LAST EDITED ON Sep-03-14 AT 02:40 AM (EDT)
 
>>V-1 has a rather blank, yet oddly tragic, personality to her.
>
>The complete goth package. "We are born to die. What's the point?"

And then there was her kid sister V-2, who never actually showed up in either the manga or the anime, but was talked about in hushed terms of fear, as if she were some sort of supernatural creature. You never saw her. You never heard her. Things would explode, and her name would be on the killboards.

The British girls, whom V-2 took the majority of her points off of, were indignant that she was allowed to play at all (and after the '45 season the rules, indeed, were amended to specify you had to meet certain physical requirements in order to compete) but she always had a note from Doctor Von Braun excusing her from mandatory league appearances off the pitch due to "medical reasons." Spitfire still isn't sure V-2 actually exists and isn't some elaborate cheat on the part of the perfidious boche.

The elaborate "V-2 never shows up on-screen" conceit was continued in the short-lived spinoff series Lift/Mass Ratio, which attempted to take the success of Fly Girls, re-contextualize it in the context of the space race, and strip out all the actual fighting to bring us more episodes of girls bickering. V-2 has a small speaking role as the grandmother of both Saturn and Soyuz (which would make Redstone and Vostok sisters, although they never refer to each other as such), and artful camera positioning is used to avoid us ever getting a direct look at her. She's a sad, quiet, fatalistic old woman in L/M R, who misses her sister and her homeland but is nonetheless quietly proud of her new family.

L/M R only ran for a half-season; none of the original showrunners were involved, it had only the most tenuous of connections to Fly Girls to begin with, and it turns out watching Redstone and Vostok yell at each other for 22 minutes actually gets really dull really fast if they can't get into the sky and blow each other up like Spitfire and 109 used to. Saturn and Soyuz showed some signs of becoming more nuanced characters, but we never really found out.

-Merc
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