Quote:
Originally Posted by Deconstructor
C - The Money and Soul of Possibility Control
[C] is my second favorite anime this season and for good reason (rhymes!). The writers realized most viewers aren't interested in the particular nuances of how an economy works. Personally I am more concerned with how the economy impacts the everyday lives of ordinary people, otherwise known as econoethics. Should we save up our money for the future or spend what we have to survive? Indeed both sides of the argument have strong points in their favor. Some people only have enough money to survive in the present; there is no choice for the poor but to make the bare minimum. And yet for affluent investors up on top of the economic pyramid, the responsibility truly falls upon them to give the impoverished many a future.
The final episode represents the final clash of these two ideals, and future wins. However, the penultimate scene has a higher power stating both sides were correct. According to the higher power, each person presents their own philosophy, and the world is better off because of the diversity in ideas. I disagree as many people think in ways I could never respect. Just look at all the tyrants, dictators, and slaughterers that have stood atop mankind's societies, and you'll see who I mean. The world did get better because of their existence, but only because justice prevailed in the end. If Mikuni succeeded, then Japan would have died.
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And it's all undercut by the fact that it was all complete bullshit. It's not just that it was based on magic to start with. It's not just that it's all retcon based. It's not even that the protagonist got, out of nowhere, the power to do all that.
It's that it was never really about ethics: it was either Mikuni and his immediate ruin of all Japan (where's your present, bitch?), or Kimimarou and his sunny "everything is fine,
somehow. Except for the yen, but who cares about that? Not the Japanese, apparently."
How is that a tough choice? How is that competing ethics?
If, say, Mikuni's course had doomed Japan to a slow but certain death, with few outward symptoms in the present, while Kimimaro's got half the population killed, but at the same time gave the remaining half the opportunity to pick themselves up by the bootstratps and come back stronger, then yeah, I could see it. But as it is? The hell?