Let us ignore the elephant in the room for a moment and say that up until that point this episode was quite good. The explanation that Za-Shunina put forward essentially admitting that the Anisotropic created humanity was quite excellent and really puts ZaShunina’s alien nature into perspective. I in particular really like his explanation as to why humanity was created in the first place. To put it in the absolute lowest terms, the Anisotropic is like a fully decked out gaming PC that’s only used to play solitaire. They wanted information to process and the universe was found wanting. So they went and created millions of worlds in hopes that one would provide them a fountain of information they crave. The one planet that managed this was earth and now ZaShunina is attempting to advance earth in hopes of providing an endless amount of information for Anisotropic. All things considered that makes sense and shows why ZaShunina going to such efforts to advance humanity for what seemed like no benefit. He even went over the last of his gifts, which is essentially the universal controller for creation. It was a bit of a dick move for him to accidently leave Shindo stuck for three days while he was screwing around with time but it does show just how disconnected he is from human nature. Overall we now know what ZaShunina is after and his end goal. By all account his motivations are actually quite beneficial to humanity and his innovations could result in a brand new frontier for the human race. One of boundless imagination.
So with all due respect…what…in the holy hell…was that?! I mean what?! You have done it haven’t you? You pulled a Samurai Flamenco. (Clarification: Samurai Flamenco was an anime which started as portraying sentai heroes in a realistic setting but went straight to crazy town after a sudden genre shift.) I did express concern that this series might go the route of turning ZaShunina into a villain but this is so jarring a shift that I have whiplash. ZaShunina my man, you were doing so well. By all accounts Shindo didn’t even reject your invitation into the anisotropic, it’s just that after you put someone through three days of being stopped in time and throw this in their face then of course he would need some time to process it! This is not out of character for ZaShunina but just suddenly declaring to make a copy of Shindo and then erase the current one with a super magic beam sword is just…what?! I mean if he wanted to erase Shindo then couldn’t he done it without the light show or was that to make Saraka’s appearance all the more “EPIC”.
Yes, Saraka is now a secret anisotropic being and I am certain that was not foreshadowed in the slightest. Even the ring in this episode didn’t seem to be previously featured and really feels like a last minute rewrite. Oh this feels like a twist that the show will not recover from and it pretty much destroys the goodwill I had for the series. True, this show wasn’t going to be my anime of the year but I at least appreciate what it was going for. An alien popping down to earth to help advance mankind is a much rarer story that what it has now become. It’s us vs them now. The inventions the alien presented to us could greatly benefit humanity but they are not right because they alien and only humanity is right. Humanity hell yeah! You know, if aliens do show up on earth I am certain a large amount of Sci-fi media would be labeled as racist, with this show being one of them. I am more than a little annoyed that Saraka’s nonsense is not only being put forward but also being constituted as “The Right Answer”. That’s not how this works show. You don’t dictate what is the right answer. Free will is part of humanities creed and therefore attempting to shove values on the viewer is indicative of disdain for humanity itself. You can’t berate an alien figure for shoving his values on humanity while doing the same thing. That’s just hypocrisy.
I posted my thoughts on the shoutbox but I think here they are more appropriate.
I think they can possibly save this. Not sure if they will. But I’d be perfectly fine with the two anisotropic beings start having shounen like battles. They are on the complete opposite side of the issue so conflict makes sense.
But they need to make everyone else still struggle with this and still fall somewhere in between. And the show itself shouldn’t take sides.
They already portrayed zashunina as somewhat evil though, so the show itself kinda took a side, but I think they can save it by saying something along the lines that he had the wrong intentions and was maybe rushing things too much, but the changes he brought forward are not a bad thing.
They did a pretty good job at threading the needle so far, until the last minute. It’s going to be really baffling if they throw away all that nuance and go for a black and white “zashunina bad, humanity good”.
Maybe shindo being an amazing negotiator will finally come really into play? (They didn’t really have him so much negotiating other than in episode 0, so building him up as a super duper negotiator must come into play at some point, right?). Maybe he’ll bring the two sides to a compromise?
Weren’t you previously like “Saraka is backwards and wrong”? I mean, this twist just flips the scale around on woho is right and wrong, neither way portraits both sides as reasonable.
But yeah, this twists sounds to be out of nowhere in bad way
“Weren’t you previously like “Saraka is backwards and wrong”?”
Yeah and I still do think that. Though that’s just an opinion. It at least was a good counterpoint to ZaShunina even if I don’t argee with it. But now to make that arguement “The right Answer” ZaShunina has been turned into a villain. Doesn’t matter if he had a point, he’s evil now.