Aquarion MoE Ep 3 Review: Absent Emotion

January 27, 2025Episode Review,  Mecha Discussion,  ,  
Episode 3 of Aquarion MoE finally give us the first “Mythical Era” flashback with Momohime joining the Element team. There are more plot exposition regarding the emotions of the Elements – or lack thereof. Regarding our new girl – Momohime – she is shown to be extremely capable, with very high charisma and good people skill as well. Overall, a “perfect” character. But is she really?

“We attended her funeral, that’s why Sayo died”
That’s one of the most bullshit plot twist I can thing of. I felt like I was watching Tenet or something. So Sayo didn’t “return” this episode, and they explained her death to be “predetermined” by the fact that they attended her funeral in episode 1. But then, someone actually forgot about Sayo’s “death” in ep 1, even though they were at the funeral. And the series said it was due to the “Mandela Effect” – where different people remember different things regarding past events – now it was a pretty smart thing to use a real life concept in the series – it still feel very…weird in terms of implementation. However, thanks to “quantum interference”, they have a solid excuse to play any retcons they wanted – basically a very convenient Quartz gun from Eureka 7 AO – where events can be altered and timelines are all mixed up.

This can mean that certain events happening now may be influencing later events – or events in the present are affected by stuff happening way down the line. This makes viewers watch in anticipation that something happening later might be foreshadowed and went “absolute cinema” – or maybe not. We’ll have to wait and see.

This episode is also dedicated to Momohime – the reincarnation of Sedona – the Moon Priestess of 12,000 years ago. Momohime’s associated emotion is Romance – in other words – “Love”. As explained by the teachers, the emotions associated with each Elements is actually what they “lack” – or having an imbalance of. For Momohime, she refused any and all romantic advances by everyone. Despite rejecting everyone, her charisma and merits are admired by many – both boys and girls. Everyone seems to idolized her, except Sakko. Sakko sees her perfection and was feeling unnerved. Ironic since they were extremely in love in their past lives. I guess their extremely close relationship back then is also kinda reversed in the present lives as well. In this episode, Rimiya was sorta charmed by Momohime, and he was the reincarnation of Sedona’s sister – Haida. This reincarnated “sisterly affection” is very much similar to the original Aquarion relationship between Sirius and Silvia. It’s not exactly the same but yeah close enough.

They also started showing the Mythical Era’s flashback starting from this episode, and Sakko and Momohime is starting to see their past lives’ appearance as well. During the flashback, we can see that Sedona was chosen by the goddess to become the next one, thus growing wings of her own. However, this really piss off the other tribe whose priest is Nanook. The elder guy is pretty jealous since he probably wanted Nanook to become divine instead. Even so, becoming a divine being meant that she could not continue her relationship with Nanook. Nanook seems disturbed by this fact as well, but I guess they are not brave enough to contest the goddess’ decision. From this episode, we can expect to see more of these flashback as the truth about the Mythical Era get revealed slowly, and will explain the other dimension’s interference with this one.

We also get to see some action this episode as well. And this is where Momohime’s “perfection” came into play the most. Despite being a new Element, her ability to pilot them is outstanding. She got exceptionally high score, as well as willing to deploy immediately. But she wasn’t very arrogant, she was pretty receptive to advice as shown in this ep. And I really like the philosophy in the show that each Element is lacking some emotional balance, and by deploying together, they can complement each other. With different combination, there will be different way for the emotions to combine and mix. It is quite similar to Evol where multiple pilots can complement each other in different ways. I think this concept is pretty good, but it will need a lot of expanding upon in MoE.

This is also the episode where we see the debut of Aquarion Feoh – the equivalent of Luna in the original. Although in contrary to Luna, Momohime is very close-range oriented – which is kinda funny since her club activity is literally Kyuudo – Archery. I guess this is just the first fight so they are keeping it simple. The platform creation thingy is also quite popular these days – with many mecha series using this gimmick recently. In addition, the emotional imbalance between the pilots can also cause adverse effects, just like Reika in the original. When the emotional imbalance get out of control, the compatibility between the Element collapse, and caused the Aquarion to become unstable. Which led to the cliffhanger of episode 3.
This episode also give us some Sakko and Momohima moment – which is supposed to be the canon OTP for the series. Sakko knows all about Momohima’s perfection and he doesn’t seem to think very highly of it. He prob thinks she can be herself and not be perfect all the time. The two of them are starting to awaken the memories of the past 12,000 year, so it will be interesting to see where their relationship will go.
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