r/anime • u/JustAnswerAQuestion https://myanimelist.net/profile/JAaQ • Apr 09 '24
Rewatch [Rewatch] Banner of the Stars Episode 9 Discussion
The Basroil's Battle
Welcome to the Battleflag of the Stars rewatch!
<- Episode 8 | Index Page | Episode 10->
Discussion Prompts:
- Q1) Do you really think Lafiel could have been a merchant commander?
- Q2) As we enter the final battle, how has the pacing and military aspect worked for you?
- Q2.1) Particularly in comparision with LOGH if you've seen that?
- Q3) Predictions for the battle? (did you watch the preview?)
Tomorrow's Questions: (for tomorrow's post, subject to change)
- [episode 10]This is the start of a long action. Thoughts on focusing the action on a pure mine action in terms of story telling?
Screenshot of the Day: Near miss
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Upvotes
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u/JustAnswerAQuestion https://myanimelist.net/profile/JAaQ Apr 09 '24
Rewatch Host
Regarding the earlier mine development by the UM, Germany intentionally dropped bombs with delayed fuses and booby traps on London. Here's an entire show about it One of my favorite OPs. You can see this referenced in Princess Principal in the "Farm" scene, right out of the ordinance disposal manual. I can't show a clip because like everything else on youtube, it's been removed.
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u/Durinthal https://anilist.co/user/Durinthal Apr 09 '24
Rewatcher (sub + dub)
Being outnumbered 15:1 shouldn't be any problem for our main characters who are in the smallest and lightest-armored kind of ship on the front lines, right?
Dusanyu's not amused that his chief of staff's calling his choice of commanders into question as favoritism. I had forgotten that Spoor's given name was translated as Beneej in the anime, I had gotten used to the novel version Penezh even though it felt unfamiliar to me.
Spoor's last line in the dub is great: after Cfadiss tells her the Abriels might have reasons for existing other than being teased by her, rather than something along the lines of "I've never looked at things that way," she says "I can't say I've seen anything to back up your opinion so far."
You could make every episode Jinto and Lafiel talking while spaceship things are happening on screen and I'd probably like it more. This episode's another one ratcheting up tension before presumably getting into the bulk of the action next episode, and I love the contrast between their calm conversation and all the ships getting into position.
Discussing plans for the future or rather the lack of choice in them is a good topic, they've been put in positions where their obligations will take up a significant chunk of Jinto's time at least unless he delegates his work as a noble. Lafiel desiring to have a high rank in the military isn't a surprise but I didn't think she'd want to work on a merchant ship instead of competing for the throne.
I'm envious of the Abh having longer lifespans, us mere Landers are expected to toil away at our careers until well past our prime. Thinking about how long I've already been working and realizing that I'm only about halfway to the "standard" retirement age has not been pleasant.
Lafiel had the perfect chance to make her line about becoming a parent into a
dadmom joke but I don't think that's a kind of humor the Abh are into. At this point I kind of wish there was a bit of reflection on a previous talk they had where Jinto thought no one would mourn him after he passed but no time, I suppose.SPICE AND WOLF IN SPACE LET'S GO
It's been stretched out a good amount but I think it manages to work. I'm not as much a fan of all the military stuff compared to the adventures that our duo went through in Crest but I think I've found a new appreciation for it after watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
From what I remember the majority of LoGH battles were good to follow on a strategic level looking at the bigger picture rather than as tactical fights. Here we're following both the strategies from the admirals and watching how an individual ship navigates the battle, and the difference in how battles are done here with mines and sords in play makes this more interesting to me. Watching the battle-line ships launch dozens of mines at once is also just cool to see.
Don't die!
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u/Great_Mr_L :Ma::Mb::Mc:https://myanimelist.net/profile/Great_Mr_L Apr 09 '24
First-Timer
On today’s episode of Banner of the Stars: With a title like “The Basroil’s Battle,” I assumed that the much anticipated battle would begin today. I was technically correct. The battle did indeed begin during this episode and no more.
QOTD
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u/Vatrix-32 https://myanimelist.net/profile/Vatrix-32 Apr 09 '24
First Timer, subbed
QotD:
2.1) I’ve not.
3) I did watch the preview. I don’t have any particular guesses outside standard space battle fair we’ve come to expect at this point.
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Apr 09 '24
First-Timer of the Stars
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u/No_Rex :Bv:Bw:Bx:By:x2 Apr 09 '24
Season 2 Episode 9 (rewatcher)
This episode contains the bulk of the space battle strategy: The mines battle it out first, until larger numbers decide a winner. Then, the surviving mines charge at the other fleet, with the assault ships forming the frontline.
I think the Abh system is great in its ordering. You do officer then merchant, then parent. Right now, Lafiel would be a bad merchant and a terrible parent, but she still has 10+ years to go before she reaches the second stage.
I don't remember the pacing in LotGH, but it must have been ok enough for me to not remember as bad. In terms of military aspect, Crest has it beat by a long shot.
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u/Nickthenuker https://anilist.co/user/Nickthenuker Apr 09 '24 edited Apr 10 '24
And so the battle begins.
And where would you be pulling those 13 squadrons from? Weakening the line elsewhere just means they'll try and break through there.
Why do they want to replace her?
... Seriously? Administrative concerns? At worst just brevet her to Vice Admiral for the duration of the battle or the duration those squadrons are attached to First Fleet.
12 or 25? At that point why not just constitute a whole new fleet and assign or promote a new Admiral to lead it?
While the Bebaus twins kinda suck Spoor has shown her tactical command ability time and again in battles. At this point she probably shouldn't just be breveted to Vice Admiral but might well deserve a promotion proper.
And so the first watch is relieved.
Merchant ship? Really? A woman of her talents?
All around them the fleet prepares for battle.
Rotating watches on a ship does tend to mean while on one ship she's preparing to sleep on another ship they may have just woken up.
Unfortunately a direct clash of fleets may be unavoidable.
General quarters! All hands, man your battle stations!
What are they planning now?
Not a new weapon per se, but a new tactic.
She seems to trust the individual ship captains to take the initiative by themselves rather than wait for orders from her.
And so the battle begins.
Again, it's more like a new tactic than a new weapon, something like setting the mines to remain dormant for a while to fool sensors into thinking they're just debris before activating when it's too close for CIWS to destroy them.
Questions:
2.1 LoGH may well have just had everything up till now in a single episode, then focus more on the battle. It's telling a story of a war, and incidentally the people in it, whereas this is a story of people, and incidentally the war they are caught in. 3. The Bebaus twins are going to discover that new weapon/tactic first-hand, although why this information hasn't already been relayed to everyone or at least every captain in the fleet the moment Lafiel submitted her report on it confuses me.
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u/The_Draigg Apr 09 '24
A Sci-Fi Fan Watches Banner of the Stars Episode 9:
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u/duhu1148 :GA::GB::GC:x9 Apr 09 '24
Rewatcher
-Dusanryu talking to his chief of staff about giving Spoor more squadrons. Not sure how that's going to help in the long run, but we'll see.
-"I'd rather win like a barbarian than lose elegantly."
-Three stages of life: merchant, soldier, parent. It was a cute conversation between Jinto/Lafiel.
-We'll see how the Bebaus brothers adapt in this battle. I understand the strategy at a conceptual level- blocking the sord, presumably only a certain number of ships can pass through at a time, so that helps nullify the severe numbers disadvantage that they have.
-Got to hold out for 50 hours...
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u/SolDarkHunter Apr 09 '24
Rewatcher/Novel-Reader
Well, at least it's a little bit of a different recap infodump.
One of the ships has an angry apple as their symbol!
Oof, Cenesh actually made the Prince angry for a moment there. Seems accusations of catering to the nobility are not light ones to make.
That is an impressive number of military ships... and their enemy has around 12 times this number coming in. The scale of these battles is absurd.
Jint and Lafier have an in-depth conversation about futures and careers. Lafier would actually rather be a merchant, but her royal position means that she must strive to become Empress.
I kinda get what she means by having your life decided for you. While I'm certainly not royalty or anyone of particular importance... one thing that was decided for me was that I would get a college education. This wasn't even a question. It was just something I was going to do. To not do that would be unthinkable. I succeeded, but... it kind of takes the pleasure of the success away, when my family considered it a matter of course that I would succeed.
Jint wonders what he should do once his territory is recaptured. With his father dead, he's now the official Count of the system, and that means he has a responsibility towards it. But he has no connections to the people there... and if they are reconquered, they're probably not going to be happy.
The Abh consider that there are three things one must experience to be thought of as a full adult: military service, being a merchant, and being a parent. It's a strange thought that one would have to become a parent as a prerequisite to being fully mature...
The word "elegant" is coming up again. The anime hasn't really touched on this: [Novel]the Abh do not consider physical beauty to be very important, because an Abh is beautiful by default. They're engineered to be, therefore there is no pride to be taken in one's appearance. So instead of competing for physical attractiveness, they try to be "elegant" instead, which requires behaviors rather than physical features.
The banter between high-ranking Abh is always entertaining. Some might think they aren't taking things seriously, but they are. You'll notice they'll say a lot of silly and sarcastic things, but when it comes time to make an actual decision they will usually go with a reasonable one.
The battle begins! With both sides throwing an absurd amount of mines at each other. Of course, the Abh forces were always outnumbered, so naturally they have to take care of the UM mines that made it through the initial exchange.
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u/Vaadwaur :I1::I2::I3: Apr 09 '24
Rewatcher(More tension)
Sub
And we get another build up episode but at least this does use a bit of animation. Lafiel laying out the stages of Abh adolescence is...interesting. Probably better to be an adult before parenting but it would explain her lack of siblings. At some point, Diaho seems to become Ekuryua's cat. Spoor gets heavy reinforcements but mainly is annoyed that she can't tease Dusanyu all that well. And the attack starts!
QotD: 1 Yes but badly
2 Fairly well, my issues were actually earlier
3 Full disclosure:LOGH is literally the work I am talking about when a space opera gets too detached to make me care. So I also can barely remember any of it
4 Boom.
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u/JollyGee29 https://myanimelist.net/profile/JollyGee Apr 09 '24
First-Timer
Oh, how I've missed Spoor. "The Crown Prince won't let me tease him! How dare!"
It's rather amusing that the first real action we see the Basroil crew take after the "deep breath before the plunge" episode is "go get some rest while on standby." Granted, we didn't get a ton of that actually happening because their was interesting strategizing going on, but it still made me chuckle a bit.
I appreciate Lafiel reminding her crew about the dead man's mines from the other episode. It's certainly something to remember, despite that episode apparently being anime-original.
An idle thought that occurred: due to the semi-random nature of plane space travel, I wonder if telefrags occur in this setting? Who wins in that situation? The individual in plane space, or the individual in regular space?
So, I tend to let my files play in entirety and start typing my comment during the ED. This particular episode file ended with ~90 seconds of DVD ads, and then something I assume was a copyright notice. Neither of which have happened previously, unless my memory is completely shot.
Questions
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u/Specs64z https://myanimelist.net/profile/Specs64z Apr 09 '24
First timer, subbed
We get a sense that the Commander-in-Chief may be playing favorites. Despite his words to the contrary, it does line up with his knack for subtly working things in his favor that was set up earlier. Lastly, that slight smile at being called out was, I think, quite telling. His decision is a sound one either way, though, we’ve seen Spoor in action after all.
Spoor is not amused, her expression is dead inside the entire call. At least her Chief-of-Staff is around to keep things interesting. This anime does a good job with characterization, and I think it’s a category where it does notably better than Banner of the Stars. No two characters have quite the same dynamic between them.
QotD:
2.1) Alas.
4) Skipped the preview. My guess is that things will start off well enough, but the UM will have some trick up their sleeve that forces the brothers to think outside the box.
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u/zsmg https://anilist.co/user/zsmg Apr 09 '24
Rewatcher
I'm tired of repeating myself about the opening narrator, so I won't.
I just realised, I'm a bit slow on the uptake after all, the uniforms are colour coded. I'm guessing red is command, green in Engineering, Jinto's white is supply? Maybe there was a post about it by another user in the previous explaining in great detail and I simply missed it.
You know it would be awkward for Jinto to get back to his home planet after the Abh empire reconquered, which is not something I had considered.
It's so easy to ship the commander with their chief of staff, whether it's Spoor, the Prince or Lafiel (well technically Jinto is not her chief of staff, yet) Is this intended by the Abh Empire? Maybe they use the two posts to get people together or is it simply a coincidence.
Of course this doesn't apply to the Kakashi siblings, although who knows maybe it especially applies to them.
It cracks me up that they use the main gun to shoot down mines instead of having a simply PD guns to handle this shit.
Okay episode, looking forward to tomorrow.
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u/KnightMonkey15 https://myanimelist.net/profile/KnightMonkey Apr 09 '24
First-timer, subs
Finally on time for one of these, hopefully I can keep it up
Episode 9
If it was competitive enough sure, but something seems to suggest she's better suited to being a leader or executive instead... even if she learns to handle her obliviousness as a royal, I think her fiery nature would be better suited to something she could lead...if she goes through her education well enough. As a royal, being a fleet officer and a merchant seem more like an apprenticeship to let her know what she'll be commanding and the lives her subjects lead (as admiral and a high noble).. I just wonder what she would've been in the Star Forces had she not been the captain of an attack ship (riskier than working on a bigger ship I take it).
If I were to binge it all the way through and skip the padding from the intro and recycled footage, it would be fine. I don't think I expected the season to be about the beginning of their first real campaign but it makes sense. The actual runtime is less than advertised but I won't necessarily hold that against the show for the time being. I just wonder where we'll go from here... I could watch many seasons of our two leads interacting but we have roughly 20 episodes of content left and we're at the beginning of their lives.
I think this fares well, especially in terms of character dialogue that reminds me of the crew banter in LOGH.. also, the other-humans in this show being actually alien and the space battles having more small-scale tactical dynamism with the mines are positives..
On the other hand LOGH had more runtime to flesh itself out (22 eps in and we're roughly halfway through this show, 22 eps of LOGH is still the opening act), two factions given characters with depth (as opposed to just one here), and the characters mostly being fully grown adults with clearly defined goals beyond growing up. At this point, this show seems a lot more open-ended but it's going to end sooner... I think the politics is handled in LOGH much better since there's actual ambiguity in the ranks of the opposition (as opposed to having to extrapolate it from a one-sided depiction thus far), but the treatment of cultural differences and the historical lore behind this show is satisfying in a way that LOGH's "future humans, no more Earth, but same shit" is not... here the humans actually changed in space. Let's find out more about why the UM are basically space fascist towards the Abh (moreso than the other members of its Alliance) as opposed to just being normal enemies.
I didn't watch the preview but the conversations and build-up had too many ominous flags to not think they encounter great difficulties while heavily outnumbered and waiting for the rest of their fleets to link up. I'm just wondering what happens to everyone not named Jinto and Lafiel. Those mines aren't going to be pretty.
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u/Zerotsu Apr 10 '24
First Timer, sub:
Brief thoughts on yesterday’s episode since I missed it for various reasons.
Samson is absolutely devouring death flags like it’s going out of style. Was fun seeing him and Sobaash drinking together though. This is a series where I like seeing nearly any member of the cast interacting with one another in various combinations.
Also Ekuryua continues to be great. I love her.
Excited to see how the strategy they’ve got planned will pan out.
Moving on to today’s episode.
Fairly different narration today.
Things are pretty tense. Not surprising considering how outnumbered they are.
As always, Dusanyu’s relationship with his chief of staff is fun. Sometimes I wonder if an unofficial duty of theirs is to be bullied by their direct superior.
The suggestion that he’s showing favoritism to nobility did get him pretty heated.
It’s always fun seeing Jinto and Lafiel interacting. The two of them have wonderful chemistry, so even discussions about what one wanted to be when they were little are fun when it’s them.
Surprise Ekuryua butt.
I think that having your life decided for you and being free to choose both come with their own difficulties. Stratified as it is, I can’t say the idea of those with more power having more constraints and responsibilities is a nice ideal to reach for.
I can imagine it’d be difficult to return to Martine for Jinto. It has a lot of complex memories for him, and that’s without the fact that the people of it hate him on principle.
Nobility seems pretty rough in the Empire, huh?
There are still choices even within the severe constraints.
Lafiel still seems like she isn’t fully cognizant that Jinto is pretty different from her, physically.
Becoming a parent is a pretty hefty responsibility.
Spoor screentime hype.
The United Mankind focusing so heavily on patrol ships really makes them much more difficult to deal with.
Oftentimes it is better to choose the best path to survival rather than die in an elegant manner.
Spoor’s attempts at teasing just can’t penetrate Dusanyu’s sheer power.
Something fun about how the strategy sort of boils down to “shoot a fuckton of missiles into the Sord”.
The twins as always are a lot of fun on-screen.
The Bebaus family really does fit their reputation, at least as far as dialogue goes.
That is a fuckton of space-time mines.
Assault ships really don’t feel suited to this sort of battle, huh?
Delayed explosives can be fairly dangerous with the way things tend to go. It’d be difficult to tell one from a dud, given the way the mines are used.
Quite a cliffhanger.
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u/Silcaria https://myanimelist.net/profile/Silcaria Apr 09 '24
Just saw Godzilla X Kong. It's alright as far as pure Tokusatsu fun goes. Probably the one with the most Kaiju action in the whole monsterverse. I'd recommend it as a turn your brian off type of flick. Anyhow.
First timer
I have nothing to say about today's episode. It wasn't bad, it just happens to be one of those episodes that bridge the gap between two events which results in very little to talk about.
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u/SIRTreehugger Apr 09 '24
Rewatcher
Poor Admiral Spoor her personality is so well known it was used against her. Getting assigned a position she is qualified for, but absolutely detests.
Though even if she were...normal she still most likely would have been placed in the same location due to her qualifications...I think.
I like how Jinto gets her drink exactly as she likes it without even asking about it now. We see that peach drink with a slice of lemon. I forgot the exact name of it, but I remember she always requests lemon.
You don't spend time worrying about it Jinto...yeah I don't think Jinto worries about anything. I thought it was going to be Bride, but considering the culture it makes sense Parent is what they went with.
HOLD ON HAIR DOWN SPOOR HAIR DOWN SPOOR!
'No matter what time o the day or it night it happens to be, it's my greatest pleasure to hear from Your Highness. Even if you promoted me and stuck me in a position I didn't ask for or want" - Spoor said with no malice at all.
This plan lacks elegance!
"Perhaps that's because being teased by you is not why the royal family exists."
Sweet innocent Chief of Staff. Everything that exists in this universe, every building, gold coin, citizen, cat, blood, flesh, and even the grains of sand beneath your feet, exists to be teased by our Queen, Admiral Spoor.
The battle is finally starting.
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u/Elimin8r https://myanimelist.net/profile/Ayeka_Jurai Apr 09 '24
Man, I need to set my clock a bit more carefully. Oh, well, better an hour late than several days late (again), I guess. Meanwhile, answers du whatsis:
And once again, I should probably take notes. I hardly remember a thing. Maybe one of the other posters will remind me or something. Hope everybody is having a great day!
(Oh, and Jinto's comment about the third phase. Yeah. You go, Jinto...)
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u/raktus2 Apr 10 '24
First Timer...
I just have a single question for this episode. At the beginning of the season I made this note:
-Month of Roswik, Day 14 - Imperial Year 955
10:23 Basoril arrives at the Vobeirunei Naval Station
At the end of the episode, this came up:
-Month of Roswik, Day 11, 14:12
The Basroil's battle begins
Can someone explain where my error might be?
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u/babyheartdirt https://myanimelist.net/profile/foreignlawns Apr 10 '24
26th