rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2008-04-03 05:03 pm
rachelmanija) wrote2008-04-03 05:03 pm
Saikano: The last love song on this little planet, by Shin Takahashi
In the morning, we walk side by side up the long hill to school, as usual… As though that day never happened. Chise is as slow as ever. Without comment, I shorten my stride and let her catch up… So the distance between us won’t grow.
Shuji is an emotionally immature teenage boy, awkward and cloddish the way teenage boys can be. Chise is a shy slow girl who’s immature in every respect. They start dating, more for practice than because they like each other in particular, and write an “exchange diary” which they trade back and forth to record their lives and feelings. Early volumes of the manga have lots of excerpts from the diary.
But then the war comes to their peaceful town. Chise is taken away and transformed into a cyborg angel of death, and set to work as a killing machine. (The series title is an abbreviation for the Japanese for "My girlfriend, the ultimate weapon.") She and Shuji try to keep up a semblance of normal life, going to school and worrying about whether they should have sex yet, but soon the war engulfs their town and their lives. They’re forced to make adult decisions they’re in no way ready for, and their feelings for each other slowly grow even as their relationship stays largely a matter of circumstance and the desire to have a relationship. It’s not so much that they’re in love, as that they hope that if they act as if they are, they will fall in love with each other.
This is a very odd series. The art is sketchy and Chise looks about nine most of the time, which made the sex scenes even creepier than they would have been already, given the limits to which the story pushes the connection between sex and death. In separate encounters, both Shuji and Chise end up having consensual comfort sex with someone who is dying in bloody agony. EW. Not a creepy fetish, but rather than a statement about war and the desperate grasping at life in the midst of death. Still, really disturbing.
The pace is slow and meditative. The emotions and the atmosphere feel raw and honest, and though I never really liked either Chise or Shuji, I did root for them to have their little love story before the world ended. There’s something very compelling about the story and the way it’s told that kept me reading even though I knew it couldn’t possibly end well. And sure enough…
Every single character we meet other than Shuji and Chise dies in the war. Chise slowly transforms into a totally non-human being. She sends Shuji a note telling him that she’s going to finish off the human race because they’re doomed anyway, and she thinks it’s the kindest thing to do. She tells him where he can meet her when he’s the last person alive. This leads to a splash page of Shuji kneeling in a vast field of piled corpses.
He meets Chise. She’s turned into a spaceship. In possibly the most Freudian moment of a very Freudian series, he crawls inside her.
It was dark and warm and red inside. I felt as though something were pushing me along. I’d never been in there before, but I knew where to go. I felt that I knew that place very well.
Earth is destroyed, but spaceship-Chise takes off with Shuji inside her. Shuji thinks, We’re going to fall in love.
Shuji is an emotionally immature teenage boy, awkward and cloddish the way teenage boys can be. Chise is a shy slow girl who’s immature in every respect. They start dating, more for practice than because they like each other in particular, and write an “exchange diary” which they trade back and forth to record their lives and feelings. Early volumes of the manga have lots of excerpts from the diary.
But then the war comes to their peaceful town. Chise is taken away and transformed into a cyborg angel of death, and set to work as a killing machine. (The series title is an abbreviation for the Japanese for "My girlfriend, the ultimate weapon.") She and Shuji try to keep up a semblance of normal life, going to school and worrying about whether they should have sex yet, but soon the war engulfs their town and their lives. They’re forced to make adult decisions they’re in no way ready for, and their feelings for each other slowly grow even as their relationship stays largely a matter of circumstance and the desire to have a relationship. It’s not so much that they’re in love, as that they hope that if they act as if they are, they will fall in love with each other.
This is a very odd series. The art is sketchy and Chise looks about nine most of the time, which made the sex scenes even creepier than they would have been already, given the limits to which the story pushes the connection between sex and death. In separate encounters, both Shuji and Chise end up having consensual comfort sex with someone who is dying in bloody agony. EW. Not a creepy fetish, but rather than a statement about war and the desperate grasping at life in the midst of death. Still, really disturbing.
The pace is slow and meditative. The emotions and the atmosphere feel raw and honest, and though I never really liked either Chise or Shuji, I did root for them to have their little love story before the world ended. There’s something very compelling about the story and the way it’s told that kept me reading even though I knew it couldn’t possibly end well. And sure enough…
Every single character we meet other than Shuji and Chise dies in the war. Chise slowly transforms into a totally non-human being. She sends Shuji a note telling him that she’s going to finish off the human race because they’re doomed anyway, and she thinks it’s the kindest thing to do. She tells him where he can meet her when he’s the last person alive. This leads to a splash page of Shuji kneeling in a vast field of piled corpses.
He meets Chise. She’s turned into a spaceship. In possibly the most Freudian moment of a very Freudian series, he crawls inside her.
It was dark and warm and red inside. I felt as though something were pushing me along. I’d never been in there before, but I knew where to go. I felt that I knew that place very well.
Earth is destroyed, but spaceship-Chise takes off with Shuji inside her. Shuji thinks, We’re going to fall in love.
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OT
Re: OT
I have been going through a bit of a dry spell in terms of media in general, sadly-- for one thing, this anime season is worse than last year's, which I had devoutly hoped was not possible, and if not for Naruto Shippuuden and Spice and Wolf I don't think I'd've bothered keeping up with anime releases this year at all. New season starts in like a week, at least. Book and manga-wise I've been doing a lot of rereading, too.
Although it occurs to me that one of those rereads was of the best memoir I read last year, which you should very much read if you haven't, namely Kate Braestrup's Here If You Need Me, which is about the author going to divinity school after the death of her husband and becoming the official chaplain of the Maine Forestry Service. It's on my shortlist of memoirs now with Richard Hoffmann's Half the House and Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart. It's very much about death, and grief, except that it isn't.
Oh, and manga-wise, did you ever read Japan As Seen By 17 Creators?
Oh, and I've been obsessively rewatching Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei because it makes me feel better about the universe for obscure reasons, but I have real qualms about actually recommending that to anybody, because I can't tell whether liking it is a symptom of some kind of grave mental problem on my part. But unless I'm crazy it was the best show I saw last year.
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And...uhm...the manga actually sounds cheerier than the anime.
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Differences I can recall: No spaceship/womb involved, no sex with people who are actually fatally wounded at the time, and the protagonists actually do care for each other specifically rather than as placeholders. (And the heroine doesn't destroy the human race out of kindness.)
I kept wondering if the author or director had personal stories from WWII in mind. The peaceful small town where people keep desperately pretending everything is normal as doom closes in, the soldiers and the officers, the ways people coped with death felt very real. Almost everyone turned out more or less sympathetic, including the military agent in charge of controlling Chise.
(War stories are not my preferred genre, though, so YMMV.)
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Dear God, this makes Beckett sound like Robert Fulgham.
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Eegads! That didn't happen in the anime. But then again I'm not surprised that the anime was heavily bowdlerized, since I think it was aired in a primetime slot.
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---L.