Summary
The trip upriver proceeds uneventfully. Around the campfire Satoru tells
everyone about how someone – who’s totally real! – saw a Balloon Dog. The
others aren’t impressed – wouldn’t a dog-like creature that inflates itself
like a balloon when angry pop like a
balloon if it inflated too much? It gets better though – apparently this
unnamed person also saw a Demon Minoshiro. Also called a False Minoshiro, you
supposedly die after seeing one, but this unnamed person hasn’t (but totally
will soon – positive!). Shun suggests they make strange creatures like the
Balloon Dog and Demon Minoshiro their trip project. Everyone then goes night
canoeing, leaving behind a pissed-off Satoru (he drew the short straw) to watch
the fire. During the ride, Shun holds Saki’s hand. She doesn’t seem to mind.
The next day, Satoru suggests they go further upriver than planned, and
even the rational Shun likes the idea. After reaching their destination and
hiking into the forest a ways they discover an old shrine buried in the
undergrowth. Suddenly, a strange, translucent creature appears, emitting a
bright light that paralyzes everyone except Saki, who put on goggles when the
brightness of the water’s surface bothered her. The others snap out of it after
it crawls between two rocks, and none of them disagree that it was a Demon
Minoshiro. Mamoru suggests that they go back, but Saki insists she can catch
it, which they accomplish by using their Power to control two giant
crab-creatures.
The Minoshiro paralyzes everyone again, and a goggles-wearing Saki retaliates
by pulling off an antenna, causing it to suddenly talk. It demands that she
stop damaging “Library” property, under which it is authorized to use its
defense mechanism (the paralyzing light), but it stops when Saki threatens to
pull off all its’ antenna. When they ask what it is, it identifies itself as
the Tsukuba Branch of the National Diet Library. Specifically, it is a remote
terminal with a storage device containing a holographic copy of the library
collection. This is mostly gibberish to the kids, but Saki seems intrigued when
it says they can access its data at any time.
Unfortunately, the kids can’t simply ask questions; they have to
register. And that’s not happening since they aren’t 18, nor do any of them
have a valid passport, drivers licence, health insurance card, or school ID.
Fortunately, there’s a way to bypass that – threaten to rip it in two. Saki
asks if Ogres and Karmic Demons exist, and the Minoshiro identifies them as
those afflicted with Larman-Krogeus Syndrome and Hashimoto-Applebaum Syndrome,
respectively. Both appeared shortly before the collapse of civilization, and
the main characteristic of the latter is their ability to use psychokinesis, or
PK – in layman’s terms, psychic powers.
The existence of psychic powers
was definitively proved in 2011, and this long-dormant ability began to
reappear shortly afterwards, until psychics comprised 0.3% of the population. Even
though they could command only a fraction of their potential they were still
extremely dangerous, and without a way to curb their abilities there was no
real way to stop them if they used their PK for destructive or violent ends. Anti-PK
riots started, humanity splintered into factions, war broke out, the threat to
PK users caused a drastic evolution of their abilities, and the world
population fell to 2% of its peak level. The five hundred year period that
followed is known as the Dark Ages.
During this period, four distinct groups emerged in northeast Asia.
PK-users formed Slave Dynasties who ruled the non-PK majority, handfuls of
non-PKs lived outside the Dynasties as hunter-gatherers, other PK-users became
bandits, and a fourth group managed to preserve remnants of the technological
past. The Dynasties practiced mutual non-interference and remained in power for
about 600 years. The deaths of the last PK users brought about their collapse,
and the fourth group stepped in to prevent the ensuing chaos from escalating.
This group recognized the need to prevent Power from being used against
others and tried various methods – first education, then using psychological
and personality tests to identify and pre-emptively eliminate those deemed
dangerous, and third, trying to make society adopt the ways of the bonobo, a relative
of the chimpanzee that resolves conflicts by having sex. None were completely
effective, so at last genetic engineering was used to modify the human genome.
The modifications were an aversion to attacking one’s own species, based on
this tendency in wolves, and what’s called the ‘Death of Shame’, which causes a
physical reaction when attacking another human and can kill you if you persist.
The kids are shocked and disturbed by all of this, and Satoru insists
it could all be lies. Shun notes a discrepancy – everyone they know has Power,
but the Minoshiro just said most people didn’t, so what happened to the latter?
It says there are few trustworthy sources for the period between the Dark Ages
and now, so it can’t answer.
Just as the Minoshiro is about to explain what Ogres are, it bursts
into flames. As it burns, the image of a woman and child appears in the flames.
The perpetrator is a man named Rijin, a monk from the Temple of Purification.
Needless to say, the kids are in serious trouble
right now – not only did they not have permission to be there, they’ve listened
to a demon and broken the Tenth
Platinum Law and must have their powers sealed.
Rijin tells everyone to come to the Temple with him. Saki believes
their Power can be unsealed, but Satoru is convinced that won’t happen –
they’ll probably just kill them. Rijin looks sick, and Shun concludes it’s
because of the woman they saw in the flames – it’s the Minoshiro’s defense
mechanism. He won’t die since he didn’t actually kill a human, but he’s still
having a reaction.
A Monster Rat suddenly appears, larger than the ones before, and armed.
Rijin kills it, but realizes from its lack of a tattoo that it’s from an
invasive species. They encounter a whole group of them, and Rijin uses his
Power to call down a massive cyclone, uprooting the earth and killing them all.
This time Rijin looks even sicker, and Saki figures the Monster Rats were far
away enough that they looked human. Then a Balloon Dog emerges from under the
corpses…
Thoughts
Remember last year, when it was all over the news that a scientist in
Azerbaijan had definitively proved the existence of psychic powers? I knew it wasn’t going to end well…
And really, wouldn’t the world be a much happier place if everyone
would just resolve their differences by having sex? So many world conflicts
that could be ended so easily...yeah, I’m not gonna take that joke any further.
Anyways, infodump ahoy! No real surprises, though; psychic powers
emerged (or rather, re-emerged), some people ended up using them for evil,
things got out of control, modern civilization went bye-bye, preindustrial
societies rose from the ashes, and as time went on various groups who had an
edge (PK, remnants of the old technology) came to power. It also came a bit too
soon, at least in my opinion. It dispels a lot of the mystery the show had,
which has been part of the appeal for me, and it feels like that’s being swept
aside prematurely, and with revelations that aren’t at all novel. Thankfully,
while the basics of what happened have been explained rather early on, it
hasn’t answered every question.
For one thing, it’s unclear if the technological group that came to
power after the Slave Dynasties ended fully remembers its origins or has still
preserved any modern technology. It sounds like they originally managed to
retain a fairly modern society, as shown by the Minoshiro requesting distinctly
modern documents like a drivers’ licence to register, despite the narrator
stating in episode 3 that she believes the former didn’t come into existence until
after everything went to hell. If there’s any translucent…whatever the
Minoshiro looks like that serve as entire libraries wandering around right now,
I certainly haven’t heard of them. They even sound like they were a little more
advanced in some areas since they were apparently capable of advanced genetic
engineering. It could certainly explain the animals the kids saw at Saddharma
Farm, and all available evidence seems to point to the Minoshiro being an
artificial lifeform, not to mention that they’ve apparently tampered with the
human genome itself.
But there’s been little evidence of any advanced capabilities so far.
There’s been hints of modernity in their society – the school system, as I
commented on before, and in these last two episodes the kids’ clothes, while probably handmade, have
a distinctly modern look to them (well, Shun kinda looks like he belongs in
Sherwood Forest, but it’s not too hard to picture Satoru wearing
identical-looking clothes and zipping down the sidewalk on a skateboard, and
Saki’s tunic looks a lot like a hoodie), but no evidence of technology beyond a
preindustrial level, or even an understanding of such. Rijin calls the
Minoshiro a demon, and declares that the Monster Rats “have no place in the
three worlds but for the grace of Buddha, who allows [them] to live as inhuman
beasts.” The mention of Buddha gives his claim a spiritual tint, whereas, if
the Minoshiro is telling the truth, the obvious explanation is genetic
engineering. It’s unclear if this is Orwellian suppression of information – is he in the know and hiding things from
the kids, as members of the general population, or is he also not high up
enough to be aware of the truth? – or if even those in power have genuinely
forgotten or no longer properly understand where their society came from.
I’ll say one thing, though – I don’t think Rijin is experiencing the Death
of Shame because those Monster Rats were far away enough to look human – they are human. Not outwardly obviously, but underneath there’s still
fundamentally human DNA. Hey, genetic engineering was supposedly possible in
the past, and something had to happen
to the mysteriously vanished Powerless majority. OK, that they’re genetically
engineered rats is a more obvious and
way simpler explanation, even moreso for the ones in the village, which are
normal-sized rats, than these ones, which are as tall as the kids, but that’s
nowhere near as disturbing as the technology group finding a more novel way to
deal with the majority that doesn’t involve killing them off. Hey, if you’re
trying to level the playing field, can’t duplicate whatever gives people Power
artificially, and just killing of the non-Power users is too impractical, you’ve
gotta do something to distance them
from those who can. Obviously this is assuming a lot about the nature of Power
and what the technology group knew about it; the key thing behind it is that
the kids’ think Rijin is genuinely experiencing the Death of Shame after
killing the Monster Rats, rather than having what’s basically a mild allergic
reaction – if that’s true why would he be unless he actually was attacking humans?
To be fair, the Death of Shame does seem to be affected by perception,
since Rijin had a reaction after killing the Minoshiro, supposedly because of
the image of the woman that appeared when he burned it. Then again, Saki is
clearly experiencing similar symptoms after attacking it earlier, when there’s
no way to mistake it for a human – her reactions rather nicely parallel its
description of the Death of Shame’s symptoms. It suggests some things about the
way Minoshiros are created…
Of course, that’s assuming that everything the Minoshiro said is true,
but if there’s one thing that genuinely holds true in fiction, it’s that
disturbing truths revealed by a questionable source contain at least a grain of
actual truth.
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