[Darthtabby]

Originally Posted by Hagoshod

This is the most pretentious excuse I always hear.

Muv-Luv did not invent the Sci-Fi Alien Bug War genre. You don't need to spend an hour brutally depicting the bug war before your audience understands there's bugs in your fictitious universe and humans fight the bugs. Again, if you DO write it that way, you completely misrepresent the setting, tone, and main character of your plot. If anything, it makes your story MORE confusing to newcomers because they're the ones who won't know ahead of time your main plot is really about a completely unrelated cast of test pilots jacking off in Alaska. If you just start the show from the third episode and say "There's a bug war and these people build weapons to fight the bugs," your audience isn't going to be thoroughly lost or confused as to wtf is going on.

Ever heard of the rule "show, don't tell?" Showing hell on the frontlines through the eyes of one of a girl who grew up to become one of the show's main characters is more effective at establishing why humanity needs new weapons then a boring narration info dump would have been.

Fuck, they could have just used the proper Starship Troopers format by opening the show in the middle of the laser gun mission in Russia, then backtracking to explain how the test base characters met each other and wound up in Russia. There's plenty of more coherent ways you could have started the Total Eclipse anime other than dictating the plot was about a vicious losing war in Japan, and then making the rest of the show be absolutely nothing about the vicious losing war in Japan you used to hook your audience and never referencing the vicious losing war in Japan again.

The first two episodes served to introduce and establish quite a few important things. In particular they really helped establish Yui, a character who is a product of an alternate Japan quite different from the one we know today.

Also, there are things that serve as reminders of what happened in the first two episodes, like Yui's mercy killing that corporal harkening back to when she was unable to mercy kill Yamashiro. Also, if the show is going to concentrate on a project to make a next generation Japanese mech than it makes sense to show what sort of situation Japan is being faced with.

I think the pros to starting the series off the way it did outweigh the cons, you may choose to disagree.

>They can't open the Total Eclipse anime with a scene of the Yukon characters fighting a bunch of holograms (or whatever) because that would be boring!
But that's the whole problem. Total Eclipse is a boring story where a whole bunch of nothing that has no bearing on the outcome of the war happens. The best you can do is go the 08th MS Team or Gundam 0080 route and write it in a way where the story finds a way to be dramatic and memorable in its own little context. But for Christ's sake, DON'T start your isolated side story with two whole episodes that completely undermine all of the bullshit that happens in the rest of the show.

Just because you find everything after the first two episodes boring doesn't mean the rest of us have to. The tone shift between episodes one and three didn't particularly bother me, and in spite of the occasional annoying bit of fan service/harem stuff I found what followed to have worthwhile drama and action.