Sora no Woto episode 12 (finale) and overall impressions metablogged

I can accept that none of them died, I can accept Takemi­kazu­chi wip­ing out a pla­toon, I can accept Hop­kins as a Roman hat­ing bas­tard that still has a sense of decency for Hel­ve­tians, I can accept that Kanata was able to con­fuse for a while, but what I find hard to accept is how Amaz­ing Grace caused such a long pause and how both Roman and Hel­ve­tian Field Armies were insight of each other but not shoot­ing, either optics are just that bad or they have trouble draw­ing distances.

THAT Anime Blog

This is just… unbe­liev­able. The end­ing went well enough, I guess. It was a bit melo­dra­matic, but okay. Then the action starts, and the spider some­how is totally fixed again. Des­pite that, it’s not some­thing that was too bad, and I had seen far worse end­ings at that point. How­ever, then Kanata star­ted play­ing the trum­pet. And every single sol­dier stopped and listened. What a head­desk moment!

Star Crossed

I think it would have been more impact­ing if Rio had left earlier in the series rather than being gone for only 1.75 epis­odes. And the fact that Kanata’s per­form­ance of “Amaz­ing Grace” in the final epis­ode, though beau­ti­fully done, was able to get the atten­tion of and halt an army of hun­dreds or even thou­sands of sol­diers in giant robots was kind of far-fetched, as was Rio’s grand reappear­ance at the exact moment that the army was going to resume their attack.

Anime Yume

Pretty much every­one talk­ing about the last epis­ode of Sora no Woto is hung up on that final scene. Kanata play­ing Amaz­ing Grace to stop the war with Rio com­ing in at the last minute with a peace treaty, of course it’s bloody corny. I hon­estly expec­ted exactly this to hap­pen. Amaz­ing Grace was always going to make a final emphatic return. Rio was always going to come back and save the day with a peace treaty. That doesn’t make the end­ing any bet­ter, just annoy­ingly eye-rollingly inev­it­able. How­ever, in it’s defence, it did make Amaz­ing Grace rel­ev­ant to both sides in the last epis­ode by hav­ing Aisha play­ing it on the trum­pet. This wasn’t some­thing they pulled out their arse, they did plan this rel­at­ively well. Still doesn’t stop it from being cornily con­veni­ent though.

My main com­plaint is that the end­ing was too happy. Both ver­sions of the legend imply some degree of sac­ri­fice by the maid­ens, and the ver­sion Yumina told in par­tic­u­lar had a bit­ter­sweet end­ing. The end­ing here, how­ever, was devoid of that. I think what really got me was Rio’s return in the epi­logue. I was okay with the com­bin­a­tion of Amaz­ing Grace and Rio end­ing the con­flict since both were solu­tions that they were build­ing up in past epis­odes, but I don’t like how how the emperor just let his fiancee return to her old mil­it­ary post. I thought the point was that Rio was giv­ing up her own life by mar­ry­ing him to ensure peace and save lives, but now that she’s back, there’s no ele­ment of sac­ri­fice left. They didn’t need her to return to have a happy end­ing, and by doing so they made it too happy, in an arti­fi­cial sort of way.

Ran­dom Curiosity

Slightly dif­fer­ent take on the end­ing. That final scene with Rio return­ing to the out­post felt like noth­ing more than a bit of fanser­vice to have a sur­gery sweet end­ing, espe­cially since the end­ing cred­its were rolling while this scene was play­ing. This is a very fair point by Omni even if this wasn’t how the legend of the Flame Maid­ens was sup­posed to have been por­trayed in the story, but there are other people who felt the story of the flame maid­ens played out in a dif­fer­ent way altogether.

I had wondered as the series pro­gressed how the writers where going to incor­por­ate the legend of the flame maid­ens without send­ing the series into BS mode , so I was quite delighted when Aisha played the role of the demon/angel, with the girls pro­tect­ing her instead of killing her.

Crys­tal Tokyo Anime Blog

This ver­sion of how the Flame Maid­ens tale was told in the story makes more sense than Omni’s ver­sion with Rio, although it still makes Rio’s return awfully arti­fi­cially happy any­way. How­ever very few of the writers I checked out made this con­nec­tion between the tale of the Flame Maid­ens and pro­tect­ing Aisha, although maybe they just didn’t write about the fact that they did (Cru­sader from THAT did men­tion it but he writes so much that he’ll obvi­ously cover everything he thought). Maybe I’m just thick and look­ing back, it does cer­tainly work quite well. How­ever for as big of a deal as they made out of the Flame Maid­ens tale, this felt like an awfully odd way of re-telling it with the pla­toon at Seize. It’s prob­ably because I was look­ing out for some­thing a lot…bigger and more dra­matic as a retell­ing of the Flame Maid­ens tale that I feel a little bit dis­s­a­poin­ted by this version.

The theme of ‘the world will end/have ended’ wasn’t developed as much as the show should have mak­ing it seem a bit over­dra­matic and maybe to some tire­some. More than once it is men­tioned the ‘end of the world’, how­ever, the lack of inform­a­tion on the biggest point of con­cern in which the story heav­ily relies suffered from under devel­op­ment with only a couple of scenes such as Filicia’s flash­backs finally shed­ding light on the war. Also how they dis­reg­ard other aspects such as explain­ing the urban legends and even going as far as men­tion­ing angels (even show­ing proof) in the last epis­ode by quickly intro­du­cing ele­ments that we weren’t sure of their exist­ence in the first place make the story seem sloppy or just some­thing we  have to ‘accept as it is’

Just as Planned

Heck, the world seemed more inter­est­ing than the char­ac­ters (…well actu­ally it still is), and I think there’s quite a good oppor­tun­ity to expand the uni­verse here. Not like they haven’t cap­it­al­ized on it, with a DS game com­ing out and all. And there’s also still 2 more unaired epis­odes as well, not like it’ll prob­ably con­trib­ute any­thing big to the whole story or whatsoever.

Kurogane’s Anime Blog

For the series as a whole, you can divide it into three parts. The fas­cin­at­ing world that the char­ac­ters lived in that was unfor­tu­nately never fully developed and took the back seat in towards the end of the series. Then the char­ac­ters, who gave the show its tag of being mil­it­ary K-ON (a tag the show still hasn’t been able to fully shake off) thanks to their moeblob appear­ance and con­form­ing to arche­types. They grew on you as the series went on though (my per­sonal favour­ite being Rio) but were never great char­ac­ters in the true sense. The last part was the actual story which star­ted off inter­est­ing but, as we can see from many of the reac­tions from people here, end­ing very disappointingly.

Epis­ode 7 told me that Sora no Woto would be the best show of the sea­son no mat­ter what, and I even wrote this on it out of pure shock and joy. Epis­ode 8 does not count.

Paper Flower

Some­how this man­ages to sum Sora no Woto up quite well. One epis­ode would be fant­astic only for the next epis­ode to be poor. Each part of its over­all pic­ture excelled in some areas only to fail in oth­ers. Even those who gen­er­ally like the show a lot can’t go crazy over the show because they know the faults are there as well. An aver­age score of 7.51 on MAL tells one story, look­ing at the break­down of the rat­ings shows you the true pic­ture. For 7.5 shows, it can be split into cat­egor­ies of ‘love it or hate it’ and ‘kinda good all round’, both of which res­ult in the same aver­age score. Sora no Woto falls into the lat­ter cat­egory. It has its fans but hon­estly, I’d be sur­prised if this was remembered sev­eral years down the line. It’s sad to think that it might only be remembered as mil­it­ary K-ON but I can cer­tainly see that happening.

And that’s the end of this metab­log­ging pro­ject. It was inter­est­ing to try out but, as I said here, it didn’t really suit me. Finally, I’d like to make a spe­cial call out to Omni from Ran­dom Curi­os­ity who, if I didn’t quote him in an epis­ode, I cer­tainly stole his screen­caps. This mon­ster blog­ger is retir­ing at the end of the sea­son and now I’m left in panic won­der­ing where I’m going to go to steal screen­caps when I’m too lazy to take my own.