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Saikano ending SPOILER!

We do have a lot to talk about... Let's start with the French text fragments that are flashed during the OP.

(snippage)

Now, you asked another question:

dormcat wrote:

One thing I don't understand is why Shin Takahashi put French in manga (the troops attacking Hokkaido speak English in anime, but French in manga).

The short answer is that French and English both signal "technologically advanced foreign culture with a history of hostility towards Japan" to the Japanese, and that may well be enough answer in itself. However, I think this deserves a fairly complex answer, if you're up to it. What follows is my preliminary analysis of some of the details of the series, in a question-and-answer format.

(snippage)

spoiler[1. Who is fighting the war?

On the one side, obviously, Western military forces are deployed against Japan. No mention is made as to whether Japan is all alone, or has allies. For reasons which I will shortly make clear, I believe that this war is between Japan alone on the one side, and most of the rest of the world on the other.

It is clear that the war hasn't been going on long - but long enough for Tokyo to have been destroyed (in a nuclear strike?) My reason for making this assumption is that none of the characters behave as if they are in a fully mobilised society, at least in the beginning. The war is a recent and somewhat unreal thing to them, in Hokkaido, and only becomes "real" to them when the air raid hits Sapporo.

2. What is the cause of the war?

Hold on to your hat - I think Chise is the reason for the war. Or rather, I believe that Japan's possession of a ground-breaking new military technology (call it "ChiseTech") has caused the other technologically advanced nations to feel threatened, and to launch a pre-emptive strike at Japan. This is a militarily sound strategy - if you get intelligence that another nation is on the verge of developing weaponry that can render it overwhelmingly powerful, a quick pre-emptive strike to stop it before it goes into action makes sense.

I think this is why Tokyo was wiped out. Probably, it was the site of most of the advanced ChiseTech research, and was hit in an attempt to block the final development of the weaponry. Too late, of course. This also gives meaning to the early raid on Sapporo - if intelligence indicated the presence of Chise there, it would make sense to attempt a raid.

One datum which supports this is the fact that, no matter how many losses the enemy sustains, they keep going - even when we are told by Chise that their supply lines have been cut, and a normal response would be to negotiate a surrender.

Herein lies paradox: The more the enemy attacks, the more powerful Chise becomes, and the more imperative it becomes for them to stop her (and the less they have to lose, as she obliterates their cities). Look at the final enemy attack, in the final episode. That's desperation - the enemy is desperate.

Which brings us neatly to the last question:

3. What is Chise?

Chise is a weapon, of course - but she is of a completely different nature from other, earlier weapons. She isn't just a sort of glorified F-16 fighter with a brain.

She obviously contains advanced data-gathering capabilities, including the ability to patch into satellites, etc. But there's more to it than that - she displays almost supernatural awareness of events at a distance, repeatedly.

As a weapon, Chise demonstrates the ability to produce missiles, wings, and some sort of winglike energy structure from her body. On several occasions, we see missiles falling out of her. It is clear that there is no way these missiles can be stored within her (not enough room), nor can they have been produced from her body mass through some sort of nanotechnological wizardry. No, it is clear they must be manifesting through her body, from Elsewhere. But where, then, do they come from?

Look at the final episode. Those enormous spikey structures stretching down from the clouds are obviously part of Chise. She controls them. I suspect that they are part of the answer to this question, and my guess is this:

ChiseTech, whatever it is, involves the ability to extract energy and matter from elsewhere (either through a gateway from somewhere in this universe, or from some other dimension). Obviously, there is a quality of unstoppability to such technology, since there is no real limit to the amount of power that one can extract - hence the "ultimate weapon".

Like any real "ultimate weapon", its use guarantees only victory in the short term. In the long term, using it is equal to species extinction. Once the weapon goes online, it escalates in power until it obliterates everything. This is clearly the message of the anime - "war is folly, and total war with modern weapons is suicide".]

That's as far as I've gotten with my analysis until now - I only finished the last episode last night, of course, and I'll be thinking it over for some time. No doubt, further insights will present themselves.

(remainder snipped)

My head hurts .

spoiler[Not just her man. THE WHOLE WORLD goes too....]

whats up with the spoiler and the whole thing of all those blanked spaces? is that the stuff about the show saikano that they censor so people don't spoil the show for other people?