YMMV / Last Exile

• Awesome Music: The opening theme is soothing and compelling at the same time.
  • The ending theme is also awesome, having mostly on-subject lyrics, nice vocals, and no Gratuitous English. Combined with the visuals, it really has some serious emotional impact.
• Complete Monster: Maestro Delphine Eraclea is the leader of the sinister Guild who desires to take control of the ancient ship, The Exile, for herself. A cruel and capricious ruler who murdered her way to power, with even her own parents as her victims, Delphine manipulates her younger brother Dio with disturbingly sexual undertones and mind rapes him into insanity. She continues a horrific, bloody war by sabotaging a peace treaty, targeting ships bringing supplies to refugees as she treats herself to luxurious meals that she claims taste all the better for the excessive resources required for them, leading to more innocent deaths. With countless civilian murdered by her machinations, she also strings along Dio's only friend Lucciola with promises to free Dio, but betrays and disintegrates Lucciola when she determines he's too much trouble for her—but not before sending her own insane brother to fight and die for her. When Delphine captures her Arch-Enemy Alex Roe, she tortures him in thorny vines, gloating how beautiful he is when he is suffering. Representing the worst decadence and manipulative cruelty of the nobility, Delphine is seen smiling the most whenever others are suffering and dying thanks to her.
• Fridge Brilliance: In episode 10, Claus and Lavie are seemingly abandoned at their docking stations by their crew during a blackout after a particularly harrowing race. They can apparently get out once the lights turn on a couple hours later, but are stranded in the meanwhile. Now this may seem like a particularly mean spirited thing to do until you take into account that Claus and Lavie are both healthy young adults with a close relationship. Claus and Lavie share their cramped quarters with a young child on a ship that probably doesn't offer much privacy. The crew left them with a good chance to win the race. The crew possibly assumed that celebrations would be in order.
  • There's also the probability that the crew wanted to provide Claus and Lavie with Plausible Deniability if something went wrong with the underlying caper they were unknowingly serving as the distraction for. Worse come to worse they'd be left behind where they'd be safe with a working vanship.
• Fridge Horror: Dio seems like just a creep until we see he's genuinely terrified of his sister. And then we meet his sister. Just what did she do to him?
• Ho Yay: The engineer Gale admits to a crush on Claus, and Dio seems awfully fond of him, with all that glomping and whatnot. Of course, everybody loves Claus in this series. And who does Claus get that doughy-eyed look of love for? His vanship. There's also considerable subtext between Tatiana and her navigator.
  • And the aforementioned Ho Yay between Dio and Lucciola.
  • Heck, the other mechanics predict Gale is going to make a play for Claus the minute they set eyes on him, judging from the banter. But we're never shown Gale doing anything beyond bemoaning his fate from the sidelines, however.
• Nightmare Fuel: Delphine blows Lucciola to tiny pieces, then laughs and twirls as his remains fall down like snowflakes.
• Moral Event Horizon: Delphine crosses it when she brainwashes Dio. She makes him do very bad things.
  • Or even before that when she causes a ship delivering water to refugees to crash on top of them for no other reason than for her personal amusement.
  • Let's just say she crosses it A LOT.
• Subbing vs. Dubbing: The dubbed version is quite good; special notice goes to Dio's voice actor, Joshua Seth.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The Anatoray and Disith conflict is supposed to be a sad case of Mirroring Factions with both sides being manipulated by the Guild and both ultimately being good people who need to work past their differences. Unfortunately due to the show spending much more time with the Anatoray side and developing their characters more, they come across as more of a heroic nation with some bad apples when compared to the largely faceless Disith soldiers. It gets especially bad when we see the backstory on how both Anatoray and Disith face climate problems, Disith is the one to declare war and is the one who invades. When the cold of their nation worsens and makes their land uninhabitable, they launch an all out attack on the Anatoray capital (full of civilians rather than soldiers) with the intent of Taking You with Me. Instead of trying to broker a peaceful solution they'd rather see their enemies dead too.
  • In support of Disith, they only attacked the Anatoray capital after Emperor executed the envoy the Disith sent to negotiate. This fact is easily missed though and only comes up in one line of dialogue.
• The Woobie: Alvis and Dio.

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