Quote:
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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I understand what you're saying and agree about a lot of points in general.
But see, when something is revealed it doesn't really have to make a big splash on everything else. It's true they didn't really have time to expand on the aftermath of it since, well since it ended and a lot of other things had to happen as well. But the whole time they were hinting at something bigger. She always thought she was something more interesting - an existence that was as far attached to this world as the Secrets and the Scub. She thought that and we went along with her. But it turned out she wan't any of that - she was a regular human just like everyone else. This means for her everything changed. You can't say that didn't have any impact on her.
It's probably a good time to point out that not all characters and their development impact the story in a big way (in general). In this case that was even clearly pointed out - that she wasn't anyone special and thus could not make any significant impact on anything. She was basically the human character of the show - the one that expects to be big and special but ends up being insignificant. That's what we humans usually do. There were a lot of these "human nature" and "that's what people do" things in this show to be honest.
All that aside it introduced one more thing, which again wasn't developed because it came way too late for there to be time for it. I mentioned it before but - Eureka went back into this world's past and managed to bring a human back from there.
There are a lot of things that could happen from this point on. But they didn't because it's over - if it was as long as the original it would have probably developed better since it would expand on a lot of things.