NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a – 09 – Into the Lion’s Den

It took four months, but we finally learn where 9S ended up: right in Adam’s clutches, as expected. The trap takes the form of an endless matrix of hallways and doors, and Adam has all the keys. He stalks 9S, then sidles right up to him and mocks 9S’ fondness for 2B. Meanwhile 2B knows something is up, so she follows the Pods to the art room, where she finds specific coordinates.

After a futile call to the Bunker for backup (there’s no backup to spare), she uses her Pod like a Mary Poppins umbrella, arresting her descent into the coordinates. A pure white “Copied City” coalesces around her.

She walks down streets, through a church-like structure filled with reliefs of humans and a grotesque construction made from captured YoRHa soldiers, and in a library similar to the one in Beauty and the Beast, Adam finally reveals himself with panache.

Adam reminds 2B that they met when he and his brother were first born, but that there “wasn’t time” to get to know each other, what with 2B trying to kill them on the spot. Now he’s in complete control, and like a cat with a mouse is content to simply mess with 2B in an attempt to get her to express emotions.

2B takes the bait when Adam shows her a crucified 9S at his mercy, and seems to feed off of her surge of anger and hatred. The two spar, but it becomes clear that physical attacks are pointless; Adam can regenerate his body instantly.

With 2B seemingly out of options, Adam produces a pure white copy of 9S. Though Adam is disconnected from the network and thus mortal, a group of 9S clones spring forth from the ground and restrain and choke 2B. But before she passes out, her Pod tells her “the appointed time has come.”

2B wasn’t really trying to defeat Adam; she was only buying time for 9S’ Pod to hack into Adam’s system. Once it does, the white city turns charcoal grey, the clones disappear, and 2B is free to impale Adam with her sword. And she would have, too, if Eve hadn’t stepped in her path.

Eve protects his big brother, but as I assume he is also disconnected from the Network, when he dies, he seems to die for good. 2B gets off relatively easy; her sword is destroyed, but Eve’s blow merely blasts her out of the library. 9S is secured, and 2B is 100% emoting when she says “let’s go home.”

Any day’s a good day when you and your partner are able to walk away in one piece. But while Adam was once merely very curious and pushy in his desire to learn everything he can about Androids and 9S and 2B in particular, now that they’ve killed his brother I imagine they’ve made a mortal enemy of him. In other words, they might’ve taught him how to be vengeful, and thus even more dangerous.

After a production-related hiatus, the final four episodes of Nier:Automata have surfaced, and a second cour has been confirmed. I’ll be watching and writing about both. And no, I still haven’t played the game!

Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai! – 05 – Toothpaste Isn’t Food!

Sakurai can’t even daydream about falling in class without Uzaki getting on his case, and it just happens to be a class about dream interpretation. Uzaki is having so much fun mocking the issues behind Sakurai’s falling dream, she almost falls down the steps herself, but is tiny enough to be plucked out of mid-air and held in the safety Sakurai’s arms. Neither blushes about this unplanned close contact.

We finally see Sakurai spend some time with his male friend Sakaki Itsuhito, who is pained to hear that his pal has been wasting his crucial college days doing nothing of note. That is, until Uzaki arrives, he gets a taste of their dynamic, and he’s fully invested in helping them get together. This draws the ire of Ami, who prefers a hands-off approach and condemns any meddling on Sakaki’s part.

But as the final sequence shows, if they don’t do anything to move things along, Sakurai and Uzaki will become an official couple in, oh, about a thousand years. That’s because in the aftermath of an epic monologue defending the Choco-Mint flavor to the mint-adverse Sakurai, the two both realize they’ve shared indirect kisses from using the same toothpick to eat the candy. This is stuff middle schoolers would get bashful about.

So yeah, like Sakaki, I’m worried this thing will just keep spinning its wheels without intervention. The Uzaki in class and in front of Sakaki was much like the one at the glasses store—mercilessly mocking Sakurai and his flaws, yet still blushing at the indirect kiss realization. Hopefully something will come of their continuing to blush over one another…but I won’t hold my breath!

P.S. Like Uzaki, I am a dedicated Choco-Mintian. Death to the Anti-Mintite Brigade!

Owarimonogatari – 06

When it’s time to solve the mystery of how Oikura’s mom disappeared from a locked room, it’s not surprise that Ougi shows up to cramp Hanekawa’s style. For someone whose face is essentially a mask, she sure doesn’t mask her contempt for Hanekawa and her large boobs, which she feels are exclusively responsible for stealing Araragi away from her.

As usual, I’m not sure how much of what Ougi says is serious and comes from her heart, because I’m still not sure she has a heart, and isn’t some kind of strange construct or apparition, in contrast to all the flesh-and-blood girls in Araragi’s life. She says all the things a jealous underclassmen who likes him would say…but does she really mean them?

I hope we’ll find out later. In the meantime, we have an arc to conclude! And conclude it does, with Hanekawa answering Ougi’s challenge and coming to the same conclusion as to what happened to Oikura’s mom. That leaves Araragi as the only one yet to realize the truth…and it’s a truth Hanekawa would rather Oikura never be told and never know for the rest of her days, not matter what immediate benefit could arise from telling her.

Still, she agrees with Ougi that it’s something Araragi must figure out for himself and make his own choice. They start offering subtle hints, and he keeps coming to the wrong conclusions, so they give him less subtle hints (over forty of them!) until he’s finally got it: Oikura’s mother starved herself to death, and for two years, Oikura took care of a corpse, until it eventually decomposed into nothing recognizable, giving the impression she disappeared, while she actually “evaporated”, like boiling water.

It is indeed an awful truth, and one Araragi and the other have no idea how Oikura will react to. But Araragi decides he’s going to tell her. He’s through looking past/overlooking Oikura, as he has for the last six years, as she overlooked her dead mother for two. He’s going to see her, look her straight in the eye, and tell her the truth. It’s a long walk back to his apartment, and the sequence of camera shots in the intensifying sunset make that walk a beautiful occasion.

Oikura takes the news far better than Araragi expected. More importantly, learning the truth (or perhaps, having it confirmed by someone else) made it that more real, and that much more releasing. Turns out Oikura is moving to a smaller municipal condo, and transferring out of Naoetsu High. But she went back to her class anyway when she knew Tetsujo was on leave, hoping something might change. In the end, Oikura is smiling, but not demonically, before the bright sunset. And the brightness isn’t hurting her.

Now that things avoided have been remembered, things at a standstill can move again. Because what was done with the truth was more important than discovering it, Ougi later concedes this particular case was her loss, also admitting she was wrong that Araragi would turn tail and run like he had in the past. But helping Oikura find change helped him to change too.

Oikura visited Senjougahara and they made up, and she left to start her new life. But not before taping an envelope under Araragi’s desk. This time, it had something in it: several pages. What exactly it was is kept a mystery (which I like), but whatever it is gives Araragi a laugh, so I like to think it’s a reversal of the message the earlier empty envelope sent.

Owarimonogatari – 05

Oikura knew Araragi’s parents were cops because they were the ones who got her out of her abusive home and had her live with them. Araragi can’t remember on his own, but that’s not entirely why Oikura despises him. As we learn during one of the more powerful sustained monologues in the Monogatari franchise, and a chance for Inoue Marina to remind us just how good she is when she sinks her teeth into a role.

As hostile as she is to both Araragi and Hanekawa (throwing tea at the former, which the latter catches with her cat-like reflexes), she still seems to get a lot off her chest and be better for it. She also comes off like never before like a deeply wounded individual; a lost soul who has given up hope.

It’s already the end for her; after all the punishment she’s endured in her still short life—physical and emotional—she believes she’s too frail for happiness, so she despises it along with herself and everything else in the world.

That punishment includes having to watch Araragi’s perfect family seem to “show off” in front of her. She’d glare at them in resentment, or for not knowing how different they regard “normal family life”; in other words, how much they take love for granted. Oikura was never given love. Her parents divorced, her mother became reclusive and never left her room, and Oikura had to take care of her, until one day she was just…gone.

After all that, Araragi forgetting all about her and giving her nothing in return for what she gave to him throughout their encounters, reveals itself as simply the tip of a very nasty, despairing iceberg. Inoue mixes dread and malice with tones of black humor and feigned happiness in Oikura’s delivery, heightening her aura of imbalance; a spinning top about to fall off a table.

She made Araragi a villain despite his relatively small contribution to her wholesale suffering because she needed to blame and despise someone other than her parents (which neither she chose nor who chose her) or herself just to keep going on. Whenever she got near the happiness Araragi seems to ooze, it felt either too bright or heavy for her frail, scarred self to survive.

Happiness, she believes, will kill her just as efficiently as the emotions on the other end of the spectrum. So she’s settled for something a little more moderate on that scale, and it’s slowly dissolving her heart. Araragi tell her happiness can’t do that, and there are many kinds that would work for her. But Oikura lacks the ability to access them.

What she needs now, more than anything else, is to continue being heard, and being in the presence of others. When she kicks them out, Hanekawa says both she and Araragi will keep coming back, because “troubling those we care about is how we do things.” It’s pushy, but it’s also something Oikura needs to hear: someone cares about her; is fond of her; and she’s several decades too early to be talking about endings. 

Hanamonogatari – 04

Because Suruga insists, Rouka tells her the full story: how she met Kaiki, who told her about apparitions, and how she acquired her first piece of the devil: her left leg. It once belonged to another girl named Rouka; a high-schooler who her older boyfriend had knocked up, and whose family wanted her to abort it. With this devil’s leg, Rouka-2 almost beat her mother to death, mirroring what happened to Suruga with her arm.

The day after hugging Rouka-2 and saying she’d take the problem from her, the devil leg had replaced her crippled old one. Rouka has since replaced almost a third of her body with devil parts, and plans to “collect them all” so she can take control of the devil altogether, even though doing so will mean losing all of her body, head to toe. With that heartrendingly bleak goal announced, Rouka says farewell to Suruga, asking her to go out and “do all the human things” she can no longer do.

That night, Suruga gets a call from Karen who informs her that Rouka committed suicide three years ago, presumably from a combination of her broken leg and her “bad” family situation. Now we’ve reached nadir of Suruga’s arc: she’s been talking with a ghost all this time. Shaken and never more uncertain, Suruga simply goes out and runs. She runs and runs across landscapes until collapsing in an intersection; a crossroads (subtle!). Then a car pulls up and honks at her, and holy shit, it’s Araragi!

Like Kaiki, Araragi’s appearance couldn’t have been timed better, or be any more awesome. He now has long hair, a resplendent yellow VW New Beetle Suruga can’t help but hilariously gripe about (“What’s with this round car?”), a Shinobu keychain, and a little more life experience behind his belt. But Suruga gradually realizes once they talk that it’s the same old Araragi she’s leaned on, looked up to and missed so dearly. If anyone can help give her the guidance she needs at this point in her story, it’s him. A gorgeous, art-filmy all-night “road-trip” segment ensues.

Also like Kaiki, Araragi isn’t interested in steering Suruga in a particular direction or in doing her own legwork for her, but he’s much nicer and more caring about it. He helps her realize she’s fee to obey the opinions of Rouka, Kaiki, of her mother if she wants, but she’s just as able to fight those opinions if she’s not convinced. Rather than go along with what those voices have said or done, she decides to strike out on her own path. Araragi asks if she needs any more help, and she says no, which pleases him. Suruga’s back, and she’s going on offense.

Hanamonogatari – 03

So, Rouka isn’t just gathering the misfortune of others, but also gathered Suruga’s devilish left arm, and shows it to her in Suruga’s classroom. Then she invites Suruga to join her for some one-on-one basketball, and whatever the extent of her career-ending leg injury, it certainly doesn’t seem to affect her anymore, as she puts up more than a fight against Suruga (who is herself understandably rusty).

Suruga is still troubled by Rouka’s present existence, and wants to know what she’s been up to these last three years. After she agrees to tell her own story of how she came upon the monkey paw (which is skipped over, since that’s mostly covered in Bakemonogatari), Suruga fights back Rouka’s amorous advances and insists she tell her the story of how she became the Devil Lord. Rouka was always someone who learned to hide the full extent of her talents to avoid being hated by her less talented peers, which is how she became a defensive specialist.

But once she was injured, people only ever looked down on her, even though she was doing the same to them. She remarks that when she was hospitalized for her leg, she wanted to talk to those as unfortunate and pitiable (if not more) than she was, so she could tell them she understood exactly how they felt (the truth) and that she’d solve it all (a lie), sending them on their way. When her first “client” returned, her problems were indeed gone (though ostensibly more as a result of time), and Rouka’s Collection of Misfortune began from there.

The basketball match is brief but adds a welcome touch of action to what is essentially another long monologue with occasional commentary by Suruga, but that doesn’t mean the setting of that conversation is any less visually interesting. I especially dig the very upscale gymnasium with way more markings than it needs, and the court of is made up of the kind of wood you’d find in the Kia K900. Rouka’s appeal to Suruga’s bisexuality is also good continuity. But the fact remains, Rouka has only told half of her story. The other half centers on how she started gathering parts of the devil – a story she warns doesn’t have a happy ending.