TheBigN on Strike Witches OVA

The advent of the Strike Witches TV prompted bloggers to revisit the OVA. Some were less successful, others more so. TheBigN provides the most sensible explanation of the OVA in rational language, without appealing to the Harley Defense ("If you have to ask, you will never understand"):

Looking back at the OVA again after watching the first couple of episodes, I noticed that I was probably looking at that short piece in the wrong way. I don’t know what I was expecting at first, but I didn’t come off impressed the first time around and felt that the premise fell a bit flat on what it was trying to do. This time around, I saw the OVA as a cheesy parody of those patriotic movies you saw back during the periods of the World Wars with a little bit of team-building, sports anime Go-for-it stuff hidden in between there. It was great with how over the top things were with the music, the story with Yoshika’s quick running away and emotional coming back, the treatment of some characters to Yoshika (Perrine and Sakamoto are notable), the fanservice (sexual, mechamusume or other wise), and when you step back how proud those citizens were of these amalgamations of fetishes. Such funny propaganda. :3

The "sports" analogy does not really click for me, but again, we're talking a rational dissection here, and SDB explained it:

Ignoring all the mecha musume trappings, what you've really got here is a girl's baseball team. And that is the story they're going to tell. Miyafuji is the newest player to join the team. She's inexperienced, but it looks like she's got home-run power if only she can learn to use it. And she will, and that's the series story-line. Ep 3 was right out of canon: the benchwarmers (Miyafuji and Bishop) got put into the game in a desperate situation and made a game-saving play together. Miyafuji is going to hit her first home run in ep 4, and it will proceed from there.

So, "sports" is a codeword.

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