Symphogear G Has A Big Bad Problem

During last year’s March of the Magical Girls, we took a look at Season 1 of Symphogear. But upon checking out its sequel, we detected an… issue. Stay Toon’d!

Hihi, everyone!

Hey guys. Sup?

It’s here! March of the Magical Girls returns!

And this year, everyting’s comin’ up Symphogear.

We’ve already done two written posts!

Now let’s just round this out with a couple episodes, huh? And for the first topic we- oh…

Eh?

Ergh… For today’s topic, we’re going to be looking at the main antagonist of Season 2 – Symphogear G.

Oh…

So, we gonna even try to pretend or…?

Yeah, no. This part gives me too much of a headache for that.

Got it. Well, I’m Riley…

I’m Rila…

And you’re watching Bulletoon…

Or something…

It’s kind of a shame, too. I mean, the rest of this season was actually pretty good.

Yeah. It’s kind of amazing how one suuuper lame villain can just tear down the whole thing.

I mean, what were they even thinking with this?

All the development the girls get is great. The conflict, itself, was really interesting. Why would you ruin it by making such a terrible villain the centerpiece?

No idea.

I’ll just be blunt. Doctor Ver… SUUUUCKS.

What the hell, man?! What was with the Saturday Morning Cartoon villain, all of a sudden?!

Whoa there, girl. Let’s not insult Saturday Morning Cartoons like that. At least those are actually fun. This guy is just… annoying.

To put it extremely mildly. Give the dude a mustache to twirl and you basically have the whole package.

Well, I definitely won’t deny that it’s pretty much impossible to take him seriously at all. And in a season that takes itself pretty seriously, that’s nooot a good thing.

It creates this conflict with the tone of the series. He’s completely out of place. But they only even did it so the girls could have a common enemy by the end of the season to rally against… except they never really do that. They stop his plan, but he’s not even really a threat on his own… at all, really. Meaning he’s ultimately pretty pointless.

Honestly, I kinda think if they’d just made Mom the main villain without really changing anything about her demeanor or motives, it would’ve been a pretty much flawless season. Just change her plan around a bit.

You could pretty easily have worked around that too. Say that the other girls all had a change of heart and tried to stop her but she’s able to initiate her plan anyway. Except it has the unintended side-effect of activating that monster… thing. What was its name, again?

Don’t remember. Don’t care.

Fair enough. Anyway, in the end they finally convince her that she’s wrong, especially after she witnesses the monster. Then poof. It’s off to be big damn heroes. You could even keep her fate the same by making it a sacrifice, rather than letting this goober basically get her killed.

Villains like this confuse me. Who is this even for? He’s not entertainingly evil, like a Dio or a Frieza. He doesn’t have any real depth, like a Kurumi. He’s just not interesting.

Yeah. When Dio acts like the bastard he is, it works. Why? On the one hand, you understand why he’s like that. Even if the reason isn’t all that deep, but you still “get it.” Even when he goes ballistic, it actually makes sense because of what we know about him. We don’t know anything about this science fair reject.

When Frieza goes nuts, it has an impact because he doesn’t usually behave that way. He usually keeps his head on straight, with an eloquent speaking voice and a polite demeanor. He’s always in control. Until he isn’t. So when he flies off the rails, you know it’s about to go down. But Doctor Bowler-Hat, here, is always acting like he’s ready to go out and kick puppies. It makes the few times he does act normal feel totally unbelievable.

And that has another effect, too. But we’ll come back to that because there’s another thing that Dio and Frieza both have that this guy, once again, cannot hide behind. They’re actually threatening. It makes it feel even more dangerous when they go off because they were already dangerous and now they’re just not holding back. But this guy? Just a regular dude. He has a fancy staff that lets him summon Noise. Whoop-dee-friggin’-doo. It still doesn’t change that he is basically made of tissue paper, compared to literally every other character, aside from the sick old lady.

And then there’s the problem we hinted at, a second ago. Do you want to know what all of this adds up to? A complete lack of ability to buy into the plot. At all.

Yeah, here’s the thing. When your entire plot hinges on having the new kids on the block being manipulated by someone, maybe make it actually believable that the guy would be capable of manipulating a light switch, let alone a handful of grown-up intelligent human beings.

“But, Riley, they’re teenagers!”

Bull. That’s old enough to know better. And Mom is an old woman. She has zero excuse.

Yeah. You’re telling me that of aaaall the people out there, you couldn’t find anyone other than this nutjob to go along with your little plot? Sorry. Not buyin’ it.

And it’s things like this that reeeally hurt. Because it’s like we said. If you remove this guy entirely and just slip part of his role over to Mom, this whole season becomes amazing. Not flawless, but still pretty damn good.

But because he’s there, all he winds up doing is dragging down all the other characters around him. He makes you wonder why in the world the main three girls are having such a hard time getting rid of him-

-And it makes you wonder exactly how stupid the ladies on his side have to be in order to buy into a damn word of what he says. Seriously. They literally all come out of this looking like absolute morons, if you don’t look at them in a vacuum, completely removed from the context of him even existing.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what we did! And it helped us out a lot.

Yeah. Remember those written posts, we talked about earlier? Well, those were actually character spotlights. The first one we did on Maria. And we even had a guest onboard to talk about her with us.

It was a super fun conversation!

Even though my sister got a lil overexcited and froze up towards the end of it.

Hey! Why didn’t you snap me out of it, when that happened?!

Hm… because I liked the peace and quiet?

Mean!

Anyway, the second post was on Kirika and Shirabe. If you guys like Symphogear, head on over to the blog and check out those articles. It’s a good time. Promise.