Just chipping in to discuss a bit about the Tomato Soup Cans before I go back to my Ep12 write-up. You guys have forgotten one little niggling detail.
Yorito despises the stuff.
He did mention that he might come to like the stuff in time, but we have never actually seen him finish a can by himself. Well... there is the possibility that Matsuri drank for the two of them, but that scene is probably just a symbolic gesture on the
existence of Matsuri and Yorito.
The pair of them had rather "depressing" beliefs about the state of their existence and how they feel that they are merely illusions that everybody will soon forget once they are gone. By showing those cans and letting us know that Aono remembers and that Mayuko remembers, and how Mana inherits certain traits of Yorito due to their past friendship, the series is letting us know that Matsuri and Yorito did not totally and utterly disappear, but that their existence continues to live on in the form of memories and such. They have not been totally forgotten.
If you notice, we are not suppose to wholesale swallow everything that Matsuri and Yorito says, and that the two of them have been wrong on many points before. They are not always right, and we have been questioning them for the past few episodes. Those cans also symbolises how they were wrong, for the better, once again.
Did I say I was just "chipping in"? Why yes, a lot of chips in this case.
Writing the "Overall Series Impressions" is going to a timesink.
Thankfully... sola has less main characters than Kanon(2006).
Cheers.