Les Miserables – Shoujo Cosette – 40

What an incredible episode! It’s been a while since someone died in this series, but boy, at times like this I really get surprised how dark a supposedly children’s show can get. The revolution in Paris has been progressing in awesome way, and it immediately places itself above all other public revolutions in anime I’ve seen, like Romeo x Juliet for example, due to the immense amount of detail that has been put into it. It almost looks like everyone has his own reason for fighting, and even the woman are giving all the support they can give. That’s the power behind this revolution: it doesn’t feel like an army of generics is about to charge for the police: it really feels that an army of individuals is. For the past few episodes, this series has been showing random people who don’t have anything to do with the story otherwise, and basically show how they feel about the war. This episode, one guy even gives up his precious metal candleholder to melt it into bullets. This feels so much better than in other anime, where these generics couldn’t even outwit a sheep. And seriously… something is going to happen to Gavroche! All the foreshadowing of this and the previous episode just has to mean that something major is about to happen to him. In this episode, it becomes clear that he hates being seen as a weakling, and something tells me that this comes from his time with Cosette, where they ended up taking care of each other against Thenardiére’s wrath. After that, he probably didn’t want to depend on anyone else, because he knew very well that Cosette was suffering. Hence why he offers help to the little children and doesn’t even bother to get the food that Cosette passes out for a quick meal. This can also work against him, though: everyone still sees him as a child, hence nobody’s going to give him weapons. Now that Gavroche has been so used to the fact that he could do everything himself, he doesn’t like how nobody gives him a gun to fight. At one point, we even see him desperately reach out for the gun of a fallen police officer, despite his comrade standing right next to him. And really, Mabeuf died like a hero. We didn’t really see much of him, but after losing his precious wife and books, I really think that he wanted to die for himself, and he found a great moment to do so, putting back a red flag, symbolizing the revolution, which had been shot over. Marius also was awesome in the way he gave the courage back to his comrades by scaring away the police.]]>