Interesting counterpart to Project Eden, going back to the spy thriller well again but with a much more serious tone. I don’t have that much in the way of thoughts about it but it was a good close to the series.

Perhaps I just had had my fill of the show already but I felt this didn’t have the same energy and fun as the main TV series. The silliness does seem to have been toned down a little. Nanmo isn’t here and both the spaceship and 3WA headquarters have been toned down into something a bit more typically scifi and the plots seem to come down to straightforward shootouts a lot.

On the positive side Kei and Yuri seem to actually like each other more now, their jabs at each other more frequently feeling more like teasing than actual meanness and doesn’t devolve into them just shouting at each other. Having a couple more recurring characters in the 3WA is fun to have too.

The show did a lot of different tones and pastiches, and for a bigger budget movie the choice to go for a cyberpunk James Bond with some Geiger influences was a solid one. It does feel like the show turned up to eleven. I laughed out loud at the Wattsman theme song but I think it does overdo the 80s pop segments a bit and it indulges in some tired anime sex comedy that the show managed to avoid most of the time.

The core concept of hyper-competent mercenaries with the personalities of teenagers is fun and works quite well when it doesn’t veer too much into them calling each other too fat to attract a man. Episodes vary a lot in tone and concept with some clear winners and losers but it’s never boring and usually not as misogynistic as it might look on first glance.

While there are some noticeable differences between this film’s take on the characters and that of the show it’s not different enough to be particularly interesting and just feels like a thirty minute episode padded out to a full hour.

Update: I have now finished watching Dirty Pair and I will admit Kei and Yuri do seem to actually like each other more in the OVA series.

I want to be grumpy about something that is fairly harmless. I have been watching Dirty Pair occasionally for the last while and I was thinking Yuri and Kei and their relationship and other relationships in the show versus how my expectations had been shaped by seeing people talking about it beforehand.

I have known or followed people online for years who are fans of or talk about this show a bit and I have seen a lot of casual references to them being girlfriends or just casually referring to them as gay. I wasn’t really expecting them to actually be lesbians when I watched it but I was expecting to see some glimpse of what other people were referring to. Spock and Kirk don’t kiss in Star Trek but it’s easy to see how their chemistry lead to the invention of slash fiction. Kei and Yuri obviously don’t really hate each other—the show is doing classic tropes of bickering partners who care about each other in the end—but they are probably more lines where one calls the other too fat to be able to catch the eye of whichever man they are crushing on this episode than there is anything that feels like it could be romantic tension between them. The trans episode was nice but this show is aggressively heterosexual at all times.

Headcanons and reinterpretations are fun but I feel like at some point jokingly calling characters queer turns into giving credit where it is not due. I have seen so many posts about reading gay relationships into, say, Metal Gear or imagining how Hideo Kojima would write something in a queer way and I feel like people started making knowing jokes about this and over time convinced themselves that his writing is sincerely exploring queer themes and not just that the female characters he writes are very shallow and are constantly killed off for male angst and so the only relationships with any depth in his stories are between men. Maybe I am just being uncharitable to people or reading the room poorly, or being a needless grouchy bitch, but I feel like it eventually turns into crediting source material for the accomplishments of fan artists.

Went out with partner for fancy burgers last night and then went back to her’s and cuddled on the couch and I suggested watching the trans episode of Dirty Pair as I had started watching the show and while I knew that there was a happy couple in it where the bride was a trans woman I did not know that they were also burger freaks.

I was on holiday in Copenhagen last week. Here are some photos.