Oh No, The Group Is Breaking Up
After Katalina slunk off in the night the kids decide that its not on and are determined to get her back, even if that means sneaking into a heavily fortified military school while the empire that just signed their pardon is still present on the island. Well, no one ever claimed Gran was good at planning ahead. Besides, Katalina, who had her own life and dreams before she absconded with Lyria, decided not to travel around with them anymore. Oh the horror.
Okay, that may have been a little bit sarcastic and part of the issue is that Katalina’s choice turns out to be fuelled by past guilt rather than rational decision making on her part. Still, given this group came together by sheer happenstance while meandering about it kind of makes sense that characters might decide to leave and actually set some sort of plan other than keep travelling at some point. What will Gran do then?
On the bright side, Vyrn was actually an almost useful character this week as he distracted the guards and allowed for an incredibly comically bad attempt by Lyria, Io and Gran at sneaking in. I’m wondering if they have Saturday morning cartoons in that world because that is what they looked like as they tried to ‘sneak’.
We finally do reunite with Katalina and she gives us a sad little back story which explains her feelings of guilt and then she more or less tells the kids to go fly a kite and leaves them to get thrown out. That’s pretty straight forward and yet apparently not good enough for the younger crew members. They have a brief interaction with Rosetta who apparently just shows up to remind us she exists and then we’re back to planning how to get into trouble with the empire again and get the band crew back together.
This was not Granblue’s finest works and coupled with very lacklustre animation outside of the fight scenes in Katalina’s flash backs (a lot of characters were very still for just that little bit too long this week) this was perhaps one of the poorer showings the anime has given us even when taking into account some of season one. It is nice that Katalina’s story is getting some attention but the execution hasn’t been great this week. Here’s hoping there’s a big finish to this particularly character arc.
Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James
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Images from: Granblue Fantasy The Animation Season 2. Dir. Y Umemoto. MAPPA. 2019.