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You could also have pointed out, that the reason we know so little about the older Hasegawa novels and so on, is because they were largely released in a pre-social media environment, much less it would have been cumbersome to even do much with those novels in an online format in the mid to late 90’s. So going by your logic, it’s not that the material was better or worse than say the GXP novels, it is that we’re in a very different technological era where we can track things better and quite simply that content is ancient by today’s standards, even if the US market never got it.

Whether it was warranted or not, Ai still ruffled feathers Dagon, on both sides of the pond. The dynamic changed. Purposefully, yes. If you rewind time back to when we were at the AICBBS, the whole cycle of events is comparable to when OVA 3 and GXP came out then. Ai (aka the non OVA preferred choice) wasn’t as expected by a chunk of the fandom, and for them it failed. Now it’s back to the OVA timeline to disappoint some segment or people group. If the fandom as a whole, were more educated on what’s actually been happening, instead of picking up from the Toonami era, it might have offset some expectations and not caused such a knee jerk reaction at each interval. But it’s not as though we haven’t tried to be that sign at the fork in the road.

From an outside perspective, you could almost say the Tenchi franchise is a rather amusing game of tennis, except each pass of the ball takes about 7-10 years.

I’d actually be slightly surprised if Funi does pick it up, because they are well aware of the backlash OVA 3 got, plus there’s the Petrea issue, which is far far lower on their list of concerns vs. sales. Harem anime have been in a decline and are at an all time low in popularity anyway. The only exception being Nisekoi, and I’d hold that due to it’s manga roots and visual presentation being a mix of Love Hina meets the Monogatari series.

What’s going to matter is how it is received in Japan. Which while not a city stopping event, there did appear to be some turn out for the thing in Takahashi. Over there people have access to the doujin info much more easily, and a lot of the old guard that shipped one girl or the other has moved on. Canonical continuations are more equivalent to god speaking from on high over there, where as Ai got a lot of backlash on both sides of the ocean. Take a look at twitter using any of the tenchi hashtags, the vast majority of people are dying for OVA 4 because of misconception that it’s going to go they way they want and they will see Tenchi get with Ayeka or Ryoko, and see space battles again. Except that doesn’t exist anymore, the story isn’t consistently more of OVA 1 and 2.

The question is just how much can Kajishima piss off everyone, and Tenchi survive on it’s name alone, because it isn’t itself anymore. If they are starting with the wedding of Noike, it’s likely we’ll see the typical reintroduction with the cast doing a lot of nothing, Seto or someone showing up out of the blue, ending with a teaser pic of everyone in royal dress. 2 will be the wedding. But where does it go from there? The little side stories from the minor doujins? Does it cover Rea and the Geminar reveal about Kenshi’s origin? Is he going to time skip to when Sasami is a teen and Tenchi’s boning Noike (Omake)? Or really time skip and go straight to IF with Noike’s first kid? Even further when the collection of kids is in school?

The problem again, is where in any of that, is a antagonist? There’s no enemy, there’s no fight, there’s the lazy and uneventful days of carrot fields and deciding which space chick to bone every day. The same is said of Tenchi’s son, and Seina’s son, and so on and so on.

If he can’t pull off more than that with OVA 4, then yes the OVA series is dead. It needs an enemy, it frankly needs Star Wars injected back into it stat. We need a unknown enemy to drop out of orbit, blast the household, poison Noike and her die in Tenchi’s arms at the pulpit, and kick off a hunt. We need someone to hit Jurai in the meantime and give them a real bloody nose. We need queen Misaki to be captured and 3 episodes of her being converted into the evil counteractor, designed to go after Tsunami. We need Tenchi’s battles to be hard and uphill, and Mihoshi to take a hit for the team, leading into a explanation of what the deal is with her bow and broken brain.

We need a hero and his epic companions, not a boring ass harem daycare simulation.

my time being exposed to the fandom makes me want to burst out laughing like Mark Hamill’s Joker.

Keep up the faith though, maybe something will happen.