[Sorrow-K]

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

Something tells me Sorrow-K is going to hate the ending

Either way, for my opinions, I can't really say. My reactions are far too mixed on the last episode. I'd probably need to rewatch it in order to organize my feelings towards it better.

I'm sitting here, trying to understand exactly what the intended meaning of the ending is. Good stories have meaning. This almost goes without saying.

Spoiler:

The way Sora just basically faded out like a candle almost suggests that her role in the story was just someone to help Gota face his own problems and grow up. But this doesn't seem right because Gota wasn't the main character, she was. This might sound cynical, but I'm looking at this from the point of view of a story, and I'm trying to figure out just what the point of Sora's role in this story was. She pretty much only had one major challenge, and she couldn't overcome it.

The show has always been understated, but because of that it never felt dramatic or gripping. It was like it was trying to move a boulder with a trickle, and it just doesn't work in 12 episodes. Which is kinda why something like ef is far more effective in communicating drama than something like this. Even ARIA, by the same animation company, is far more successful at building up to dramatic and powerful moments than this. They're not the same type of series, obviously, but I think this could have learnt something from ARIA.

As far as the animation itself is concerned, I think I started off as indifferent, but now I'm a critic. It's a bit like the rest of the show, it's understated, but that also leaves it simplistic, basic, hell I'd almost go so far as crude. I really don't think it complements the atmosphere in a way the show intended. The show intended to have a fairly mature set of themes, but the animation at times looked childish, which created an unintended, jarring juxtaposition.

I wrote a fairly lengthy post a couple of days ago about some random thoughts about this show's take on characterization, but it got eaten when my browser crashed before hitting the "Submit Reply" button (FFFFFUUU---). To give the gist, I thought it ended up feeling like the characters are incomplete. Lead characters like Gota and Sora have a fairly standard personality-type, one or two major dilemmas to give their characters some colour and individuality, and a set of small nuances which are shown to us over the course of the series. So basically there's two layers, the big stuff, and the little stuff... but what about the stuff in between. How do they think, how do they interact with people, what motivates them, how do they live, what do they want to make of their lives and arguably most importantly, what was in their past. Gota got some of this stuff, Sora got a lot less, while most of the side characters basically got none. We know nothing of Hara's past, for example, and the only stuff we know about his relationships are these tiny little glimpses we got that told us very little. So I ended up being rather critical of how this show did character development. At best it made characters that were two-layered, at worst it made characters that weren't layered at all.