Star Crossed Anime

Now this is the Kino I remember. Somber stories that aren’t about Kino showing up and being cool but instead about people and fascinating food for thought. We have two stories this week which both include heroes. The first story involves Kino paying a visit to a museum in honor of a traveler who saved the country. It started off slow but it does present an interesting way of showing how people glorify idols and forget they are human as they are. The tour guide constantly dresses up everything this traveler did and owned as if it has some grand meaning while Kino and Hermes silently establish the cruder truth between each other. This is a bit too much of a segway but it reminds me a lot of how some talk of Evangelion and it’s creator Anno. I have seen people speak of Anno like he was some incredible mastermind who always knew what Evangelion would be right from the beginning and weaved an intricate canvas of direction and detail to make it what it is. In reality Evangelion was more lightning in a bottle that became what it was more due to a dwindling budget and Anno’s mental state at the time. But that is it, after the fact people dress up the accomplishment as some grand effort of genius which glorifies the moment of it’s conception. Sort of how some may dress up how they met there lover as some grand event when it could have been much more mundane in reality.

Thus enter the motorrad, a sentient being whose been propped up for display and the only other motorrad to be introduced aside from Hermes. Again the tour guide fashions up a grand story of the motorrad going silent perhaps in mourning of his previous master or having died with him. But the reality is that the motorrad is in pure display at being put up for display and denied the freedom of riding the lands as a motorrad should. The people have glorified the object as a memory of a great man but in doing so have denied that thing it’s very purpose. There was real emotion in seeing the bike pled Kino to take him out of there or destroy him, only to fall into despair again when Kino revealed that she could do neither of those things. This is the Kino I know, she listens to the stories of the people but never interferes. Instead letting things play out, regardless how they may turn out. Still she did at least throw a little hope the motorrads way by telling a boy to reveal his desire to travel to the bike, perhaps resulting in the boy starting to travel much in the same way Kino did.

I liked the first half of this episode but it was the second half that truly stole the show. The story is of a country full of liars as this episode is named after but much like any other Kino story, the title is not quite what it appears. It is true that this country is full of people lying to each other but the intent is rather different from one might expect. This story flips the table many times and your opinion on the situation completely changes with it. We have a bitter story of a man waiting for his lover to come back to a story of a man gone mad after accidently killing his lover in a revolt against the country’s king, to the story of the lover returning to look after her now insane lover who no longer recognises her to an oddly heartwarming reveal of the man not being insane at all and choosing to pretend to be because he is happy with the situation and doesn’t wish to disrupt it.

It’s an odd situation where everyone is lying to each other and yet out of that everyone is still happy to continue lying because their life is better. It’s so conflicting that no one knows the truth and yet are content in the lives they live. In an old episode of Kino there was a situation where everyone could read each other’s minds and that tore society apart while this episode is almost a antithesis of that story. Where no one truly knows what the other person is thinking and hiding and yet are happier than those that know everything about everyone else. The hedgehog’s dilemma laments that people cannot get close to one another without hurting each other but if there is distance through deceit then can a more meaningful relationship be formed? Even if everyone is lying to you does that mean you will be unhappy? Ahhh…this kind of thought…I missed you Kino.

I have noticed a degree of negativity with this brand new Kino series and true enough, so far it is proving underwhelming. Not bad, but it’s predecessor set a high bar to follow up on. But I believe it’s important to note that the problem here isn’t how the stories are adapted. Instead it’s what stories have been chosen to be adapted. So who have we to blame for choosing the stories? Surely the studio? Well nope, unfortunately the blame belongs to the readers. The stories chosen were picked out of the most popular voted stories in a poll run in 2015. Now things make a lot more sense to me, such as why the story choices are the ones where Kino plays a more active role. I understand that with the 20 volumes of Kino out that it’s hard to pick and choose which stories are worth adapting (Though in my opinion, it should be all of them.) but depending on a popularity poll tends to have mixed results. For what is popular does not equal quality. I don’t think there is any real problem which how the stories are being adapted as the first and third episodes were spot on adaption wise. Both colosseum and this episode suffered from the stories being too big to fit into one episode. Even then I don’t think the stories would have benefited from being elongated. I think we will still get some great episodes mixed in here, it’s just such a shame that more thoughtful stories are going get sidelined for stories that make Kino look cool.

Anyway for a change of pace it’s Shizu and RIko in the protagonist seat as they head to a country which is a floating ship on the sea. Society is split into two groups with the common folk below deck, malnourished and in poor living conditions while the leaders of the ship live above. The story is a bit rushed, in particular when it comes to the little girl who is now a part of Shizu’s crew. But I do like the moral of this particular story. Shizu sees the doomed society and unlike Kino with her no interference policy, decides to take up arms to save the people. In any other story his efforts would be rewarded and he would be touted as a hero. Not this one. The people he saved didn’t asked to be saved and don’t take kindly to some stranger telling them to live on land. Completely ignorant of their own poor status, they decide to board the ship once again ignoring the warning that in a few years the boat will sink, dooming them all. You can take it as an environmental lesson where in people ignore the damage to the world until it’s too late. You can take it as criticism of government where people depend on governments to do right by the people when governments only care for themselves. You can even take it as a lesson on how people will venomously refuse to acknowledge a problem until it’s staring them right in the face. Or even as satire that countries aren’t waiting around for some mysterious hero to come and solve all their problems. Or if we are to get really elaborate, the subtitle of this episode is also the name of a post-apocalyptic novel about a group of people waiting for the inevitable fallout of radiation from a World War to kill them which somewhat parallels the future these people will have to face.

The explanation for this whole situation is that a disease killed off all the adults on the ship country which only left the shi[s AI and the children on the boat. The AI managed but didn’t know how to care for the children, meanwhile the children grew up ignorant and didn’t know how to repair the ship. It does go a way of explaining their child’s dismissal of Shizu’s claims but acts more for an explanation on why the girl was excluded from the society. I found the last minutes of this episode to be rather forced as there wasn’t much build up for the giant escalation of the situation. Having the Tifana girl stab Shizu was certainly unexpected but I found the logic behind it to be rather extreme. Basically her interpreting Shizu telling her to go back to a ship that doesn’t want her as some claim that she is useless to him and thus is thrown away. This was a rather sudden development in the novels too and does feel like an excuse to get her to join Shizu’s merry crew. Thus the parts of this episode that dealt with the country’s situation was the most engaging but when the plot brought things to deal with this girl and Shizu, I found it far to typical for the likes of Kino’s narratives. The only real part I liked about these two was the small moment where they stop in the rain to listen to the drops hit Shizu’s coat. I reminds me of the old moments between Kino and Hermes where they talk of strange topics which bring a sense of wonder to the series.