English Dub Review: Strike Witches: 501st JOINT FIGHTER WING Take Off! “501st, Take Off?”

If there’s a god of loli, I have definitely pissed them off.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Yoshka Miafuji is a new recruit to the 501^st Joint Fighter Wing, a battalion of the world’s greatest magical fighter pilots. She dreamed of a life of adventure and glory, but so far she has only managed to do some cooking and cleaning in the 501^st’s palatial barracks. She speaks with her commanding officer Trudy, who tells her that she is the best cook the 501^st has ever had, and as such, they have changed the protocol from a rotating cooking schedule to ensure that Yoshka cooks every day. Yoshka says she’s surely not that good a cook but then spies another soldier making a “salad” by boiling an entire head of cabbage and starts to get the picture.

Yoskha is all set to accompany Trudy on her rounds to wake up the recruits, but they are already awake for the most part. A notable exception is a legendary ace that Yoshka is a massive fan of. She’s quite surly upon being awoken, and a startled Yoshka accidentally breaks one of her things. The two return to the kitchen, but while they were gone, the science officer diluted the food with trace amounts of hydrochloric acid, making the entire dish inedible. Yoshka is all set to begin her training, but she is placed on standby so that she still has the energy to cook tasty food.

On standby, Yoshka notes that her fellow soldiers are more interested in getting tans than doing any sort of training. They lay out while Yoshka watches a few of the soldiers who are doing some sword work nearby. As the episode come to a close, some aliens have attacked, and the 501^st Joint Fighter Wing springs into action, except for Yoskha who is still too inexperienced to go on a mission.

Our Take

I’m not sure exactly what I’ve walked into here. On the one hand, it is incredibly clear to me that I’ve come into contact with another confluence of strange Japanese things that I had managed to avoid in my anime journey so far. Yesterday it was loli and furry adjacent cosplaying in Helpful Fox Senko-san, but this one may be even weirder.

So, Strike Girls, as a franchise, has already seen a previous anime adaptation which ran for two seasons with a movie and a spinoff. This series has been billed as the third season of that original series. I can definitely see long-time fans of the series being disappointed with that. The animation is bottom of the barrel stuff. Tons of still images with only a single element moving at a time and a ten-minute runtime are not likely to please people who have been waiting for a continuation of the longtime series. Furthermore, the whole thing seems like it’s more of a chibi spinoff about the witches’ downtime rather than a continuation of the series, but that’s hard to tell for a number of reasons.

The first and simplest reason is that not every episode is necessarily going to take place at the barracks, just this one did, but the tone of the pilot tells me that this looks to be what the series’ goals are. The other, more complicated, the reason is the loli. For those not familiar, Strike Witches is about a world where, instead of World War II happening, and/or continuing through 1944, aliens attack. The world governments then align and send a series of prepubescent girls with magical powers to attack the aliens in fighter jets.

So, it should be pretty obvious why a Japanese series might not want the normal timeline to reach the year 1945. With this, I realize that I have entered the subgenre of anime where Japan wants to forget it was an Axis power. Sure, they’ve done the prerequisite job making up new maps and allegiances and adding magic, but the implication is clear any time the series drifts into any of its deep lore.

Add onto this Japan’s penchant for placing underage girls in sexually compromising situations, and you have a recipe for disaster. I’m not sure who this one is for. Someone like me is not very interested in Japan’s wartime apologia/loli fetish softcore (someone get these girls some pants), and longtime fans who are itching for more of this story are going to be disappointed by the interstitial nature of the adventures. This one feels a bit like a misfire on all fronts.