Sora no Woto episode 4 metablogged

When Kanata and Noel enter the city, it is scar­ily quiet. I do know that the pop­u­la­tion is depleted, but still, the city is unnat­ural. It is sup­pose to be bust­ling and full of noise, not a city with empty streets and silence.

Black and Blue Socks

Wel­come to the semi post-apocalyptic world of Sora no Woto~

As for the set­ting, my guess would be that we are in the French part of Switzer­land.… A hint of why there is now way that this show is set in Japan is how the sales­wo­man didn’t mind to be called by her first name. These cul­tural val­ues are very com­mon in Europe, but I don’t see it hap­pen in Japan, even with a num­ber of cen­tur­ies in the future. It’s also very plaus­ible for French coun­tries to have Eng­lish soft­ware, espe­cially in the mil­it­ary. Heck, I live in the Neth­er­lands and about half of the soft­ware I use is in Eng­lish. One big ques­tion that I still have is: what happened tot he archi­tec­ture? My guess would be that the build­ings we see here are built by by the loc­als after some­thing wiped out all of the mod­ern build­ings, and that they were mod­elled after local archi­tec­ture and resources that were available.

Star Crossed Anime Blog

The issue of where our her­oes are exactly is one that I’ve found par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing since the start. THAT did a bet­ter job of look­ing through dif­fer­ent parts of this coun­try that has had cus­toms lif­ted out of vari­ous dif­fer­ent places across our world. The Ger­man Uni­forms, Eng­lish writ­ing in the tank but French writ­ing in the let­ters, Span­ish Cus­toms, they all point to some­where in Europe, which is what psgels here is offer­ing as an explan­a­tion. That doesn’t quite explain why there’s a Japan­ese style school sit­ting in there. I hon­estly find myself won­der­ing if they are even on the earth at all although almost everything so far points to them being on earth. For example, how old is that cus­tom of dous­ing the maid­ens from the first epis­ode? Does it pre-date the semi-apocalypse?

I like that Sora no Woto isn’t turn­ing mil­it­ary life into noth­ing but frivolity and fun. Death is present; death lingers around the Takemi­kazu­chi, and evid­ence thereof can be found through­out the town of Seize. Here we find the sort of bal­anced approach that I find most desirable.

Pon­ti­fus

I don’t think Noel has ever killed any­one and if she’s lucky she’ll never have to shoot some that didn’t deserve to die. Still Noel’s reac­tion was under­stand­able since not every kid who signs that dot­ted line has a clear cut idea about what it means to serve

THAT Anime Blog

This is some­thing I also have to praise Sora no Woto for. Up until this epis­ode, the threat of war has never been felt. Actu­ally, the threat of war still hasn’t been felt but the threat of destruc­tion is much more tan­gible when you have that giant tank sit­ting around. Most of what they’ve been doing so far in regards to ammuni­tion and other tools of war related activ­it­ies seem to just be run of the mill duties that might as well be done with toys. With this epis­ode we finally see a bit more of a hint at the destruc­tion that can and has been caused. There’s still no sense that there’s a war going on. More like a war has happened and the places such as the glass fact­ory and the orphan are spin-offs of spin-offs of this conflict.

First of all, we under­stand that Noel is more com­fort­able around machines, but her com­ment that “machines won’t betray you” raises a lot of ques­tions like who screwed her over/betrayed her, her par­ents, a lover, or the gov­ern­ment. I feel a bit sad for Noel if she feels that she needs to retreat to the cold solace of a machine instead seek­ing human inter­ac­tion. I could see how emo­tion­ally depend­ant she is on her rela­tion­ship with the tank is when she basic­ally sought out Kanata judgment/approval of the tank.

Crys­tal Tokyo Anime Blog

And so we gradu­ally learn more about each char­ac­ter in the pla­toon and how they each have some­thing that happened to them into the past. Which is a bit old-hat in terms of how plots usu­ally run but what’s inter­est­ing about Sora no Woto is that it never actu­ally tells you what did hap­pen to them into the past. I must say, I’m an abso­lute sucker for that kind of stuff. The clas­sic strip-tease les­son of it’s not what you show, it’s what you don’t show. I love con­coct­ing all sorts of the­or­ies in my own head as to what’s happened to people in the past. Gran­ted, I’m much more inter­ested in what happened to the planet and all the sea life than the char­ac­ters’ pasts, but it’s still inter­est­ing enough to keep my mind at bay when I start run­ning out for the­or­ies on this apocalypse.

Whatever caused the massive down grade in the tech level and loss of pop­u­la­tion it had to have been big enough to wipe out most if not all life in the oceans. I am hope­ful that there is some life out in the seas they can’t see but if all that algae were gone then that would be a sig­ni­fic­ant loss of oxy­gen though I guess car­bon emis­sions aren’t much of a prob­lem in this period. Still wip­ing out all life in the oceans is some feat though it could have been a dom­ino effect of los­ing one to many cru­cial species

THAT Anime blog

So what did hap­pen? Why has the pop­u­la­tion on the main­land been cut sig­ni­fic­antly and why is there no more sea life? The most import­ant fact I think is not why it happened but when. Did this war start before the apo­ca­lypse and there­fore cause it? Or did this hap­pen sev­eral hun­dred years ago and these new cus­toms that have been cre­ated are in fact based off things that happened back in the days when the tech­no­logy was at it’s most advanced state. One com­ment on a pre­vi­ous post poin­ted out that the legend stated some­thing about a spider help­ing out these fire maid­ens. Spider tank anyone?