Ugh, the new Full Metal Panic sequel is a real sequel, and not another season of Full Metal Panic Fumoffu!. The author of that blog thinks this is a good thing. You wouldn't be misled if you took away the impression that I don't join him/her/it in such a sentiment. I thought the original Full Metal Panic was an unutterably cliched lump of undigested shit - nuggets of fish-out-of-water high school hijinks suspended in the midst of pseudo-Gasaraki mecha drama.

The half-sequel Fumoffu pretty much forgot about mecha melodrama, in favor of a true fish-out-of-water type of comedy in which said fish was unapologetically insane. This was Fumoffu's genius - that series refused to credit Sosuke with sane motives. He was a figure of chaos operating on his own, rigid, internal code of behavior - and that code was absolutely, objectively nuts. He made a perfect foil for Chidori's precarious straight-man routine. His lunacy was just operative enough to be horribly seductive - his high-explosives, heavily armed approach to high-school comedic problems *worked*, more often than not. And after all, every school girl must be tempted at times to spit on her hands, raise the black flag, and start slitting throats.

The original series, on the other hand, took Sosuke, and by extension, itself, seriously. We're talking about a teenaged non-com who grew up as an Afghani guerilla piloting a battle-mecha, for the love of Nagai. It surely didn't help that his main antagonist was killed not once, not twice, but three distinct times. The writers just resurrected him from the dustbin whenever they needed to re-start the melodrama machine. I don't *want* more of the original Full Metal Panic. It was a stupid show. I'd prefer more sequels which agree with me on the subject, like Fumoffu.

Oh, BTW? Use permalinks, people. Makes it a pain to link to you, otherwise.