The second season of Gunslinger Girl focuses mostly on the second eldest assassin, Triela. The series also spends more time fleshing out the characters of Claes and Angelica. Henrietta, the focus of the first season, takes a back end role but still sees some character development.
This season has a more cohesive storyline than the first. It mainly focuses on the efforts of a mafia don and an idealistic terrorist group trying to create more equality in Italian society.
There are a lot more flashbacks in this season. Some episodes are mostly memories of the cyborg handlers. Cyborgs have only limited memory.
Gunslinger Girl can almost fit into the world of Ghost in the Shell. The cyborg technology and general feel of the series strongly reminds me of Ghost. It could fit into the period right before the third World War of that universe. Gunslinger Girl is more consistently sentimental and sad than the philosophical Ghost.
As with the first season, the music really makes this anime. The classical movements compliment the scenes and expresses the suppressed emotions of the girls. The animation isn’t stellar. It’s simply solid. The pacing of the second season, with all its flashbacks and character background, feels disjointed. I often had moments when I wasn’t sure what was going on with the main story. Gunslinger Girls suffers from lack of focus. It does an admirable job with character development considering the number of characters it is trying to flesh out in just 13 episodes. I didn’t find myself feeling for any single character, except perhaps for Claes.
Gunslinger Girls is a decent anime. If it had better focus and fewer characters, it would be a great anime. Or perhaps if it had more than just 26 total episodes. The idea and feel of the series is excellent and poignant. It suffers from lack of focus and cohesive pacing.
It seems I have a double, since I don’t remember commenting on the site before. Yes, perhaps I could have worked Japanese into the book a little better. I just wanted to convey the way the language works on how even the word for you can mean so much depending upon which word you choose. I hope I conveyed that well.I think to have done it as a footnote would have been distracting but your approach might have been better. I couldn’t say. Yes, I do disapprove of your Lolita Appreciation category but that comes from knowledge that anime and pornographic comic books are often used by pedophiles to indoctrinate children and then rape them. However, certainly it’s not as horrific as real child pornography. Maybe some people can keep that in their fantasy life and it’s cathartic and prevents them from acting it out in real life. I don’t know. I’m not saying I think you’re a perv, by the way. What you posted in that category seems relatively benign but I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t point out some problematic aspects of the stuff. Nice blog, other than that, I’m way behind on the anime scene. The last thing I watched all the way from start to finish was DEATH NOTE which was excellent. God knows I wish I had one. I can think of several names I’d write down as fast as I could move a pen.
I respect your thoughts on Lolita. Some aspects such as the Aristocratic Lolita, are efforts to return modesty to fashion since they dress from neck to ankle. In any case, it is a mainstream fashion in Japan and, increasingly, the United States. I don’t like the extreme sexually oriented genres of anime and manga.
I didn’t really care for Death Note, as heretical as that seems.
If you want a nice, thoughtful anime I can suggest watching Mushishi. It is an interesting view on the interconnections of living beings.