Fall 2011 anime – Last Exile – Ginkyo no Fam, etc

Ben-tou shopping scene
Ben-tou shopping scene
I’m still following about half a dozen titles from the current season, basically the titles I’ve written about at greater length earlier.
Last Exile – Ginkyo no Fam has done nothing to dispel the reservations I expressed previously. Looking around the Web, I see that it has attracted a fair amount of comment. Much of this is uncritically favourable, or goes into great detail about the personalities of the various characters. There are a few negative reviews that raise some awkward and pertinent questions, such as:
Why are we constantly told that Fam is a great pilot, and not shown so that we can judge for ourselves?
Why is more not made of the potential of the small “vanships” to usher in new kinds of weapons and new ideas about how to conduct military operations?
Why introduce “fan-service” and idiot behaviour by the principal characters at the opening of the 2nd series?
Why are sections of the plot so jaw-droppingly implausible? Such as the sequence where the older princess is snatched off the deck of her flagship. (What a stupid place to stand! What an unlikely manoevure!). Her friends figure out exactly where she is, fly through a battle zone, infiltrate the Ades flagship through a gap in the hull (somebody really ought to tell the Turan general staff about that hole in the armour belt), fly around inside the vast hull encountering only light opposition, finally to confront the enemy commander.
Why set up the Ades Federation as the bad guys plotting genocide and killing the princesses’ father, and then confuse this simple but fit-for-purpose plot by having a scene that depicts Turan as land-grabbing invaders?
When is the show going to bother explaining what is going on and fill in minor but interesting details like what exactly happened to the Turan flagship and its crew?
One would like to think that there’s a clear resolution of how the nice princess suddenly has super-powers that allow her to vape a city with an interplanetary spaceship that pops up like a rabbit out of a hat, but in view of the above, I doubt it very much.
And why are the pirates, who should be a pragmatic and self-interested bunch, aligning themselves with Turan, which has just lost the war, and against Ades, the most powerful military machine on the planet? (Clue: most of them fled from territories over-run by Ades).
Clearly one is supposed to ignore these awkward questions and instead enjoy a predominantly young and female set of characters expressing their feelings and generally acting up like uncontrolled adolescents for much of the screen time.