Anime / Last Exile

"What lies beyond the furthest reaches of the sky?"

A 2003 anime series from GONZO.

Claus and Lavie are "vanship" pilots who work as air mail couriers using the vanship that their respective parents left to them. It's a hard, dangerous living, and they must risk their lives to earn enough to soup up their vanship enough to be a contender in the air races. One day, however, just as they're finally about to win a race, a crippled vanship crashes right in front of them. When they go to its aid, the dying pilot begs them to take over his delivery job: safely deliver a mysterious young girl to the legendary pirate ship Silvana.

Naturally, the same force that was pursuing the girl- The Guild, an organization ruled by the power-hungry Maestro Delphine Eraclea- now turns their sights on Claus and Lavie, who find themselves at the center of a conflict that threatens to tear their world apart.

A sequel series titled Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing aired in the fall of 2011.

A manga on the series was also serialized in Newtype Ace. Entitled Sunadokei no Tabibito (literally Travelers from the Hourglass), it serves as a bridge between Last Exile and its sequel, explaining what happened to the original cast and how they figure in the conflict engulfing the world in the new series.

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Last Exile provides examples of:

• 2-D Space: Addressed in the first episode — while there is the entirety of the upper sky left empty during war, it's a breach of the chivalry which regulates war to use it.
• Ace Custom: the Silvana. Equipped with the heaviest and strongest armor around, loaded for bear with highly destructive artillery, and with a spacious belly full of combat Vanships —a novel concept in aerial warfare— and at the same time, smaller and more maneuverable than standard airships. And, unlike the Urbanus class, there is only one Silvana around, and it's under Alex Rowe's control. Oh, and it's the only one with an unregistered Claudia Unit; every other ship has a bunch of Guilders hitching a ride inside its Unit, waiting to yank a switch and drop the rest of the ship out of the sky at the Guild's orders.
  • Super Prototype: The Silvana is so powerful because it is essentially a testbed for a variety of experimental systems, several of which would later be integrated into the new Urbanus class vessels.
• Achilles in His Tent: Lavie. She's an ace vanship navigator, racer, and courier, but becomes a mechanic after she realizes she's just not cut out for combat. She steps back into the fray when the heroes need a pair of ace couriers to save the day.
• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: the Silvana, among others
• Airstrike Impossible: Basically, what any Vanship assault on a battlecruiser boils down to, but especially notable in the endgame battles.
• All There in the Manual:
  • While it is mostly explained by the time of the final episode, almost all aspects of the political situation at the start of the series is unknown to the viewer bordering on being Lost in Medias Res. Only the timeline in the Aerial Log book fully explains things.
  • Dio survives the final episode, as implied by his voice echoing through the Silvana's engine room, and by a lone page out of the Last Exile artbook that shows him reuniting with Claus, Lavie and Alvis on Earth. This is confirmed by the sequel series, Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing.
• Almighty Janitor: Sophia. She's already the heir to the Anatoray throne while serving as the Silvana's executive officer. After her father dies and she becomes the Empress, she remains aboard the Silvana as its XO, and expects the crew to treat her only as their superior officer, not their sovereign. (As far a the rest of the fleet is concerned, however, she's still their sovereign and the Silvana is her flagship)
• Ancient Conspiracy: The Guild. It was originally an organization entrusted to oversee both the Exile program and an ambitious geo-engineering plan to undo the disastrous aftermath of climate change, which also sent some of its members to oversee the colonists. Over the centuries however, they've turned into a secretive order more interested in maintaining their power and manipulating the rest of mankind than fulfilling their original objective. In some cases, they seemed to have forgotten why they even came to be in the first place.
• Arc Words The questions and answers which are key to opening Exile.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: There are aversions, but is mostly played straight, especially with The Guild. On the heroic side, only those aristocrats directly associated with the heroes subvert it.

• Awesome, but Impractical: The Disith warships, looking very futuristic next to the Anatoray armada (and vaguely reminiscent of Exile's cocoon form, with batteries of revolving cannons on their bellies. Which means they can't target anything that isn't directly beneath them without tilting the whole ship on its side.
  • This is justified in the supplemental materials, which explained that the invading Disith expected to engage in combat primarily while descending from the Grand Stream, so their ships are designed with the expectation that their enemies will usually be at a lower altitude. For the same reason, Anatoray battleships are designed with the majority of their weapons on the topside of the ship with expectation of fighting Disith who would be descending from above.
  • Musketeers on both sides are armed with cool-looking, but heinously impractical steam muskets as well as fancy uniforms wholly pointless given the use of Musketeers (uniforms traditionally are brightly colored to distinguish faction, something unneeded when everyone is volleying from ship to ship with no intention of boarding). Then again, everything about Musketeers is just cool-looking, cruel fluff dictated by the guild.
  • The method of giving out vanship pilot jobs in the first episode. Taping them to the side of a cliff and having pilots fly by and read them and signal which one they want looks awesome, but... with all the effort it would take to set that all up each morning, wouldn't it be much more efficient to just have them, you know, stop by an office and grab the assignment?

• Banging Pots and Pans: Lavie wakes Claus every morning by banging a hammer against a sheet of metal.
• Battle Butler: Lucciola to Dio, Cicada to Delphine.
• Best Served Cold: Alex's motivation for captaining the Silvana and hunting down Exile.
• BFG Pretty much any hand-held weapon in the series.
• Big Bad: Maestro Delphine Eraclea is the leader of the Guild who oppresses her people and seeks to capture Alvis to use her to activate the titular Last Exile and gain even more power.
• Bilingual Bonus: All the text in the series is English written in the Greek alphabet. The real Greek alphabet mind you, none of that mucking about using capital sigmas for E's and the such. There are some pragmatic changes ("h" doesn't have an easy equivalent in Greek, and so gets transcribed into η, which would be the letter for é), and some outright mistakes (δικαίος, ᾱ, ον would be translated as "fair one, the", as in what you'd find in a dictionary), but the translation is overall pretty good.
• Bling of War: Mullin's medals in specific, but every fleet has its own more or less elaborate uniform, with even gaudier uniforms for the officers.

• Butt-Monkey: Mullin Shetland during his time on the Silvana; he didn't get ANY breaks.

• Can't Argue with Elves: The Guild. Aloof, fair-featured and pointy-eared, agile and graceful, with otherworldly technology, with an outlook of the entire world being their playthings? Definitely elf.
• Captain Ersatz: Word of God says that Alex Row is based on Captain Harlock.
• Chainsaw Good: The Urbanus class ships.
• Chess Motifs: Alex talking about taking his enemy's queen to win the game in a chess match. And most if not all of the episodes are named after chess moves or gambits, e.g. "Castling Lucciola" and "Sicilian Defense".
• Cliffhanger: Episode 12, "Discovered Attack" The Silvana is sinking, Claus and Tatiana have been shot down, Lavie lies unconscious on the hangar deck... is this the end? (Of course not, it's episode 12)
• Clone Degeneration: Travelers from the Hourglass reveals that the Earth Guild replenishes its numbers via cloning, but have hit the limit of reproductive cloning due to degraded DNA telomeres.

• Combat Tentacles: Exile's while in cocoon mode.
• Cool Airship: Many, but the Silvana rules the skies through an innovative design, a competent crew, a determined commander and, of course, overwhelming firepower.

• Curb-Stomp Battle: Silvana's duel against Goliath, which serves primarily as the first operational test of Silvana's secret multi-barrelled armor piercing rocket launchers.
• Dance Battler: This seems to be a common fighting style among the Guild, at least if Lucciola and Cicada's battle is anything to go by. Also accompanied by very appropriate background music.

• Defrosting Ice Queen: Tatiana.
• Demoted to Extra: After being a major character for the first third of the series, Lavie starts to play an increasingly minor role compared to Claus after she withdraws from combat to become a mechanic. She starts to make it back up the ladder towards the end.

• Distant Finale: The series ends with a glimpse of the main characters (Claus, Lavie, and Alvis) and some of their friends (Mullin, Dunya and her siblings) living peacefully on a farm on Earth for at least a year, with others (Tatiana and Alister) dropping by for a visit. However as Travelers from the Hourglass and Fam: The Silver Wing soon reveals that this peace never happens, as Claus and his friends are attacked by the Earth Guild less than a month after they arrived. Whats worse, Earth is apparently in the middle of a war that's already at least a decade old by the time the Prester immigrants return.

• Elaborate Underground Base: The Earth Guild has a very impressive and intensive one built inside a mountain range, as revealed by chapter 7 of the Hourglass manga.
• The Empire: Both Anatoray and Disith qualify, though we see far more of the former.

• Establishing Character Moment: Alex saving Claus, Lavie, and Alvis from a Guild drone with a single, well-placed shot from his gun-cane. Especially since the entire maintenance crew could barely dent a drone's armor with their BFG.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Everyone wants Claus. Gale the mechanic admits it, and Dio is essentially walking, talking Ho Yay whenever Claus is around.
• Evil Tastes Good: Maestro Delphine indulges gluttony on every level.
• Evolving Credits: Minor, but after episode 18 there's a noticeable change.
• Exact Time to Failure: When the Guild first attacks the Silvana, it's stated they can operate for 20 minutes at full power. After exactly twenty minutes, they all break off and leave (including Dio and Luciola, who entered the battle later on).
• Expository Hairstyle Change:
  • Sophia's hair-down-to-there upon taking the Imperial Throne.
  • Dio's braid is unwrapped, and his bangs re-brushed to show off his Mark of the Covenant, after being brainwashed for the Rite and turned into a remorseless killing machine..
  • Lavie bobs her hair after she and Claus lose their parents, probably to make it easier to manage as a vanship pilot.

• Extreme Doormat: Lucciola, but he eventually becomes an Extreme Badass.
  • And by extension, he is also Dio's Battle Butler.
  • Lucciola does have a mind of his own, however — and often uses it to keep Dio alive and out of trouble.
• Extreme Speculative Stratification: The Guild are the ruling class of the planet who live in spectacular structures above the clouds and jealously preserve their advanced technology for their own use alone. The people living on the actual planet, on the continents of Anatoray and Disith, are forced to war with one another for control of the small (and thanks to the Guild's carelessness, shrinking) habitable areas. The Guild occasionally lends them weaponry to keep the war going, as they regard it as a source of entertainment.

• Failure Montage: A flashback showing how the duo learned to fly plays out like this.

• Foregone Conclusion: The Earth Guild will go extinct, if their lack of presence in Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing is anything to go by.
• Foreshadowing Lavie's mid-battle "Screw Chivalry" rant in which she screams that chivalry only matters to nobles who have never gone hungry presages the reason the Disith have abandoned the traditional rules of engagement: they're desperate because their lands are rapidly becoming uninhabitable.
• For the Evulz: Seems to be Delphine's motivation for most of her actions, such as not intervening when Disith ships disregard the rules of engagement in the first fight, and sometimes she seems to enjoy watching people suffer and/or die. It's even implied that she deliberately allowed the climate to become unbalanced in order to pit Disith and Anatoray against each other.
• Freudian Excuse: Dio comes off as a thoroughly unsympathetic creep until we meet his sister.
• Fridge Brilliance: From the first episode, the favored way to begin engagements by both the Disith and Anatoray fleets is to deploy ranks of musketeers to exchange volley-fire, count the casualties, and potentially secure a favorable ceasefire. For an airborne fleet of ships bristling with large-caliber guns capable of firing at distances of many kilometers, this seems stupidly wasteful and pointless...until you remember the actual objective of the war: invading Anatoray with the intention of securing and occupying livable territory, or repulsing an invasion, respectively, something both sides need armies of infantry do feasibly. Allowing a fleet to withdraw peaceably after losing its infantry component then makes good sense from the standpoint of the fleet commanders, while remaining brutally cruel to the infantry sacrificed for the meat grinder.

• The Glomp: Dio is exceedingly fond of this. Not only will he get touchy-feely with his faithful companion Lucciola, he also has a thing for glomping Claus, who is pretty freaked out by it.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Delphine, just Delphine...
• Green Rocks: The water-soluble, luminescent crystal Claudia powers the airship's antigravity units and serves as the basis of currency.
• Guy in Back: Quite a few as most vanships required a navigator. Lavie Head, Alister Agrew, and Lucciola were the most noticeable examples.
• Happy Ending For most of the cast, if you take just this series into consideration. If you count the bridge manga Travelers from the Hourglass and Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing? Not so much.
• Her Boyfriend's Jacket: After Claus and Tatiana crash land in the desert, at one point he offers her some spare coveralls as a change of clothes. When they get back to the Silvana, Claus' old friend Lavie sees Tatiana wearing his clothes and she begins to fear this is happening.
• Heroic BSoD: Tatiana experiences a brief one after she watches the Silvana go down in battle, primarily because she's convinced she just lost her best friend Alister, with whom she'd been fighting.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Lucciola does this to give Claus, Al, and Dio time to escape. Delphine "rewards" him with a ring that disintegrates him even as she repeatedly asks her to free Dio from his mental state.
  • Potentially Alex as well, as he's busy choking Delphine to death so that she can't give any commands, and allowing the Silvana time to fire on her ship, while he's still aboard it.
  • Claus and Lavie's fathers' attempt to cross the Grand Stream turned out to have been a heroic sacrifice as well.
• Honor Before Reason: Mad-Thane's subordinate officer would rather fight to the death for honor rather than retreat sensibly. Mad-Thane himself appears to agree with him until he hears Lavie's "Screw Chivalry!" rant
  • The entire Guild-approved chivalry system, which requires - among other nonsensicalities - the routine sacrifice of musketeers in an initial rifle battle as a formal beginning of an engagement. To clarify, neither side can hurt the other's ships in any way with rifle fire, so they just target the other musketeers; the whole thing is merely done so the arbitrary Guild requirement for chivalry is fulfilled (if a certain percentage of musketeers on one side die, they have the right to withdraw from battle without any loss of honor) and the ships can begin exchanging cannon fire, which is what actually determines the course of a battle.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Most episodes are named after chess terms.
• Idiot Ball: A few, but when Mullin starts getting wistful for his "glory days" as a cannon-fodder rifleman, every viewer is required by law to perform a Face Palm and quietly tell him to take his Darwin Award and get out of here... redeemed, somewhat, by The Alliance's plan to convert their musketeers from Cannon Fodder to an elite assault force in order to capture their Claudia units from the guild.
• I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: The vanship pilot at the beginning.
• Improvised Weapon: Alex uses an area with jagged, overhanging rocks to kill two ships by dropping one of the arches on them.
• Initiation Ceremony: According to Word of God, Mullin being stripped naked and roughed up a bit by the Silvana's crew is a standard hazing ritual they put all new members through.

• Invading Refugees: Disith.
• Jabba Table Manners: The Guild, enough to make Jabba himself look like a gentleman. Guild connoisseurs take pride at how a tiny morsel of succulent meat took the lives of dozens of men to acquire and how a slice of fish is washed with enough water to slake a family's thirst. After all, so they reason, the sacrifice makes the food all the more tasty. Claus, an orphan of the Guild's endless war, is increasingly horrified by each dish, poignantly reminiscing about Lavie's sandwiches just to keep from screaming.

• Kick the Dog: Delphine recalls the engine of a ship bringing water to some thirsty folks just fo' funzies.
• Lady of War: Sophia is respected, beautiful, competent, and She Cleans Up Nicely when regal needs arise.

• Light Is Not Good: The Guild. Aside from the customary white clothing, Guild ships are very bright and full of sunlight, particularly in contrast to the Silvana.
• Live-Action Adaptation: This may be happening for the series, but it's currently rotting somewhere in Development Hell.
• Lost Colony: Prester is not a natural planet at all, but rather is an artificial colony overseen by the Guild. Travelers from the Hourglass and Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing later reveal that it's just one of at least seven others.
• Lost Technology: Exile and Prester itself, where the latter is an artificial planet with an inhabitable interior surface, much like an hourglass, with the Grand Stream barring the way across the connection. Everything inside the closed system (weather, projections of the sun and moon) is monitored by Exile and the Guild.
• Low Culture, High Tech: The nations of Disith and Anatoray have to rent the anti-gravity engines of their Airborne Aircraft Carrier fleets from the Guild; complete with engineers to maintain them. If the ship takes too much damage, the engineers yank a few levers, tear the engine free and let everyone else aboard crash and burn. Sometimes the Guild recalls engines out of spite.
• MacGuffin Super-Person: The first half of the anime concerns Claus and Lavie (and later, the entire crew of the Silvana) trying to keep Alvis out of the clutches of the Guild. Why they're hunting her isn't revealed until the last episode. Turns out she's a living "ignition key" for the eponymous space ship.

• Magnetic Hero: Claus displays that uncanny ability to win people over to respect him with his sincerity and vanship skills, though falls a bit short on the all-loving personality that would push him over the line to be The Messiah.

• Meaningful Name:
  • The eponymous Last Exile, though its significance will only come to the fore in the sequel Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing.
  • Alex's wife Eurys, is probably a reference to the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.
• Military Mashup Machine: Battleship-Aircraftcarrier-Zeppelins.
• Mind Rape: Dio's Rite of the Covenant sure qualifies.
• Miracle Rally: More than one of them.
• Mood Whiplash: Surprisingly enough it's NOT in the exact middle of the series as is common for Gonzo shows, but closer to the end.
• More Dakka: The main weapon of most of the ships. The vanships can utilize this, or torpedoes in the second half of the series.

• Neck Snap: Apparently, Alex considers this too good for Delphine at the end as he forgoes a simple neck snap in favor of strangling her to death as he stares into her eyes.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: Tatiana almost gives up after she's convinced her best friend Alister, with whom she'd been fighting, went down with the Silvana. Claus' never-say-die attitude pulls her out of it.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: the Silvana was assembled with experimental Guild machinery by a group of renegades who fled the Guild with stolen technology. Being that the source of its technology will never want to part with any more of it, it will always be a one-off — any plans or backups would be useless without the hardware to build another. For the next experimental vessels capable of going against the Guild its creators instead employ vastly-improved non-Guild technology and come up with completely different designs.
• No-Sell: During the duel, the Goliath shoots before the signal is given and actually hits the Silvana. Not only is no actual damage dealt — nobody on board is so much as slightly bothered that the enemy has hit them. Sophia is almost giddy when she proposes using an experimental weapon, and throughout the event captain Alex is utterly bored. During the series the Silvana similarly shrugs off attacks by other vessels, only suffering actual damage at the hands of the Guild which makes sense since it effectively is a Guild ship or concentrated attacks by several new and experimental capital ships.
• No Sense of Personal Space: Dio with pretty much everyone, but especially Claus.
• Not So Above It All: Tatiana, who annoys everyone with her hardass attitude until she freezes in the face of losing the one person she cares about most and realizes that everyone has their limits.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Dio has that look when his sister shows up at Sophia's crowning ceremony.
  • Delphine when Alex suddenly springs back to life and grabs her neck in the last episode.
• Orphan's Plot Trinket: in a fairly subtle example, Alvis' toy goat was a present from Alex when Lavie was a little girl. Lavie doesn't make the connection, but Alex probably does.
• Out-of-Character Moment: Mullin gets one in "Sunadokei no Tabibito". In the manga, when everyone is wondering why Claus hasn't come back yet from meeting Tatiana, he says that Claus is such a sly dog and that he doesn't think he will be coming back that night, saying that something must have happened between them in the desert, he does this in front of Lavie, and after she walks away, he thinks he did nothing wrong, since she was "smiling". To put things into perspective, in the anime, when the crew of Silvana where going on about how "something" must have happened between Claus and Tatiana while they were stranded in the desert, he tells them to stop making assumptions like that, Since he felt sorry for Lavie, this conversation happens in the gym...
• Parental Abandonment: Played straight, although we get to see what happened to Claus and Lavie's parents and why they aren't around when the story starts.
• Perpetual Storm: The Grand Stream, a powerful, stable and deadly storm.

• The Quiet One: Alex. Sophia comments that he seems strangely talkative after he utters a single sentence that is not an order.
• Ragnarök Proofing: In the centuries leading up to the Exile's return to Earth, very little of our civilization survived.
• Ramming Always Works: In a surprising instance, where Claus uses his vanship to ram Aranea's starfish fighter.
• Redshirt Army: In this case, a Red Shirt Navy.
• The Remnant: The Earth Guild, as of Travelers from the Hourglass, is dying, and they know this. This seems to be the main motivating factor for them to kidnap Alvis, so they can gain new genetic material to keep on existing.
  • The Guild are also shown to be pretty much all that's left of pre-Exile Earth.

• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The dead little copilot was what broke Alex and sent him on his path of revenge.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Sophia. She refuses to abandon her position as the Silvana's first officer to assume her father's throne ... So she's crowned Empress anyway and is back on the bridge issuing order within five minutes.
• Ruins for Ruins' Sake: There's a vast and elaborate abandoned city deep beneath Claus and Lavie's hometown of Norkia, with vaults and arches large enough for Vanships to fly through. Even though Norkia is built on levels, the ruins make very little sense since Prester is an artificial world and abandoning such a large volume of its habitable space seems awfully wasteful.
• Rule of Cool: Flying battleships?
  • Not to mention the Vanships which are for all intents and purposes, planes without most of the wings.
• Say It with Hearts: Lavie blows a heart kiss to Fat Chicken during the race.
• Say My Name: Dio casually calls Claus by name - finally, after it had always been "Immelmann" - when they are searching a seemingly abandoned Silvana together — just before he is taken away by the Guild.
• Scenery Porn
• Shout-Out:
  • The Guild is a powerful, self-indulgent, 'neutral' force with complete control over the main mode of transport.
  • The space colony Prester is shaped quite similar to the PLANT colonies in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED.
  • While the Horizon Race pilot raffle is being held, blue vanship number 6 is suspiciously specifically mentioned before all others.
• The Sky Is an Ocean: To the point that shooting down a ship is referred to as "sinking" it, and getting a downed ship airborne again is referred to as "surfacing."
• Spell My Name With An S: The two countries in conflict, Anatoray and Disith in the dub, are named for the Greek "Anatolé" "Rising (Sun)" and "Dysis" "Setting (Sun)". Also:
  • Claus/Klaus Valca/Valka/Balka/Barka/Barca
  • Lavi/Lavie/Ravey/Robbie Head
  • Dio/Deo Eraclea/Elaclair/Elacrea
  • Lucciola/Luciola
  • Mullin/Moran Shetland
  • Dunya Scheer/Shear
  • Tatiana Wisla/Visla/Visura/Visula
  • Alister/Alistia/Alista/Arista Agrew/Agroo/Agleu
    • But for the record, Word of God says it's Claus Valca, Lavie Head, Dio Eraclea, Lucciola, Mullin Shetland, Dunya Scheer, Tatiana Wisla, and Alister Agrew.
    • It doesn't help that Lucciola's name is technically said incorrectly, going by the Word of God spelling. Lucciola is an Italian word meaning firefly; double C followed by i and o is said like "cho" (listen to [1] for an example of this sound). This was shifted to "shi" in the Japanese version, presumably because they were judging sound from spelling, making him "Rushiora." This change takes on the (Engrish) pronunciation of Lucciola's root word: luciola, which is Latin.
    • The mid-episode 'splash' panels (before and after the commercial break) in some of the early episodes clearly spell the name of the 'Silvana' as "Silverna".
    • Given the snakes painted all over its hull, the Urbanas may more be correctly called the Uroboros. It could also be derived from the Latin word urbanus, which has several meanings.
• Spider Tank: Or are they aircraft that walk on spider legs?
• Spoiler Title: Some of the chess metaphors used, such as in "Castling" Lucciola, are dead giveaways.
• Stealth Pun: Vanships and airships use a fuel source named Claudia to go into the clouds.
• Steampunk: With steam-powered muskets. Unusually, it's not portrayed as remotely practical.
• Straight Gay: Gale, one of the mechanics. He eyes Claus appreciatively once or twice, to the amusement of his fellow crew-members, but if not for that you wouldn't realize he swings that way.
• Super-Strength: While the series showcased how members of the Guild are much more graceful and faster than the normal baseline human, Travelers from the Hourglass's Earth Guild reveals how a Guildsman is supernaturally strong as well, after one picks up Lavie with one arm and throws her bodily several feet from where she was seated in Claus' vanship.
• Supporting Leader: Vincent plays this, at separate times, to both his friend and colleague Alex and his Empress Sophia.
• Survival Mantra: "Disith bullets will avoid Mullin Shetland's body."
  • Averted in his last fight, although he survives, because he's fighting alongside the Disith this time.
  • He makes a new mantra: "Guild bullets will avoid Mullin Shetland's body" and one for his girlfriend: "Guild bullets will avoid Dunya Sheer's body".
• Sword Cane: Henry Knowles has a sword cane and Alex Row uses a gun cane.
• Theme Naming: Several instances.
  • Guild bodyguards, both in the man series (Lucciola, Cicada) and the bridge manga (Uroctea, Aranea) are named after animals, with insects in the former, and arachnids in the latter.
  • All the Urbanus-class warships (Martinus, Julianus, Georgius, Sebastianus, Eustatius) are named after Roman Catholic popes.
• Token Mini-Moe: Al.
• Tomboyish Name: Alister and Alvis.
• Unwanted Harem: Many females on the ship, from the Shorttank to the Tsundere Bruiser, seem to have a thing for main man Claus. Not to mention the (male) mechanic and... Dio.
• Waif Prophet
• What a Senseless Waste of Human Life: Think about it, the only reason ships carry Musketmen is to kill another ship's Musketmen. It's a meaningless duel of death.
• Unexplained Recovery: Mullin Shetland and, according to an interview with the creators in the supplemental artbook, Dio Eraclea.
• World Half Full: Figuratively and literally, as the Guild is allowing Disith to glaciate while Anatoray suffers from drought.
• World Shapes Prester is shaped like an hourglass, which also happens to be the Guild's emblem. It appears that it's also a hollow world and the events take place inside it — presumably "gravity" is produced by the hourglass spinning rapidly.
• Wrench Wench: Quite a few, though Lavie certainly qualifies.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Performed by Lucciola in order to allow the protagonists to escape from Delphine's ship with Dio.

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