"Vandread" (Anime)

[pkristen]

26 episode TV Series.

Originally posted on my blog: Sunday 4 September 2011

Summary
Far in the future and far away, humans have colonized two planets, each populated with a gender, with deep hatred and distrust for the other.

The story begins with a pirate spaceship of an all-female crew unexpectedly takes on three male stowaways, forming a very unexpected merged team as they deal with an invasion that threatens to wipe out both civilizations as well as issues that would come up with the genders cross paths, in obvious and not so obvious ways.

My Thoughts (with potential spoilers!)
First released in 2000, this is one of the original series that got me hooked into Japanese anime and manga as a source of potential gay and lesbian material that wouldn’t be created in the western countries. With my recent move to Vegas, I had an opportunity to dig out some old stuff so this series was a wonderful revisit.

While I am ultimately fond of the entire series, I was quickly reminded of how uneven the story execution is between the first season (the first 13 episodes) and the second season (the last 13). The first season is VERY heterosexual, ignorantly homophobic, and somewhat skittish about portraying any same gender affection. However, apparently the success of the first season gave the animators a lot more comfort about the fact that they are dealing with characters that really could be gay and lesbian. Though I do find it amusing that the entire premise is based on the fact that deep, cultural homophobia could be pushed aside in a couple of generations — more driven by hatred of the other gender.

My only other comment is that this series has one of my favorite lesbian couples of Jura and Barnett, the first one being the supposedly shallow prima donna and the second being her long suffering spouse.