In stark alignment with everything preceding it, the finale to Zankyou no Terror is something of a mess. Character motivations remain vague to nonexistent, Five’s entire subplot has been in service of absolutely fuck all but pinning more of the already unwieldy story on American involvement, and the second half refuses to clarify what should be important details. It serves as the perfect capstone to a muddled, toothless pseudo-incendiary piece that offers no definitive statement, and little in the way of the perspective that it aimed to. It attempts to make terrorists sympathetic with the least amount of effort, and it really shows.
On the other hand, it ends in the most fitting way possible: With an inexplicable ball-passing session between Lisa, Nine, and Twelve, followed by a hasty conclusion to the Oedipus cliff’s notes, followed by pissed off Americans. It’s a striking metaphor for Zankyou no Terror’s god-awful writing process of one writer passing a tenuous plot thread to another writer, who then passes his tenuous plot thread to another writer, who then uses it to hit Lisa in the face.
The finale as a whole is a cluttered affair that attempts to do too much, imbue it all with relevance, and fails because it just can’t tie its disparate plot threads together in any meaningful way. The nuke going off appears to have no actual consequence for any of the characters, and the motives behind it remain somewhat ambiguous– not impossible to parse, but as a whole, it’s too disconnected from the rest of the plot to be much of a climax. The scenes that follow it, with Lisa, Nine, and Twelve playing ball and the detective resolving his chase, work better, but still come across as total nonsequiturs with no organic relation to any other scene. The scope just feels way beyond what the writing can possibly match.
As a whole, the conclusion to Zankyou no Terror is a mess that, while having a strong aesthetic sense and decent composition, is strongly indicative of the disconnect that the rest of the show suffers from. It’s not much of a resolution to an already troubled, disjointed narrative that hates its characters in every capacity. It not so much resolves as it adds to an already intimidating laundry list of issues that only grows larger the more one thinks about everything that’s happened. When Tokyo Ghoul has better characters than your show, you know you fucked up.
The Cart Driver 
Wasn’t it about people trying to pass a message/denounce an injustice done to them within a society that constantly shuts down such messages which leads to a kind of alienation and extreme measures(obvsly the scale was exaggerated but I personally don’t care much about realism). The ball scene to me was a breather where the characters could just be kids for a short time forgetting their constant fight.
Um whats your thoughts on Bobduh’s take on the show?
But what awareness did those acts give? Why was Five necessary to anything? What did the whole Oedipus allusion add to the message? It tried to keep a lot of balls in the air, but they all ended up hitting Lisa’s face.
As for his thoughts, haven’t given them a read yet.
I’m going to disagree with you. As for the characters of Five and Lisa, they did have a purpose in the series. Five was the true antagonist within the series in that she would intend on beating Nine by keeping the information covered up. Though this may seem petty, it still was a strong enough motive from Five’s point of view to prevent Nine and Twelve’s goal from being achieved. She basically just wanted to finish “the game” back time with him when they were in Institution. And pretty much explained why the chess game in the airport happened. It still left question mark to me considering from Nine’s nightmare back then, five was being left behind and didn’t manage to escape with him and twelve. Nine himself even questioning if she was hold the grudge against him because of that incident, perhaps? Also considering that five mentioned nine more than twelve, the fact that it obvious her intention trying to separate twelve and nine in order made twelve betrayed him by using lisa as the hostage. The fact probably she wants nine felt the same how it was feel to be betrayed, but yet she lost because in the end (episode 10) twelve still went to save nine.
her characterization is quite complicated to understand. the fact that people forgot that she also same as nine and twelve who are also the lab experiment for athena plan, the fact that she basically only the tool for FBI who just targeting the prototype of atomic bomb. Before she died she said “I was be able to survive because of you”, it’s like escalate pretty much that nine is the reason why five’s desire to keep living, despite she doesn’t have much time to keep alive.
Their motivation? to make sure that no one could deny their existence, which meant that no one could deny the existence of the institute and the other children that were there, or the past atrocities committed by the members that led that institute. That’s why they did all the terrorism and reveal all the “japan darkness”, corruption, etc. By “waking up” the japan so the something that has done in the past wouldn’t be repeated again.
What did the whole Oedipus allusion add to the message? If you really get from the episodes 2, all the riddles aren’t something that should be wasted. The purpose of why they named themselves sphinx are in order to find “the oedipus” >> Shibazaki. Clearly Oedipus story is a tragic story. when Oedipus swore that he would find the truth behind King Laius’s death, but one of the play’s many ironies is that he could not see the truth until he had physically blinded himself. In other words, despite being clear-eyed, Oedipus is actually blind to the truth whereas Tiresias, the blind seer, could “see” the world for what it is: “So, you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You with your precious eyes, you’re blind to the corruption of your life…”
And now it reflected today’s media are being blinded and not seeking the truth forall the abuse happened / corruption behind “japan darkness”. And this is what the purpose of Nine/Twelve have done all along. If you questioning that why they rather not “upload video online like they have did and reveal all these athena plan”, the answer is no one believe it so the only way they seek the attention by just do the act of terrorism.
Shibazaki basically reflected Oedipus because he was willing to do harm to himself in pursuit of the truth. Unlike many of his peers, Shibazaki was never afraid of the repercussions. He knew his life could be forfeit, but he pressed on anyway.
I often think that people who over analyze entertainment often end up missing a lot of simple details. This is not to say that they are wrong to do so cause it is something they likely enjoy being able to do. But I would just say in my opinion this show has already straightforward and ended with great conclusion. It has a social commentary without you realize it all along.
I’m not arguing that it doesn’t have a clear message. I just found its approach to be needlessly byzantine and self-satisfied, branching the narrative where it was in no condition to be branched.
Five’s whole arc was misplaced development, imo, that actively harmed the overarching story. It’s like they realized that their “kids plant bombs, detective finds bombs, detective rationalizes reason and slowly sympathizes” arc couldn’t last an entire cour, but drew it out in the most circuitous way possible. It’s just unnecessarily padded.
Normally I at least admire ambition, but this is just talking to make itself seem smart, rather than make a genuine point, while actually doing fuck all to back it up. It’s the Bono approach to preaching.
Am I missing something, or were all the bombings and riddles rather pointless in retrospect? If all they needed was to have their story heard, wouldn’t just the EMP nuke be more then enough to garner attention?
To be honest, I can’t be bothered to discern whatever political messages this show was trying to make. The delivery was far too hamfisted and illogical on every front for me to care.
nah what you expect from two 17-years old teenagers who wanted to gain attention, without the riddles/bombing there will be no underlying messages on their actions. If they only just do EMP nuke will just gained nothing for them but panic for people in Tokyo.
Just not forget eps 5 which shibazaki has finally realized the connection of their bombing and thus, to find the truth of Nine/Twelve abuser in the past.
No one really cared about the underlying messages of the bombings asides from Shibazaki now did they?
The bombings aren’t /completely/ pointless. They make sense, they’re just repetitious and add very, very little. Hell, it’s when the show drifts away from Sphinx setting them up that it starts to be unable to pull itself together.
The plan was along the lines of “give them a few test bombings just to make it clear that we’re not to be fucked with/threaten them with the nuke/get them to give us a press conference so that we can unveil the truth”. They never meant to detonate the nuke in the first place. What happened was that Five fucked it up thoroughly for whatever reason (I can sort of understand she was being a psychotic teen partly in love, though trying to confess by sending an airplane rigged with explosives straight against the terminal where your crush is may seem a bit excessive even in the way of tsundere-ism; what is really baffling is that the US government gave her the support and the means to keep up this psychotic campaign of sabotage).
The biggest problem is that no one actually worried about, y’know, addressing how these kids do have moral responsibility for what they did. It was all brushed aside as “they didn’t kill anyone”. First, lots of crimes don’t kill anyone and are still, y’know, crimes, because they make life more miserable for people; second, like fuck they didn’t kill anyone. You don’t hit the biggest and possibly most hi-tech city in the world with an EMP and get away with zero deaths. What about the people with pacemakers? Or attached to life support? What about the ensuing chaos, the riots, the lootings, the traffic accidents? In The Dark Knight Returns there’s the same exact situation hitting Gotham and the city turns into a post-apocalyptic scenario in ten seconds top. That strikes me as a slightly more realistic description of what would happen than ZnT’s “and then everyone was okay because the bomb didn’t kill anyone directly”.
That’s also a pretty big issue. An EMP would still cause so much damage that them not actually getting busted (only getting offed by Americans or dying off the clock) or hounded even further is fucking ridiculous.
That no one looked for them in-world, I guess can be justified exactly as a consequence of the EMP fucking everything up and there being no organized police force any more. What bothers me the most is that the show doesn’t make an effort to portray their action as at least problematic. When Shibazaki confronts them, he’s very understanding. Now I realize he uncovered all that corruption, but still, wasn’t he traumatized by nuclear weapons? Didn’t he hate them? How is he so quick to excuse these boys for their destructive actions because shitty childhood? It seems to me the show is really pushing the view of this not being really their fault – but truly, it was, and especially if they didn’t want to kill anyone (like they seem to imply), then their methods were doubly irresponsible, because their control was merely an illusion. Accidents happen, plans get foiled; if you don’t want to kill anyone, do not plant a fucking nuclear bomb in a densely populated city.
Ha! I could tell before the show started that it would be thoroughly unsatisfying. smug
I really wanted to like this show, but I felt myself growing more and more dissatisfied with every episode. The clusterfuck of the finale only served as a cherry on top of the shitcake. The creators were too concerned with sharing their views against Japan’s neo-nationalist trends and America’s involvement, that they kind of forgot they had to make a story that actually makes sense with as least some shreds of believability. So instead we get ham-handed politically commentary featuring American agents that can put a bomb on a plane and crash it into an airport with absolutely no consequences. As ridiculous as the whole “Oedipus” thing and the lack of character motivations are, that airport scene and Five’s complete nothing of an ending were the worst offenders to me personally.
At least the show was pretty. And I like the OP a lot.
This show was grounded in reality, but it didn’t tried to be realistic.
That’s a pretty important nuance.
The caracters’ journey is as important (or probably more) than the actual events.
What exactly do you mean by the characters’ journey? I was going to site the lack of development in the characters as one of the show’s biggest flaws. It seemed to me like Terror put far more emphasis on the movements of the plot than the characters, hence why so much time was spent on the intrigues of the bombing and Sphinx’s plans.
The characters didn’t journey anywhere. There was almost no character development in the entire series. Terror in Resonance is basically the opposite of a character-driven anime given that it ignored character development for the sake of driving home a theme (with a sledgehammer).
Once again I will complain about people completely missing the point…
I don’t even love this show that much, but people’s reaction towards this show is positively baffling.
I can agree about Five not adding a lot at the end. She was the show’s biggest problem.
Now… The final showed only what was relevant. As is the case for everything in the show. This may feels like a disconnect, and sometime made the show feels a little dry, dull.
This kind of story telling way is pretty rare, especially on anime, where we often see shows trying to extend a 1-cour show to a 2-cour show, and fillers are legion. (They may have been one or two less bombings, but that’s hardly a fault.)
The dryness of the story also kinda stopped the affection we may have towards the characters.
This isn’t the case here, maybe extremely so. But that’s something that I at least respect
It didn’t tried to show “terrorists” on a negative lights, because that’s besides the point.
This is a story about abandonned children (Nine and Twelve, but Lisa too) who wants not to be forgotten. They wants the truth to be known, because otherwise they whle life would have been meaningless.
The only way they had to be heard is those bombings, because otherwise no one would have listened to them. It was just here to caught attention.
The goal was to find Shibazaki (their “Oedipius”), who will give them attention, and help their message to be passed.
And they tried to limit the damages, because otherwise no one would have believed them.
They were just kids, despite all their intelligence, and they had really few time left.
And the ball game session was the best way to go. It allowed them to finally have the childhood that was taken away for them. This was more relevant to the story told than showing the aftermath of the bombing.
I mean, the show ended up with “Hope” being their main motive. That’s hard to be clearer. That’s as in-your-face as you can expect Watanabe to be.
This would like complaining about the lack of humour.
This would be like complaining about the ham and silly pose in JoJo.
You (all of you) were expecting a totally different show. This is probably not the show everyone expected (and I can understand that).
But that’s not a reason to critic a totally different show and complaining about the fact it isn’t the show you were expecting.
This was a highly ambitious show, and it may not have fully succeeded.
But, given what the show tried to be about, it did quite a good job, and I at least respect it.
I guess the problem is people demand too much from watanabe. I admit it’s not a perfect show but I disagree when people said that this series is a waste because I don’t think people understand the underlying message to deliver on the viewers. Moreover people trying to find more logical points and more flaws in this anime somewhat funny that they’re forgetting that this is actually an anime.
Yep.
The only reason I can interpret the reaction is Hype Backlash.
It wasn’t the greates show ever. And it had clear flaws.
But it wasn’t bad on any level.
I actually really liked the show. Yea it has it’s problems but if you like and look forward to watching every episode then it is a good show. i also really liked the ball scene, I laughed and felt really happy for them that they are really good friends and stuff. The ending I also really liked. It’s a unique show that not many other shows have done as well or done something similar at all.
The greatest crime Zankyou No Terror has how it tries to be intellectual and pretentious. It might have had the good story to tell but its execution seems horrendous judging by the impression Inushinde goes by. I may have given up early in the 4 episodes, and seems like it was good that I gave up.
Overall, I thought Zankyou no Terror was a good show. The beginning had me captivated and though it stumbled in the middle it picked up again in the end. My biggest complaints were that I didn’t connect with the characters and the idea of Sphinx not killing by relying on others to save the populace seemed cheap. I thought the involvement of the US was paramount to the point of the series, though it could have been handled smoother. Terror had some powerful scenes that had my full attention. The motorcycle scene, the Ferris wheel scene, and the nuclear explosion are going to be what I remember about this series. So yeah, Terror had its missteps but it got my gears turning every week.
I’m interested to hear what Watanabe has to say about Terror now that it’s finished.