Air TV - 10

I hate to say it, but Air entries are becoming a chore to write. On the one hand, I'm ridiculously busy right now (and I'm about to take a week off anyway, since I won't have broadband over spring break - we'll see if that helps) but, on the other, I no longer seem to care that I don't know what's going on.

I hated the Summer arc, for one. Actually, this is the first negative consequence of this blog I've found - I spent a lot of time with those episodes, as I've spent a lot of time with every episode I've blogged, whereas ordinarily I would have dismissed them as a brief lapse and moved on. Instead, I tried to look deeper into them, which any high-school English student will tell you is a recipe for disaster.

The core of my dislike, I think, was this: Ryuya, Kanna, and Uraha weren't active participants in the events. They'd react to one tragedy, then another would drop out of the sky on them. In the end, it wasn't a story about three people - it was a story about some stuff that happened to three people. And so I was bored at first, and eventually annoyed.

And I'm not really engaged with this episode, either; it spends an awful lot of time on the mistakes and transgressions of people like Misuzu's hoped-for friends and erstwhile father - people we've never seen and have no reason to care about.

Not to mention, why, why, why, why is Yukito a crow? Yes, I know there are excellent reasons to pick a crow as opposed to other animals. I mean why take away his humanity at the exact moment when he's poised to actually do some good with it? Seeing the world as "Sora" may have helped his (and our) understanding of things, but it didn't change the course of action he would have taken. Now that his side of the emotional story has been resolved, it's just one more obstacle in his path - and without a good explanation, it's as arbitrary as those chanting monks.

On the edge of this, and in a strange position, is Haruko. She's obviously a side character - it's one of the unfortunate side effects of dating-sim conventions that the division between "side" and "main" characters is so clearly drawn - and I almost feel like she's "allowed" to make mistakes because she's not part of the Holy Trinity of perfect girls. Haruko's misery is actually of her own making.

So also for, come to think of it, Minagi's mother. There's a little bit of that in Hijiri too - Hijiri probably didn't handle Kano's situation as well as she could have - but I could see arguing the "it's all Mom's fault" angle just from Minagi and Misuzu. Which is not a wholly welcome direction (some of Freud's craziest ideas were along these lines) and probably not really supportable. We'll see next time how Misuzu's father fits into things.

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