Sarazanmai 11: "...so Sarazanmai"
I guess there’s not much to say, except
Honestly, this episode almost felt like a different show to me, at least the first half. We’ve always had a kappa world to contrast with the human world, but we haven’t had a world of dreams and memories like this. Not to mention the most physical symbolism we’ve had…possibly all show.
Keppi and the other two boys decide to spell things out explicitly—
—and now it’s Back to the Future, or possibly Looper. And, y’know, I’m down for that! I’m good with retroactively messing with time in the service of personal connections.
(Not in real life. Please do not mess with time, in service of personal connections or otherwise.)
It’s interesting to think about what would happen if this all went through. Would the path of the last several years be changed so that none of them met Keppi, like Kazuki predicted about Haruka’s accident back in episode 6? Was that the otters’ real plan, so that Keppi wouldn’t have been able to fight back? Who knows?
Anyway, it works! They catch up to Toi and stop him! But then it doesn’t work, because Dark Keppi shoots past Toi anyway! But thanks to the power of Friendship, they escape their fate by turning into kappa!
I really don’t like this trope, where some fate is Inescapable but not for the Special Main Characters. You could probably explain this one by saying that it doesn’t work the same when there are three of them, or for people who have proper connections (unlike the zombies), or when Toi’s not the one doing the shooting, but it came off as “oh, these boys overcame the inevitable by sheer will”.
Anyway, I skipped over the part where the otter scientist confronts Keppi, including a cool scene of it jumping towards Keppi with teeth bared. That’s a lot cooler than what it does during the “final sarazanmai”:
I can only guess at what the point is here—maybe “abstract concepts can’t be defeated”? I don’t think it sounds any better in Japanese either. Regardless, it turns out abstract concepts can be defeated, especially with Sparkly Sailor Soldiers Leo and Mab.
We got one last reminder that Ikuhara misses Utena
and then I’ve never been so unhappy to be right
about Keppi having a humanoid form. *shudder* On the plus side, it looks like all of Sarazanmai was really just an advertisement for Deltarune? Is Susie secretly kappa royalty?
…
It was a surprise to me that Toi actually went to jail a juvenile detention center, but I guess it shouldn’t be. That was still an interesting set of scenes to put in the “closing” credits (still more like “interstitial” credits), especially since they only focused on Toi. I was expecting to see Kazuki and Enta going through school themselves, and then I expected to see them waiting for Toi when he got out. Instead…
…well, Toi somehow has exactly the same haircut he had when he went into prison, and also some awesome boots. Look at those boots. Where did he get them? Do you think I can pull off boots like that?
The show actually has one more serious moment to try.
I have to say, I didn’t see this coming. I didn’t think things would be easy for Toi, but I thought he’d believe in their connection after having a shared traumatic fantastical experience right before going to prison. But he gets back and sees that all his other connections are gone: his family, his home, even the school he went to for a while. So I guess I buy it.
Of course, this show wasn’t going to leave it at Toi committing suicide. Kazuki and Enta show up at just the right time, and Toi’s glad to see them. Sarazanmai.
That was the show. Three boys managed to form a lasting connection, in a world that…well, okay, only Toi was really that disconnected. Despite largely enjoying this episode—and the soccer-future sequence I skipped over that referenced all the previous episodes—I have a lot of complaints about the show.
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The stakes on Keppi’s side were never really made clear.
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Sara’s kappa-ness was never really made clear, nor her connection to Keppi. (I think Ikuhara tweeted that they’re siblings?)
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Enta never got to explore/resolve his feelings.
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Haruka never actually got helped; we didn’t even see Kazuki’s relationship with him improve that much.
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I think I missed whatever was up with Kazuki’s birth mom and how he ended up in his family.
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Leo and Mab got a deus ex machina ending. If you’re going to make a show about how bad things can happen, let them happen. (On the other hand, don’t Bury Your Gays.)
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At the same time, they were never confronted for their crimes as conscripts in the Otterman Army.
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I didn’t get the feeling that the kappa zombie sequences were playing back into the regular world, though I see that that’s the artificial connection between these three boys before they could form a proper one.
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I hated the way the post-credits scenes were done. By the end they really were just more episode, but in the beginning they were presented like previews of the next episode, which meant the timing was overly compressed and comedic even when they had serious content. And it’d be really easy for someone to miss them.
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All the “shame” stuff I was complaining about in the early episodes was never really made up for, even though it became less important.
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What was I supposed to have gained from watching this show?
Idea: What if the show had been more like the sixth episode and the last episode? Instead of focusing on all this “desire vs. love” stuff, it could have been about connections vs. erasure. The otters are erasing people entirely, and they started with the people with the fewest connections. Then you can have commentary about the people with the fewest connections. You can even still have the Haruka sequence, because Haruka has connections he cares about even though Kazuki doesn’t. (I don’t know what to do with Leo/Mab in this version, but that’s okay because they were basically a disconnected story here as well.)
It’s also possible that it would have worked better with two seasons. You could spend more time on nuance and development, introduce more subplots, and have Leo be a bit more integrated into everything else. Not to mention “Dark Keppi.”
So while there were moments I enjoyed throughout, I’m overall underwhelmed again, and can’t see myself recommending Sarazanmai to pretty much anyone. Just from my own experience, if you want to see a show about kids forming connections, check out Erased; if you want a show about kids making questionable deals for wishes and magic powers, that’s Madoka (although my summary of Madoka says I found that forgettable too); and if you want Ikuhara-brand battle sequences, symbolism, flashbacks, and general weirdness, try Revolutionary Girl Utena.
Meanwhile, I’m off to try Ikuhara’s Mawaru Penguindrum next, on recommendation, though not with this kind of every-episode posting. And then I think it’ll be a break from Ikuhara for a while, possibly forever.