We continue across the sea of stars, where Gee and Iro watch the seminal 1988-1997 Legend of the Galactic Heroes OVA a few episodes at a time. Keep an eye out for this podcast between main installments of The GLORIO Chat as we work our way through the history books.
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Opening Song: Sea of Stars
Interlude Song: Fourth Battle of Tiamat (Bolero composed by Maurice Ravel)
Ending Song: Crossing the Bridge of Light (Orchestral Version)
Show Notes
This installment covers episodes:
- 96. Live by the Sword…
- 97. Die by the Sword
- 98. Endless Requiem
02:35 – Episode 96
04:45 – The Second Battle of Rantemario
06:23 – Enjoying Battle
08:50 – Bittenfeld and the Black Lancers
11:30 – Wahlen arrives, the battle continues
14:20 – Bittenfeld and the usefulness of a good adjutant
16:29 – Yang the Magician
18:00 – Wahlen is a badass
19:30 – Julian’s Decision
22:40 – Offensive Lines
24:10 – Episode 97
26:22 – Grillpalzer pulls the trigger
28:10 – Reuenthal gets hit
32:00 – Did Reuenthal ever stand a chance?
37:10 – How the Empire’s Power Structure might change
41:52 – We need more Detective Mecklinger
47:20 – 90% Casualties
48:20 – Episode 98
49:17 – F I N A L L Y
56:00 – Here, have this kid.
58:55 – RIP Reuenthal
59:30 – Mittermeyer is here
1:00:54 – RIP Bergengrun
1:03:35 – Reinhard still in bed
1:05:55 – Hilda still hella smart
1:07:25 – Mom Clothes! (Also political precedent)
1:10:10 – Finally pinned down Lang
1:13:50 – Rubinsky still in hiding
1:15:15 – Lang’s Wife
1:16:20 – Oberstein’s opinions on the matter
1:21:50 – By the way, who was the dual wielder? (Hard left into DNT)
1:26:16 – Delayed Satisfaction
1:32:20 – Housekeeping
And don’t forget that Legend of the Galactic Heroes is available for streaming on HIDIVE!
The Glorio Blog 
Reuenthal’s aide is named Heinrich, I think it’s been mentioned previously. By the way, Reuenthal is impaled by a cheramic (I think) shard to go with the whole Tristan theme he low-key has going on (where, funnily enough, Mittermeier ends up playing Isolde more than once).
(Also, fwiw a lot of the weirdly over the top anachronistic things about the Empire, like the torture chambers, come from the OVA writers, not from the book… sometimes the OVA seems to forget that as anachronistic the Empire is, on purpose, about certain things, this is still sci-fi.)
In hindsight Ruenthal was never going to make it because of the simple fact that it would be too much like Yang. That one commander that manages to take whatever the empire throws at him and keep on going. There was no way that was going to happen aside from Yang maybe Reinhard or Kircheis in a similar position might have done something with. During the first invasion Yang overcame all but one disadvantage that tied him down and managed to get within shooting distance of Reinhard.
I did like the battle though. Bergengrun actually participated in the battle. What happened was that he got the job for the initial plan to coordinate the fleet elements to wear down the enemy but Mittermeyer anticipated that and went in too fast for that kind of strategy to work and then went in for the head on clash that had the desired effect of even if he lost Ruenthal would take too many losses.
Once battle was joined it was cool to see both sides coming to the same conclusions. Don’t fight the commander and the main fleet they are too strong but concentrate on their sub commanders. It’s just that Ruenthal had way worse ones while Bittenfield managed to yolo himself into a win and Wahlen took too long to die before Ruenthal had to pull out. It is funny among the three commanders Ruenthal decided Bittenfeld was the weakest one and tried to take him out first confirming the in and out universe’s people’s assumptions that Bittenfield is an easy mark.
Knapstein and Grillpalzer came from Lennenkampf’s fleet. You can see one of them being Len’s number 2 shouting to his commander that Yang is kicking their asses during the diversionary attack on the fortress in season 2. They probably split Len’s fleet after their boss died so that and the Bittenfield and Fahrenheit fleets getting merged after being mauled by Yang is that thing we saw earlier in the FPA where they don’t actually create new fleets anymore and just consolidate from ones that took too many losses. If you count all the admirals and their fleets and their death star, Yang really did takeout a huge chunk of the imperial fleet.
I liked that Grillpalzer was motivated by ambition for rank rather than earth cult stuff because this entire civil war’s main cause of pride and ego is a big flaw in the empire’s government. The desire for rank is but another aspect of that and the more everything is happening is because of empire characters the more this entire thing stands as a critique of that system itself.
On that note I’d have to lower the show’s ability to portray this civil war as pointless and a very big flaw of an autocratic government because an end result of it is Job getting got. Finally. I am more than willing to say that all those millions of deaths were worth it to finally put a laser blast through him. Their sacrifices were not in vain if they put Ruenthal in a position where consequences don’t matter and Job not understanding the Ruenthal is actually still loyal to Reinhard.
It echoes that thing Mecklinger said about a mouse’s wisdom not understanding the lion’s feelings. Job miscalculated because he didn’t understand the whole empire pride thing and Grillpalzer too. Despite technically his betrayal handing the victory to Mittermeyer it was something no one in the empire would dare voice as okay.
I was really sad for Bergengrun because in my initial watch of the series I remembered him in season 2 because I watched it all in a week so I was still remembering him as that guy Kircheis cured of alcoholism because he was that pure and good when he committed suicide. The cherry on top of that was Mittermeyer having this “I am too exhausted to care look.” because this just came after seeing his best friend’s body.
I find it interesting that Job and Lang two evil people have directly managed to have a smaller body count than say Reinhard, Yang or even Ruenthal. Job voted against the empire invasion and the fpa invasion was made by Reinhard with some Phezzan assist. Job had a minor part of that compared to the first two. He always manages to indirectly the reason why there is so much suffering. Even the fpa coup wasn’t his plan. Lang never had the power to cause that much of a body count compared to fleet commanders.