Sora no Woto episode 5 metablogged

If you thought this was silly, you haven’t seen 200 guys run­ning around the woods shout­ing “SHOT, SHOT, SHOT, BURRRRRSSST!“.

Jinx

The anib­log­sphere is a good meas­ure of how accur­ate the depic­tion of mil­it­ary life is in an anime by the num­ber of people come out to reveal they also spent time run­ning around with bags full of rocks in their bag (I’m con­vinced those bags were made heav­ier with a few rocks just for the train­ing exer­cise. That will make them feel any later bags feel a lot less heavier).

We already knew that there was some kind of no-man’s land which was prob­ably cre­ated through nuc­lear fal­lout, but actu­ally see­ing it had much more impact. What we saw there very much looked like huge craters, and it’s very much pos­sible that those were caused by nuc­lear bombs.

Star Crossed

It is a beau­ti­ful land­scape whose beauty is marred by the ruins and desert that mark the start of No Man’s Land. What ever was the cause of the great cata­strophe it seems that is was sig­ni­fic­ant enough to reduce a major city to a sterile desert, and given how you still have big tall chunks it might not have been nuc­lear. I won­der if those obser­va­tions posts were put up before or after the calam­ity. Cer­tainly being short and stout would have helped as opposed to the tall sky­scrapers and offices.

THAT Anime Blog

The reveal of No Man’s Land was quite a shocker in the epis­ode. There’s been brief men­tions and signs at the apo­ca­lypse, such as the lack of fish in the ocean (and yet still fish in the streams, as you may have noticed), the hyper-advanced machinery and the derel­ict school, but this is the first sign we got of the true hor­ror of the destruc­tion. One thing it did high­light was that this apo­ca­lypse was indeed caused by war­fare, prob­ably the exact same war which they’re fight­ing right now. It’s hard to really tell how far back No Man’s Land was cre­ated. I was of the opin­ion that it was a looooong time ago but this epis­ode made me think oth­er­wise. Nuc­lear vs non-nuclear is a bit of a moot point though. Humans are fully cap­able of wreck­ing havoc without nuc­lear weaponry, just maybe not as quickly.

I feel the series hits the right tone in how it por­trays mil­it­ary life in a non-combat out­post type of set­ting. While at first glance, Kanata, Kur­eha, Noel, Rio, and Fili­cia might seem to be tropes, but I can tell you for a fact that I’ve meet many a sol­dier that I could just change their names to any of the girl’s names and it would be almost a per­fect per­son­al­ity match.

Crys­tal Tokyo Anime Blog

The way Sora no Woto quickly decided how we should assume its char­ac­ters to func­tion actu­ally shows tre­mend­ous poten­tial for con­tin­ued, well, not neces­sar­ily char­ac­ter pro­gres­sion but char­ac­ter explor­a­tion. Think of determ­in­ing the sup­posed char­ac­ter arche­type as barely scratch­ing the sur­face of what’s underneath.

On the Fence

Now this was unusual to read. My main prob­lem with the series, and clearly many oth­ers, is how pain­fully ste­reo­typ­ical each of the char­ac­ters are. What bugs me is that there’s no attempt to do any­thing really that dif­fer­ent with the char­ac­ter arche­types, or expand on them either. It seems happy to keep to the status quo. But hey, there’s clearly people who dis­agree with me here. It’s odd how people can often cri­ti­cize things for being ste­reo­typ­ical when they are very true to life.

The girls are pro­tec­ted by what feels like the last remain­ing sanc­tu­ary of their coun­try; the only place where youth and naiv­ety are still able to exist, and that feel­ing of moé, of inno­cence, is woven beau­ti­fully into a world on the brink. In a way, it’s like Haibane Ren­mei, where quiet, hazy days are frit­ted away on mundane tasks, yet the under­cur­rent of sad­ness is palp­able. The dir­ec­tion is con­flic­ted, like someone sim­ul­tan­eously cel­eb­rat­ing youth yet lament­ing its tran­si­ence and fra­gil­ity; nos­tal­gia, per­haps? It’s as if the faintest of touches could shat­ter these girls’ into a mil­lion tiny pieces, and that sense of vul­ner­ab­il­ity is fore­bod­ing and melancholy

Batezi Anime Blog

For what plays off like a slice of life, I keep think­ing Sora no Woto is going to take a much more dra­matic or darker turn later in the show. I wondered why, and then I real­ized that I couldn’t remem­ber Sora no Woto using one instance of chibi faces or any sort of comic dis­tor­tion. Everything’s been really, really straight laced, which is shock­ing for a show that fea­tures cute girls with yuri under­tones. And then the world they live in reminds me of Haibane Renmei’s Old Home – mys­ter­i­ous but quaint, tra­di­tional but crum­bling, a dying world filled with hope­ful people.

Rab­bit­po­ets

I spend the first epis­ode focus­ing on how people kept com­par­ing this to K-ON and I was quick to make the com­par­ison between this and Haibane Rem­nei. More and more people are gradu­ally catch­ing onto this sim­il­ar­ity and it has cer­tainly fol­lowed the same pat­tern to Haibane thus far. I hadn’t real­ised quite the level of sim­il­ar­ity the two had until I did my blog rounds though. Ah, aren’t anime blogs won­der­ful things~