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Glass Fleet confuses me, and I don’t mean because the story is overly complex: I understand the ideas of the revolution.  What confuses me is why the story spends all it’s time with Cleo and his merry band of space pirates/revolutionaries when the antagonist, Vetti, is a much more interesting character.  So much so that I worry that my enjoyment of his amoral antics might make me a bad person, or at least a worse person than when I started. 

You may recall that the last volume of Glass Fleet contained an episode highlighting the back-story of our would be king of the universe; and between his tragic yet engaging history, his grand and currently working scheme to take over the universe, and his fatal illness that is the driving factor for all of his affairs, he a much more rounded character than Cleo or Michel at this point.  Plus, he’s a total ass.  More often than not that would be a bad thing, but Vetti is the sort of always right, arrogant ass that people love.  Think House, but in space and with more buggery.  For example, Vetti needed to marry the daughter of the Space Pope in order to rule the galaxy, and she agreed to marry him for purely political reason: but that’s not enough for him.  Vetti goes through all of the extra effort to make the woman fall in love with him just so he can snub her to feel better about himself.  Her sorrow is delicious.

I am forced to assume that eventually the character of Cleo will be fleshed out in such a way that I will actually care about him, but the problem with having such an aloof character is that if he doesn’t care about anything, I have a hard time caring about him.  At this point he lacks a goal, sure he might decided to go after the throne his royal blood deserves but until he commits to doing something other than flying around the galaxy looking for trouble he’s dead weight in a story that bogged down by too many flashbacks as is.

Speaking of flashbacks, this volume has a flashback episode as well.  This time we are treated to the history of Cleo’s parentage, which is only interesting because I’m all but certain that Cleo and Vetti are brothers.  This sheds some interesting light on the prophecy that has been told to both Cleo and Vetti during the course of the show.  Both of them have heard it and made their own conclusions, but neither of them has yet to fathom the true meaning of the words. 

On the whole, Volume Four of Glass Fleet was far more enjoyable that Volume Three was.  I can only hope that Volume Five breaks the pattern or I’ll be forced to suffer through another two hours of flashbacks about seemingly random characters until Volume Six tell me why I should care.  All of this highlights the main problem I have with Glass Fleet, which is its horrid pacing.  When it’s good, it’s very good; but when it’s bad I start to wonder why I’m watching it at all.  As of right now, the good is outweighing the bad, but only just.  Let’s cross our fingers as we await the next installment.

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