I’m back from vacation! I’ll slowly be catching up over the next week or two. I’ll continue to combine episodes into single posts depending on how much I have to say.

Finally Akiho realizes how dumb giant humanoid robots with human pilots are. I could have told her that in the first episode, but oh well. She still seems to be under the illusion that a giant humanoid robot without a human pilot is a good idea, but we’re slowly heading in the right direction, it seems. I do appreciate this show’s turn towards realism! (Why am I saying this regarding the episode where a magnetic monopole randomly falls out of the sky? Well, whatever. That’s the type of sci-fi I can accept.)

The funniest part is that even after building this giant robot, the legs of this robot has wheels. So this robot won’t be traversing any rough terrain or be able to regain its balance. The only potential advantages of a legged robot are completely nullified. There was absolutely no point in making it a humanoid robot, it was solely to replicate the robot from the anime.

And why would they demo the robot to the public and their sponsors before testing it themselves?! That’s just asking to shoot yourself in the foot.

Taking Advice

Part of Akiho’s problem and her stubbornness and refusal to change plans may stem from the fact that she has such awful role models. The two we’re most familiar with, her sister and her teacher, are pretty awful.

Her sister is an asshole who doesn’t respect other people, including Akiho herself. Akiho needs to find her own dream rather than trying to fulfill her sister’s. In fact she should just forget about her sister entirely, like her sister forgot about her. What a terrible person.

We also have their teacher, who seems even worse. He tells Akiho to her face that her robot sucks. Way to encourage your students, jerk. Now I’ve been saying since episode one that giant humanoid robots are stupid, but even I have to give Akiho some credit here. That robot is pretty darn impressive, especially for something she built as a high schooler! Fundamentally misguided, yes, but impressive nevertheless. It’s absolutely amazing, even if she is ten years behind current research (although I don’t see how this is research at all, seems like pure engineering). But what do you expect? She’s in high school! And you know what, maybe she could have done some excellent research if her sponsor got off his ass and gave her some guidance. Not that a high school teacher would know anything about current robotics research anyway.

Same thing with the crowd. That was the most unrealistic part of this entire episode. Like kids and normal people aren’t going to be impressed solely because something isn’t the most state of the art recent research! As a robotics researcher myself, I demonstrate my robots to plenty of reporters and visitors who aren’t scientists. These robots do all these amazing things. Yet without fail, what all the non-scientific visitors are impressed by are the dumb things like speech synthesis and blinking lights. Things that their cellphones can do just as well as our robots. They couldn’t care less, much less know what state of the art research is. And come on, even I’ve got to say that a giant robot like that is going to be crazy impressive, even if it isn’t really research. Give me a break, are all these six year old boys reading peer-reviewed journals in their spare time or something?

The other people Akiho is close to include Kai who completely ignores her, her dad who is too shy to talk to her (but hey, at least he’s trying), purple haired girl who’s totally useless, and Frau who is totally insane. Subaru is the only one giving her good advice. I’m glad she’s finally decided to take it.

Further Thoughts

Akiho really has the best expressions, although Frau is pretty good too. This show in general does an excellent job at showing people’s emotions in non-boring ways. I guess they feel they have to make up for Kai.

This rock falling from the sky was pretty weird. Not sure what else to make of it.

Yeah, this relationship is not going to work. At least I hope not. The teacher and Akiho’s sister deserve each other, since they’re both such assholes.

This relationship isn’t going to work either— Subaru belongs to Frau, of course— but it was pretty funny.