Assault Lily: Bouquet Episode 8

Battle Competition

Assault Lily: Bouquet episode 8 was a surprisingly good episode. It had some great action with what I’ll call some pretty good animation. There were a lot of blurs used during the fights, so the animation wasn’t the best, but it was way above what I expected.

And, considering that this series is animated by Shaft, I expect that the Blu-ray release will have a lot of the animation cleaned up. Well, at least I hope the animation is cleaned up for it. Because I’d love to rewatch that scene without all of the blur effects between keyframes.

Anyway, this episode features the battle competition, which is essentially the sports festival for Lilies. There are team competitions, solo competitions, exhibition matches, and even a cosplay contest.

I would also like to bring your attention to the grand prize for the battle competition: special upgrades to the CHARM of the winner. This isn’t exactly what I predicted at the start of the series, but I did say that Riri would get an overpowered CHARM. Perhaps this is how.

And, the last thing I want to mention regarding the battle competition is that I don’t really understand its purpose. I guess it’s just a way to let the girls have fun, but if that were the case, why wouldn’t it be a normal sports and culture festival?

The battle festival here seems more like an exhibition of what the Lilies are capable of — kind of like the sports festival in My Hero Academia. But, there were no spectators. The event wasn’t watched by the military or even by the general public. It was a closed-off event, which seems like a waste.

Why are There Lilies?

One of the big questions brought up in this episode is what the purpose of the Lilies truly is. I touched on this somewhat last week, so it’s interesting that it was brought up in the very next episode. But, I will admit that some of my initial speculation seems to have been off the mark.

One thing I got right was that Yuri is a Lily who was manufactured by the military. This also leads into my guess that the military wanted to use Lilies in wars against other countries. That too seems to have been confirmed by Yuyu bringing up the fact that if the HUGE were eliminated, Lilies would likely be used in the next war.

What I didn’t get right was the exact connection between these manufactured Lilies and the HUGE. I figured that the Lilies were just being incubated until they became HUGE, at which point they would be used as weapons. In reality, the opposite was pretty much the case.

Rather than these Lilies being HUGE in the making, they were made by using the DNA of HUGE. I’m still waiting on the reveal of how exactly Lilies and HUGE are related, but this seems to be pretty solid proof that they are in fact one and the same.

It’s possible that the military just used HUGE DNA to implant magie within non-Lilies. However, I took it more as they took HUGE DNA cloned it to produce Lilies. If that’s indeed the case, then HUGE and Lilies would have to be one and the same.

Think of it like Jurassic Park. The first possible situation would be like when they use frog DNA to fill in the gaps of the dinosaur DNA. The second situation would be like if they used frog DNA to grow new frogs.

Manufactured Lilies

Continuing on with this whole manufactured Lilies topic, it appears to be confirmed that not every Lily is manufactured. Last week I said that this may be the case, but at this point, I’m going to go ahead and say that’s incorrect. The reason being that we were told Yuri’s DNA is too perfect, unlike most Lilies.

That implies that most Lilies have DNA imperfections that you would expect to see in normal humans. So again, there’s one of my “possible” predictions proven false. I don’t think I definitively stated that Lilies were all manufactured, but I did mention it as a possibility.

But, what does the manufacturing of Lilies really mean? We don’t necessarily know the motivation behind it. We assume that the government wants to use them as weapons in a war against other nations. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe they just want to help in the fight against the HUGE? (I doubt it.)

What I think is more interesting to consider is that the government is preparing for a post-HUGE world. As Yuyu mentioned, wars stopped when the HUGE appeared because humanity had a common enemy. And from that, we can assume wars probably won’t resume until the HUGE are eliminated.

So does the government think the age of the HUGE is coming to an end? Do they have evidence to back this up? Or are they just planning for what they see as an eventuality? Or perhaps they’re planning to fight their own Lilies with these manufactured ones.

We need to remember that the Lilies currently aren’t controlled by the government. If the government is concerned about what’s effectively a private company controlling the Lilies, they may want some Lilies of their own as a defensive measure.

Conclusion

What do you think of Assault Lily: Bouquet episode 8? Did you like the action in this episode? Do you think the manufactured Lilies are inherently different from the natural ones? Or are all Lilies the same regardless of their origin? Let me know in the comments.

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My review of the next episode is available here.