Girls Und Panzer reminds me why I intermittently stop watching anime. It’s the kind of arbitrary fap bait that has permeated nearly every season of anime for the past…well, as long as I’ve been watching anime. It’s a show with a following because it appeals to a demographic of people while also appealing to their weiners. Obviously if you like tanks or World War II or military stuff, you’ve most likely seen Girls Und Panzer. Whether you’re into these things or not, you’re embarking on a subpar journey with very few positive merits.
The show takes place at Oarai Girls Academy, where Miho Nishizumi is attempting to escape her previous life as a member of a tankery team. She meets new friends and, because the plot demands it, winds up getting stuck in a tankery after school activity. Her friends join her and together they, along with a lot of other students, set out to win a tankery tournament and save their school.
So we have a real basic setup here. The tank thing is an after-school event and the show focuses on the tournament between the different schools. It’s basically a sports anime in that regard. Once the initial hurdle of getting to the tournament is passed, the series moves at a fast clip, sending us from battle to battle. It’s paced pretty well but there’s a point about halfway through where they skip an entire battle for absolutely no reason. Every other fight of the tournament between our heroes and the other teams is shown, but this one is skipped. Okay, they wanted to push the anime forward and fit everything into the allotted episode limit. But it kind of ruins the whole idea of the underdog coming out on top. It’s a boring and overused plot device but part of the drama of this device is seeing how these underdogs manage to win. Especially after the upset of the first match, where we’re led to believe the Oarai team won due to some divine miracle, it breaks up the drama. Great, the underdogs are really badasses. Okay, so we can expect that they’ll win all their other matches.
But that only scratches the surface of the problems. The first major problem comes from the idea of tankery being feminine. The series establishes that tanks are feminine and tankery makes you a better wife. This raises a lot of questions in my head. Who, other than a Japanese man with strange fetishes, finds tanks to be feminine? When I think of femininity I don’t think of giant hunks of metal with massive cannons on them. So this idea of tanks being the kind of thing girls would love is ridiculously stupid. I’ve never known a girl who can tell an AK-47 from an M-16, let alone one who thinks tanks are cool.
Also, the anime takes place on a converted aircraft carrier. As in, the top of the carrier has been terraformed. Okay, the image is cool and if this were an anime like Gargantia where the planet is covered in water, I’d buy it. But the explanation of why schools are on battleships has something to do with how bad the school system is. Basically, the question is glossed over because not even the writer can figure out why the hell the schools are on ships.
And all the schools in the show are all-girl schools! Where are the men? What do men do in this world?
Why is it that people see a tank driving through their neighborhood and shooting and go from shocked to “GOOD LUCK AT THE MATCH!”
Why did a guy forget about the fact a tank was run into his shopfront because it is “good luck”?
How come they use old tanks? How come these tanks move so fast? How come the tank uniforms consist of short skirts? How come tanks are relevant to combat in a series that takes place in modern times?
And how come they didn’t mention that the school would close if they didn’t win the tournament until near the end? That’s a pretty big thing to forget about until the plot demands a reason for the characters to band together and set aside everything to succeed.
This show opens up so many questions. It has the skeletal parts of a story, but none of the meat that makes a story, you know, understandable. It’s like a guy was sitting at his desk with a model tank, a tank guidebook, and was watching Lucky Star. He had a voila moment and wrote out an anime that shows he obviously likes tanks and moe but he doesn’t understand anything about storytelling, character development, or world building.
Oh but the characters! How can I hate such fantastic characters? Every character in this show is pretty much awful with the exception of Yukari, who managed to be silly and cute at the same time. There’s Mako who falls asleep a lot. And Hana who…arranges flowers and that’s about it. Saori…she needs to get laid. Miho, the main character. She’s about as boring as you’d expect. One bad thing in her past defines her otherwise unstoppable winning streak. Like Kirito, she can pull shit from the air. She drifts a tank. She seriously drifts a fucking tank. Like, I could forgive most of the stupid physics and liberties taken with the tanks since it’s a cartoon. But drifting a tank…okay you’ve lost me.
Compound all these inherent problems with a lackluster main theme and ending (at least during the show the military music is a nice touch) as well as some mediocre animation (along with terrible CG tanks) and you have yourself a show so underwhelming and stupid, you’ll wonder why you sat through all twelve episodes.
