To Your Eternity Season 3

Episode 13

It's been a while, thanks to the broadcast delays over in Japan, but To Your Eternity's third season is finally back to continue Fushi's modern-day misadventures doing battle against the Nokker cult. Thanks to the drama of the last episode, Fushi has a new form to take on with Funa, which gives the Orb another perspective from which to try to understand the impossible labyrinth of emotions and miscommunication that is the Japanese high-school experience. As Fushi inevitably discovers, making a safe space for Mizuha isn't as simple as handing out little hair doodads to everyone in school and asking everyone to be nice.

That would have been the case if Mizuha were just your average moderately depressed teenage girl, but of course, the Nokkers are here to make Fushi's job more complicated. Mizuha can go on all she wants about how the Nokkers are “just flu medicine” to make the pain go away, but the real Funa is back to the world of the living to make it clear that just letting sad people die and taking over their identities is, you know, not actually a reasonable solution for anything. For as much time as the show has spent presenting the Nokkers as more complex villains than they initially seemed back in the old days, which I do appreciate! — It is very amusing for Funa to jump into Fushi and Nokker's intimate moment to announce that the Nokkers are still dicks, actually. Humans are messy, contradictory, and occasionally even self-destructive, but that doesn't mean that the only way to find happiness is to be freed from this mortal coil for good. We have to learn how to live in these compromised bags of meat with all of the other compromised bags of meat, even if that means screwing up and being sad sometimes.

Take Mizuha's painful relationship with Hanna, for instance. All of Mizuha's desperate clawing for love and affection is the textbook definition of toxic, and the way she plays with Hanna's obvious crush on her is cruel in the extreme. Mizuha isn't a villain for that, though; she's just a messed up kid who doesn't know how to feel happy in her own skin, but instead of doing to hard work of finding that path to happiness and healthy relationships the old-fashioned way, she's become convinced that the best solution is to let the Nokker in and take care of all those pesky negative experiences and feelings. That is a recipe for stagnation and decay. Pain and failure may not be fun to experience, but they're often the means by which we learn and grow the most.

Fushi may not be able to understand or articulate that principle on his own, yet, but that fundamental core of the human experience is what he's been fighting for these past hundreds of years. Immortality is often portrayed as a curse in fiction, and for understandable reasons, but Fushi represents the incredible potential that such a life could represent. Our Orb has suffered plenty, and he will suffer more still for as long as he exists, but that also means that each passing day allows him to become a better and more complete version of himself than he was just the day before.

That said, sometimes people need a shock to their system to learn this lesson in a way that will stick. When we check back in with her this week, her life hasn't become materially easier for her; she hasn't magically become a happy girl with a perfect mother. Still, this little kid is determined to make the best of her new lease on life, and she even acknowledges that the Nokker incident showed her how to approach her difficult circumstances with resolve. When Fushi asks if she has an enjoyable life now, Mimori simply acknowledges that she has to “make it enjoyable.” That's not an easy answer to accept, but it's one that Mizuha is going to have to accept sooner or later. She's become so fixated on the idea that either the Nokker or Fushi will be the one to save her from her pain. In the end, the only one who will be able to truly save Mizuha is Mizuha herself. So it goes for the rest of Fushi's family and friends, and so it goes for us all.

Episode Rating:

To Your Eternity Season 3 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.