[bin1127]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

By the same token, I would say that things started building from the true ending of the first season with his "confession" to Kirino in America. The extent of his confession there and the amount he had bonded with her (and she with him) was suspicious, and this got reinforced again in Ria's episode in this second season.

I really should rewatch the S1 ending just to see how far their relationship had progressed up to that point. The first time I watched it I couldn't pick out anything obvious. Though Ria seemed to show something did.

The balancing act to not spoil it early for us was tough but as long as valid hints were dropped long the way and didn't just make up a deus ex Kirino then I think author did a great job. I especially liked how the author chose to throw everything into the open right from the 1st of the 3 ending episodes. It's as though the earth rolled off his shoulder and was finally allowed to let the cat of the bag that has almost chewed its way out.

Originally Posted by Night Blitz

After the ending aired I was a bit....perplexed, but it was through reading the interpretations here on the series that I gained a higher respect for the author.

[...]I showed my sister who happens to be 3 years younger than me, she's 21, this series and explained what happened while I showed her some clips. She loved it and felt that as a narrative it was well done. That lead me to conclude that one needs a type of maturity to appreciate this series and what the author intended to do.

Maybe it's maturity, or maybe you're just living the dream.

I'm sure the author took a lot of flak throughout the whole writing and production but the harshest has got to be from denying partisan fans their Kuroneko or Ayase ending. If we're thinking about morality of incest in anime then we're more on worrying about how mainstream media compares to this. But if you're a Kuroneko diehard, the gripe with Kyousuke choosing Kirino is that she's not Kurnoneko.

Originally Posted by Fragment_Searcher

So, basically, it could be that her breaking down wasn’t just because of her guilt then, it may also have been because she was losing confidence that she really could go through with it after all.

That's an interesting way of seeing that scene. Truthfully I couldn't quite focus on what that scene meant cause I was still recovery from the Manami confession . But I always felt Kirino was aiming towards a defined and limited goal and becoming the village pariah for the sake of love probably wasn't her intention.

Originally Posted by SigUp

Furthermore, what I find a little bit of funny is the different attitudes of people while judging fiction. You have boatloads of fiction about violence, murder, war, killing, yet most people are not grossed out by that or have morale questions about the plot (I mean James Bond for example not only kills loads of people, but he sleeps with like multiple women in every film ). In contrast, show something like incest and suddenly many people are like "Whoa, that's gross!".

Exactly. I felt incest in an anime is an acceptable plot element but it's not like I would propose people do it in real life. Interestingly though the jdrama Sora Kara Furu Ichioku no Hoshi with Kimura Takuya also had a surprise incest twist at the end and that shook me up more than all the anime incest out there. I guess fiction with real people is more "real"?