Summary
Saki and Satoru escape It by creating a mirror that reflects the image
of the boat and quickly hovering onto the bank. Taking cover in the grass, they
speed up the boat, prompting It to set it on fire. Seemingly convinced it’s
killed them, It goes back the way it came.
They spend the night at an abandoned house in the woods, changing from
their festival kimonos into more practical clothes they find there. In the
morning they take a wagon from outside and use it as a raft. It bumps something
in the water, and they discover a strange, mutant fish underneath them. That
spews gunpowder. And can create sparks. They take to the air and are separated
in the explosion. Saki runs into a boy who was separated from his family during
the night. He fills her in on what happened.
By dawn, the Monster Rats seemed to have been wiped out, but fish like
the one Saki saw had snuck into town using the canals, and that’s when they
struck. The town is now in ruins. In response most of the canals were blocked
off, since it would be impossible to watch them all. But now the town is also
without its quickest means of transportation.
Saki finds out Tomiko is at her old school, where the survivors are
gathering. Badly injured and bedridden, Tomiko can’t believe what she’s
hearing, even though it’s coming from Saki. She says there’s nothing they can
do. The town was lucky after the incident with K; they can’t assume it will
recover again. News of the Ogre reaches the school, but Tomiko refuses to
leave, saying she’d slow everyone down in her condition. She tells Saki to go
to the Temple of Purification and her assistant Niimi to warn everyone using
the broadcast system at the Community Center.
After Saki and Niimi leave the hospital, Kaburagi writes a message in
the clouds telling everyone to remain calm. He vows to destroy every Monster
Rat left in Japan, to the acclaim of those gathered in the square. Then the
ground explodes. The resulting crater is pockmarked with tunnels, which Monster
Rats emerge from. Kaburagi kills them all. Niimi pulls Saki into hiding as a
child wearing a ragged cloak and tunic approaches the square. She looks an
awful lot like a girl Saki used to know.
In the resulting chaos Kaburagi and those he saved are killed. Satoru
meets up with Saki and Niimi and they slip into the tunnels. They find a
Monster Rat and try to interrogate him for information. He gives them nothing
definitive, hailing Yakomaru as a ‘Hero of the Liberation’ and the Ogre as a
‘Messiah from Heaven.’ Humans like them are the real ogres, he insists before committing suicide.
The trio emerges from the tunnels in the woods outside town. Niimi goes
to the Community Center and broadcasts the warning, fulfilling Tomiko’s last
request. Saki and Satoru go to the Temple of Purification. A monk tells Saki that
her parents came there, but went back to town, considering it their duty to
stop the Ogre. They left something for her, but first there’s someone else who
wants to see her.
The other person is Inui. When his squad went to eliminate the Robber
Flies they found the colony deserted. Searching, they found a squad at a cave.
When a human child emerged Inui’s four colleagues immediately approached her.
And went Splat! The Monster Rats knew
Preservation Officers travelled in groups of five, so he had to spend the next
day on the run and in hiding until he reached Thatchring Village. It was
deserted – everyone was at the Summer Festival – but he knew there’d be people
at the hospital, and someone on duty at the nursery, and went to the latter.
The nurse was dead and the infants all missing. Saki remembers the larvae that
were taken from the Earth Spider nest fourteen years ago.
They all realize the horrible truth of Yakomaru’s plan. Even if he
can’t hope to take more than a single town right now, he just needs to hold out
for ten years, and he’ll have an army of Ogres at his back. And there’s little
doubt he’ll try to gather more. First, Japan, and
then, the world!
Thoughts
Damn. I never even thought Yakomaru would try to make more Ogres! This guy’s villainy just
keeps ballooning in scale! And as was brought up in episode 19, Saki and Satoru
have the dubious honor of saying they knew him when, back when he was just
shady instead of a dictator trying to, ahem, take over the world.*
And the humans are getting hoist by their own petard. “We’ve never
treated you that badly” my ass. You used them for manual labour and left them
to live in the dirt and fight each other in near-genocidal wars. They were kept
in line by the threat that even a single half-trained human teenager could tear
a colony apart with Power. Just because they considered humans gods, or at
least called them that to their faces, doesn’t mean they never thought their
masters were cruel.
The rebellion looks to be illustrative of a central theme in the story
about the duality of human nature, symbolized by the two sides. Humans have
managed to create a simple, peaceful society, free of any conflict bigger than
being on bad terms with a friend, one where the idea of attacking another
person is almost unthinkable, food is plentiful, and everyone has a place. But,
they’ve done so by trying to curb tendencies like aggression and ambition,
symbolized by the Monster Rats. The latter thrive on conflict, and it’s always
been conflict of one form or another that’s driven human progress and
innovation forward. The society of Kamisu 66, and presumably all humans in
Japan, hasn’t meaningfully changed in probably several hundred years. And why
should it, when everyone’s provided for, has a role to play, and is, in their
day-to-day lives, happy? The biggest dangers are ones they can easily counter
with Power, so there’s no need to worry about outside threats, either. The
Monster Rats, meanwhile, have been living in a dangerous world, one where they
need to fight and adapt to survive. They’ve had to overcome many obstacles, and
Power, the thing keeping them at a distance from those who could make their
lives better, is nothing more than another obstacle to be overcome. The human
society represents the ideals we value and strive to implement, the Monster
Rats the side of us we try to avoid but helps us move forward as a species.
The point is that we can’t deny our full nature, not without becoming
something less than human and potentially being destroyed by the very thing we
tried to stamp out. Both factions embody only one side of human nature, and it
drives them both to extremes. Humans kill their own children when they’re
deemed dangerous, and subconsciously influence the thoughts of others, decisions
that’s coldly dispassionate but still cruel by modern values, since they deny
the idea that everyone has the right to exist and to form their own opinions.
They try to control their abilities and mitigate its dangers, an artificial
tampering that carries the risk of backfiring. Ogres and Karmic Demons are, if
anything, a minor version of the duality theme – trying to suppress something
natural in a way that can ultimately backfire. The Monster Rats, meanwhile, are
emotional, to the point of fanaticism. Compromise and self-preservation don’t
seem to have a place in their actions. They’re willing to wipe out humans for
their past injustices against them, to the point of being throw their lives
away without a second thought. Come to think of it, that sheds some possible
light on the things that were suspicious about Kiroumaru’s actions in episode
17. If they’re willing to throw their lives away, why not by fighting each
other, or allowing themselves to be killed by their messiah, to make it look
like they aren’t working together? Kiroumaru’s in on the plan isn’t he…
On the other hand, Yakomaru’s plan feels, well, kinda stereotypical. I
makes sense for him as a character, but it’s nothing surprising or novel. The
most interesting bits of the series are the society humans created and the
things they’ve decided are necessary to maintain it. At its heart that follows
the same idea of what happens when we try to suppress the darker side of human
nature to try and create a more ‘enlightened’ society, which is still what the
‘Humans vs. Monster Rats’ conflict is about. That it could spread beyond the
immediate scope of the story is fitting since it truly isn’t something anyone,
anywhere, can effectively deny. But at the same time, it means the story has
fallen back on the ‘stop the bad guy before he takes over the world’ plotline. Or
maybe I’m just wary of anything that reminds me of Batman & Robin. As I should be.
*With all due apologies to Doug Walker
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