More Incomprehensible Award Nominations!

[rachelmanija]

Note to helpful commenters: Please at least attempt to explain what is incomprehensible, even in brief (I realize this is inherently difficult.) For example, "I understood it until Dave turned into a giant space fetus, unless that was supposed to be metaphorical."

If the series/movie/whatever is still running or is very recent (like Tsubasa) please black out or rot13 spoilers! (Go to rot13.com to encrypt and decrypt, it's easy.)

I did not find Angel Sanctuary that hard to follow once I got past the first few volumes. On the other hand I am still not sure what what happened to God, Lucifer, or the flying cannibal angel embryo armada, so I think it qualifies. It was probably just comprehensible in comparison to, say, Fairy Cube.

I still have no idea what happened at the end of Akira, except that I think it involved destroying Tokyo.

My further nominees: The Quiet Earth: A mysterious event leaves Earth depopulated except for three people. I am not sure what happened at the end or why, but it's possible that one of the men was mysteriously whisked to a moon of Jupiter.

Was Altered States the movie in which William Hurt watches a trippy light show for twenty minutes, then turns into a chimpanzee?

Comments

[nenena.livejournal.com]

All right, I'm going to step up to bat and attempt to explain the shitfest that Tsubasa has turned into. This comment assumes some familiarity with the premise of Tsubasa, at least up through the Tokyo arc.

What makes Tsubasa incomprehensible: 1. There are so many clones of the main two characters floating around right now, that it's nearly impossible to keep track of them. As of last week there are three Syaoran and five (possibly four, depending on how you count) Sakura. One Syaoran and three (possibly two) Sakura are already dead, though, so that helps narrow things down. 2. BTW, the "main" Syaoran in the series is a clone of another Syaoran who is the identical son of another Syaoran/Sakura pairing, and yes, he's in love with another Sakura, so that makes this whole thing FUCKING OEDIPAL. And yes, CLAMP is blatantly not even bothering to hide the incest. Syaoran even comments on how his love interest Sakura's mother, Nadeshiko, is exactly like his own grandmother - because she IS the same person, but in an alternate reality. Ewwwww. 3. We find out that Syaoran made a wish to "reset time" seven years ago. So we've flashed back to two different childhoods that he's experienced so far. Yep, he relived his childhood twice. And the Clow Country that he experiences is completely different both times - i.e., originally Fujitaka was the king of Clow Country and Sakura's father. In Syaoran's second childhood, however, Clow Reed is the king and Sakura's father, and Fujitaka is a childless archeaologist who adopts Syaoran. So far there has been no explanation for how these inconsistencies can reconcile. It's even more confusing because Yuuko said that she prevented Clow Country from being reality-altered by the time reset that Syaoran initiated at the end of his first childhood... But clearly not well enough. Bwuh. What. Dunno. And then we find out that for some reason time reset twice again, somewhere around chapter 200-something, so I dunno there have been like four time resets or something at this point, but who's keeping track? 4. Oh yeah, and Clow Country is actually the far-far-far future of Acid Tokyo, as it turns out. Or at least, one Clow Country is. There may be more than one at this point, as an alterna-Clow Country may or may not have been spawned by the second or third time reset. 5. The villain, Fei Wong Reed, has gone from having a simple goal and taking straightforward actions to accomplish it, to... I dunno, doing a bunch of incomprehensible, ridiculous things that make no sense. Apparently he attacked Sakura when she was seven years old, but instead of killing her right away, he put a "death seal" on her that was set to go off and kill her on her fourteenth birthday. FOR NO REASON. Seriously, that part of the story makes absolutely no sense given everything that we know about FWR, especially given the fact that his goal was originally to keep Sakura alive long enough to let her travel across many worlds and inscribe the memories of multiple dimensions into her body. He even, as it turns out, employed Fay *specifically for the purpose* of keeping Sakura alive during her journey. Then we find out in a flashback that he randomly tried to kill Sakura, way back before the multiple time resets, for some reason. And not even a straight kill. He did that stupid "death seal" thing, I guess because he wanted to wait seven years for her to die, for some reason. WHUT.

And that's just scratching the surface. There's more stuff that makes no sense, but that's the gist of it.

[reileen.livejournal.com]

Man, I stopped following Tsubasa around volume 12 or so. I was gonna pick it up again, and then I read spoilers for later volumes and I was like WTF???

Oh, CLAMP, why so crazy? I swear, it's like they've taken every drug in existence and mixed it with every brand of liquor in existence, and that's the stuff they use every time they need to figure out something new in the story.

"Okay, ladies, it's plot time! Drink up!"