Reflection and Analysis

Princess Nine - Princess Nine Reviews (2/28/2022)

So - as I finish watching Princess Nine and plan on writing my own review, there are a few things I'm seeing in reviews for the series which bother me.

"Some people consider this anime to be just another sports anime. In actuality, Princess 9 is very likely the worst sports anime to ever have been made."

Not only are those words rather harsh, I took the time to check this person's list and saw that Inazuma Eleven and Ultimate Muscle aren't on their list, which are two series I consider worse than this one. Looking at the lowest scoring Anime, those who have enough people scoring it to be up high on the list, one of the ones one my list that's even worse than those is Arcade Gamer Fubuki and one not on my list is Issho ni Training, though I've seen parts of it. The point here, is there are worse series out there

"I personally am not a fan of anime that cut every possible corner and have repetitive filler episodes, though most people seem to like them. If you are one of them I recommend you buy this series right away, surely there is no shortage of people trying to get rid of their copy."

What filler? No, seriously. The starter episodes are about them finding each member of the team. Then we get into the attempt to cancel the team and some important games in this regard. Then there is their training camp, a staple of all sports Anime and then it rushes through all games up to the important endgame games. Yes, there is some painful drama in the series, but this isn't fillers.

Here's some quotes from another review.

"I can forgive a lot of things about Shoujo storytelling. Shoujo has two things primarily working against it. One is that there's rarely a good budget like its shounen counterpart, so stock footage, sparkles, and lots of talking are used as storytelling devices. The other is that shoujo tends to be aimed at women and faces more scrutiny than shounen, so shoujo is (largely) emotion and character dynamic heavy.

First off, the series isn't categorized as Shoujo. For those who know anything about the category, Shoijo is manga series aimed at a very specific demographic, but this is a series which started out as an Anime and then became a Manga.

Second, this makes the typical assumption made regarding the Shoujo genre that the target audience must be female if the main characters are female, which is why Inuyasha is labeled as Shoujo when it was Shounen. I also have to wonder where they get this idea that Shoujo series are given less of a budget than Shounen series, but they're going with the usual assumption that the "emotion and character dynamic heavy" is something exclusive to Shoujo and a fault of Shoujo, when there are some great Shounen series where this isn't the case.

Of course, third - if you've got to call it "storytelling" or "genre" then you don't know Shounen, but are falling into steretypical generalizations of works aimed at men and women, or in this case boys and girls, such as Shounen not involving romance and Shoujo not involving any form of good stroytelling. It's sexist, to be honest, but it begs to question how many of either the person has watched.