Well, so this was the best episode of the new season yet if we ignore the first episodes.
This episode consisted out of two halves. By far the biggest part was, like Zetsuen no Tempest’s latest episode, exposition. I remember how I found that rather boring, however, here I really liked it. The creators didn’t just have someone talk for 10 minutes without doing anything else, and they made great use of flashbacks, reaction shots and visual images of what was going on. Not to mention ho well written that exposition was.
I did not expect that the story behind the prologue in the first episode would be told so fast. That strange slug-like creature basically tells what happened to the world, and these scenes turned out to be the start of a conflict between people who have the Force and those who don’t. In the ages after that, this culture evolved that was meant to safeguard the force, and prevent people from going on a rampage like what was shown there. Heck, these really were just children who were testing out the limits of their powers!
What’s also great is that there is no real right or wrong here. Sure, the kids may have the right to know what’s going on and all, but the danger of them abusing their powers remains. When they’re so easily able to kill others, something has to be done to restrain them. In the meantime, what is the role of the different creatures in this series, like those rat monsters? They appeared in the final half of the episode, and here again, it’s pretty much established that they’re at the mercy of the Force. Sure they’re aggressive, but they’re pretty much slaughtered in an instant.
In any case, I hope that there will be more episodes like this that place so much focus on dialogue. It’s going to have to be tough to keep track of everything, but that’s really good: we have a series here that isn’t planning to hold your hand along the ride.
Rating: 6/8 (Awesome)
The preview of the next episode showed the rat-like creatures talking so now I’m wondering, were they once human? What were those diseases that the library mentioned? What happened to the people who didn’t have any powers? Maybe those human-like creatures were once human (w/o power) but had one of those diseases…
There are two possibilities, we know the “Fiends” are mentioned to be a result of syndrome (just like the PK users got their power from a syndrome and were called Karma Demons), but we don’t know whether this “Fiend” syndrome infected humans or animals .. i’m leaning towards the possibility that the Queerats and other fiends (like the real Minoshiro) are actually evolved animals/creatures who evolved due to the so called “fiend syndrome” and were not human at all .. it seems like the fake Minoshiro/Library was going to explain this part but that damn Monk burned it to a crisp .. guess we will have to wait a little bit more to find out more about the Fiends and the Queerats.
Nonetheless, this doesn’t explain how the Queerats can use human speech
“what is the role of the different creatures in this series, like those rat monsters?”
Really you guys??? I’m pretty sure they mentioned that a few times just not outright said it. . .unless Im an idiot.
They evolved enough to be able to learn human language .. isn’t that what evolution theory dictates in case of humans in real life.
Easily my favorite show of the season. 🙂
I lost it at “the Force” reference, if that was indeed a reference; I lol’d. I can’t entirely agree with the power plot or restraining methods of this show, if everyone has power everyone is the same after all. While it can be dangerous I think this show is close to Psycho Pass in it’s dystopia in which the way humans are treated.
First of all, not everyone had PK powers, only 0.3% of the population before the collapse had powers, and after the collapse there were still a minority
Second, clearly the PK users clearly abused their powers and were almost unstoppable in their rampaging and in how easily they can kill other people even by mistake (heck, one of the post-collapse emperors mentioned would just rampaged and kill normal people indiscriminately he cut down the population of his kingdom by half) .. so there is a VERY GOOD reason why those restraints are being applied.
A PK user in a moment of emotional instability can kill and slaughter any human in-front of him/her (even if he/she didn’t mean to, this specially applies to young people who still haven’t matured .. like our heroes .. and like the boy that killed and raped 19 women when he discovered his PK power) .. now imagine what serious criminals and bandits do with such power in a society of normal humans.
Thats the way this story puts it, but I don’t necessarily think.. it’s just a little too… humans are never going to have nice things. Society only works if we are all weak and feeble right? Ah. No superheroes, no goodwill, just utter destruction.
You’re missing the point here. This isn’t just some nice perk that some people have, this is literally a bunch of WMDs walking around.
What do you think would happen when 20+ million people are given near limitless power, with the more powerful of them having even more destructive power than nuclear weapons, literally?
Oh yea, the world gets send back to the dark ages with barely any humans left, the PKs did a better job at exterminating humans than Skynet ever managed :p
Well actually, the old weak human race tends to die out to the superior new human race; that of which will build a new world. Superior species thrive,it is a possible scenario I think.
This may even be were this story is headed; though I doubt it’ll ever deal with such stuff seriously.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. Are you trying to say that the world would not have gone down the path of destruction after the advent of PKs?
Also, superior? superior in what way? the only thing the PKs were “superior” in was their ability to wreck havoc and destruction. PK doesn’t bestow any higher intellect or morality, it is no different than handing out a machine gun to everyone to do as they please with it.
The superhero to super villain ratio is usually 1 to 5 or more. Technically if the supervillains ever get their shit together, they should be take out the superheroes. Why is Superman not dead? because he’s way more powerful than all of his rouge put together
But the basic idea of from the new world is that for some reason development of PK escalated uncontrollably globally like a sudden outburst of a dormant epidemic and was not contained in time. That’s why the world fell into chaos.
@TheUltimateReaper
Sorry, but your idea that it’s ok for the PK users to commit genocide against other humans who don’t have PK powers in the name of evolution is very disturbing and outright disgusting .. the PK users aren’t superior in anything other than their capacity for random killing and destruction !!!
Do you happen to be a fan of the stupid and brutal ideas of Nietzsche and Hitler that involve systematically weeding out the weak and sickly to improve our genetic pool or what !!?
Late reply, but holy shit balls.
@Mike, its reasonable but I don’t think it’s the only way things could have gone down
@wicked that makes perfect sense
@HunterWulf
It’s merely an observation, one quite common in science if you do your study.
I like power. I hate how feeble weak and pathetic humans are. I’ve been powerless most of my life, at the mercy of others. Power also has the capacity to be an equalizer. But alas humans are too stupid.
Killing killing killing. You all have some pretty fucked up views on the goodness of humanity. Power leads to killing? Guns lead to killing? Powers don’t kill people, no, oh no. It’s the poeple behind the powers that kill people.
@ultimate it’s not a commentary on humanity in this case. It was said that early PK users werent in complete control of their abilities, It’s like 0.3% of the population were suddenly equipped with bombs triggered by random emotions. Remember back in episode 02 the emperor were in the air and people in the crowd randomly burst into flames? The emperor’s PK was so powerful, that he kills people in his sleep without knowing
I have to disagree, it’s by no means a bad episode, but the heavy info dump and terminology used left me with a headache, and i’m surprised you say “They didn’t just have someone talk for 10 minutes without doing anything else” becasue that’s exactly what happened .. yeah they used flashbacks but those where mostly as simplistic as still pictures or recycled from previous ones(like the emperor’s assassination), so it was basically the Minoshiro just standing there dumping info into our ears.
Personally i think Zetsuen no Tempest ep3 handled exposition way better, “parallel” to everything that was being explained we were also experiencing dynamic action scenes that show us an application of all the info we were told .. there was never a dull moment or a moment with nothing happening .. and the exposition wasn’t concentrated into one huge dump like in Shin Sekai, but rather with every bit of info we get we switch back to to see it in action .. this kind of pacing and alternating between action and exposition made the whole episode and excellent experience .. something i can’t say about Shin Sekai Yori ep4.
Still, this episode did explain a lot of things, first .. Karma Demons and Fiends actually mean something in the real-world and aren’t just story-book monsters .. the Karma Demons are basically the PK users (like our heroes) but the Fiends (which surprisingly are caused by a syndrome too like the Karma Demons Syndrome) are still a mystery (it seems the Minoshiro was just going to explain that before the monk torched it with fire), are the Fiends those Queerats and other monsters that appeared after civilization collapsed, are they humans who mutated or animals who evolved .. we don’t know yet.
Second, the segregation that happened to society into PK users and non-PK users and into 4 different factions is interesting, it seems the Slave Kingdoms just fell apart (which were PK users enslaving non-PK users) the hunters and gatherers are probably still there, as well as the PK bandits .. then the scientists which are the most interesting as we don’t know their goal or whether they themselves are PK users or not (they seem to run things in the settlements from the shadows).
All in all, while i still love this series for its imaginative world and amazing atmosphere i think they erally mishandled the exposition this episode and could have done it better.
side-notes:
-Saki got on my nerves for the first time, she was acting weird all the time and topped that by defending the feral Queerats who clearly wanted to slaughter them and when asked why she thinks they aren’t the enemy she didn’t answer, silly girl, when you defend something at least have a clue why you are defending it XD
-What’s with the monkey sex !!!, i was too focused trying to warp my head around all the syndrome info and post-collapse factions that i didn’t quite get it !!!!
I did think that zetsuen handled the info dump better…
As for saki, i think that she just felt bad for the Queerats, i mean she probably never saw anyone directly kill a creature before so she’s understandably shocked.
I actually agree that the part where Saki defended the Queerats was not played well. If she was merely feeling bad for seeing something get killed, the conversation should have been more like
Satoru: Aren’t they they enemy?
Saki: It’s.. just wrong! (you can’t simply kill stuff like that) <- sounds silly, but something along that line
Instead, the creators chose to make Saki attempt to sound knowledgeable and righteous by implying she understood the whole darn situation even though the infodump was probably an hour ago and it might've been only her third time seeing a Queerat. I just feel they should've handled that scene differently.
Yeah, that’s my point, she sounded like she is more than just concerned or felt bad for the Queerats (which i would have understood .. since killing a sentient creature seems to be a foreign concept to her), but the problem was that she sounded like she knew something that everyone else didn’t, but when she was asked .. she didn’t seem to know anything extra .. that’s why it irked me.
Don’t forget the whole concept of death-feedback. The queerats are human looking – proven by the fact that even the monk is affected by dealing with them.
During the false minoshiro’s info-dump, Saki recalled the feeling of death-feedback as the priest tested her (“you are killing me!”) during the ritual of awakening/controlling/sealing her PK-power. She looked visibly ill, while none of the other kids did. I’m not sure how much time has passed since her powers awakened, but it has been shown that Saki was the last of her friends, so this memory might be rather fresh (or “freshest” as far as the other kids go).
So, after the resurfacing of her memories of this conditioning, it’s not much of a stretch to believe Saki was sensitive to death-feedback triggers: killing the queerats – even if she didn’t have a rational reason for protecting them.
Also, the concept of harming sentient beings is not foreign to Saki. She had no qualms about torturing the false minoshiro, or threatening it with death. But then, it did not look human.
Which makes me wonder – why didn’t they make the false minoshiros resemble humans? Projecting a human image while being destroyed doesn’t seem to prevent much.
Now I’m not an expert of the subject at all, but my Psychology class watched a video about bonobos at the disgust of my classmates, because my teacher was weird (and awesome). Basically, those apes have sex. Lots of sex. Sex between everyone, be it mother or child or whatever. This allows for reduction of aggression and stress. This, in the video, was placed in contrast with closely-related common chimpanzees, which have been shown to be capable of extreme violence against one another. If i’m correct, the scientists in the show were trying to impose this incredibly peaceful social structure (that of the bonobos) on the remaining folk to prevent destruction.
And of course, for your bonobo information, wikipedia or google is a far greater source than I 😛
Thanks for the info ^_^
Yea, the bonobo metaphor was used badly though. The juxtaposition of images of Saki with her mom, with her friend, did not fit. Even after describing bonobo society, they forgot that it is forged through SEX, which as far as we’ve been shown, is not a factor in Shinsekai Yori’s utopia.
Not a factor as far as we know – these are 12 year olds, after all.
Actually… just wait for next episode. Sex IS big factor in SSY. 😉
This is one of the details that got lost in the book->anime translation, I think. In the book the opening is taken at a much slower pace and so by the time you get to this exposition scene you know much more of the details of their society; in particular the bonobo reference doesn’t come out of left field…
Random thought: Considering how often anime likes to make up random countries in Europe as if the general public thinks Europe has a bunch of random Liechtenstein-sized kingdom countries, it’s surprising that they even mention an Azerbaijani. Respect
Uhmmm a good anime but by far the best episode was Jojo ep 3 of the woole new season. My perspecive.
I love info-dumps so this episode is awesome for me. Though, I can see why it’s overwhelming for some people; it had roughly 10 minutes of straight talking and not really many images to help it along.
How they wrote in all of the setting for this world was absolutely outstanding. Again though… those f’ing kids! Am I the only one anoyed and thrown off by these little shits? I think I’m going to have a strong hate for this show by the time it’s over, or at least for the characters. It’s something I want to like, but I just… can’t ignore it’s glaring faults.
I imagine that the Queerats were the “barbarian” humans w/out the power. But because the PK-less humans were growing ever so violent, and because they had already invented the “death feedback” preventing PK-users from killing human-looking beings, I hypothesize that the PK-users/Scientists did something that made all those without PK into monsters and Queerats so that they can now be better managed without the fear of the “death feedback”.
probably so
That’s a very good point, so far we actually (surprisingly) haven’t seen any humans confirmed to be without PK powers (aside from the flashbacks), and they did mention something about conditioning and hypnotizing as methods for creating the death-feedback in the first place .. these methods can also be used to manipulate ones mind to see things differently (the coming-of-age ritual is suspect of that .. it seems there a lot to it than just sealing/toning down their Cantus or PK power).
Ooo. I like your hypothesis. The library Minoshiro dodged the question when Shun asked what happened to the non-PK users. Everything in this world seems carefully manipulated by this scientist faction. They might have found a way to make those humans Queerats.
Other thoughts: This series appears to be narrated by an older version of Saki. I wonder how quickly the kids will grow up from episode to episode. Could they be teenagers a few weeks from now? Adults?
At the end of episode 2, the narrator implies Maria kills “untold numbers”. Saki is clearly against callous killing with her Cantus. Will there be a split in the group as the story moves along?
That was interesting. You’re probably right.
First half was pure infodumping, the second one was a dangerous reminder that the staff is handling the budget very carefully. If the book was translated, the TV show would be pointless.
It is translated. It’s in Japanese after all and this is an Anime broadcast in Japan
Despite this series’ inelegant way of dumping exposition on the viewer, it has been very solid in the story-telling department. Just look at the tone of the episodes so far: very slice-of-life, with hints of trouble in paradise. Then, in this episode, their world gets turned upside-down. Now this series has a hero’s journey vibe.
This episode would be a “call to adventure.” I have a hunch they will escape the monk and leave the world they know behind, aka. “crossing the first threshold.”
I think everyone can agree this series is heavily inspired by the works of Hayao Miyazaki. Most of Miyazaki’s movies also follow the broad strokes of the hero’s journey, with “Nausicca”, “Princess Mononoke”, and “Spirited Away” being the most obvious.
Well, Hayao won’t always be around, so I will always welcome works inspired by him.
Indeed, the whole atmosphere the past two episodes and the Minoshiro itself gave me very strong Studio Ghibli vibes.
Your bias is very obvious, psgels. 🙁
Well, yeah well the info dump was hard to track, but that doesn’t detract from my interest in this show, still amazing, I like this entire world that they created and how it slowly unveils the darker aspects of its setting. The way they do it, shows a very good sense in its direction, I get the feeling, that its going to have a solid progression just by the way they carefully build everything up.
i guess the kanada style animation not just one time only
also just found out that ed was by Shingo Yamashita, no wander i love the ed for this
and about this episode, it a good episode, however i dislike the overreaction the had after knowing history. i meant i just not logical, do people react like that in history class ?
But that’s not a normal history class, in their case they realized how different/special they are from normal humans and how their ancestors (the first PK users) committed untold atrocities (which they too are capable of) and that everything so far in their whole life-time was designed to keep them leashed and under close control and observation like wild animals in captivity so they don’t go berserk and repeat the mass murders of their ancestors.
What kind of history class tells you stuff like –> “Son, you are a potent unstoppable psychic killing machine and we are keeping you in-check using brainwashing, hypnosis and a kill-switch” .. i doubt any does that XD
This episode came out of nowhere and blew me away.
Lol how did it come out of nowhere. You obviously weren’t paying attention the last 4 eps.
I mean 3 eps
W-What if… those fiends are actually humans without PK, and are STILL humans? During the coming of age ceremony, they hypnotized the children into seeing normal humans as fiends.
This, will explain why children aren’t allowed to see queerats as implied by earlier episodes (ep1 iirc?)
They might also be hypnotized into not being able to hear the queerats’ speech. If they can somehow snap out of it, that’d expain the talking queerats in the next episode….
Now I’m really curious.
I find it interesting that so many people seem to have trouble following the “info-dump”. I personally was fascinated by it and this episode proved to me that the potential I saw in this back in episode 1 may not be unfounded.
If the anime can keep these kinds of quality episodes up then I think I found my fav of the season. Alongside Jojo of course!