Air TV - 07

For those of you feeling like you're stuck in a rut, I recommend taking four exams in five days. It cleanses the soul wonderfully.

And, while you do that, in between trying to grasp the subtleties of queueing theory and Bayes' Law (and trying not to watch too much Kaleido Star, which is so gloriously fluffy that I can watch ten episodes and feel like I've barely seen one) you can try to get a handle on an episode of Air in which the fundamental point is that nothing much happens.

Or, rather, nothing that anybody tries works. The walls are closing in on Yukito and Misuzu; heck, the show's start to feel like a lazily programmed game. Go to the beach? Nope! (Can't make it.) Try to ignore Misuzu's dreams? Nope! (And get a fresh scar for the trouble.) Run away? Nope! (No buses.) And meanwhile, anyone who might be able to offer support is either rejected or leaves.

No, I don't think this is laziness; I think it's underscoring Yukito's sudden helplessness. Remember, he solved Kano's and Minagi's problems with not much more than a wave of his hand (and almost literally that in Kano's case) but he seems totally lost with Misuzu. (I wondered about this earlier; whether Kano and Minagi would serve as, essentially, warmups. Superficially, it seems to work - Misuzu combines the "echoes of history" from Kano's arc with Misuzu's family dysfunctionality - but the vital difference of Yukito being strongly invested in whether things work out makes me not really like the idea.)

Besides, the really interesting question is: why has Misuzu never been to the beach? The easy answer is that she's never had friends to go with. But, then, she said something awfully strange about her dream of a festival - she was standing alone, looking in from outside, and yet the first thing she says about the dream is that it was "fun." Since when?

Well, way back in the first episode she talked about how she'd like to take wing, and "see everything on land looking so small." We know she has a romantic streak, and she's drawn to tragic stories (at least, that was the reason she gave for her dinosaur fixation.) She seems just as happy to be "holding back" on going to the beach as she was to be going. And her first reaction on hearing that Haruko's skipped out is "I love Mother" - with no elaboration on why. Could it be because she leaves Misuzu to her loneliness?

If Misuzu's in love with the idea of being a tragic heroine - not an uncommon affliction for teenagers - then it might explain why Yukito's at such a loss. Kano and Minagi just needed to be shocked out of their ruts - but how do you help someone who knows exactly what's going on, and is just fine with it?

Yeah, I'm reaching. Air makes me want to reach; that's probably one of its strongest points. I've spent the last couple days with the opening's phrase "todokanai basho" - unreachable place - going through my head whenever I think about the beach; I desperately want to apply some specific metaphor, but I don't feel like I have enough textual evidence to work one out.

The part of me that's asking what I'd do, though, says "adulthood;" Misuzu's childishness (and mood swings) would be the outward sign of a refusal to accept any emotions beyond black-and-white "love/hate." Which would create a subtext rejecting the culture-of-cute that has thirty-year-old women pouting and snuggling stuffed animals; eventually, Misuzu would abandon her hyper-cuteness (in particular the "Gao" affectation) and resolve to move beyond being the ephebophile-bait that made her attractive to all her fans in the first place.

I have absolutely no good reason to believe that's even close to what's going to happen. But, hey, that's not the point!

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