Excel Saga

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Over the last several weeks, gweniveeve and I have been watching the Excel Saga DVDs that she's been getting from Netflix, and tonight we finished the series. It was amazing just how much I enjoyed it, so I thought I'd write a bit of a review.

Okay, here's the deal: Excel Saga is two parts crack, two parts meta, and one part everything else. Actually, one part in five might be an overstatement. But in spite of that, its continuity is airtight. It's kind of mindblowing, really, that everything can seem so very random, like the creators were just making shit up as they went along, and then something will happen to tie it all together in a way that was so obviously foreshadowed from the beginning--I'm thinking of one big specific thing, here, but quite a few little things popped up for me in the last several episodes, like so many popup balloons. Oh, man, the popup balloons were everywhere. I know I missed more than a few episode plot developments because I was too busy trying to read the whole screen. But they were definitely helpful, and I got to feel all excited when I understood a reference. Which was almost never, if you don't count Lupin. Strangely enough, Ren and I also understood a few Gundam references, despite not being familiar with any of the canon, because of our exposure to the dozens of characters from Gundam SEED at campfuckudie.

I won't lie; I didn't pay attention to maybe five or so episodes in the first half of the series. They were just more in a line of neverending crack that didn't really have any relevance to an overall plot, and to an extent, I actually still feel this way. The real plot was in the second half, along with a few episodes at the beginning that I did pay attention to. It's a very hard series to take seriously, but honestly? You know how sometimes you'll be kind of mildly interested by a book or TV show or whatever, and not really feel that you've invested much in it, but then something happens to the characters and you realize just how much you've come to care for them? It was definitely like that for me with the last ten episodes or so. I loved Excel from the beginning (you can't not love her; she's just so open and genuine and adorable), and was amused by Ilpalazzo, but in those episodes I realized how much I liked them both.

There were a few other characters like that, too; namely, Pedro the immigrant-construction-worker-turned-ghost, and Menchi the dog-who-looks-suspiciously-like-a-cat. Pedro is killed in episode one or two, is brought back...kind of, and remains ambiguously dead for the rest of the series. His story revolves around his struggle to reunite with his family. Menchi's entire life consists of attempting to escape Excel and Hyatt's apartment and then being recaptured by Excel later in the episode, because her supposed purpose is to act as Excel's emergency food supply. However, considering the number of times Excel almost starves to death while Menchi is readily available, one wonders just how hungry she would have to be to eat her. You would think that Menchi, being quite capable of rational thought (if not human speech, even though other dogs in canon are), would figure this out and feel safe living comfortably in Excel's apartment, but then it's also possible that she's just sick of hearing Excel remind her (as she does at least once an episode) that she's just there to be food. Anyway, Pedro and Menchi are clearly supposed to spend most of the series breaking our hearts with their sad, sad situations, and of course I bought it all completely. I mean, the end sequence is Menchi singing a morbid song about being food, which I watched once and then made Ren skip past every time after that. So I cared about Pedro and Menchi, but it wasn't until the end that I realized just how much I really did care.

HERE BE SPOILERS. LA LA LA SPOILERS. So I'm just going to go ahead and squee at the ending. HOT DAMN, do I ever ship Excel/Ilpalazzo now. Ren and I awwwwed repeatedly throughout most of his scenes in the last two episodes. Because as attractive as Ilpalazzo is as a plotting megalomaniac who regularly drops Excel into a bottomless pit, he is about fifteen thousand times more attractive as a plotting megalomaniac who regularly drops Excel into a bottomless pit to show, among other things, that he is hopelessly and ridiculously attached to her. Furthermore, after he became evil and encouraged me to remember him in better days when he fondled Key in a field, I was compelled to announce to Ren that Excel/Key/Ilpalazzo was my series OT3. I'm going to stick with that. Meanwhile, Excel/herself is my yuri OTP, because MY GOD. Although I have to say, she is rather pretty, and not many people are blessed with the opportunity to have sex with their own bodies, so really I could accept that she was just being opportunistic. BY THE WAY, Key is fucking awesome and it is absolutely adorable when Ilpalazzo gets all jealous and learns to play the guitar to get Excel to notice him again. Emo blonde boys wearing assless pants will never not be hilarious.

Okay, I'm exhausted (wanted to get this all out tonight, though, while it was still fresh in my mind), so I'd better go to bed. A smart person would come back to this post later and finish it, but that's probably not going to happen here. Oh well. In conclusion, Excel Saga = ♥