My return to Revue Starlight: J’ai besoin de m’améliorer en Français.

Every week I say I’ll think of a decent title for my Revue Starlight posts, and every week they never happen. So now we’re at the last one, I just give up. As an aniblogger, I can literally incapable of making a decent title for my posts.

We’ve had arcs dedicated to Mahiru, Futaba x Kaoruko, and now Junna x Nana, which finally got its happy ending. And so now comes the time for the final one…the two big bosses Karen and Hikari have to face to reach the end of the game: Maya and Claudine.

This post will see this little post project of mine come to an end. I thought that giving my two cents on their pairing was something I considered more important to discuss than what happened at the end of the show. More on that later though, but right now…

…Il est temps de parler de notre couple préféré.

(NB: Cet article contient des spoilers pour les derniers épisodes de Revue Starlight)

My return to Revue Starlight: The Yuri Has Been Doubled!

In case you haven’t been following, this is post number 4 in my Revue Starlight project. These posts weren’t meant to go in any kind of chronological order, but somehow they seem to have ended up that way. The first two posts ended up covering the first half, while I dedicated an entire post to Mahiru, the disaster lesbian of the show. So perhaps I should just get back to what’s the most important thing in the show, which is obviously not the action: the yuri.

The way I saw it, right from the very opening episode, we could already see our main couples in the show. They didn’t try to be subtle about it in any way at all; we all knew who was going to be with who. Karen with Hikari, Maya with Claudine, Junna with Nana, and Futaba with Kaoruko. Saying all this now, I feel even more rotten for Mahiru, as aside from her beloved Karen who is off romancing Hikari, the poor girl’s on her own. Each pairing is unique in its own way, though; something that came of a relief, as I did not want to see 4 couples that ended up all being the exact same.

(NB: Yuribait spoilers for a Yuribait show like Revue Starlight follow)

My return to Revue Starlight: The Official Mahiru Tsuyuzaki Fan Club.

Sooooo…you can take a wild guess at what this third post is going to be about. That one girl who chases after her beloved Karen, who feels left behind by everyone else in the show, who doesn’t have that much of a direction in life both at the academy and after graduation, and who just can’t catch a break at school, at all. Our favourite adorable muffin & disaster lesbian, Mahiru Tsuyuzaki.

It really does feel like a lot of yuri shows have this one girl who ends up down on her luck, and who ends up straggling behind everyone else, almost to the point of obscurity. While Junna remains my favorite girl in Revue Starlight, we really cannot help but feel for poor Mahiru, especially considering how quickly her roomie Karen does a 180 on her when Hikari arrives on the scene; literally the very second Hikari arrives in their classroom as a transfer student, Karen flips over. But Junna and Mahiru are almost polar opposites, in how we see their behavior in the show. Junna has the aura of a class representative, and comes across as a girl who could take you on but is in fact as sweet as pie. Mahiru, on the other hand, is that one adorable little muffin in the show who could hand you your ass in a heartbeat, and still be that adorable little muffin.

As I watched the episode devoted to her, ‘Where The Light Is’, I was thinking to myself what’ll be the end result for our muffin girl.

“At least give us one happy ending where this girl is either reunited with her love or sees how wonderful life really is for her…”

…and so did we get it?

(NB: This post has approved and endorsed by The Official Mahiru Tsuyuzaki Fan Club, and will therefore contain plenty of disaster lesbian moments/Revue Starlight spoilers)

My return to Revue Starlight: Part 2, Electric Boogaloo.

I’m a fair bit into Revue Starlight now. (Ba)karen has stormed into the fight club causing all kinds of ripples, but she’s the idiot main protagonist, so we can kind of forgive her for that. She’s the airhead of the class, has trouble with stretches and singing scales practice, and she seems undeterred with any rules, just as long as her beloved is nearby. And so the more I watch this show, the more I wonder why the giraffe still saw potential in her, and let her be a part of the Revue auditions.

As early on as episode 2, we understand that each participant in the auditions have other reasons to be there, and something to strive towards, large or small. Revue Starlight may put a fair amount of attention on visuals and art direction, but I’m just as keen to touch on the character design in the show. Each episode will bring out the better in (Ba)karen, but I’m just as curious about everyone else too.

(Oh, and I just couldn’t resist Electric Boogaloo; I really suck at making post titles, don’t I?)

(NB: This post will contain spoilers for Revue Starlight…obviously)

My return to Revue Starlight: The first post.

Okay, it’s been two months since I put out a prelude post to this. If I announce a post project and two months pass by, that usually means that I’d completely forgotten all about it, or was just too lazy to do it.

I know first impressions mean a lot, but the truth is that pure laziness is the best excuse I could come up with here. And pure laziness is my excuse for not thinking of a better post title too; then again, we all know that the main protagonist’s real name is not Karen Aijo…it is Bakaren.

For real though, I have quite a few legit reasons for being tardy. I have been doing a lot of work over the spring season for The OASG, and have even begun my own anime-watching project there, where I take a look back at Escaflowne, a show of my youth. I had stepped back from my regular Otaku Theater column, only for me to end up back on the anime trash-talking bus.

Here on Anime Solstice meanwhile, I’ll be taking a look at Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight, a show that really annoyed the heck out of me when it originally aired in 2018. I asked myself whether this was even a good idea to do this review project, considering how much I tore apart Mahouka way back when, when I marathoned the entire thing, non-stop. At first watch of Revue Starlight, the main protagonists frustrated the heck out of me, the overall surreal atmosphere of the show really took me by an unwelcome surprise (for some reason), and thanks to all of that, an indescribable rage boiled up in me. And so here I am, returning to this show that pissed me off so much, and going in with a far more open mind…and a stress ball at hand if/when I need it.

But before I begin, I should say that these posts won’t be in any strict show order, and I won’t be entirely going over them episode-by-episode. This was the ‘cool weeb’ show that I missed out on, and I might as well be cool and hip and write about it in a…well…okay, let’s just get cracking here.

(NB: This post, along with the others, will contain spoilers for Revue Starlight)