Stardate 20031205.1528

(Captain's log): I recently wrote about my reactions to the first DVD (of six) of the anime series Louie the Rune Soldier. Since then I have purchased #2-#5 and have watched all but two of the episodes on them, 18 out of 26 total.

I wanted to write about my reactions to the series. I am trying hard to not include any "spoilers" in this, but it's possible I might screw up. I have been watching them in Japanese with English subtitles.

There are five major characters in the series. From left to right: Ila is Louie's best friend and a fellow student at the magician's guild. Genie is a big warrior, deadly with longsword and greatsword, stoic and unemotional. Melissa is a priestess of the war god Mylee, and not a happy camper. Merrill is a thief. Louie is the protagonist of the series, adopted son of the head of the magician's guild and an indifferent student in magic, who was revealed to Melissa by Mylee as being the hero she must follow. He's also known the head priestess of Melissa's religious order since he was a kid; he calls her "aunt Jenny" and she calls him "Lou-kun". ("-kun" is a suffix used by girls and women for men and boys to indicate familiarity and affection; "Lou-kun" would be translated more-or-less as "Lou dear" or "Lou love". "-chan" is a similar suffix used by everyone to refer to girls and attractive young women, or so I understand it.)

To say that Melissa was disappointed in Mylee's revelation is an understatement. Melissa is definitely not a happy camper.

The series is excellent; I have really been enjoying it. The characters are complex and interesting, and Louie isn't a pitiful loser like the guy in Love Hina. He starts as a klutz, and he screws up a lot, but it's clear from the very beginning that he's a diamond in the rough.

Very rough, to be sure; when Mylee designates Louie as Melissa's hero, she really has her work cut out for her. But he's deep-down decent and honorable, and he is a real tryer, and as the series goes on he does better. Ila believes in him from the very beginning, and the others come around.

There's a hero inside him, and it spontaneously shows up more and more. His magic becomes more reliable and more useful, and he becomes an asset in other ways, and the four of them do pull together. Based on the series concept it's a foregone conclusion that this would take place, but it happens slowly, in ways which make sense in character terms; it doesn't feel contrived. Over time the women come to think of Louie as a comrade, and they reach a point of taking it for granted that he's a part of their team. It becomes "we four", not "we three". He's still the junior member, and still takes more than his share of abuse from them, and he suffers from bad luck some of the time. But as the series proceeds he becomes an increasingly valuable asset, and not just because they force him to carry all their equipment and supplies.

Obviously I don't want to spoil the series for you, so I can't get into details about what happens. But with 7 episodes remaining that I haven't viewed (5 of which won't be available until the last DVD is released mid-January) I can see them working towards a very satisfactory ending. The hero will get the girl. (It is not yet clear which girl. There are two possibilities, but I'm pretty certain which it will be.) By the point where I am in the series, the identity of "final boss" and the general nature of the crisis that Louie will face has been revealed to the audience, and since we can assume he'll win (that being the kind of show it is), it will be the kind of victory over the kind of challenge of which legends are made.

Even if Louie uses rather unorthodox means of winning, which is virtually certain. He'll win, and he'll win deliberately. It is not the case that he will win by bumbling and being preposterously lucky in doing the right thing for the wrong reason. That's already clear. But he won't win the way we think of epic heroes winning.

An example as an analogy: As part of his training, he's in the forest and the three are watching him. A really huge bear sneaks up on him from behind, and when he realizes it he turns around and punches the bear in the jaw, knocking it out. (Louie is astoundingly strong.) Genie's reaction is disgust because he didn't use his sword or a spell.

He took out the bear, but he didn't do it "the right way". I have no doubt that he'll make a deliberate plan in the end to win, and will succeed, but not "the right way".

But it's not like he turned, saw the bear, reacted in fright, slipped and fell but kicked away a rock which caused a Bugs-Bunnyesque chain reaction leading to a tree falling on the bear. Nor do I expect him to win in the end by doing something stupid which fortuitously turns out to be useful. That isn't how the series is developing.

It's going to be an interesting ending in other ways. The title sequence includes an image of another group consisting of a second priestess of Mylee (named Isabel), an older guy with white hair in a long braided pony tail, a tiny girl with a staff who never smiles, and a tall handsome man who turns out to Isabel's hero, Renard. It's clear that he too will be involved in the victory. The interaction between the two groups (and the two heroes) is another interesting plot arc, which doesn't develop the way you might expect if the writers were lazy or formulaic.

One of the things which has been particularly interesting to watch has been the way that the relationships Louie has with the three women have developed. They're all quite different as people (and not just physically), and he treats them all differently. He's making human missteps, of course, because that's the kind of character he is, but he is basically doing it right in all three cases – and it's working. It's part of what is making this a treat to watch. Comparing and contrasting how he deals with the three is quite revealing.

One interesting things in the series is the fact that even though on the surface, at the beginning, the three women all are more competent than Louie, deep down on a personal level all three of them are a lot more flawed than he is. (That becomes evident quite early.)

He may have problems as a fighter and a magician and an adventurer, but as a person he's surprisingly together, even at the beginning. He knows himself and is true to himself; he lives to an honor code. (He sounds downright American... give that man a cowboy hat!) If he had problems initially it was because he was drifting, due to frustration and a feeling of pointlessness in his life. Becoming part of the group with the three women has offered him the chance for the kind of thing he always wanted, and he's seized it with both hands.

The three women, on the other hand, all have pretty serious issues to work through. The series is developing two of the characters and letting them work through their problems.

Unfortunately, the other has been converted into a ludicrous clown, the victim in many cases of low slapstick. She hasn't caught a pie in the face yet, but I would not be surprised if that eventually happens. It makes no sense in either plot terms or character terms; they seem to be doing it because as Louie develops they can't do it as much to him anymore. On the first DVD that character was strong and competent and likeable. By the fourth DVD they may as well have placed a "kick me" sign on her butt. At the beginning I really liked that character, but since then I've moved through pity to outright contempt.

If the series has any major flaw, that's it. I would have been much happier if they had not wasted that character that way.

The setup for one of the episodes makes a joke by relying on a Japanese pun. It creates momentary confusion which is cleared up a few seconds later, and is really only intended to prevent some necessary plot exposition from being dry. But I thought it was noteworthy.

They have just entered a remote town, and they've just seen a huge man win a barfight, and he taunts his victim laying on the ground about having no chance in the "fighting tournament". Genie starts providing background about the tournament, but an extra text block pops up which says, "In Japanese, the words for "fighting tournament" and "dance party" can be the same. Louie misinterprets it and has a brief mental image of the huge brawler doing ballet, but as the exposition proceeds he soon realizes his mistake.

Puns are notoriously difficult to translate across languages, especially languages which are not related, and those who wrote the script for the English dub couldn't ignore this pun because it would have made Louie's mental image of that brawler in a pink tutu incomprehensible. I switched audio tracks and watched that sequence again to see how they handled it. It was a tough problem: they had to come up with a pun in English which could mean a fight or a dance.

Can you think of one? I sure couldn't. But they found one, which can be found at the end of this post, and it's a good'un.

Obviously I haven't finished watching the series, but this is not the kind of series which will have a surprising or tragic ending which would make me change my overall opinion, the way I was negatively affected by episodes 23-25 of Excel Saga, or the way I fear I will feel after I watch the end of Mahoromatic. We know Louie will save the day, deliberately and heroically, but in an unorthodox way; it's just that we don't yet know in detail what he'll save the day from or how he'll go about it.

Based on what I've seen so far (18 of 26 episodes) I recommend this series. A few episodes are substandard, but even those are fun. There hasn't been an episode yet that which I thought stunk, and only one major character is being wasted. Overall it's extremely good, and four of the five main characters remain interesting and engaging.

As to the pun? In the English dub, the brawler calls it "the Velasquez ultimate street rumble", and Louie mumbles, "the Velasquez ultimate street rumba?"

MOST impressive! That's far better than anything I could have come up with.

Update 20031206: More about the -kun ending here. Also, Roderick writes to tell me the series has 24 episodes, not 26.