Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Yūki Yūna wa Yūsha de Aru
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Tenebrae
Posts: 486 |
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Besides the twists offered in this episode (ten), I like how they rused the audience coming from episode nine into this. They had sold Fuu as the caring type who is guilt tripping over pulling her friends and especially her little sister into the hero system, and the revelation that sange after-effects are permanent. Having established her as the most likely to snap, they spend the episode tightening the screws until she does and decides to make Taisha history. She comes around though because of her friends, and internal crisis is averted. Taisha and Shinju are safe because nobody would use similar story arcs twice in a thirteen episoder, right?
Then they put the gotcha right at the beginning of the next episode. It is Togo, the blah blah national defense girl, the one that seemed the most reliable and level-headed, that goes over the edge (literally) and kickstarts the apocalypse. Additionally, the latter half seems to suggest to me that this is a case of Just As Planned to Sonoko. She told Togo the truth because she correctly guessed her reaction. I assume her goal in this would be to get her terminal back, because now the Taisha have no alternative but to throw even her back into the fire. Too bad she already told Togo she's with her no matter what her decision will be. So she might either go join Togo, or directly to attack Shinju. (As for power levels, Sonoko seems very confident that she could floor all the other heroes, having 21 "pretty strong" fairies to support her.) Edit - a thought had also occured to me. Now that we know what the world really looks like... It seems to me that the procedure upon vertex attack is easier to understand. When they breach the barrier, Shinju literally freezes the world remnant and folds it up into its pocket, revealing the true world underneath. As long as Shinju is safe so is the world, except for places where has to unfold back over its battle-damaged roots. |
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Wtv
Posts: 157 |
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You know, moe is a pretty vague term and it's more a feeling than a genre, so it's hard to talk about it. And, while in fact it is used to make you want to protect the characters at times (usually in harems with a self-insert protagonist), I don't see how you see this being the case here. You can't say that this feeling exist because of the hardship that the characters fight, because every character in every work will have some kind of drama at some point. They're not there to make you want to protect the character, but to make it interesting, as well as develop that character. See Itsuki. She was the more dependable character until know, always feeling like she needs her sister protection every time. But in episode 9, in a role reversal, she's the one to give her sister an emotional aid. But above all, I don't understand how Yuna can be seen as a character that needs some care. She has been pretty strong about her condition and will probably be the one to save Togo in the end. Even Takahiro said that viewers should enjoys the girls "cuteness and heroism". They're not meant to be the character that you want to protect (while you can feel like that anyway). They are really meant to be cute and strong girls. |
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Yttrbio
 Posts: 3652 |
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Although, since they already explained how it turned out, it wasn't as harrowing as it could have been. I wonder if it was a deliberate effort on the creators' part to avoid certain reactions from the audience. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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Well, if we're just going by hitting some, but not all, checkboxes... let's look at some other show. How about... Fate/Stay Night? Sakura easily has all those qualities, and no agency (unlike everyone in Yuki Yuna. In Fate/Zero she was such an excessively tortured damsel it was almost comical, and there's the issue of Kiritsugu's homunculus-wife and child, among others). Rin, Saber, and especially Shirou strongly tend towards being good and heroic, and the girls are often innocently cute or tsundere for its own sake. They often end up in seemingly hopeless situations, Shirou gets injured repeatedly and is incompetent almost to the point of helplessness. So does that sound like a moe show, or a drama? Sakura seems pretty darn moe to me, but other than that the heroism and failures all seem like part of the story. At worst, you might say the same about Yuki Yuna with Itsuki being the moe one, but she's a hell of a lot more of an active participant than Sakura. You don't see a whole lot of people calling Fate/Stay Night a moe anime, but by that measure it seems more like one than Yuki Yuna does... Again, bad things happening to good people doesn't automatically mean it's moe and nothing more, because almost all stories have that. "Excessively cute" is subjective, as is moeness itself, so I can't really say you're not allowed to see it that way. But this tendency to interpret tragedy as moe-service is oddly common, especially for shows full of female characters (many people still see Madoka that way). Probably because Western media does horror and semi-literal torture-porn far more often than tragedy. Actually, maybe tragedy is the wrong word? With 10's revelations, this is starting to seem more like a dystopia. |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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Calling this a dystopia is not quite right. This is a Cthulhu Mythos type of scenario, where you realize the elder gods are out to destroy (more like squash under their pinky finger) humankind. The only difference is that the weird looking cultists are actually your "friends" and the main characters do not only start losing their sanity as they grow wiser and (magically) stronger, they also start to lose pieces of their bodies like if this was some mechwarrior battle. I agree that at this moment it seems we will have a happy ending (the world will be saved), the series title clearly showcases that fact. Albeit at this moment it is a up in the air whether any of our heroines will survive, if we will get a martyrs ending or something in between. |
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Yttrbio
Posts: 3652 |
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Perhaps I was the only one who thought destroying the world (and killing her friends) was a feature, not a bug, to her mind, on the theory that it's better than what happens if they keep fighting? I actually found the "turn on your friends" idea to be much better-executed in this show than it typically is. |
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Megiddo
 Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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The point is that she doesn't want her friends to end up like Sonoko did. She's rather destroy the world and end everything than see her friends continue to lose parts of themselves in sacrifice in a perpetual loop. Is a quick death better than endless suffering? I'm sure not a small number of people would say yes. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18187 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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^
Oh, I know that was the angle they were going for, but such a fatalistic view ("the only escape is to destroy everything") doesn't quite feel right for her. It's about the only place where I have felt that the series is stretching to justify something. |
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Megiddo
Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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So you are one to be an optimist and believe that things will work out somehow and you just gotta keep trying? That's Yuuna's schtick.
Personally, I side more with Tougou's decision. If there is nothing worth fighting for and fighting only creates more pain and suffering then why not look for a way out of the fight? It seems only logical to me. |
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HaruhiToy
 Posts: 4118 |
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The other interpretation in your review is that she has simply become unhinged as the result of her experiences. Not only afflicted and seeing her friends afflicted, but they tampered with her memory and that probably didn't help her stability much. That seems to me the only way to read this. As for resolving the story they have several options and at this point I can't say which one they will take. |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18187 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Except the continued existence of what is left of the world? (And a pretty peaceful-looking one at that, not a crappy, worn-down remnant.) She has already seen what happens to the area that wasn't protected by the Shinju, and she has been given no reason to believe that the world would be better off without the Shinju. So much of how she is acting flies completely in the face of the Hero Club tenets. Anyway, as long as the series finishes strong next episode, I can tolerate a bit of stretching here. This episode doesn't shake one bit my conviction that the series is one of the year's best. |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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That is not logic, that is weakness. <spock>Simple rational logic indicates that the well being of the many precedes the well being of the few</spock>. That simple logic is the foundation of the heroes in any society, no matter the culture. I think a politician who died before my birth used more eloquent words. Seems to me that nowadays the western society no longer feels this precepts, everything is about personal well being and f*ck the world. |
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Actar
 Posts: 1074 Location: Singapore |
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That's just utilitarianism though and there are flaws aplenty with that moral philosophy. |
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Yttrbio
Posts: 3652 |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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There is no single moral philosophy without flaws, otherwise we would NOT need different political parties and democracy would be long forgotten. That does not change the fact that every society has respect for heroes because they did the greater good knowing they had to give "their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives". |
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