Rolling Review – Little Witch Academia (18)

 

 

Episode Synopsis:

The Wild Hunt, an event where highly trained ghost hunters compete (?) to hunt ghosts that appear on a set schedule, is coming to town.  Constanze, the mute techno-mage in training (different kind of techno-magic than Croix, though), is preparing a mighty mechanical steed to participate.  Enter Akko, who accidentally breaks one of Constanze’s helper robots, and takes it upon herself to make it up to Constanze by working with her to build her ship.  Problem is, Constanze doesn’t want any help.  So begins Akko’s quest to prove that sometimes, it takes teamwork to get a difficult job done.  Oh, there’s also a massive magical mecha showdown towards the end.

Episode Review:

This is another fine episode by Studio Trigger from a quality standpoint, with some standout scenes, but I can’t help but feel like the message is a bit off.  Constanze makes it clear from the outset that she doesn’t want any help from Akko.

Akko takes the lack of friendship as a challenge, and sets about aggressively trying to make Constanze her friend.

This is despite numerous conversations with both her own friends and Constanze’s that confirm Constanze’s preference.

Now, I figured we were setting up Akko to learn another valuable lesson about how people are different, gain (or at least try out) a new virtue that will help her unlock one of the Words, etc.  Instead, the lesson is that Constanze is in the wrong by not accepting Akko’s help…

…and that sometimes it takes people with different skills to accomplish an objective.

Now, admittedly, that’s a fine lesson too, but there’s gotta be a better way for Constanze to learn it than having unwanted assistance shoved down her throat until she accepts it.  Someday, Akko is going to meet someone that she truly can’t help with her patented mixture of optimism and bull-headedness, and that’s going to be a rough day.  On a side note, why doesn’t Akko show this level of commitment to making friends with Diana?

Moving on, the second half of the episode is an incredibly fun action sequence in which Constanze and Akko take off in their new ghost-hunting magitek ship for some Wild Hunt action.

The fight is Trigger at their best, with dramatic action shots all over the place, and gets much more hectic once Croix shows up to make the ghosts stronger and more aggressive with her techno-magical cube things.

Fortunately, Constanze and Akko have a trick up their sleeve.

 

Is it kind of strange to suddenly have a mecha show in the middle of your magical witch school show?  Sure.  I still enjoyed every minute.  From the transformation sequence to the English attack names to the giant explosions, it was a perfect classic mecha nostalgia moment.

In terms of plot development, there isn’t too much, though we do get a bit more of Croix’s master plan, which is currently in the research phase.  She apparently has some way to obtain energy from human emotions, and today’s experiment was to gauge the output from panic.

Based on previous episodes, it seems like she’s really going for the negative emotions, but she may also be causing unintended benefits for Akko’s plan to get people to like magic again:

Another episode behind us, and I’m left with only one question: Does Akko even attend classes anymore?

 

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