Omen, The Rising Wind, & More Than the Darkness
Summary
Two years
have passed, and nearly every student at the Unified School is in a same-sex
relationship. Although this appears to be common and casual, it doesn’t stop
Saki from feeling upset after seeing Shun and Satoru French-kiss. The solution,
however, still involves running to Maria for comfort. Mamoru, meanwhile, has no
partner and pines over Maria. Saki initially chides him for it but then just feels
sorry for him. Then Shun unexpectedly breaks up with Satoru, and doesn’t react
at all when the latter walks into class with a new partner.
That same day, the class gets a surprise visit from Kaburagi Shisei,
the strongest Power user, whom it is whispered is powerful enough to break the
world in two. He spots Shun, whom everyone assumes will be his successor,
sitting alone in the corner and approaches him. Suddenly, there’s a shimmer,
and Kaburagi storms out of the class. Only Saki sees Shun crack an evil grin.
After the teacher dismisses the students, Shun faints, although he insists it’s
nothing.
That evening, Saki is sitting alone by the riverbank when Shun
approaches her. He says he has to go away but won’t give specifics, just that
it’s an illness and he’ll be staying at some sort of cabin. Saki tries to tell
him how she feels, but he interrupts to tell her that he thinks they haven’t
fooled anyone – the adults have known all along about what happened and just
deferred punishment. He tells her to watch out for cats, and after giving her
the collar he was wearing – a charm against said cats – he turns and leaves.
Four days
later, nobody’s heard from him, and Satoru insists they need to find him. He’s
startled when something drops into their midst, but it’s only a bug. That
becomes less innocuous when Maria repeats rumors that top Power users like
Kaburagi Shisei can create creatures to do their bidding. Since staying
together would be too conspicuous, they break up into pairs – Saki and Satoru
going to Pinewind Village, Shun’s home, while Maria and Mamoru ask other
students if they know anything.
As Saki and
Satoru head down the river they spot a large boat blocking the way, with black
and yellow rope barriers to either side, and decide to go overland. Not only is
there a rope barrier and a Monster Rat sentry, there’s a Sacred Barrier inside
the more mundane cordon. After passing through it they see strange things like
faces in the trees, a carpet of dead moths, and frost on the ground. Pinewind
Village itself is gone, with only a massive crater where it used to be.
At dinner,
Saki asks her parents about Shun. They admit there was an accident but beg her
not to ask any questions, period, and her mother almost lets the ‘I don’t want
to lose another child’ thing slip. Thinking about this in her room, Saki
recalls looking up the meaning of her name when she was little. The ‘ki’ part
indicates that the child is the youngest, which brings up faded memories of her
older sister Yoshimi. The shock at remembering someone who doesn’t, supposedly,
exist is broken by Maria appearing at her window.
When Maria
and Mamoru asked other students about Shun, they found out everyone from Pinewind was missing. Then they remembered Shun
telling them about storage buildings in the courtyard at Harmony Elementary and
decide to check Unified’s own sealed courtyard, which contained a number of
large cylinders. The door suddenly opened, and Maria and Mamoru hid too fast to
see who was there, but one of the new arrivals was a woman, another their
teacher. They’d had come to release ‘Impure Cats’ before a “transformation” can
finish. After two lion-sized creatures were taken from their cylinders, the
teacher remarked “he was so talented. It’s such a waste” and clearly said
Shun’s name, to Maria and Mamoru’s horror.
Determined
to find out the truth, Saki sneaks back into the quarantine zone. Shun’s charm
proves to be effective when one of the cats attacks her. It stops the cat from
biting her neck, and she’s able to kill it with her Power. The landscape around
her has become even more distorted and strange, and Shun’s voice suddenly tells
her to leave. When she refuses he finally materializes, wearing white robes and
a plain white mask he refuses to take off. Reluctantly, he agrees to tell her
what’s happened.
In school
they’re taught that one can’t use Power unless they properly visualize the
intended action first, but Shun says that’s not actually true. Things like
visualizations and mantras are controls to keep Power in check, but they aren’t
foolproof; everyone is constantly leaking Power and affecting the world around
them. Any one person only leaks a tiny amount that will have no lasting
effects, but when it interacts with the Power of another, the results become
unpredictable. That’s the reason behind creatures like the Minoshiro or
Thatchnesters – they were created by leaked Power. The whole reason the Sacred
Barrier exists is not to keep away the outside world, but to redirect the
excess Power of the population outside. In Shun’s case, however, it’s as if the
lid has broken and his Power is leaking at an uncontrollable rate, affecting
everything around him. They tried to treat him, but there was no stopping it.
Shun has Hashimoto Applebaum Syndrome – he’s become a Karmic Demon.
Saki worries that it’s because she restored his Power improperly, but
he insists it’s not her fault. The second cat appears, but Shun neither does
anything nor allows Saki to. Then his dog Subaru, twisted and deformed by the
leaked Power but still loyal to his master, suddenly attacks, but it kills him.
Shun kills the cat in return and blames himself for the death and destruction
that happened – not just Subaru but his parents and the village as well.
Something strange starts to happen and he compares it to the arrival of a
Blessing Spirit, though it brings only death, and propels Saki out of the
house. She finally decides she needs to live and flees.
Thoughts
It’s not like those who are into that sort of thing needed a reason to
create Saki/Maria and/or Shun/Satoru slash pairings, but now that those are canon…
Well, sorta at least. It’s obvious whoever runs this society has
managed to make everyone more like bonobos. The Minoshiro said it didn’t prove
to be the solution to human-on-human aggression, but hey, if it helps, why not,
right? But at the same time, it feels incomplete, or that it must be an ongoing
process. Bonobos
are entirely non-committal in their sexual relations, have them with both
sexes, and do not have specific partners, yet that’s very much the case here.
Shun and Satoru are seen wearing identical necklaces, which is clearly
motivated by their being together (Saki briefly suggests to Maria that they do
the same thing), the former ‘breaks up’ with the latter (who seemingly accepts
the other boy’s advances partly to get back at Shun, and the others ask if he
wants to ‘get back together with’ Shun when he insists they find out what
happened to him), and Saki still has a crush on Shun, which causes her to get
upset when she sees him fooling around with Satoru. Yet the solution to the
latter is running to Maria and engaging in some les yay. Saki’s
lesbian relationship with Maria is apparently not incompatible with her
heterosexual crush on Shun, which makes me want to put lesbian in parentheses,
because while it’s exclusive, as if they are
a couple, it still gives the feel of being a non-committal thing, one that
‘doesn’t count’, so to speak, when it comes to developing relationships with
the opposite sex, and since it’s clearly shown that all these ‘casual’
relationships are same-sex, it seems like this was deliberately engineered
precisely to avoid complicating the latter. It does feel kind of abrupt, but
nevertheless, it’s been hinted at before, as if the process has been a gradual
and ongoing one. When the Minoshiro described bonobos’ sexual behaviour, Saki
had flashbacks to a few times when members of the group got touchy-feely,
albeit in a more minor way than they do here. Not to mention the scene with
Saki and Satoru in the cage, where the former overcame the impulse in a way she
didn’t this time around. It’s also possible that this sort of thing only
emerges as they get older alongside more normal human sexual awareness, but
given that even immature bonobos will apparently engage in sexual activity, I
have my doubts that that’s the case.
And who says anime isn’t educational (well, I’ve never heard claims
that it isn’t, or should be, but whatever)? Did you know there was a relative of the chimpanzee that practiced free
love before you started watching this, because I sure didn’t.
On another note, remember that thing I said two series posts back,
about there being no evidence of modern technology in their society so far? I
was wrong. Not because we see a phonograph, loudspeakers, a modern clock, and
watches (which obviously aren’t some kind of restricted tech, because Saki has
one) and get mentions of electricity and phosphorescent lights, rather, because
there was evidence of it earlier –
when the curfew announcement was broadcast in episode 1. Yeah, bit of a ‘d’oh!’
on my part.
Also, yay, the Trickster Cat is back! Well, yay at first, not so much
later. After Shun’s warning, I spent most of episode 9 waiting for it to jump
out of hiding, and it gave the whole episode a nice, tense atmosphere,
especially after we find out that yep, it (or rather, they) are on the prowl. Yeah, surprise, surprise, the adults were
controlling it – it’s not like that was hard to figure out, so it’s still cool.
Or at least, it was up until Saki ran into one. We knew nothing about the
Trickster Cat, except for vague, boogieman-like allusions that it was a threat
to naughty children, and not knowing when it might catch the protagonists (and
the viewer) unaware made it spooky. That it was a tool of the adults, rather
than some monster or spirit beyond human control, didn’t detract from this much
because, y’know, it meant the grown-ups were deliberately sending a large
predator after friggin’ kids,
presumably to take them by surprise, and when they can barely defend themselves
as it is. Now, we’ve seen it, and not in a way that suggests there’s more to it
we don’t know about yet. It’s a just large cat; dangerous, sure, but it only
attacks people who’ve severely broken the law or otherwise been deemed a
threat, and even a teenager who’s still only at a fraction of their power can
kill it if it doesn’t get the jump on them (or is otherwise thwarted – that
collar isn’t really a charm, just practical). Shun compounded this by killing
the second one just as off-handedly, but he’s exponentially more powerful than
Saki right now, so that at least is to be expected. Of course, if Saki had had
more trouble with the one that attacked her it would’ve meant more – ‘wow, Shun’s
really powerful now’ rather than, ‘eh, it’s not so dangerous after all.’ Kinda
sucks – it was one of the best parts of the early episodes.
So, Shun. It’s not clear what happened to him, but I don’t think he’s
dead. Maybe he is, and his death will be what motivates his friends to find out
once and for all the dark secrets that underlie their society, but Rule of Drama
says having your friend seemingly be dead only to reappear as your enemy is
much richer source of conflict. He’s just gone through some traumatic
experiences – parents dead, dog dead, village a giant crater, all presumably
his doing directly or indirectly. Or not – Subaru’s loyalty is actually really
touching, and it feels so much more poignant if taken as a deliberate decision
on his part to stay with his best friend, deformities and trippy surroundings
be damned, rather than as purely an effect of Shun’s out-of-control Power manipulating
him through the latter’s desire not to be alone. It’s probably a bit of both,
but we don’t know how the power of suggestion works when using, well, Power –
as in, how the target’s own inclinations play a role in whether or how it has
an effect, and it’s the sense that genuine love and friendship were in there
that make Subaru’s sacrifice a little more than a cheap source of extra angst
for Shun. I really hope I’m not just reading this into it, because if it is just Because Angst, that’s kinda
lame. Regardless, he’s just been through a lot, has pushed his friends away,
hoping it’s for their own safety, and has nowhere to turn with a condition he
can’t control. Exactly the kind of person who’d reappear with A God Am I, or at
least messianic, delusions about how Power should not be suppressed but
embraced in all its trippy weirdness as the next stage of human evolution. We
may have found our Big Bad. And even if we haven’t, at least now we know what
those masked figures who appear during the credits sequence are.
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