Bigheaded Robots

One thing about mecha series is that often, the more interesting or memorable mecha designs are associated with secondary characters, enemies, or redshirts.

Watching a series over the past few days*, I saw some robots that made a real impression on me... but to my knowledge (admittedly I haven't done a tremendous amount of research and my lack of ability to read Japanese limits my qualifications to do such research) the model doesn't even have an official name, and I haven't seen any images while scouring Google for the series.

So I decided I might as well post screenshots, because they aren't gonna post themselves: Here we have what I've dubbed the Great Chinese Alliance Bighead.

I might not have gotten stirred up about them, but then I saw them in action:

Yes, they have huge round heads that they point top-first at enemies to fire as cannons. That is fantastic.

*The anime is called Majestic Prince, and can be found on a couple of legal streaming sites. While I enjoyed it, it wasn't without various problems (read: stupid fanservice, mostly, plus certain bits of sex-related humor I didn't care for, and a fistful of stupid plotpoints scattered throughout) and took a bit of time to warm up. And a lot of the things I enjoyed about it were worldbuilding details, like the massive amount of maintenance that they had to put their otherwise fanciful robots through, plus their regular need to refuel and reload and other logistical considerations, or the massive fleet sizes in the larger battles, or the aesthetic of the enemy mecha, or the alien invaders' society, which wasn't gone into much, but had its relevant bits revealed so efficiently it was ridiculous. Or kind of stupid things, like the fact that most of the cast was a bunch of surprisingly lovable losers**. And I did tear up a bit when some things happened at one point, so yeah, I was more invested by the end than I'd expected from the beginning; the last six episodes or so were a lot better than the first six, and there were twelve episodes inbetween where the series was improving.

**Like, the guy who would have been the super-serious calm guy to contrast the hotheaded primary hero in any other series? At one point he randomly trips and falls on his face for no real reason, and he suffered from near-constant stomach pains related to stress because he felt pressure to try to be cool all the time.

Even better, the team's leader was widely regarded by the other characters as the biggest loser of the lot, and when something bad happened to him at one point, the symptoms that tipped them off that there was something very wrong involved him suddenly being cool.

-Signing off.