YMMV / Project A-Ko

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: For some that hated her, they may have sympathized with C-ko's feelings of alienation and fear of being left alone.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: B-ko believes herself to be the best friend C-ko can have. However, A-ko remembers B-ko as someone who abused and ribbed C-ko all the time, and while C-ko herself doesn't explicitly support or deny this version, she clearly doesn't regard B-ko as a friend either. This implies that B-ko's obsession over C-ko has made the rich girl literally delusional about their past together.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Yes, female urinals are a real thing.
• Americans Hate Tingle: C-ko was at least more or less accepted in Japan, at least in the series' heyday. Viewers in the West, however, were far less forgiving, and she became one of the earliest examples of this.
• Awesome Music: You could put the entire soundtrack to the original film in this section.
• Complete Monster (Uncivil Wars): Lady Xena is a powerful sorceress who desires to merge and destroy all universes and creates a perfect new one where she rules as its god. Mastering the dark magics and gaining control of the powerful Dragon God, she became too old and weak to properly control it, and so created a religion to indoctrinate others into helping her seek a younger body to possess while using her minions to combat the Galactic Police and kill many members. Upon her spirit being channeled into C-ko Kotobuki's body by Gail, Xena promptly abandons her followers to die in an explosion, then uses the Dragon God to destroy the Kotobuki fleet, several planets, and an entire galaxy while relishing their suffering. When she reaches the Talho sector, Xena begins merging the universes together, preparing to destroy them while trying to kill A-ko Magami and B-ko Daitokuji.
• Crazy Is Cool: Project A-ko is an over-the-top parody of Japanese pop culture from The '80s that features manly alien ladies, gigantic spaceships, a high-tech armor bikini, a millionaire yandere, and the daughter of Superman and Wonder Woman. Fans of the Japanese animation scene may have grown accustomed to this sort of craziness, but for the time of Project A-ko, if the latter was not Crazy Enough to Work, then it deserved to be.
• Cult Classic: Though its popularity has faded to the sands of time on both sides of the globe, numerous older anime fans (particularly in the US) remain grateful for this series thanks to it being the first video release of prolific 90s anime licensor Central Park Media which put it in virtually every 90s video store's tiny anime section. The first movie and the OVAs were also frequently run on the early Sci-Fi Channel during their weekend anime blocks. For some 90s anime fans, it was their gateway to anime to begin with. The gigantic A-ko reference that was the fan-favorite 2013 anime Kill la Kill also helped to keep the memories alive.
• Die for Our Ship: C-ko is a victim of this, especially with A-ko/B-ko shippers. Kei also falls victim to this in the hands of both Yuri Fans, as well as other fans for stuff described under The Scrappy below.
• Expy: Several:
  • Miss Ayumi was deliberately designed to be a grown-up copy of Creamy Mami with a slightly different hair color.
  • Mari is a gender-flipped version of Kenshiro.
  • Captain Neopolita is an alcoholic gender-flip of Captain Harlock.
  • B-Ko's father is a white haired variation of 80s Tony Stark.
• Fanfic Fuel: The identity of A-ko's parents is just a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo, but FanFics based on this series set it somewhere in The DCU far more often than not due to them. So committed were A-ko fans to this that some of them felt a crushing disappointment when, in Kingdom Come, Superman and Wonder Woman had a son together instead of a daughter. Some fans also prefer to have B-ko related to Batman - or Lex Luthor - in some fashion, typically by having him be her uncle.
• Gateway Series: arguably, THE gateway series in the late 80s/early 90s, aka the one existing fans would show to friends to make new fans.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The original film was successful enough at the time in Japan to spawn three sequels and two alternate universes OVAs, but it is now all but forgotten in Japan. In America, the series (especially the original film) is better remembered due to its prominence in the emerging anime scene of the early 90s. While many of the parodies of then-contemporary Japanese pop culture flew over the heads of Western fans, the concept of a high-energy comedy-action film with a teenage girl fighting robots in her school uniform was more of a novelty.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: C-ko's line in the first OVA - "'Let it all hang out', I always say" - isn't too far off from a certain other animated character's motto.
• Les Yay:
  • The original film has a bath scene where B-ko lightly fondles one of her own breasts while thinking of C-ko. The scene itself was the only sequence animated during its Hentai origins as a Cream Lemon OVA that was retained for the final product.
  • In Final, C-ko begins to worry that she's losing A-ko, due to her escalating rivalry with B-ko. It culminates in a brief dream sequence where A-ko shoves C-ko on the ground, allowing B-ko to smugly take her place at A-ko's side, which promptly scares C-ko awake.
  • Lampshaded by B-ko near the end of Final, as she and A-ko burn upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere, seemingly to their imminent demise:
    B-ko: "How ironic... a lover's suicide with A-ko..."
• Like You Would Really Do It: You didn't really think B-ko was gonna stay dead in Uncivil Wars, now did you?
• Moe: C-ko could be considered one of the forerunners in anime, given she embodies many of the qualities commonly associated with it: short, cute, childlike, vulnerable, and seemingly innocent.
• Porting Disaster: The original film's negatives were believed lost at some point in the 1990s, which meant that every DVD release of the film afterward was based on degraded masters or a laserdisc release. Central Park Media's original DVD release of Project A-ko looked horrible; the master had degenerated to a point where the film was nearly unwatchable. (The earlier LaserDisc and VHS releases looked better in comparison.) CPM eventually released a Special Edition with a remastered version of the film, based on a full-frame Laserdisc source. Discotek Media later released their own Special Edition of the film that improved upon the previous transfer significantly and ported over most of the special features (minus the soundtrack CD). Discotek later announced a high definition restoration for Blu-ray, originally slated for 2021 and using a new AI-assisted technology called AstroRes to upscale the Laserdisc... only for the release to be "canceled" because out of the blue, the original film negatives were finally located, in pristine condition. Discotek proceeded to announce, for the first time, a high-definition home release of the original film using the original masters, also to be released in 2021.
• Retroactive Recognition: B-ko was Emi Shinohara's debut role, 6 years later, she would land the role that she's most famous for: Makoto Kino/Sailor Jupiter from Sailor Moon.
  • Similarly, C-ko was one of Michie Tomizawa's earlier roles before landing her two biggest roles, Rei Hino/Sailor Mars in Sailor Moon and her most famous role, Sumire Kanzaki from Sakura Wars a decade later.
• The Scrappy: Kei, due to A-ko, B-ko, and Ms. Ayumi all falling for him at first sight. In B-ko's case for Yuri Shippers, she eventually gets over C-ko in favor of pursuing Kei. While it's possible that Kei was intended to be a parody of the Bishōnen Chick Magnet character archetype, he ends up seeming more of a Parody Failure.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Spanish fans were disappointed that Graciela Molina, A-ko's voice actress from the first film, had to be replaced in the second.
• Woolseyism: C-ko's voice is a lower pitch in the English dub, which some fans consider an improvement. This only applies to the first dub, as her dub voice in the sequels is probably her most hated voice.

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