Legend of the Galactic Heroes S1E2: “The Battle of Astarte”
This episode has another voice over intro after the OP, over similar (and some reused) footage. However, either it’s phrased better this time, or the localizer just did a much better job on this one for some reason. Phezzan is now described as an autonomous state rather than a city state, so that’s good. That Adrian Rubinsky guy who we saw a glimpse of earlier is confirmed to be their head of state, but also confusingly described as a “feudal lord.” If he’s the top dog of an independent feudal government, wouldn’t that make him a king? “Lord” has connotations of being subservient to someone else, in a feudal context. Maybe “feudal lord” is just a mistranslation of “dictator,” that would make more sense. It’s also made explicit now that the Alliance is a democracy. It was implied in the dialogue and aesthetics, both in this show and in DNT, but now it’s been said in as many words.
Also, no waxing poetic over random desert ruins this time. Man, that really puts the lie to the claim that they were trying to cram as much story as possible into the pilot due to not knowing how many episodes they have, doesn’t it? If they were trying to get through material quickly, then they were really, really bad at it.
In his office, Adrian Rubinsky is (somehow?) getting realtime updates on the battle of Astarte. His words suggest that he’s disappointed with Reinhard’s surprising winning streak, but he’s still making his gloaty Lex Luther face that makes him look smug about it.
I don’t know if he’s actually “just as planning” here and was hoping the Empire would win, or if that’s just the only expression they drew for him. I fear it's the latter.
Cut to the Imperial fleet hitting the next Alliance group, with dissonantly happy music playing as we see Alliance personnel die screaming deaths. I think the show is going for deliberate irony with this, but if so it’s not quite hitting the mark. Aboard the Patorakles, the shockwave of an explosion tears through the bridge. Like in DNT, Vice Admiral Paeta is knocked out with severe injuries. Unlike in DNT though, Wen-Li doesn’t quite escape unscathed himself. He’s in much better shape than Paeta and a few other unfortunate bridge crew members, but he’s got some deep looking cuts and is having difficulty standing upright.
Also, I dig this visual for what a half-destroyed command center full of smart glass displays and holoscreens might look like:
Especially since I thought they were going with the soft scifi space windows aesthetic at first (which even soft milscifi does on occasion, bafflingly). But nope, just a room covered in smart screens! Pleasant surprise there.
Wen-Li assesses the condition of the Patorakles and its officers, and sends Paeta to sickbay in a stasis bed (notably, the Alliance crew seem a little bit less confident in their own medical resources than the Imperial soldiers did last episode. Either a difference in attitude, or an actual disparity in medical technology and/or resources). Paetas’ last act before losing consciousness in an absolutely unconvincing and anime-ish manner is to bestow command over what’s left of their fleet to Wen-Li. Then, Wen-Li sends his fleet-wide command. On one hand, it’s way less self-glorifying and unhinged-sounding than the DNT version, with him even stopping midway through to marvel at how unusually confident his voice is sounding. More consistent with Yang Wen-Li’s general personality, for sure.
On the downside, whatsisname the staff officer encouraging him afterward has absolutely zero warmth or spirit behind it due to how shortened his appearances up until now have been and how bland his expressions and voice acting are.
Also, for some reason there’s almost never any music when people are talking to each other on the bridge. Given how over the top the soundtrack is during space battle footage, or planetside footage, or while waiting around for shit to happen, it’s REALLY conspicuous by its absence in these dramatic dialogue scenes that lack it.
Then we…cut to a couple of random fighter pilots taking off from the Patorakles and flying toward Reinhard’s fleet. And, while in the middle of a fucking battle, they start nonchalantly chatting about predictions of the ultimate outcome of the war. Not of this particular battle, of the entire war. And they’re talking about this on viewscreens, while weaving around enemy fire. And their expressions while doing so look like this:
It’s not even a case of miscommunication between art and voice direction, because their VA’s sound exactly the way the characters look. Just cheery and placid while shit explodes all around them. “It’s okay, bruh. It’s only two thirds of the fleet that’s been slaughtered, bruh. Chill out and take a bong hit, bruh.”
The purpose of this completely inane scene is apparently to establish the importance of the nearby Imperial fortress world of Iserlohn, which they mention while shooting the breeze mid-dogfight. Apparently, there’s a big region of space between the currently held Empire and Alliance territories that is impassable except for a narrow corridor of star systems. Why it’s impassible isn’t specified, but given how barren the space around the corridor looks when we’re shown it on a starmap, it’s easy to infer that ships have a limited range, and the distance across the empty space is farther than they can go without refueling. Anyway, Iserlohn orbits a key star along that one passage, which makes it strategically critical.
Iserlohn is an artificial pseudoplanet, 60 kilometers across and armored by a gravitationally bound “ocean” of liquid metal. Mercury, perhaps? Mercury is fairly dense, so if you had a fortress big enough to hold it in place via gravity maybe it would make a good armor material? Sadly, I’m not a physics person. Anyway, whenever Alliance ships try to take the system, an island rises from the mercury sea and fires a uniquely gigantic particle beam weapon called Thor’s Hammer that instantly vaporizes capital ships by the handful. That’s the kind of thing that probably hurts even a hemigalactic empire’s pocketbooks, but it seems to have paid off for them by rendering an entire spiral arm’s worth of border impassable to the enemy.
Good information, and a really cool scifi setpiece. But, there are two big problems with the delivery.
Why do we need to know about it NOW, at the turning point of this battle sequence?
Why do we need a random-ass Greek chorus of blithe fighter pilots to tell us that Iserlohn exists when we’ve already had a scene there in the previous episode? A significant detail here is that all the new information about Iserlohn’s location along that star corridor comes from the omniscient narrator, after those pilots namedrop the place. The only thing the pilots themselves tell us is that Iserlohn Fortress exists and is important, which we already knew from the pilot. So it’s not even like the new information is being conveyed more organically this way.
Back to the present, Reinhard reacts with cold amusement when Wen-Li assumes command of the remaining enemy fleet. Also, he isn’t able to intercept the broadcast that Wen-Li sent in this version, so that buildup with him randomly fearing the hero of El Facil doesn’t get to pay off yet.
Between Reinhard’s characterization, the framing of his officers when they were first introduced, and the narrator telling us that this is a dictatorship vs. democracy conflict, the OVA seems like it’s trying to make Wen-Li the hero and Reinhard the villain. Which would be fine, except that it also seems to expect us to care about Reinhard’s personal life sometimes, and the intro/outro focus on both sets of characters suggests a neutral approach more like DNT’s. So, like much else about the OVA, it comes across muddled and ineffective.
This is really making me curious about the book. Which anime version is closer to it?
As in the last version, Reinhard orders his ships to form a spindle formation and push through the middle. Wen-Li sees what he’s doing, and races his mind furiously to come up with a way of preventing their passage. As an extra lore tidbit helpfully provided by the localizer, Wen-Li also reveals that he is the great great great great great great grandson of Shirou Emiya.
Wen-Li remembers that spaceships explode when they are blown up, and parts his fleet in two directions to let the spindle between and then come back around behind it to shoot the vulnerable aft flanks. Reinhard rages and mutters about this “mockery” his plan is being thwarted by, and realizes that it must be that damned Commodore Wen-Li, the hero of El Facil who he’d inexplicably been dreading. If Reinhard had a moustache, he’d be twirling the hell out of it right now. Unfitting music plays while he supervillains to himself and Siegfried tries to cheer him up to no avail.
Then we cut to those two random nonchalant fighter pilots again. They’re still videochatting mid-dogfight. They comment about how with enough determination, they can probably win this battle after all. While sounded like they don’t care enough to be even slightly determined. When the battle seems to actually favor them, one of the pilots delivers an apathetic, casual comment whose localization is almost as amazing as the previous screenshot’s:
The voice acting and art fucked this up one way. The translation fucked it up another. The end result is more hilarious than the sum of its parts.
The Battle of Astarte is a bit more protracted than in the DNT version. Reinhard attempts to outflank Wen-Li’s outflanking, which results in the two fleets ending up forming a ring shape, like two snakes eating each other’s tails.
One of Reinhard’s naysayer vice admirals refuses the order to outflank the flank, and instead has his own command ship turn around to face the enemy head on. His ship is promptly destroyed. Back on the Brunhild’s bridge, Reinhard snickers about how glad he is to be rid of that guy, and hopes that the other officers will take that as a case in point of why you really ought to follow orders.
The mutual chase continues for a time. The fighter pilots remark about this peculiar set of circumstances while absentmindedly racing for their lives away from the capital ship fire directly behind them. Wen-Li talks to whatsisname, and remarks that he just hopes the enemy commander will realize that victory would cost him too many ships to continue the push into Alliance space and that he might as well turn back now to minimize losses. And in this version of events, that decision is made by…Siegfried.
Not Reinhard. His adjutant, Siegfried, is the one who urges him to retreat back to up the corridor to the Iserlohn system. Reinhard resists that advice, and Siegfried has to almost plead with him before he finally concedes that continuing to fight would be pointless and gives the order to retreat. All while grumbling about how close he came to pushing into Alliance space and that victory should have been his and typical anime villain word salad.
This time, when he sends his message to Wen-Li, it comes across as much more backhanded. “I wish you good health…until next time.” The emphasis is clearly on the second half of the sentence, whereas in DNT it felt more like it was on the first half. “I’ll get you next time!” versus “Well done, my worthy opponent.”
Back on the Patorakles, Wen-Li watches the Imperials retreat, and chooses not to respond to Reinhard’s message for the same given reasons as in DNT. He orders the fleet to return to the previous two battle sites and start recovering survivors. He also spares a word for his engaged friend, Mark, who most likely died in one of those battles.
Cut to the body of the person who got improbably impaled against the ceiling of their ship by a spear of deformed metal, the photo he was looking at floating free of his lifeless hand. Oh, I guess that was Mark. I should have known, since he mentioned having a significant other. Tragic music plays, and we cut to some planet in Alliance space where his fiancé gets the news and breaks down in tears all over her piano, hitting appropriately discordant keys.
Oh my god he almost literally is Mark. If ONLY he’d been on the Space Germany side instead of the Space Anglo-America side, it would have been completely perfect.
Never forget. ;_;
So, both fleets head back the way they came. The random officers we saw in the Iserlohn death star’s control room show up again, and celebrate Reinhard’s kinda-sorta-victory. Can’t tell if they’re being facetious or not.
On the Imperial homeworld, someone I don’t know tells Reinhard’s sister about the victory, and she reacts by being impassive. How dramatic.
There is an interesting detail in that both sides report the Battle of Astarte as a victory, playing up their own fleet’s achievements while downplaying its failures. Reinhard’s sister and other characters in frame are hearing about how the Imperial fleet inflicted massive casualties on the Alliance before coming home with the strategic calculus now shifted more in the Empire’s favor. The newscasts and grapevine reports in the Mark’s Fiance sequence are all about how the Imperial invasion was thwarted (though they at least admit that the victory was an expensive one. As opposed to the imperials completely avoiding the fact that their task force failed to achieve its objective). There’s also a quick flash back to Lex Luther over on Phezzan, who vagues vaguely about this surprising turnaround and decides that Wen-Li and Reinhard are both individuals he should keep tabs on.
Finally, we cut to Wen-Li and his friend That One Guy having returned to Alliance space, paying their respects at a memorial cemetery on planet whatever. Mark’s fiancé widow (fiancidow? Fidow? Fidow.) meets them there, and Wen-Li takes it upon himself as the commander of the fleet to apologize for her loss. Even though they both know that he wasn’t its commander yet at the time of Mark’s death. It’s like, sad and emotional, because these characters who I care about and remember the names of are saying that they are feeling feelings.
Finally, mercifully, we reach the closing voiceover. More waxing philosophical. More stupid desert ruins.
That depends on which records they had access to. Did they watch Die Neue These, or this lethal dose of boredom?
End episode.
I wish I could say that it’s hard to pick a favorite and that both adaptations have their own merits, but I’m not in the business of lying to y’all. The New Thesis is superior to the original video adaptation in every way. I didn’t even like DNT all that much at the time, but sitting through two episodes of this pile of poor decisions makes me remember it much more fondly and wish I was rewatching it instead. Conversely, I probably wouldn’t be quite this unhappy with the OVA if I hadn’t already seen a better version.
I’m not going to hold the (much) lower budget against the OVA, nor am I going to blame the work itself for the poor English translation, but those were just frosting on top of the real problems. The complete lack of tone and pacing, the failure to put even a little bit of work into building investment in the characters, the relentless tell-don’t-show of setting information and backstories that reads like some obnoxious Star Wars fan’s youtube comments, those are things that you can’t blame on budget or third party translations.
Comparing the two of them, I’d say that Die Neue These is an excellent example of how to introduce an audience to a big, complicated fictional universe. For the first two episodes, everything is centered on the lead characters (in fact, the pilot is centered on just ONE lead character). It introduces us to Reinhard von Lohengramm, gives him a chance to make an impression, and also takes pains to make sure he’s someone we can care about. The focus of the pilot was Reinhard proving himself to the naysayers who assumed he was a political appointment, with a thematic subplot about him needing a worthy opponent. The second episode was all about Yang Wen-Li trying to save himself and his crewmates from a slow motion disaster that his superiors wouldn’t prevent. Start small. Keep the camera frame juuust big enough to show the main character and their immediate surroundings, engaged in a relatable conflict. Then, once the audience cares about the protagonist, you can slowly zoom the camera out and show more and more of the crazy scifi/fantasy world they inhabit.
For those opening, character-centric arcs that resolve themselves in the Battle of Astarte, we don’t need to know why Reinhard’s fleet is moving in this particular direction, or what the Alliance fleet was trying to protect from it. Just that they’re at war and that Reinhard’s fleet is following a strategically critical vector. The medical stuff with the stasis gurneys and hypersleep pods was cool, but it would have been just as cool if it appeared an episode or two later when it was more immediately relevant. The mercury-coated death star was cool, but see above. Hell, given that the battle ended with Wen-Li going to rescue survivors and Reinhard withdrawing back to Iserlohn, episode three would have been the perfect place to introduce both those concepts. We could have a scene or two of Wen-Li overseeing the evacuation, with him or one of his underlings reviewing footage of people being rescued from the shipwrecks in those stasis gurneys and walking out of sickbay with new cyberlimbs. Maybe use that as an opportunity to go into their personal histories in a way that actually characterizes them, as the carnage and treatment reminds them of whatever earlier war experiences got them to their current stations. Then in the second half of the episode we could have the Imperial fleet enter Iserlohn orbit, and use that to fill in the context of the battle that just happened to prepare us for the next arc. Etc.
I’m sure that DNT gets to all these things in their due time. Just, not before then. And I’ll bet I’d appreciate those things’ introductions much more if I had a reason to care about them.
Speaking of people to care about, I’m really bemused by Reinhard’s portrayal in each series. Wen-Li is recognizably the same character in both, but Reinhard’s personality is almost a complete opposite from one to the other. I much prefer DNT’s take on Reinhard, regardless of whether it’s truer to the source material. Not just because he’s more likable, but because he’s more charismatic and interesting. OVA Reinhard isn’t a good antihero, or even a good villain. He’s just boring.
One flaw that was much more prevalent in DNT was the strawman-like malice and incompetence of the other commanders. Thing is, I can’t even give the OVA credit for avoiding that issue, because the only reason it didn’t bother me more is that the OVA episodes spent so much time flailing around introducing irrelevant characters and concepts and repeating things over and over again that there wasn’t much left for them. When Reinhard’s underlings and Wen-Li’s superiors were onscreen, they were virtually identical to their DNT counterparts. DNT’s focus on the important stuff also brought the flaws of the important stuff into focus, whereas the OVA buried those under a million other flaws.
This is also why I’m not going to cut the OVA writers any slack for not knowing how many episodes they’d have to work with going in. If you’re worried about screentime, you don’t have characters repeat the same sentence back and forth three times or spend precious minutes on the narrator waxing philosophical at desert ruins. It’s pure incompetence no matter which way you slice it.
So, yeah. The best thing I can say about the Legend of the Galactic Heroes OVA (or at least its opening episodes) is that it made me appreciate the new series much more.
