Letter Bee episode 10

When you drop a crap anime you simply ignore it for the rest of your life. However if you drop an average anime you might keep track of anime blogs to see if it improved and whether it’s worth picking up again. Those people who decided their decision was a correct one after episode 8 and 9 might what to re-think their views a bit. Episode 9 was a huge step in the right direction and Lag barely cried at all!

The above paragraph may or may not be a thinly veiled attempt at getting people to continue reading my posts.

The Child of Maka vs Loli in a wheelchair. Who will win? If you said the Child of Maka then you clearly haven’t seen how vicious a sport wheelchair rugby is.

It makes a lot of sense for Lag to live with Sylvette as a tenant. Lag gets a house near the Bee Hive for what is almost certainly a reduced rate. There’s someone there to help take care of Niche (who can be pretty high-maintenence to say the least), a landlord who will look after him and even cook his meals for him, although that’s probably not a good thing. For Sylvette, she’s getting some money on top of that miserable amount she must get for making dolls. She’s got a tenant who won’t fuck her over and is a government employee so he has guaranteed wage to pay for his accommodation (I wonder if Bees have a union?). Most importantly she has someone around to fill the void left by Gauche. I doubt Aria visited that often since I’d guess she was trying to keep away from anything that reminded her of Gauche. Remember Sylvette first welcomed Lag with a gun pointed at his face? OK, it wasn’t a real gun but it shows how unsafe she must have felt.

This entire scene blew me away completely. This wasn’t just about the usual quality artwork. Pierrot upped the animation budget for this episode considerably and it showed. Combine the music and some of the revelations that occurred during Aria’s flashback and you have a magical scene. I’m sure you’ve all noticed this by now at how the artificial sun is the same shape as those little spiky balls that look like sea mines when someone is watching memories through a shindan or whenever they blow up one of those horrible CGI bugs and all the sparkles that come out of them. I’ve always thought that it’s some kind of magical power that resides in Amberground but everything with the Shindan is run by heart (*eyeroll* I will never get used to saying that awfully corny phrase). If the sun runs on the same principle then how is the thing powered? Since everyone calls it an artificial sun, does that mean there was a real sun before? And if so, what happened to it? I’ve got a bunch of theories flying about in my head but they are all absurd and based off assumptions I’ve been making about how Amberground works.

This is where things got interesting and it’s all these revelations that has led me to start forming all sorts of wild theories in my head. The Day of Flicker, the day where the sun went out. Can you imagine the shock it must be to the people of Amberground? To constantly have this sun that never stops giving out light to suddenly stop, no wonder baby Aria couldn’t move. It would be like looking at the sky in Ireland and not seeing a single cloud or trying to go to sleep at university and not hearing music blazing from someone elses room. These things just never happen!

Any anime character instantly have their coolness factor raised when they stand silhouetted by the sun. Bonus points if it’s an artificial sun. Just look at this picture of Aria and tell me she isn’t the coolest fucking thing in existence and that you are not already prostrating in front of her to show you are not worthy.

So a quick re-cap of the Day of Flicker. The sun went out and as soon as it turned back on a government airship crashed. The government said they were performing maintenance on the sun and that the crash was unrelated but I seriously doubt that. The flickering of the sun clearly had more than just the shock effect of everything suddenly getting dark. At the very least we know it somehow caused Gauche to lose the memories of his mother. Wasn’t it said that using too much power in your shindan would cause you to lose your memories? Hey I just answered my own question from earlier. Obviously the flickering of the sun is connected to the same heart power that shindans work on. Then how is the fact Lag was born on this day relevant, or is it relevant at all? Argh, so many theories flying about in my head. If I was to write them all out I’d never reach the end of this post.

Then Connor appeared and the entire episode took a nose-dive. The music changed from the haunting melody to something that sounded oddly similar to the pokemon theme music and we met that prick Zazie trying to fight off a load of level 3 Rattata’s on route 1. The entire last 4 minutes of the episode seemed to have no more purpose other than to throw in another soup joke. Considering how little happens in an episode of Letter Bee anyway it’s a real pain to watch it waste time with stupid things like this. Bloody Zazie, I don’t like that fellow. And Connor is going to show his true colours soon as the true villain of the show and take the position of Head Bee ahead of Lag. I dare say Connor isn’t far from finishing his goal.

I’m a happy man right about now. Those poor last two episodes were quickly replaced by this wonderful one. You know when your football team loses 2 or 3 games in a row and you start to worry if they’re falling into a rut. Then there’s the huge relief when they finally win a match. That’s what’s happened to Letter Bee. What really stood out was the huge increase in animation quality to complement the artwork. I’ve taken loads of screenshots, most of them of Niche making some funny facial expressions, and I never got a chance to use them. Ah well, this has been a long post so I’ll use two more.

I guess some things never change.