>This returns to the basic structure of the older one-shots (most
>obviously Aegis Florea), in which UF-Gryphon falls headfirst into
>whichever anime has captured RL-Gryphon's attention this month

Sometimes it's a useful exercise to go back to the basics and see what transpires...

>only with the benefit of a decade-plus of additional writing experience.

There are some musings on the differences that time/experience differential introduced in the annotations, once they're through review.

>We don't really need to see the entire
>Strike Witches plotline play out to appreciate Mio's problem
>and G's approach to solving it.

It is, in fact, a deliberate feature of the way this was set up that G wasn't there for any of the things that happened in the Strike Witches TV series - the first season can be assumed to have happened just as it did on screen, and the second up to about the midway point of episode 11, which is where Mio leaves from (as it were) in the second flashback. (The finale of season two will therefore necessarily have been... a bit different, though, again, he wasn't there for it.) The adventures he had with the 501st all happened well before the first episode (which is set in the late spring of 1944), which is why he doesn't know Lynne Bishop or Yoshika Miyafuji - they joined after he left.

>The triumphant return of the Rocket Attack USA monologue is
>appreciated.

I was going to go for the straight-up "you-had-to-be-there" shared-experience retelling, but then I thought, well, no, it was an alternate universe excursion... :)

>I have no idea which sentai team that's supposed to be in the opening
>short, but it was fun to watch anyway.

That is, as Spotted Kitty theorized, an extrapolated version of the cast of Vividred Operation, seen about five years after the show (by which time, it is assumed, protagonist Akane's younger sister Momo has accumulated a second Vivid squad of her own).

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.