"Hey xm, on your list of anime you hate, you listed something called, 'Battles Athletes.' What the heck is that?"
Consider yourself fortunate you haven't heard of that. Back in my teen years, my assfuck "friends" at that time made me watch god-awful anime against my will. One of them was a series called Battle Athletes. There's two of them; a tv series, and a straight-to-video miniseries. I don't remember which one it was, but it was one of them. I saw the first two episodes in Japanese with English subtitles, mainly because my "friends" were dub haters. Maybe BA had a bad English dub, maybe they were just sucking up to Japanese culture again, I don't know. Are you surprised that these people aren't my friends anymore?
Oh yeah, BA. You see, BA is just like Kiddy Grade, Fruits Basket, and Code Geass. As in, BA is an emdodiment of everything I hate in anime. How can that be? I will explain.
BA's premise starts off promising. It's set many thousands of years in the future. Humankind does not fight wars anymore; all competition is done through sporting events. Some people strive to become the Greatest Athlete Evar. To do so, you have to be a master of every sport in existence. Aspiring Greatest Athlete Evars train at man-made satellites which serve as universities. You mainly see two university satellites: an all-boys university, and an all-girls university. We mainly focus on the girls' university, for the main protagonist is a girl.
The main protagonist, I can't remember her name, is a good-natured 16 year old who just got accepted into Girl Athlete U. Her mother, wait, I meant, her late mother, was a bona fide Greatest Athlete Evar. (Okay, okay, the actual title they use in the series is "Cosmic Beauty", but that's a really lame term to describe a master athlete, so I'm substituting my own term here.) She aspires to become a Greatest Athlete Evar herself, just like her now-deceased mother. So what we have here is a shounen sports series crossed with shoujo cliches.
"Hey wait, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Cardcaptor Sakura was chock full of Shoujo cliches, and you loved it!"
Yes, but we're not talking about CCS, now are we? Anyways, she must play, and be good at, a lot of different sports. In the two episodes I saw, I saw our heroine partake in track and field, and lacrosse. Also, she gets her own dorm, some dorm mates, an "emo" rival, and . . . yeah.
So, what we have is a semi-original premise. What could go wrong? Well I don't know, how 'bout fucking up an interesting concept with mind-numbing stupidity!?
The girl heroine is a bumbling idiot, not unlike, say, Tohru Honda, Every other character is a one-dimensional walking cliche, the animation and music wasn't any good, and the sexual fanservice, oh, dear GOD, the sexual fanservice. There is so much gratuitous (and wholly unnecessary) nudity in this series, you'll be asking yourself, "Why didn't they just make a straight-up hentai series?" 'Cause that's all BA is; a half-assed (no pun intended) wannabe hentai franchise. Yeah, let's just say, Haruhi was more tasteful. As well as Chobits.
See, this is what I mean by an embodiment of what I hate most in anime; start off with an interesting premise, and an interesting setting, and completely fuck it up with horrible execution. By the beginning of the first episode of BA, I thought, "Hey, this actually might be good." By the end of the second episode, I was thinking, "Jesus, this show sucks!" It's just like CG, KG, and FB in that regard. They all could've been something neat, but no.
Of course, there are anime series even worse than those examples. Sonic X is, yes, worse than FB, but SX wasn't promising to be anything decent to begin with.
What was interesting was this wasn't a fansub; it was a real DVD distributed by an actual "evil" anime company. Gee, the only people I can think of who would like BA would be horny fanboys wanting to see nekkid athletic girls. Oh joy.
Talking about an anime series I had hoped I had forgotten about is triggering painful memories of my past. I must counteract, the only way I know how . . . . .
Help me, Eureka! Swoop down in the Nirvash and lift me away from this cliched madness! But if she's not available . . . . . . Save me, Colonel Mustang! Send in reinforcements and protect me from the suckitude! . . . . But if he's not available . . . .
"Hey xm, what about Snow Fairy Sugar?"
Uh, that's a little more well-known than BA, so I'm not gonna explain its premise, so I'll just say Snow Fairy Sugar sucks because it's ridiculous, and it tries way too hard to be cute. It only ends up annoying, nothing more.
"Hey xm, what about . . ."
If you don't shut up, do you know what's gonna happen? I'm gonna eat a potato chip. Let's leave it at that.
