[Aquillion]

Originally Posted by Guido

I guess that if there's any theme or moral is it that the moment we are borned our struggle starts to cling to life as much as possible and not to be left behind.

I think that there were really two separate things the show was aiming at (probably as a result of the anime's director struggling against the manga, although I've never read the manga so I can't be sure--and I don't know which message is whose.)

This sort of comes down to my problem with the Masterminds, too. I do feel that this show had many good episodes and had a great deal of potential. One line could have had the potential to serve as the show's lynchpin, if they'd put it together better and focused on saying one clear thing:

Spoiler:

Kanji, when he has his vision of the Masterminds, says something along the lines of how they are too far above us, too grand and perfect. I said in another post that the writers almost wanted to portray the Masterminds as God... and, actually, if they had gone all out and done that, I think the show would have worked. Not, literally, God in a religious sense, but as something completely beyond our comprehension and out of our control... the children are doomed in the same way as if they'd contracted cancer, or been struck by lightning, or killed by an earthquake. The Masterminds are the God from the book of Job, inexplicable and terrible; Zearth is the Leviathan, vast beyond human comprehension.

If you look at it from this perspective, the show makes a lot more sense. It isn't about people fighting or about urban renewal contracts or about what happens afterwards; it's about 15 children facing death, about how each of them reacts to it. The real message is that, while the universe is harsh and unfair and death is inescapable, you can still face it in your own way; each child found their own meaning in their life or death (friends, family, country, duty, and so on)... or failed to do so.

The show's biggest failings, as I see them, came down to these:

First, it spent too much time focusing on people who weren't the children. The military and the government and all that had no real place in the story. It feels almost like the authors had a completely unrelated message they wanted to graft in, and it didn't fit. We don't really care who gets the Urban Renewal Contract; the story of the government Hushing It Up might have made an interesting TV drama, but didn't really have anything to do with the main plot.

Second, Dung Beetle. He was entirely and completely a mistake, and he should have been cut entirely. He never fit the tone of the series, and having him there undercut the basic message. Yes, the big scene in episode 23 was great, but it left literally the entire the rest of the show hanging bizarrely; one or the other needed to be cut. By acting as their proxy, he put a face on the Masterminds, made them less inexplicable and more comically evil. This is very bad. As long as the Masterminds remained distant and inexplicable, there wasn't any need to address them; but having their impish servant constantly darting around undercut the majesty Kanji described for them. If you're going to put your children in the biblical role of Job, you cannot then have a stand-in for God constantly darting around making fun of them. Paradoxically, for the show's message to work, the children's death and the reason they were forced to fight had to be without intrinsic meaning or reason (since the point was that they each found their own meaning.)

Having Dung Beetle there meant that it ended up feeling like they died because an evil bad imp killed them. That is unsatisfactory, to put it mildly. If, say, Daichii (to name one of the episodes they did well) died because an evil bad imp killed him... well, it sort of changes the message of his story, and not for the better.

This leads to the third problem. The show tried to describe reasons for what the Masterminds were doing, and tried to give a justification for why the children were being forced to fight and die. Why was this there? There was no way any explaination would satisfy (in this case, even if we accept the premise that this pruning is necessary, it is monstrous that anyone would do it in such a random and haphazard fashion), and, in any case, we shouldn't be thinking about that. The focus should be on how the children confront their deaths; focusing on why they're dying, putting in evil villains and convoluted explanations and all of that... it ends up detracting from the central story.

If they wanted to bring in scientists and government officials and people like that, I think they should've aimed at leading to the main message that those adults were, in the end, just as helpless and scared as the children in the face of the "terrible majesty" of the universe; in the end, everyone has to face the death, and everyone has to do it on their own. That would have been a much more mature way of dealing with it... as it was, it felt like the show went out of its way to show the children and a few friendly adults as human (even the ones who break down and can't take it), whereas the government officials are shown as being inexplicably evil and corrupt. Showing the adults as human, frightened, and overwhelmed by the situation themselves would have been much more powerful. There were some hints of this with Kanji's mother, but not very much. It should have been the central point of the scientist / government arc, if they were going to include it at all.

Despite what I said before, I do think that this show succeeded more often than it failed. The individual stories of the children and their deaths were generally pretty well done. Death is unfair. It can happen to anyone at any time for no reason, and no matter what we do or how we change, it is going to claim us eventually. Each of the children's deaths had their own concrete take on this.

I think that they tried a bit too hard to make Jun's into a "link everything together and wrap it up" death, though. I also think that the last episode should have ended immediately at Jun's death. The shot of him destroying Zearth was a rough, far-too-late effort to tie up the loose ends... the problem was that they should never have been focusing on those ends in the first place; the focus should always have stayed on the children and how they died, not on questions of the backstory (the battles after that and so on.) And, after that, it seemed almost cheating and fan-servicey to focus on a "happily ever after" where Kana tells the noble story of the children's fights.

It wasn't a story about noble fights. It was a story, basically, about 15 terminally ill patients and how each of them dealt with it; if the authors had focused on that instead of on Dung Beetle and Urban Renewal Contracts and Zearth Programs and alternate-universe weeding, the show would have been the better for it.