PinkuBentoBox

I’m feeling a little idle at work at the moment, so I thought I’d wax lyrical about Simoun for a bit. I’ve broken down and obtained the raws & softsubs which have been floating about in various interweb locations, so I expect to get up to speed on the series pretty soon. Simoun-Fans do a really admirable job… but I just can’t wait any more.

For a long time now, pretty much since the series began, I’ve been getting a strange sense of nostalgia while watching. I thought perhaps it was hitting some cues or re-treading some oft-untread turf, but I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was, and more importantly, why it was causing such a reaction in me.

I grew up in New Zealand, living there for most of my more formative years - our family shifted to Australia when I was 15. But I digress. When I first started at school, we lived in Christchurch. I doubt that many people outside of New Zealand know this, but Christchurch was actually the location of Wigram Air Force Base, New Zealand’s first. It was closed down in the early 90s, but back in the late 80s when I had just started school, New Zealand had been doing quite a bit with their small squadron of A-4 Skyhawks that were stationed there. They were great little aircraft, very quick and maneuverable and highly reliable.

Yes, there is a point to this. The RNZAF Skyhawks were a bit of a PR exercise. To be honest, New Zealand doesn’t really have much of a need for a fighter squadron. It’s such a small and isolated country that no one would really want to attack it, and if they did, they’d need to stage out of Australia anyway. However they had these extremely advanced Skyhawks (in the late 80s, they were upgraded with F-16 electronics and missiles) and they needed to use them for something. In fact, the Skyhawk squadrons were quite a common sight at air shows in Australia and New Zealand.

What they did, I can only really call ‘Synchronised Aerobatics’. Trailing coloured smoke, the six aircraft would go through a series of synchronised maneuvers, painting complex trails in the sky. This isn’t something new, either - other squadrons, for example the US’s Blue Angels, do the same sort of thing. I’m sure by now that people are seeing the connection to Simoun. Those maneuvers they would go through even had names, and the flight leader would call them out to the pilots as they did each one.

Those pilots had to practice their maneuvers, of course. It just so happened that because of our proximity to Wigram, they often ended up doing it in the skies over my school. This wasn’t that regular an event - I think it happened four, maybe five times, before they re-stationed the Skyhawk squadron somewhere else. Still, watching them doing that when I was a kid is one of my earliest memories of being in school. It took me a while to realise it, but this is exactly where I was getting that curious sensation from.

I also want to take a second to thumb my nose a bit. The whole elitist asshole thing. I’ve noticed a lot of people saying that they didn’t like this show and so on until it got good around episode 6. Well, while I’ll be the first to admit it didn’t start as strongly as it could have, I liked it right from the beginning, and thought it had a huge amount of potential. Maybe watching the first few episodes raw instead of inflicting Doremi on myself helped with that opinion, I dunno.

As of last night, I’ve seen to the end of episode 13. The plan is to watch a pile tonight. At the moment I’m hoping that Aaeru either has a damn good reason for acting like an insensitive clod, or she eventually grows a conscience. While I liked her a lot at first, her personality is starting to grate with me quite a bit, and I’m finding I’m a lot more interested in the secondary characters. Well, in everyone but her. We’ll see how it works out.

Side note: watching unedited subtitles is painful when you’re an anal-retentive asshole.