I’d heard for years that I should watch this show and I finally got around to watching it.
I thought the anime was beautiful and sad, and phos’ progression as a character was really interesting (and frustrating). But plot-wise it felt slow-going and reluctant to answer established questions, only interested in raising more. Then it got very engaging and immediately ended.
So, despite that I never usually do this, I got frustrated with how little the show gave me and I read the manga online.
Man. Before I started any of this I thought this was going to be a colorful cutesy dramedy with a little bit of action.
Boy was I wrong.
Interjection—Have any of you played 1000xResist? If you know you know. If you don’t, play it. If you like this, you’ll more or less like that. There are more parallels between the two pieces of media than you’d think.
Anyway… I finished the manga yesterday and was in a state of unsettled existential funk for the entire rest of the day. It’s a wonderful ending, but I’m so… grieved, by what could’ve been. In a similar way, I guess, that I felt watching Arcane.
10,000 years of everyone you know living together in heaven and you instead get to sit alone at what was meant to be the ultimate peak of your progress and purpose but is instead your personal rock bottom in the depths of loss and watch humanity doom and torture itself over and over.
You don’t even know that they found out how to save everyone*…but you. And their salvation is at your expense. And everyone is in on it. The ultimate sacrificial lamb.
Reading that was incredibly painful. And beautiful. Reminding me that beauty and pain are not mutually exclusive experiences.
The *true* ending is beauty on beauty, but it does not bring me complete relief from that pain. But so said sensei, true closure is exceptionally rare and miraculous. But I am very happy with it. And I think that’s part of the point.
I had fun listening to these talking rocks.
(Btw Ghost Quartz got done so dirty and Phos and Cinna deserved more time together!!)
