YMMV / Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water

• Adorkable: Jean is not only intelligent, but also generous, sweet-natured, caring, friendly, loyal, naive, and dedicated to what he likes. He's quite brave, as well. Of course he's naturally green when it comes to social graces around the opposite sex, but in a way it proves to be an asset. Nadia's English voice actress Meg Bauman said on the original DVD interview's that she would date someone like him "in a heartbeat".
• Americans Hate Tingle:
  • Despite being voted as the favorite anime heroine in the famous Japanese magazine Animage, Nadia has had her fair share of detractors overseas, who find her whiny and unlikable. Ironically, even much the Japanese staff of Gainax shared the view of said overseas detractors.
  • Certain critics have even found the Grandis Gang annoying, while they were very popular in Japan.
• Awesome Music: The music score for the final battle between New Nautilus and Red Noah. The rest of the series score is high quality given Shiro Sagisu's involvement (and indeed the style of the music foreshadows what would come half a decade later with Neon Genesis Evangelion).
• Bizarro Episode:
  • The Island/Africa episodes (23-34), save 30 (well, parts of it anyway) and 31. All you need to know about them is: Jean, Nadia, Marie, and King wash up on an island and meet up with Grandis, Sanson, Hanson, and Ayerton on another island. At this point, one can watch 30 and 31 and skip right to 35.
  • Also the sequel movie, which was not produced by Gainax, has nothing to do with the original plot, and recycles over half an hour of footage (a third of its runtime).
• Broken Base:
  • In Spain, the series's opening was replaced by a totally new song, more calypso than pop, performed by the legendary Sol Pilas, who sang the Spanish openings of a lot of series in The '90s. However, this new song (which you can hear there) is a deep base-breaker among Spaniards: some love it for its quirky nature and nostalgia value, while others only think of it as a Replacement Scrappy for the original opening by Miho Morikawa.
  • Some like the Spanish dub for its good handful of terrific performances (including but not limited to Jean, Gargoyle and Nemo, the latter two being considered by some to be even better than the original) while others decry it for also having questionable cast choices (Nadia and Marie especially) and an inconsistent translation (which actually led to Sanson and Hanson weirdly swapping one of their names and getting the other changed).
• Cult Classic: While not terribly well remembered (espcecially in comparison to its successor Evangelion), Nadia is still considered a solid piece of anime from The '90s and shares fans with the rest of the works of both of its creators, Miyazaki and Anno. To put it in perspective, it's still beloved enough to have gotten a 30th Anniversary celebration and exhibition in Tokyo in 2020.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • There are no fans of the aforementioned sequel movie, "Nadia: The Motion Picture", mainly due to the fact that Gainax was forced to opt out at the beginning of production and ultimately had nothing involved with it^note While they are listed as the studio that animated it on My Anime List, the animation was actually done by Sogo Vision, who did work on some of the TV series, but were not in charge, as well as the fact that it had major flaws in continuity, and reset most of the Character Development.
  • Sentai Filmworks evidently feels the same way. The Movie was excluded from their Complete Series DVD and Blu-Ray Sets when they reissued Nadia in 2014, which is a contrast to the original ADV Complete Sets in the mid-2000s, which had included the Movie. The 2022 reissue by GKids similarly excludes the Movie from the Blu-Ray set.
• Gateway Series: Nadia was arguably Studio Gainax's biggest success before Neon Genesis Evangelion. The title of Welcome to the NHK is a Shout-Out to how many Otaku — and Hikikomori — first became interested because of this series.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Even if it was butchered with censorship, odd original music and a divisive dub, the anime became a minor success in Spain, where it was titled Nadia: The Mystery of the Blue Gemstone and broadcast in the good old times of Telecinco in The '90s.
• Questionable Casting: The Spanish dub features a slight base breaking with the casting of Jaione Insausti, who is sometimes criticized for sounding too childish for a teenager like Nadia, and Maribel Legarreta, who is criticized for sounding too adult for Marie.
• Spiritual Successor: Nadia has certain similarities to Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky; the original plot outline/treatment was written by Miyazaki himself back in the 70s – pre-Laputa, and in fact reused by Miyazaki for his film.
• Superlative Dubbing: Even if there's folks out there who wish Streamline Pictures subbed the whole series or simply prefer that dub over ADV's, you can't deny that the latter's extremely good in its own right. Monster Island's decision to cast kids for the main trio turned out to be a good one, and even with Nathan Parsons' shaky French accent early on, that, too, evolves over time. Also, you can feel the chemistry with him and Meg Bauman.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Ensign Fait. While his death in Episode 15 is one of the show's most powerful moments, it's also arguably undermined by Fait only having been introduced in that episode (and not even having been seen as an Extra in the Nautilus crew shots). Had Jean befriended Fait in the preceding episodes once they came aboard the Nautilus, his death would've been even more of a gut punch for Jean and the audience.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The movie arguably. While Episode 39 gives the series closure, the Distant Epilogue doesn’t allow Nadia to explore the repercussions of Gargoyle taking the Secret War public. It’s also plausible and realistic that not every Neo-Atlantean would’ve been aboard Red Noah when it went down. Having surviving Neo-Atlanteans operating from the shadows and without the oversight of Gargoyle (and possibly even tying them into the lead-up to the First World War) could’ve been an interesting, compelling storyline if it had been executed differently.
• Unexpected Character: Would you ever expect this series to make its way to a long running video game series involving various robots fighting each other?
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Some viewers find Nadia to be completely off-putting, even during the canonical episodes. Her worsening personality in the filler arcs also makes it hard for some viewers to care about her anymore after the plot returns at episode 35.
• Vocal Evolution:
  • As per the norm with any English Dub and its cast – particularly, as pointed out earlier, Nathan Parsons struggling with Jean's French accent initially.
  • Like Aaron Dismuke on Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) a few years later, Parsons and Meg Bauman (Nadia) also both hit puberty during the dubbing and their voices noticeably deepen by the time of the closing episodes and the Movie. Ironically, this arguably helps their performances and sells Jean and Nadia’s character growth and the passage of time (as the series roughly takes place over a full year from 1889 to 1890).
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite its generally lighthearted narrative, there are many scenes (and several episodes) that are decidedly dark. Several characters are executed onscreen quite graphically, the heroine tries to commit suicide at one point, and later shoots her father, Nemo, while under Gargoyle's control. There's also a brief instance of racism, and near the end (between episodes 30 and 31), Nadia spends nearly two full episodes nude. And yet, it was originally aired on a prime time slot in the early evening.

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