Yuu is said to have been a first year who was accelerated to second year on the website. However, she ends up in the same class as Mato in their second year. This doesn't make sense; in Mato's first year, Yuu would have to have at least been in first year to be the basketball team manager (it's implied she's higher with the "first-year ace" line). But in Mato's second year, Yuu is clearly in the second year with her (they're in the same class). Japanese schools are isolated by grade classes, and so unless Yuu had to repeat a year, at what point did Yuu get "accelerated to second year"?
This is corrected in the 2012 anime where Yuu starts school with Mato and is only aspiring to become manager of the basketball team.
One unusual inconsistency with how the Rock Cannon is wielded. In the OVA continuity, B★RS holds it in her left arm, but in other media, such as official shots of the figma, she holds it in her right hand.
Actually, it's always been on her left. The figma is incorrect - huke's original drawings, along with the Nendoroid B★RS and the concept art, put it on her left. (Note this◊.)
According to Strength, the Other World is where girls' minds go to deal with their emotional pain. Among the hordes of dead bodies of other selves, we see not a male in sight. Where does boys' emotional pain go?
The pain and strife that boy's experience could just be substantially different that they have their own world to fight in. Perhaps Seinen/Sentai is exactly that, a playground for frustrated male teens to escape into.
Or mabye it's exactly because boys have so many media-based avenues to escape into that they don't need an other world to escape into.
Also, not every girl has another self, since we've only seen a handful so far and most seem to be connected to Yuu. Yuu invites Saya to the Otherworld (who in turn, summons others to the otherworld), Yuu was childhood friends with Mato—which could explain how Black Rock Shooter was born if Mato subconsiously wanted to help Yuu. Also, Yomi's strife didn't really surface until she met Mato, and Mato couldn't connect with Yomi without having to get through Kagari. Yuu's the foundation of the world that sort of evolves on it's own after that.
Without opening up a whole other can of worms about the emotional capacity of boys, I always just traced it the fact that the Other Selves were all female back to huke being more comfortable designing female characters than male ones. Almost all of the main character designs originated from him, if I'm not mistaken, and most of them existed long before there was even any indication of the anime getting made. So, I figured that the cast, and thus the denizens if the Otherworld, were predominantly or entirely female because almost all of the characters that provided the basis for them are also female.
Can someone explain the timeline of this anime to me because I don't get how Yuu can be a kid when Saya is a kid and also Mato's childhood friend when Saya is an adult. How can Mato and Yuu be the same age in flashbacks and still at the end of the series if Yuu met Saya as a young student?
Here's a timeline breakdown, not canonical, but reasonable:
Mato and Yuu are born (Age: 0)
Mato and Yuu become childhood friends starting in kindergarten (Age: ~4)
Yuu (Age: 9, still in elementary) meets Saya (Age: 17, classic Japanese sailor highschool uniform)
Yuu (Age: ~11) switches places with Strength (permanently) and around this time shows Saya the Other World
Mato and Yuu/Strength (Ages: 14) start Middle School at the start of the series, (14 is the typical age to start middle school in Japan)
Saya (22, enough time to get a decent college education and start middle-school level counseling) is the coffee-loving child counselor and overwatcher of Yuu/Strength
Saya (22, or at the time of the end of the show) “adopts” the real Yuu (14) (implied I guess, considering Strength told Yuu she'll have Saya to rely on, and that the real Yuu needs to live somewhere)
So you don't have to worry about wibbly-wobbly time stuff!
More likely that Saya adopted or looked after Strength as a spirit as soon as Yuu became Strength.
it's actually just that Mato's memories of Yuu were all fake and she became friends with Mato because of Black Rock Shooter. Mato starts forgetting them because they were never there in the first place. Strength didn't age as Yuu so Yuu would actually be around 20 now.
What do the other abbreviations stand for? The Other Wiki doesn't seem to say, and as far as I'm aware, abbreviations such as XNFE have no official meaning.
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