“Hesitating Birthday”

Sundays in Japan only because this will NEVER BE LICENSED

Windermere is on the verge of conquering the galaxy, but more importantly IT’S FREYJA’S BIRTHDAY!!!

Jel’s thoughts

It was good to get some down time after a few intense episodes in a row. Sure the birthday party thing was mostly frivolous, but it’s always good to remind us what everyone is fighting for. Hayate’s birthday present as a nice moment although Freyja’s current happiness levels and talk of mortality are making me worry about her even more than last week. It’s only episode 16 so things definitely have to get worse before they get better. Naturally there was a whole lot of love triangle going on, so let’s get right into that:

Love Triangle
Some may see this episode as “Freyja Strikes Back” and yes things were getting kind of romantic toward the end there. She was totally ready to let Hayate touch her rune, or whatever the kids are calling it these days. Fear not though, fellow Team Mirage members, this is still a lock. You don’t see Hayate running off all the time with Freyja to discuss big life issues with. Bonus points to Mirage for just outright asking Hayate if he likes Freyja. Now if we could only get her to be honest about herself, we’d be all good here.

Pop Music
I’d say The Birthday Song sure has changed a lot in 60 years but I think it’s more MIKUMO WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR ESTABLISHED MUSICAL BIRTHDAY TRADITIONS. Freyja’s song for rolling around in the snow was really nice, definitely one of her better performances. I kind of wish that would become the new ED although can I just note it would be really hard to sing while laying on the ground like that?

Streaming Missiles
No fighting this week and thankfully not much of Windermere. I am pretty tired of them after last week. We do get a brief scene to remind of of the growing seeds of dissent though. I’ve always thought they would team up with Delta at some point to take on a greater enemy like NUNS or something, but it looks more likely a group of them will split off to take on Lloyd (Roid?) and NUNS will remain the morally ambiguous third party. With a break this sweet I suspect we’ll be back hot and heavy into the conflict next week, so we’ll see how it plays out.

[Programming note: based on the scheduling of this season’s shows, we’re going to move The Roundup to Thursday and I’m going to try having the Macross posts Wednesdays. So come back tomorrow for that.]