Bye Bye, Earth: First Impressions

It is that time of day again where I decide to randomly start pick up a new anime series for kicks and giggles. The current one is called "Bye Bye, Earth", a fantasy action anime featuring the main character, a human, called Belle Lablac. This show had a 6.12 star rating on MAL at the time of writing and I mainly picked it up because it featured Kevin Penkin, a musician that I really enjoyed listening to over the years.

The show kicks off with a fight scene between the Belle and another character, where she exuded a great sense of emotional pain from having to partake in that very confrontation. Just within this scene, one could easily appreciate the attention to detail put in, from the contrast of the characters' glow colour which suggests a that they are on different sides to the well-designed silhouettes that easily seperates the 2 characters apart. However, this can easily be said about most other shows nowadays as well, but at least this means that the show meets the standard of quality that would make it pleasing to watch even if lacked in other components.

Story-wise, viewers are given a snapshot of the present before being taken on a tour of the past, this provides an idea of where the show would eventually reach, however, I felt that this was done way too quickly as we have reached that snapshot within one episode. Furthermore, this snapshot was later revealed, admittedly as a cliff-hanger, to be a tragedy which did its job of telling the story, however failed in delivering the emotional aspect of it. By squeezing the whole recollection into one episode, we as the viewer are not given enough time to build a connection with Belle, understand why she feels lonely and mourn with her the loss of her master. Instead, we are simply shown that "this is what Belle has experience, thus she's sad".

This is pretty scary, because I feel the potential in this show and the passion put in by the team, but by doing this, we as the viewer might not ever have the chance again to establish an emotional connection with Belle, which might result in the rest of the show as a simple "let's watch a badass girl fight evil".
As such, I really do hope that the ratings aren't accurate and that it is only based off initial response. Should there be a greater focus on presenting Belle as a person rather than a simple character in later episodes, I could see the show really taking off.

Of course, with the original reason on why I picked up the show in mind, yes, the audio track was amazing, as expected of Kevin Penkin.