I’ve been watching Princess Resurrection since ACEN, where I picked up the first collection from Sentai Filmwork’s booth there. It’s not possible for me to recommend the series enough (it’s everything I love about anime), I’d actually like to write about something that’s especially noticeable in this show, because it’s done very, very well but still somewhat obviously. There are lots of unusual characters in Princess Resurrection, and this implies an unusual environment that they come from, even if we only get a very brief glance at that environment.
The character that actually brought this to mind was Hime, who is just a comfortable duel-wielding chainsaws as she is planning her defenses against assassins as she is drinking tea. Stop and think about that for a minute — how
utterly strange is that? Did she have back-to-back martial arts and etiquette lessons? How does she know the traits and weaknesses of almost anything that comes after her — was she simultaneously a hard-core Monstropedia editor?
All of these questions, in turn, lead to unusual questions about the environment. Who taught he all this stuff, and what was her incentive to learn it? Are there monster tutors? We see monster lawyers at one point, so it seems reasonable as a guess. Does this mean that there are monster schools? Monster college? Monster PhDs?
Suppose that it weren’t the case that an unusual character implies an unusual environment. Then, you could throw together any combination of character traits, and it would work. The concept of a zombie-ninja-pirate-robot is funny because you can’t do this in a story — it doesn’t work — there is no environment that would lead to such a character.
