Sousei no Aquarion – 16

Summary:
While watching a vampire movie, Tsugumi notices that Jun has bite marks on his neck. Reika notices that Tsugumi also has bite marks. The next day, both Tsugumi and Jun are completely exhausted during class to the point where Jun faints. After regaining their energy, both realize that Rena recently sucked a wound of theirs. They say some insensitive things only to realize that Rena was listening the entire time. Silvia goes after Rena, finding her singing in the garden after running into Apollo. Rena brushes them off and rides away. That night, Silvia goes through Rena’s room and finds an old picture of her, but gets caught snooping. When Rena questions her, Silvia claims that she believes in Rena, to which Rena asks “really?” and then flies off.
A shadow angel attacks, and when Aquarion responds, our pilots (Silvia, Apollo, and Jun) find that it’s a vampire with a resemblance to Rena. They get battered around a bit until Apollo sniffs out the real Rena and summons her with his yell. They gattai into Solar Aquarion, but the vampire still kicks their ass. It starts sucking energy away and Rena grows weak, until Apollo offers his neck. Rena sucking on it throws the vampire away and powers up the Aquarion. With Rena in control, Aquarion uses a piece of debris as a stake and impales the vampire, vanquishing it. Afterwords, apologies go all around and Tsugumi accuses Silvia of being jealous of Apollo and Rena, which Silvia vehemently denies while her face turns bright red.

Well, I can honestly say I really enjoyed this week’s Aquarion. Never mind that it centered around Rena, I thought the episode was relatively well written too. The vampire stuff and Rena’s feelings getting hurt was a tad bit cliché, but the fact that we got to see Rena in a gattai more than made up for that. Plus, we get to see Silvia with her hair down (it looks a better that way).
Speaking of Silvia, while this episode was about Rena, there was quite a bit of Silvia development to go with it. She’s really growing to like Apollo, and gets rather jealous every time Rena is with him. Also of note is the fact that they’re taking special pains to show that Sirius is growing apart from his sister, avoiding her even, after what happened in episode 14. I think it’s safe to bet that they’ll get an episode in the near future devoted to their strained relationship.
The animation bothered me slightly, but only because there was an abundance of cutesy, looney tunes style faces this episode. Looking at the next episode preview, the character designs seem to change yet again.
Oh and we get a special Rena-drawn ending sequence this episode which has some pretty cute moments. The final shot of the sequence was of Rena’s smiling mouth, teeth sticking out.

Edit a few hours later: I found this poll on the official Aquarion site. Interesting rankings, I’d have thought Apollo, Silvia, and Sirius would be higher on the list, and Reika lower. Toma at number one doesn’t surprise me too much, but Apollonius is all the way at number 11 being beat out by Jean-Jerome of all people.