The Other Sandy

Pattern by Servotron on Sprite Stitch.

For those who don't watch anime, NERV was the organization behind the Human Instrumentality Project in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The original pattern calls for it to be stitched in black on white fabric, but I’ve always been partial to the red on black version of the logo. I’ve never been able to get a truly accurate picture, but the colors look amazing in person.

Gunslinger Girl is not a new series. It originally came out on DVD in 2005, but I put off watching it because it was by the same people who made Noir and I hated Noir. Gunslinger Girl and Noir do have a lot in common, namely similarly styled character designs, an excellent soundtrack, spectacular gun battles, and little girls who stare a lot, but Gunslinger Girl corrects much of what went wrong with Noir.

Where Noir's plot moved along at a stultifyingly glacial pace, Gunslinger Girl makes steady progress in moving the story forward. You never get to the end of an episode and feel like nothing happened. And even though Gunslinger Girl had 5 main characters as opposed to Noir's 2, Gunslinger Girl had much stronger character development, as well. Each girl had her turn in the spotlight, and in the end, emerged as a fully formed character. It was clear throughout what the girls were thinking and feeling and what was motivating them, whereas in Noir, you were just left with Kirika staring a lot and never really saying anything, so you had no idea what was going on in her head.

Both series had a great soundtrack, but I have to give the edge to Noir here for having the most unusual and effective running gun battle music ever. It was very operatic and really fit well with the noirish atmosphere of the series. Gunslinger Girl had a very traditional Italian-influenced soundtrack that fit well with the series, but was very unobtrusive. It didn't have the impact that Noir's soundtrack did. In fact, with as boring as Noir was, there were some episodes I got through just by listening to the music and treating the episode like a music video.

You can't have a series about girl assassins without gun battles, and this is where both series really shine. The gun battles are rendered in such loving detail as to basically qualify as gun porn. In each sequence, the animators drew each and every aspect of gunplay: the recoil, the slide retracting to eject a shell casing, the shell casing ejecting, the blowback, exhaust smoking out of the barrel and exhaust ports...there's even a sound effect for each shell casing hitting the floor. There are live action shows and movies that aren't that realistic. Gunslinger Girl even has a scene where Henrietta painstakingly disassembles her semi-automatic pistol to clean it and lays the parts out on her desk with military precision. I love the gun battles in both series, but I have to give the edge to Gunslinger Girl here for the sheer variety of weapons in use, from semi-automatic pistols to sniper rifles to automatic weapons.

Both series are very similar on a superficial level and Noir had a lot of potential, but Gunslinger Girl corrects where Noir went wrong and wound up being a surprisingly good series. I heard just a couple of days ago that there will be a season 2 of Gunslinger Girl. I'm looking forward to it.