Fumetsu no Anata e 2nd Season - 18

I suppose it was always unlikely that a season that held my interest mainly through sheer strangeness and randomness was going to hold together when it had to wrap up its story. Still, it's striking just what an unholy mess FumeTwo has turned out to be. It's strictly my opinion, but in addition to the murky moral perspective, the plot itself is quite poorly stitched together. The pacing is completely indecipherable and the Renril arc has gone on way, way too long. How much of that it the fault of the source material (I suspect the majority) and how much the adaptation I don't know, not having read this far. But by God, it's a trainwreck.

As well, this episode was kind of a reminder that I never really cared for March as a character. She's not awful or anything but she ain't good, and when she started to dominate the narrative in S1 that was the first sign after a phenomenal premiere that quality was going to be a rollercoaster ride. I still don't even really understand why she's alive again, to be honest. I'm no genius by any means but this isn't my first time at the rodeo here - I'm consumed a lot of anime and a lot of fiction in my time. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect things to make a little more sense than they currently do.

Another thing we don't know is why the nokkers invited Fushi to prepare for a year rather than just invading Renril and killing everybody with ease. Given that we do at least know that Kahaku's nokker was a sleeper agent all along, maybe the thinking was that they wanted to kill two birds with one stone - massively "liberate" the largest human settlement and take out their arch-enemy at the same time. I sort of feel back for Kahaku, nutburger though he is. Literally the last thing he would want to do is hurt Fushi, and that's exactly what his nokker made him do. We all knew that arm was getting hacked off sooner or later though, I suppose.

Bon and his whole "turn Fushi into a WMD" plan have been a stinker from the very start, frankly. It's interesting that we still can't really tell what Ooima-sensei's take on that is. Does she endorse what Bon has been doing, or see the cruel irony in it? I don't know whether he's supposed to be the villain of the arc or the hero, but in my view Bon has made things materially worse rather than better. So not all that heartbroken to see him off himself here, though I assume Fushi will come back to himself and revive Bon when he does. That would be ironic too - the ability Bon has selfishly hidden fron Fushi in order to further his own plans being used to bring him back to life.

The good news is that we're only two eps away from the end of the season, so this Groundhog Day is finally coming to and end one way or the other. I don't know where Fumetsu no Anata e stands as an adaptation after that - two seasons is pretty common for NHK productions - and I don't know where I'd stand with it even if it does come back. I hate to ever give up on a series that can deliver the highs this one can. And even for most of this cattywampus season I was morbidly fascinated by just how inexplicable this show was. And in Fushi, it has a genuinely great protagonist whose character arc has pathos to burn. But at some point even that isn't going to be enough, unless the series gets its house in order.