Miha at Ex-Wota has found an ANN review objectionable. After looking over the review, I have to say there is indeed something amiss.
The girls themselves offer a standard moe personality distribution. Young Kureha is the resident tsundere type; Kanata is the innocent, enthusiastic, starry-eyed newcomer; Felicia is the faultlessly nice one; Noel is the reserved, minimally-speaking one; and Rio is the hard-edged but still compassionate one. Nothing particularly fresh or exciting here, unfortunately.
The problem with ANN’s review is that those archetypes aren’t moe archetypes. They’re present in war stories going back centuries.
Sub out those names and this could easily describe any video game or movie that tells the story of fresh recruits mixed with a unit of grizzled veterans. Plenty of military tales, for instance, had “the guy who doesn’t speak much” as a stock character, or “the guy who acts tough and ungrateful but actually thinks of the unit as his family.” People don’t ask for fresh or exciting there. They ask for identifiable characters so they can get right to the business of the story.
Isn’t Sora no Woto a military story? Can’t it get away with reflexively using the same military story cliches that other productions rely on? And if it can’t, shouldn’t we accurately identify the genre a cliche belongs to?
