Girls Und Panzer - Historical Outrage or Dumb Manga Fun?

[onager]

Current hot topic in the online scale-modeling community. One model builder said his 2 young daughters watched this online, got into it, and are now demanding their own scale model tanks to build. And paint pink.

General feeling: "Meh. The usual Japan-style weirdness from Japan. Nothing to worry about. At least not until the Yokohama Girls' School shows an interest in annexing the Sudetenland."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_und_Panzer

You may have heard of kung fu, but the girls at Oarai High School practice gun-fu - really, really BIG 75mm gun-fu, in fact.

It's called Sensha-do, and it's the martial art of operating armored tanks! They take it seriously too, and since winning the national Sensha-do championship is such a huge deal at Oarai, they sometimes go to extreme ends in order to get the best students from Panzer class to sign up.

Which is how Miho Nishizumi, who HATES operating tanks, gets drafted to join doomsday-driven driver Mako, even-triggered gunner Hana, highly receptive radio operator Saori and combustible tank-fangirl and loader Yukari as the incomparable Anko Team. They may not be on the half-track to fame and fortune, and maybe a few of them would rather shop for tank tops than become tops in tanks, but once their focus is locked and loaded, they're absolutely driven.

http://chiakikoga.blogspot.com/2013/03/girls-und-panzer-sub-indo.html

[Aristus]

1. 10 out of 10 for style, but I would put a lot of stock in their tanks.

2 M-3 Lee/Grants, an M-5 Stuart, and what looks like a British-made Chieftain. They wouldn't last long against my M1A2:

[onager]

3. Ha! True. The story uses all WWII armor.

Near as I can put it together, the story involves 5 different girls' schools in an alternate universe. The school teams represent WWII armor from Germany, Britain, Russia, the USA and Italy.

So the most modern tank at the USA school is the M4 Sherman. IIRC, the "German school" hasn't even worked its way up to Panthers or Tigers yet. I think they're still stuck with the Panzer IV and the Sturmgeschutz III assault guns.

[harmonicon]

2. I guess I'd have to know more about it to pass judgement...

and it hasn't sparked enough interest in me to want to learn more. Generally, so long as it's in the realm of art and not an attempt at historical revisionism, I say anything goes.

However, one of my favourite books is Gravity's Rainbow, so I might not be the person to ask.