Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Terdwilicker's Anime Reviews ❯ Strike Witches ( Chapter 64 )

Strike Witches is a cute girls story, with panty shots. They are underaged girls so this is creepy. Once you get past the pilot episode, which is the most egregious at this flaw, it becomes a cute girls being cute show, but it takes some explanation to help understand WHY it exists.

It begins with an advertising campaign by the Japanese branch of Microsoft. Cute girls sell things in Japan, as local idols. The company was given the task of convincing Japanese people to buy the new Windows operating systems in 2000, starting with a fan-made version of Windows Millenium as a fickle unstable girl. More examples arose using the idea until it turned into a phenomenon over the course of months and years, basically a meme that turned into a real advertising campaign, a different girl for each operating system.

A fan of the idea like it enough to make a manga about countries as cute girls, which expanded this and it become a series of short anime. Then a weirder manga artist took the idea and made guns into girls, and that became an anime. Repeat until the ideas of girls being idols that are stereotypes of nations turn into the stereotypes of their air-forces vs generic alien invasion force made of CGI  and bendy-lasers.

So Strike Witches is a reference to a parody to a reference to a parody of a meme that mocked Microsoft WinMe being unstable. And it was, too. My wife had it. I had to reinstall/repair that OS every month. 

Oddly enough. Strike Witches has a bunch of spin-offs, mainly because the fans enjoyed the humor of it, it was cheap to make, and the plots were kind of trivial despite retelling WW2 as an alien invasion. There's also an unrelated Tank Girls anime, where cute girls operate tanks like a sports anime and nobody dies despite using live ammo. Because it is a cute girls show, and screw physics.

I am strongly tempted to make a fanfiction of Strike Witches using girls from other shows. Imagine Tanya the Evil as the german commander Mina, replacing her. And Motoko Aoyama replacing her second. And some silly girl to replace Yoshika, perhaps Anna from Makeine, and Alya and her sister as the Finn/Russian pair from the show. Semi-neurotic girls replacing the sweet girls? Yes, it would work. And the aliens would flee rather than face Tanya and her fuel-air bombs.