English Dub Review: Strike Witches – World Witches Take Off! “501st, Your Feelings Are Different?”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The 501st are close to fully reuniting, but first Yoshika must help Sanya find her lost parents!

OUR TAKE

Contrary to that description, Yoshika saving Sanya’s parents is not really a big focus of the episode. It’s pretty much just more standing around and jabbering at a fast pace like the rest of this series has been. Only this week it has actually even more erratic and energized dialogue, the kind that I think would probably be more funny if you watched this in Japanese, but only slightly. The main source of this would be Sanya’s heterosexual life partner Eila, whose every other line is talking about how awesome Sanya is. Which, okay that’s fair, she’s very cute and competent and I’ve consistently liked every episode that’s focused on her, but that motivation powering all of Eila’s dialogue gets to be a bit too much. There’s a moment where she is initially really into the idea of Sanya being a big part of that documentary that the Strike Witches are making (oh yeah, remember the documentary?) but then she realizes that if more people know the awesomeness that is Sanya, then she’ll get a stalker because then more people will know how great she is. I’m not sure how likely that would be in the 1940’s this is taking place in but I guess that’s a legitimate concern.

Also of note this week is the worldbuilding lore segment at the end of this episode. We’ve seen one for each episode so far in this series but none of them have had a subject that was worth mentioning until now. This time, they go into a bit of detail about the Neuroi, the main antagonists of the entire franchise. Apparently, the Neuroi are simply the latest stage of evolution for a malevolent force that witches have been fighting for millennia. Except that they have somehow not ever figured out exactly what this force wants or why they’re doing what they’re doing. I know that the main purpose of this series is to sell figures of cute girls wearing fighter plane stockings, but I guess I was hoping that the lore that they had made for this series so far would have come to some sort of conclusion about what the faceless alien enemy forces have been after this entire time. Then again, I don’t think we’re ever going to see any Neuroi fighting in this parody series, so this is just an increasingly confusing place to put that detail about them. Ah well, back to the Brave Witches.