Eyrie Productions, Unlimited - A Few Thoughts on Girls und Panzer

Now you've got me thinking about what crew positions they would take if, for some preposterous reason,* they actually had to operate a tank. I think Mugi would have to be the loader - she's probably the only one of them who's actually strong enough. Ritsu would insist on command until she found out that the commander doesn't actually get to shoot the giant gun, at which point she would pawn it off on Mio, which, Grodd help them, means she has to talk on the radio** and Yui has to drive. Imagine Yui driving anything, much less a vehicle that can crush and/or knock down basically anything that happens to be in its way. It won't take them long to realize that this is a really bad plan and switch them, at which point Yui ends up in command of the tank.

Everyone would expect that to be a complete disaster, of course, until she stayed up all night the night before the game so Ui could read Guderian to her out loud (translating it on the fly from the original), at which point she's utterly brilliant at tankery - but after the game they'll discover she's forgotten how to read.

* Such as:

Mio looked puzzled. "What are you talking about, Nodoka? 'Challenge to Ōarai Girls' Academy'?"

"I've never even heard of that school," Yui mused.

"There's a surprise," Azusa muttered under her breath.

"Why don't you ask your club president?" asked Nodoka, sounding genuinely annoyed for one of the very few times Mio could remember. "After all, according to this, she issued it," she went on, slapping a slightly crumpled sheet of paper down on the table.

"Huh?" said Ritsu, coming back from her drummer trance as the impact jarred the table. She paused her iPod and took the earbuds from her ears. "Oh, hey, Nodoka. What's up?"

"Nodoka-chan says you challenged some other school to a duel or something!" Yui declared.

"Huh?" Ritsu repeated. Confused, she looked from Yui's face to the piece of paper, still partly concealed by Nodoka's flattened, splay-fingered hand. "Oh that! Yeah, you remember, those girls in the green and white uniforms we met at SchoolFest? I challenged their Light Music Club to a battle of the bands."

Nodoka took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose with a pained little sound. "No, Ritsu, you didn't. Did you even read the form before you signed it?" Putting her glasses back on, she glowered over them at the Light Music Club's president and told her, hands on hips, "You challenged their sensha-dō team to a match."

"WHAT!" said everyone else in the room.

" - 's that?" Yui went on after the others had finished.

"Uh... I did?" Ritsu hesitantly picked up the paper and read it over. "... Huh." She put it down and folded her hands behind her head, giving her bandmates a weak grin. "Guess I kinda did." She cringed slightly, instinctively expecting Mio to bash her on top of the head, but when it didn't come, she opened her eyes again and saw that her tall, raven-haired best friend was just looking at her with narrowed eyes.

"You are the dumbest person I have ever met," said Mio, in that too-calm tone of voice that meant she only hadn't hit Ritsu because she hadn't taken the reality of the situation fully on board yet.

"It was an honest mistake!" Ritsu protested. "Besides, they can't hold us to it, can they? We're not a sensha-dō club. Sakuragaoka High doesn't even have a sensha-dō club."

"They can and they will," said Nodoka flatly, folding her arms. "It's a matter of honor to them now. We'll have to forfeit, of course, because, as you say, we don't have any way of following through. It's extremely bad form, since we were the school issuing the challenge. The principal will be humiliated. If the administration at Ōarai really want to press the issue, they might even be able to get the school's charter revoked by the Board of Education."

"Revoked?!" Azusa burst out. "As in close the school?"

Nodoka nodded. "So I suggest, Ritsu, that you book yourself a ticket on the next train to Ōarai and get ready to do some serious groveling. It's a long shot, but if you explain your mistake and abase yourself enough, you might be able to convince them to let you work off the forfeit somehow and save the school."

Ritsu blinked, frightful images passing through her head; then she looked to her left and saw that Yui's face had gone blank and red, and concluded that much more frightful images of what might happen to her friend were passing through hers. That almost gave her a chuckle, even under the circumstances, but not quite. Most of her mind was too busy racing, slamming itself bodily against every closed door looking for a way out of the mess.

Before she could blurt any of her ideas out, though - particularly the one about moving the whole school to another country - Mugi spoke for the first time since Nodoka had dropped her bombshell. What she said was so completely out of context that it took everyone else in the clubroom a moment to realize that she wasn't talking to any of them; rather, she had her phone to her ear and was saying calmly into it,

"Hello! It's Tsumugi here. How are you today? I'm very well, thank you. If you have a moment, I have a small favor I need to ask of you. My friends and I have a little project for school that we need some special equipment for. Mm? No, not musical instruments, we have all of those we need. No, we're good on tea sets for the moment as well. We need a tank. What? No, not for storing liquids, an armored vehicle. Yes! Precisely. You do? What kind? Wait a moment."

Mugi lowered the phone, covering the mouthpiece with her palm, and said, "Nodoka-chan, would a 1945 Panther Ausführung G tank be suitable?"

"I... think so?" Nodoka replied hesitantly.

Mugi nodded and returned the phone to her ear. "Yes, I think that will do very nicely. Oh, how wonderful. Can you have it at my school by three o'clock tomorrow? Oh, that would be perfect. Thank you very much. Yes. I will. Take care! Bye!"

Then she switched off the phone, closed it, put it away, and beamed cheerfully at her bandmates. "There!" Seeing the incredulous looks she was receiving from all around her, Mugi hesitated, her smile becoming tentative. "... What?"

Good grief, even when I'm talking about Girls und Panzer I end up talking about K-On! lately. I do apologize. It's just that it's the pleasantest surprise I've had in the new-media-discoveries department in such a long time (and Girls und Panzer is right behind it), and it came along at exactly the right time, when my fuse was burning really, really short regarding Other Matters.

--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
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