Originally Posted by Xagzan
That's the problem. We don't get anything else. So we find out who Elena is. And that's it. Nothing changes. She doesn't change (aside from maybe she won't go on incoherent rants anymore, but she's still the same one note otaku girl), Ao doesn't change, Fleur doesn't change, the plot certainly doesn't change. It has no impact, so how in the world am I supposed to care about it? I definitely didn't care about finding out who she was for Elena's own sake, aside from faint curiosity about whether it would give her depth; that would've required me being previously invested in her character in the first place. The only reason I had any interest in this plot thread was to see how it would affect things I did care about, like Ao, or Fleur, or even more so, Eureka and the E7 world.
So then we get to the reveal, and, ok, she's not Ao's sister, she's not Renton and Eureka's daughter, that's fine. That was just one possibility I was anticipating among countless others I hadn't even considered. But she wasn't just not any of those things. She was nothing. And I don't mean she was a nobody: being simply some random girl of no blood relation to Ao would've been just dandy, if done right. No, I mean nothing. Her true identity had no relevance to anyone else's goals, their backgrounds, or even really their subsequent actions or how the story got resolved. The only thing you could maybe say was changed by this plot thread was Elena herself, and even there, hardly at all.
So in the end, we were led along with entire episodes hinting at something--we didn't know what, but something--anything more to the mystery they were foisting on us. But there wasn't. It's fine to subvert your audience's expectations, but whatever it is you eventually present to them, whether they expected it or not, should at least make some kind of splash. Otherwise you just wasted valuable time that should've been devoted to something actually important to the show.
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