Forum - View topicBodacious Space Pirates (TV).
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Brent Allison
 Posts: 2444 Location: Athens-Clarke County, GA, USA |
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Possible explanation for good: Tatsuo Sato took a cue from his earlier work with Akazukin Cha-Cha where Cha-Cha didn't define herself in relation to Shiine or Riiya. Possible explanation for ehhhh: Her lack of relationship lets the het-males in the audience imagine themselves in that role.
Thank you for adding your perspective from that bit of relevant life experience. That relates to another issue I'm wondering about; could this series have had the same gender dynamics if Marika went to a co-ed school? Something tells me that the praise this show earned might have been more hard-earned in that setting. |
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Kruszer
 Posts: 7983 Location: Minnesota, USA |
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Overall this series was fun and entertaining enough to keep me interested....but still I can't help but think that it had a ton of untapped potential it never explored. spoiler[It never really did anything big or important until the last arc. Personally, I would have rather integrated the pirate hunting story into the whole series and made Quartz and the Grand Cross a recurring threat throughout the show. It could have added a level of mystery to the series as they tried to figure out who it was. We never got a chance to explore the other pirate characters brought in for the pirate hunting arc or the Bentenmaru's own crew for that matter.]
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18189 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Are you forgetting the Golden Ghost ship arc and its fall-out? spoiler[Pirates don't get medals from princesses for doing small and unimportant-in-the-big-picture things.] |
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Yttrbio
 Posts: 3652 |
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infiltration.cru
 Posts: 321 |
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what i would have loved to see more of, is kurie. true, she might be one of the better established crew members(perhaps the most) but during the last part she went from cool and goofy to awesome.
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Brent Allison
Posts: 2444 Location: Athens-Clarke County, GA, USA |
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The producers might have wanted the show's elements to be more reliant on smaller arcs than developing themes and characters over the course of the series. Perhaps they hoped to garner a different type of audience in terms of size or export market (just speculation, no data). As HaruhiToy pointed out,
That might be a relationship to Haruhi's point; the lack of character development over the series (or a detailed series-wide narrative for that matter) to the lack of explicit character emotion. When characters come to turning points in their lives, they're going to display emotions that are strong and push against the melodramatic, if not fall headlong into it. Chiaki did change (somewhat) thanks to her relationship between her dad and Marika over the series, and she gave the higher emotional counterbalance to Marika's devil-may-care attitude. Point being, if the other characters expressed strong emotions as a result of development, and the series kept its non-connecting arc structure, it would have been a bumpier ride than on the Grand Cross during maneuvers. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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I loved Ai's arc, and I think Marika had a decent amount of development, but the problems in arc structure probably were because the original light novels didn't have enough material. I'm not quite sure, but isn't the finale's arc anime-only?
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Spastic Minnow
 Bargain HunterExempt from Grammar Rules  Posts: 4609 Location: Gainesville, FL |
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Everyone here has read the AX Tatsuo Sato Focus Panel transcript, right?
Indeed, everything (other some small details) from episode 19 on was anime original. In a way that seemed to help, Sato certainly seems to know where he personally wants to go with the story and isn't worrying about anything so problematic as "source material" (which apparently had run out?) I like how it ended, no need to be slavish to a novel (or manga?) series whose author might milk for a while more if it's making him/her money. |
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Agent355
Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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Thanks for the link, Spastic Minnow! I can't believe I totally missed that!
Tatsuo Sato has such a great handle on the world and the characters that I think the anime-only stuff he came up with is better than the lighthearted light novel based fare. I'm looking forward to the movie even more now, hopefully it will be even more exciting than the finale. It's rare (very, very rare), but sometimes you just have to take what you can from the source material and run away with it! 
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Kruszer
Posts: 7983 Location: Minnesota, USA |
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No I'm not forgetting, that had the potential to be though, but instead was over too quick, pretty anti-climactic, and the implications of which were mostly brushed aside and forgotten. Last edited by Kruszer on Tue Jul 03, 2012 9:05 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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But it had such importance for the princesses and the future of their world!!!- none of which we see on screen or are brought up ever again, having zero bearing or effect on our characters and their goings-on. Last Exile handled that matter better in the second series, given that spoiler[all of the exiles coming back really set off massive global conflicts.] |
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Surrender Artist
 Posts: 3264 Location: Pennsylvania, USA |
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Bodacious Space Pirates was the first series that I ever watched streaming and it got me to subscribe to Crunchyroll. I had dismissed it at first because of the title, but then it got raves in the preview guide, so my curiosity was piqued and I really took to it. I don't know that I'd've watched this series if it didn't have such a perfectly absurd title, which I'm glad to see some people embrace. To a little surprise, I have found that I rather miss getting to see a new episode every Saturday. It got under my skin in a good way.
I enjoyed the finale. It carried through some of the excitement that had finally built in the concluding arc and felt like it put a nice capstone on the first part of Marika's pirating career. Whatever makes this series work so well is a little strange and hard to pin down, but it must be there, because even when it lagged in the middle, I couldn't stop watching and was quick to forgive when it whirred back to life from the race episode onward. One of my favorite things about this series was its quiet moments. It never quite delivered on what I had hoped for from the first five episodes, but I feel as though when examined more closely, there's more underneath the surface of Bodacious Space Pirates than you'd expect. Part of that came through at many times when two characters would have short, calm and revelatory or introspective conversations. These weren't big moments, but they always held my attention and did a lot to secure my interest in the characters. I also enjoyed its dearth of fanservice. I'm not a great fan of it generally and in this case, It think that it would gone against the spirit of the series. There were a handful of moments that might've raised an eyebrow, but they were downright modest by contemporary standards, to say nothing of few and passing. Even the most sexily drawn regular, Misa, was sparsely used for fanservice despite usually wearing revealing skin-tight clothing. Hell, I thought that Ririka was sexy as Hell, but I don't think that we ever saw her anything less than fully covered. Even the series' beach episode declined to deliver. Instead we got a series full of distinctly female, even girly, characters who still went out and did impressive or important things without their gender being raised. (The uncomfortable Cosplay Pirates affair perhaps excepted) I loved when it showed us 'sexy' Coorie, but then took it right back because that's not who she really is. Oh, and the romance between Lynn and Jenny; that was cool. I liked this series a lot in the end. I like it. I want more. I'm really eager about the film, which I hope that Sentai will license, and look forward to owning it. I actually drew a few fantasy English dub casts up, but I can't remember them and my methodology was probably flawed. The only recommendation that I can remember and stand by is that I thought that Shelley Calene-Black should play Luca's voice, but, then again, I try to put her in everything. (What can I say, Noir had quite an effect on me... I'm sure that a show full of schoolgirls has room for Monica Rial too...)
I agree and I like this way of looking at it. I was at first slightly disappointed that the spoiler[battle with the Grand Crosses went exactly according to plan so smoothly], but a properly tense and uncertain battle is very hard to pull off. The scenario that you complain about is really annoying. The way that the series played might have been a little light on drama, but it was cool enough to make up for that.
That wasn't quite what I was getting toward. I quite agree about the distinction and charm that Marika offered. What I meant is not that the series would be unchanged if Marika had been a boy, but that not that much about the outline of the series or very many of the happenings would need to be changed to make it about a boy. It would change the feeling and atmosphere of the series, but not the essence of the story. To me, especially near the end, Bodacious Space Pirates felt like a Leiji Matsumoto yarn with all of the tediously exaggerated manriness and worship of boyhood stripped out. The series became curiously more noteworthy for having a female lead and so many important women, but much of the structure underlying that is more or less gender-neutral or even traditionally masculine. I think that this essay by Erica Friedman better puts some of what I had in mind. (And draws an interesting parallel to Maria Watches Over Us) |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18189 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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A question for someone who can actually read Japanese: How did this series end up doing overall in Japanese sales figures? The couple of English references that I can find suggest that Blu-Ray sales figures for at least some of its volumes were respectable (in the 6-8k range the first week). That suggests to me that it did pretty well but was hardly a top seller.
Can anyone comment authoritatively on this? |
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Saffire
 Posts: 1255 Location: Iowa, USA |
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Megiddo
 Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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One thing to note about BSP sales is that it had a rather strange release pattern. For a two cour series it only had 7 BD volumes (nobody bought the DVD vols but it was even stranger) with the price for each volume being relatively cheap for such a release. This is only one volume more than the standard amount for a one cour series. So while it did quite well number-wise with ~7k, in terms of the actual amount of cash generated it's more like ~5k if it had a more standard two cour release (9-10 vols).
Release structure is hugely important when it comes to sales. As a quick example, we can look at estimated gross sales for Mouretsu Pirates and Muv Luv: Total Eclipse. As established, Mouretsu had an average of 7,337 units per volume at an average price of 6700 yen MSRP for 7 volumes which comes out to around 344,000,000 yen (~3.7 million USD). Whereas Total Eclipse had an average of 6,120 units per volume at an average price of 7800 yen MSRP for 9 volumes which comes out to around 430,000,000 yen (~4.6 million USD) So even though Total Eclipse had 1.2k fewer average units per volume sold it still ended up with more estimated gross sales due to a higher MSRP and 2 more volumes in its release structure. That is probably a lot more than you wanted to know, but it's an important point to realize when you're looking at Mouretsu Pirates's disc sales. |
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