But that was not her blood; it was her mother's. Ange was crying from the enormity of all that had happened to her that day, including the loss of her dignity. But she was not mourning the loss of her maidenhead nor in pain from it. That popular but wrong interpretation of the scene started Cross Ange on the wrong foot.

 

This was not a serious show. It was a fun, trashy, mecha, exploitative, sexy show. There was some graphic violence, but rare and portrayed in a shocking manner to illustrate its rareness and horror. For the most part, the sexiness was confined to what you would expect from an all female prison. Yuri, trashy, and voyeuristic. It was great! Then the story grew larger in scope, the characters developed, the colors got brighter, and the show developed its sarcastic and irreverent tone. It carried that tone through the end.

 

There were some undeveloped threads, though. The one that sticks out for me was Ange's almost orgasmic experience from killing a dragon with her bare hands. This was alluded to earlier when she faced dragons for the first time in battle and she was sexually aroused. After her rescue from the island she shared with Tusk, the sensuality angle of why Norma are used to kill dragons was never mentioned again. It was explained much later that Norma were immune from being driven insane by the dragons' voices in contrast to the mana users. The original conception may have changed during the course of the 25 episodes.

 

In all, I enjoyed the humor, the well drawn girls, the relationships which focused on sisterhood, friendship, family and love. And I enjoyed that this weird charismatic villain introduced halfway through the story got sliced in half by the guy who always buried his face in Ange's crotch. That's storytelling.