Cruel Angel Theses

So my predictions in my previous post were wrong. I’m glad they were, for had I been right, it would’ve meant that kimikiss would have been unpredictably predictable, and we all know how well that would have went down. The masses need their closure, even if the more discerning among us can do without all that finality riff-raff, and I suppose it’s nice to have a good old-fashioned choice for once. You win some, you lose some.

I had a feeling the eyecatch would be that of the victorious girls

IKnight’s quirky Exia analogies made me think of Gundam 00 episode 24, and how for all its majesty and pomp, the emotional impact of Christina and Lichtendahl’s coughing-up-blood-in-my-suit, tears-floating-in-zero-gravity, asteroids-all-around-us deathbed confession only lasted for as long as the moment, like the hum in your ears after a particularly deafening rock concert. What kimikiss did in its final throes was different, like the melancholic realisation that Konata experiences after the concert, a quiet discovery of what would otherwise be just another bit of entertainment silently consumed.

But I’ve already said all I can or want to say about it, I’d think. So has Jenny. So has CCY. So has Mike. What I noted in the latter half of the episode was how for all of Kasai’s ability to potentially take it somewhere else and break through its already-broken adaptation status, he chose to instead steer it through a path more sweet than bitter, with the obligatory fireworks sequence that’s already been done before, and will probably be continued to be used as long as the much romanticised in fiction school festival device remains in vogue.

I don’t blame him. Previous works that I’ve seen or read that embrace the the double-pronged category of contemporary realism/teen romance include Bokura ga Ita and Yubisaki Milk Tea; while undeniably realistic for the most part, they impact in a way more uncomfortable than delightful, and spin a tale so steeped in despair even Itoshiki Nozomu would give his thumbs up in approval. Real teens are stupid and cruel in love. They screw with each other’s hearts and mostly remind you of yourself in how immature and shoddy their thought processes are; they bring to light how a majority of teenage couples eventually breakup and how getting into a relationship at that age is nothing but a farce.

In contrast, kimikiss was fashioned in a distinctively hyperreal style, something I was always aware of but didn’t elucidate till recently. It’s no different from Kaiji or any other show that tries to illustrate by means of its characters a Big Idea or Interesting Point about the state of the human psyche; the variables are all controlled, the environment is at its optimal settings for maximised data collation and hypothesis testing efficiency, and while suspension of disbelief tends to fray at a rate that only questioning anime physics can match if acceptance of the world isn’t complete, when it works it tends to do so really well.

Technical achievements aside, there were several parallels in the finale that tickled me, if only because the resemblance to other well-known anime and how Kasai managed — whether as a result of exposure to other works or subliminally as a result of prolonged exposure study in the genre — to revive many a familiar scene that made me wonder if there was any amount of nod-wink on his part, or the storyboard’s.

I couldn’t bring myself to screencap the frog puppet lesbians

School Days was the first thing that came to mind here. The last school festival that I saw in a series with a bonfire structure in the centre and students dancing around it ended in tears, blood, drama and a sense of the macabre. What I liked about the scene was how little focus was given to it, or the school festival in general for that matter, and you could say that kimikiss subverted this very well by allowing its characters to basically ruin what any other anime usually glorifies to the extent of allocating a couple of episodes.

Shakugan no Shana aside, I was glad to see that the school festival wasn’t an ends to a means like how any typical high school anime would have abused it. Instead of endlessly harping on what’s really nothing more than just a glorified date within the boundaries of school traditions, the emphasis here lay with the characters, allowing their latent problems to finally manifest and culminate in various resolutions. How many shows have actually done that instead of resorting to some saccharine and run-of-the-mill fluff? Not a lot, I’d guess.

unlike Sanae, however, I doubt Eriko would last 5 minutes on a surfboard

Then there was Byousoku 5cm, Cosmonaut specifically. I guess the question as to what a paper airplane symbolises should never be brought up again in future romance anime considering that we’ve had Shinkai and Kasai both elaborate in turn as to how it’s a matter of maturing and confronting your own fears head on instead of running away from them; nevertheless, its recurrence in this scene is significant, even if it seems to be at odds with its Shinkai counterpart.

In Byousoku, Sanae folds her career choice sheet into an airplane before launching it as a way of showing how she’s finally letting go of her anxieties, literally throwing caution to the wind as she proceeds to tackle that wave she’s been having problems with. In kimikiss this is handled differently as it represents Eriko’s indolence and her indifference towards life and living in general: the detail here, however, is in how both the scene as it actually happened and the scene in recollection are portrayed.

The actual launching of the paper airplane doesn’t go very far as it’s discovered by Kazuki, leading to their meeting. It’s interesting to deconstruct the double meaning here — on one hand, it’s implied that the airplane as imagined by Eriko in this scene mirrors the conversation that she has with Kazuki, and how he’ll chase her no matter how much she runs away. Assuming that the airplane does indeed fall to the ground at some point, this means that the act of launching the airplane is nothing more than Eriko running away like she mentions, and since that means that Kazuki would have to walk that much further to retrieve it and return it to her, it seems like an apt accompaniment.

On the other hand you have the more conventional possibility that Eriko imagines this scene as Sanae does, finally throwing caution to the wind and getting over her fear of commitment in a relationship. Both of them share the same insecurity that comes with indecision. It’s straightforward and gets the job done, although I can’t help but favour the first interpretation of the airplane better.

this scene needed more mini-donkey and snow, and less creepy brother-sister talk

I still need to write a review on Tokyo Marble Chocolate, but this will do for now. It’s amazing how such a relatively short scene has stuck with me for so long, but what I remember of it fits pretty well into kimikiss. In TMC both the guy’s and girl’s sides end with them reuniting on the pedestrian bridge, and what Mao and Kouichi have gone through would be no less, even if you discount all the teenage angst; the long-awaited confession could be construed as a tragic misunderstanding of sorts, disregarding the scale on which it happens in TMC.

What struck me about love in anime is how it’s often portrayed as a race towards the finish line, with many a series underscoring this by having the confession take place at the eleventh hour. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and TMC goes out of its way to debunk this popular myth: love is like a waltz more than anything, something that can only be achieved if done in tandem with your significant other. It illustrated to great effect how trying to rough it out alone instead of confiding to someone never works, and while it doesn’t really compare to kimikiss in that regard, the similarity here was comforting nonetheless.

Speaking of waltzes, the Honey and Clover vibes were strong with this one. It was a great way to conclude kimikiss by way of reminder that Kasai did have a hand in this after all, for having not one but two confessions coming to fruit beneath the distant glow of fireworks seemed like deja vu to me at first; it was then that I noticed it felt all too familiar no thanks to Takemoto and his long-overdue confession at the end of season 1, and realised that the effect achieved here must have been intentional. Or maybe there’s something about fireworks and confessions after all that romantic tension that go hand in hand.

for the sequel they need Yuumi to have magical AIDS and be estranged from her sister

Kanon 2006 made a surprise appearance in this one, and it was this shot of lonely Yuumi at the fountain that reminded me at last of what I found so tragic in episode 13, where Kouichi goes on this manly rant about saving up and promises and long-distance relationships — it wasn’t what was being said so much as it was the bloody fountain nearby. Despite how I thought Shiori had one of the weakest arcs no thanks to her mysterious terminal disease and even more suspect recovery later on no thanks to “miracles”, the scene by the fountain with Yuuichi remains one of the more picturesque and tragic ones.

Funny how the mind works. It might be that I’ve come to equate fountains in the park at night with a sense of hopelessness and fatalistic come-what-may no thanks to that episode of Kanon, and Kouichi’s little speech made all that difference — not because what he was saying was particularly amazing, but because unlike Yuuichi and Shiori, there was at the very least a glimmer of hope in what I saw as an otherwise futile and despairing backdrop. It’s too bad that Yuumi had to be there all alone and on such a night, too, but better single and happy than attached and sad, I guess.

fuck yes you are the most heartbreaking departure ever

It might seem strange to some of you to have a relationship end with a handshake, especially if you’ve been one of those hardcore Kouichi x Yuumi supporters, but there’s a lot of truth in this simple gesture and her actions leading up to it, even if everything else’s been far from realistic. From this point onwards I was sold, and it wasn’t because I had done the exact same thing in real life previously, either — it was how Yuumi’s end was handled with grace and dignity befitting that of her person, and couldn’t have been done better.

Playing Waltz at this point wouldn’t have went amiss either, considering how it felt like Honey and Clover II’s finale. There seems to be a strange continuity here with Kouichi taking on Takemoto-sque designs, even if he’s not as manly or dedicated in his resolve about things, but the way in which Yuumi said her farewell felt like Hagu all over again, right down to the “I’m glad I met you” line. Even if in lieu of epic tear-soaked honey sandwich eating all we got was a shot of Kouichi facepalming like he just got back his STD test results, the impact was there, and it worked.

So what’s life after kimikiss look like? Well, I’ve got higher standards by which to measure anything vaguely resembling a love drama, for one. It’s taught me to anticipate any future works that Kasai may or may not direct. It’s reaffirmed my belief that realistic harem shows are the way to go, if only because I won’t be amazingly frustrated at H2O’s recent venture into Higurashi territory, the last episode of which still remains unwatched at the time of writing this.

Most of all, it’s shown me that you can have a school drama centred around teenagers and romance that’s grounded in reality without making them screw or stab the brains out of each other while trying to resolve their various love triangles in a manner akin to flipping a coin. Maybe a decade from now when shows like these become the norm for the vague harem label rather than the exception and astral projections are a thing of the past, we’ll look back on this and commemorate Kasai as one of the pioneers of such a brave venture. With a statue. And a town named after him in his honour.