Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Wish Upon the Pleiades
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mangaka-chan
 Posts: 283 |
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I have to disagree that Minato got the short end of the stick. Yes, he's still unconscious in the hospital, but I think there are subtle signs that there is hope for him. When we see him previously he's on a ventilator. When we see him at the end of episode 12 he's off the ventilator, suggesting he can breath on his own now, and that his condition might be improving. Medically it's not unheard of for someone to wake up from a coma after many years, so I have hope that someday he will be able to meet Subaru again.
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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Instead of Madoka (although that works too) the "potentials" concept of these last several episodes instead kept reminding me of the heart eggs from Shugo Chara, with the similar plot idea of children having unlimited potentials because they haven't chosen their paths yet, and the pieces that Minato talked about in this episode as people's unrealized potentials being equivalent to the "X-eggs" of children who've given up on their dreams. In fact, Minato himself is like a hatched X-character, right down to his black outfit and negative attitude.
Now it doesn't say much for Pleiades' originality that Rose and I can look at the same plot point and make sensible comparisons to two totally different magical girl series. On the other hand, I wasn't going into this series looking for mind-blowing originality. All I wanted was an entertaining and not-too-fanservicey magical girl adventure with a group of girls that I liked as characters, and on that count it delivered. Given that before the season started this was one of the shows I expected to drop early, you could even say it exceeded my expectations. Episodes 4 and 10 were both among my top 10-15 favorite episodes of the season from any series, and as a nice bonus I also really like HnP's ending theme. I haven't settled on a final score for it yet, but it'll either be 6/10 or 7/10 overall, so I think a B- grade is perfectly fair. |
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Ingraman
Posts: 1077 |
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That sounds like a very good comparison. I hadn't given any consideration as to what series it might most be like, but Madoka Magica wouldn't have come to mind at all (except in the vaguest sense). I haven't thought about Shugo Chara for a long time... ^^
IIRC, that was revealed at/toward the end of the episode about Minato and Elnath. I'm not remembering all of the details, but after the two split, we see Elnath revert to his undefined shape and drop to the riverbed by the bridge, where his current companion was shown to have found him in an earlier episode. As they were floating nearby the black hole, I was expecting one or more of the girls to go in and retrieve the last fragment and come back out. My mind was ready to add "With Subaru all-wheel drive, you have the traction to escape a black hole!" ^^;;; |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5872 Location: Virginia, United States |
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It still is the short end of the stick. It's like you are arguing, "Yeah, I have $100,000 in unpaid medical bills and I have been unemployed for months, but I got this great job delivering newspapers door to door. Things must be looking up."
Pretty boring at that and unrealistic. Naturally they will be changed by their contact with each other. Who isn't. These girls seem like they have no dreams. |
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mangaka-chan
Posts: 283 |
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It is unfortunate that Minato is still in the hospital, yes, but we see that there is the possibility of him getting better in the future. For some, this is no great improvement from his previous situation, but he now has the possibility for a future, and that's something more significant, I think, than what the girls received at the end. I also don't think your scenario is a good argument for someone in Minato's situation. A person who can go around and deliver newspaper can at least move, can have a chance to pay off those bills and make a better life in the future. Minato had none of those possibilities while he was in a coma. For someone who simply wishes for a future, for a chance to make choices for himself in his life, even a future filled with challenges is better than no future at all. |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5872 Location: Virginia, United States |
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@mangaka-chan
My response was about scale. Just because he was in a coma, didn't mean he had no possibility of getting better or just waking up. But at the end of the show, he is still in the same crappy boat, and no one cared enough to give him a hand. Sort of like Shinji always waking up and seeing that same crappy ceiling. My example is quite okay, for it is not about what is happening, but the scale of things. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11428 |
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Yeah, I dunno... They start from the beginning of time practically and they can't choose a future where Minato doesn't get sick in the first place?
I guess I could accept it a little better if we'd at least seen some indication that Subaru finds him again, hopefully before he gets out of the hospital, which would be years from now given all the rehab he'd have to do. I hate to think of him fighting his battle alone for all that time. Not really a fan of this ending. :/ |
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AholePony
 Posts: 330 Location: Arizona |
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Yeah me thinks Rose might have been falling asleep when that happened in the Minato back-story episode. Not that I blame her, I found myself getting bored a little too often watching this series myself. ...I do wish people would take a break from comparing every mahou shoujo to Madoka, but I guess that's the benchmark for a lot of the fandom. Many many if these shows are built around the common theme of growing up, both inter and intrapersonally, so continually comparing one series to all of them seems like going for the low hanging fruit. I gave this show a 5/10. I wanted to like it more but the animation issues, weird plot choices and under developed characters took its toll for me. |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 666 |
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I don't know if everyone is seeing things different from me entirely, or if maybe I saw the writer's intent is different from how others see the writer'so intent. But the aspect of "potential" seems to me to be that everyone has a fixed amount of potential that is effected by their choices and the choices of those around them. The girls had enough potential that they could be taken anywhere in time to facilitate whatever dream they want. But Minato had much less potential, basically that no matter where he goes in time, he can't avoid getting sick or being in the hospital. In that sense, his survival at all, the possibility of his making it out of the hospital well, is a major shift of his "potential" sincenter he should otherwise be dead.
Furthermore, it is implied that one can only make a wish on their own future. It may not have even been possible for them to wish a better future for Minato. I think they played the ending in a way that doesn't make magic such a completely convenient out. It would've been too easy to say, "we'll just make everything completely clean and happy". They didn't make it too complex either, but they could've gone with that much easier path. |
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Selipse
Posts: 216 |
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I don't know if everyone is overlooking this or I'm just mistaken, but isn't the world we saw at the end after Subaru wakes up only Subaru's world?
I mean, the girls as we saw them throughout the show were from their own "timelines". That means the versions of them that we see at the end are different. I'm not entirely sure if Subaru remembers what happened, but the others don't. Either way, it's not really a matter of memories. The girls we see at the end are essentially different people than the ones we know. Their different hairstyles are the most evident indicator of this. Also, that part where they say goodbye and are all alone. That means that every girl returned to their own timeline, giving this numerous potential endings for each girl. However, Minato is definitely from the same timeline as Subaru (seeing as how they stay together after everyone else leaves), so I guess that really is his "true" ending. I wonder how everyone ends up in the other timelines, though. |
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Ahirue
 Posts: 62 |
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Well, I suppose this is all true, but personally, I wasn't looking for Pleiades to mean anything, and I'm glad it didn't try to force itself to be deeper or darker or more thought-provoking. (The Madoka comparisons are cropping up more frequently than I think this show calls for as it is, imagine how bad it would have been if this show had been more than just sparkly fun! ;D) There's merit in sparkly fun for sparkly fun's sake, and Pleiades was some super adorable sparkly fun. :) |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 666 |
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For lack of a better term, I've argued before that Madoka has ruined the magical girl genre in that it has become a sort of all-consuming force. The genre itself lends itself to rehashing the same grounds in varying ways. But any time any series touches remotely on the same themes as Madoka, everyone seems compelled to deem that series as some sort of attempt at recreating Madoka in some way. The similarities between Madoka and Pleiades can be said to be the similarities between Madoka and virtually any other series in the magical girl genre from even before Madoka was a story written on paper. It's probably time that a more concerted effort is made to avoid tying everything back to Madoka. Or, moreover, avoid deeming any series that doesn't strike the exact same chords as Madoka as being itself a failure. |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5872 Location: Virginia, United States |
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This is no big mystery or even requires a concerted effort. People use Madoka Magica because it is recent and it did set the bar. Sometime in the future, some other magical girl show will come out and everyone will remember it and do the same thing. Sort of like the Wheel of Time saying.
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Yttrbio
 Posts: 3653 |
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It set a bar that has nothing to do with what the show is trying to accomplish. It makes no sense to compare sprinters' performance to a high jump bar.
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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Yes, and it also gets frustrating, especially for someone like me who's been a magical girl fan for a long time and seen most of the major series in the genre. Partly because it was Urobuchi and Shaft, Madoka pulled in a whole bunch of viewers who don't normally watch magical girl and thought it was doing crazy revolutionary stuff, when in reality it was building off of trails already blazed by Lyrical Nanoha, Princess Tutu, Uta Kata, and a few other shows (for example, the scene that introduces Kyubey and Homura borrows from both Yuuno Scrya's introduction in Nanoha and Natsuki Kuga's introduction in Mai Hime). Many North American fans don't even know that Shinbo himself had already directed the first season of Lyrical Nanoha seven years before Madoka, and I noticed several instances of him drawing on his experience with Nanoha in the way he storyboarded certain scenes. Having said all that, Madoka definitely did do some innovative things, and one thing I'll absolutely give it credit for is significantly improving on many of its predecessors in many areas (it's a WAY better series than either Mai Hime or Uta Kata, for instance). I won't even argue that it's worthy of "benchmark" status, in the same way that NGE was a benchmark for mecha in the 90s, just because it's so much more well known than so many of the shows that inspired it. But it would be nice to see more people - especially people like ANN Reviewers who are theoretically more worldly anime watchers - pointing out comparisons to magical girls other than Madoka sometimes (when appropriate, of course), just to give their readers a more balanced perspective on the genre. It's like when Nick made a comparison to Serial Experiments Lain in his review of a recent Nagato Yuki-chan episode - I hadn't even thought about that, but once he pointed it out it made perfect sense and made for a more enlightening review. |
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