Sora no Woto episode 2 metablogged

On the sur­face, it’s all fun and frol­ics, but there are once again def­in­ite nods to some­thing a little deeper and more ser­i­ous going on beneath the surface

Han­ners’ Anime Blog

Some­thing a little deeper…understatement much?

Second epis­ode of my metab­log­ging pro­ject and I’ve been delighted with the amount of people blog­ging this show. I was wor­ried I might have to scour animen­ano to find people talk­ing but it’s come to the point yet again that there’s actu­ally way too many people blog­ging it. I decided to toss aside those who were unim­pressed with the epis­ode so I could spend the time mainly dis­cuss­ing the actual plot points. Oh, and also because I loved this epis­ode and got bored read­ing the criticism.

Why the mil­it­ary motif? It seems unusual here; the last thing I’d ima­gine these char­ac­ters car­ry­ing around is guns — and yet one was fired, even, in the second epis­ode. But why? Anime often throws teen­agers — the abso­lute lastage group I’d trust with weaponry — into mil­it­ary organ­iz­a­tions, but new­types and NERV exper­i­ments these heroines are not (they’re effect­ively routed by an owl, for one thing).

Pon­ti­fus

This has been a sub­ject that’s been on the fore­front of an awful lot of peoples minds. Why so young? Why do we have teen­age girls defend­ing an entire town by them­selves with noth­ing more than a broken tank and inac­cur­ate shoot­ing? Pon­ti­fus sug­gests that it could be a rather subtle use of moe but I prefer his second suggestion.

2. Con­sist­ency with the setting

I know I dis­cred­ited this, in a way, above, but I didn’t really intend to dis­credit it entirely. Con­sider how under­staffed these mil­it­ar­ies are — under­staffed enough to man a bor­der fort­ress with teen­age girls, for chris­sakes. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if our prot­ag­on­ists are prac­tic­ally (if not tech­nic­ally) con­scripts, or if the bene­fits of vol­un­tary ser­vice are such that any young per­son who knows what’s good for her enlists, or if simple peer pres­sure plays a role. It’s pos­sible, also, that the mil­it­ary has requisi­tioned cer­tain ser­vices — music train­ing, for example — for the sake of encour­aging enlist­ment. That seems to be how they got Kanata, at least.

Here we are see­ing the Yoko­hama Kai­dashi Kikou sim­il­ar­it­ies with a world with a dwind­ling pop­u­la­tion (a bit like Japan OH SNAP!). Notice how Kanata says classes are a lot smal­ler to those in that aban­doned school. While that answers the ques­tion of why they’re enlist­ing teen­age girls slightly, it does bring up the huge ques­tion of what on earth happened to the worlds population.

Yeah, with this epis­ode I’m sure: the thing that’s keep­ing me inter­ested in Sora no Oto is the set­ting. This epis­ode did a great job of flesh­ing out the aban­doned school build­ing that the lead char­ac­ters live in. I’m inter­ested in the cus­toms that these girls have, the his­tory behind the people who once were in the school, and the over­all cul­ture in the coun­try of Hel­vetica. It’s ima­gin­at­ive, detailed and inspired. I love how this epis­ode took its time to intro­duce the vari­ous rooms in the build­ing. That’s why I think that this show rocks.

Star Crossed

The set­ting really has a lot of thought put into it and it’s been touted as the stand out factor of the epis­ode. I know there’s the prom­ise of spider tank battles but even if this show spends the rest of it’s short run look­ing back at the his­tory of how this land has ended up in the mess it’s in.

While we did get some back­ground, they did hint much more about the set­ting which is pretty inter­est­ing without being too depress­ing. As men­tioned before it seems that in this post war period both sides seem to have fought until their strength was all but spent. War seems to be the last thing on their minds as the draft is gone but they are still tak­ing in kids as a sort of uni­formed wel­fare to cut costs. I won­der if 1121^st is actu­ally made up of all orphans since I don’t see par­ents being too will­ing to let their kids go off to some far away post. Cer­tainly it would lend more cred­ib­il­ity to the set­ting with the state being nearly bank­rupt with a deteri­or­at­ing army that barely keeps its units sup­plied. The lack of edu­ca­tion sug­gests that they did scrape the bot­tom of the man-power bar­rel as edu­ca­tion took a nose dive with elect­ive course like music gone the way of the dodo.

THAT Anime Blog

You have to won­der about how long this war has been going on and whether they really were super-powered at the begin­ning. I ser­i­ously doubt for one that the war was the factor in this post-apocalyptic state we cur­rently have. The girls talked about hav­ing big­ger classes as though it was some­thing that man­kind had for­got­ten about. Even if their edu­ca­tion sys­tem has gone to shit and they know noth­ing about his­tory, it still strikes me that the time the school was in ser­vice must be quite a long time in the past. Also, while Cru­sader would obvi­ously know more about this than I do, but surely 5 people is an awfully small amount to defend a town with, even if they are all teen­age girls. My guess is this war star­ted long after the post-apocalyptic state and was fought with small forces with extremely advanced weaponry, which has obvi­ously now all gone to pot with the war being dragged out for so long.

We also got a little tour around the build­ing they live in, even though it came in a form of ghost-hunting. That was one heck of a mys­ter­i­ous build­ing indeed, and I won­der if that “ghost” is really real (like, the lady shown on ep1), and they only mis­took the owl as one ghost. See this pic below why I believe that there’s indeed a ghost:

Metan­orn

You didn’t spot this either did you? I was first aler­ted to it in a com­ment on Star Crossed and con­firmed on Metan­orn to prove that I wasn’t going crazy. I mean, holy shit that is fuck­ing scary! It’s been hin­ted sev­eral times before that there’s a super­nat­ural ele­ment to this anime, what with that fossil in epis­ode one and know this ghost. It wasn’t the owl after all folks.

Ser­i­ously, everytime I look at that pic­ture it gives me goose­bumps so I’m going to end the post now before I piss myself.