Hey all—
Well, it’s the final Anime Club of the semester tonight, but I’m stuck here revising a paper/presentation on Rūmī so I can’t bring any spectacularly good-to-eat items. (If anybody else wanted to contribute…) But I can make us feel better about the admittedly depressing endings of the series we’re watching, by “previewing” endings even more depressing than the real ones:
In Kokoro Library, a sudden and harsh winter traps the sisters and some friends inside the library. Resorting to cannibalism to survive, they eat Uezawa the delivery man, causing Iina to go insane with guilt. As the winter ends and a general famine settles across the land, hostilities break out once again with the richer nation to the north and Kokoro Library is the target of a “morale strike.” The claustrophobic Iina is trapped by falling masonry in a tiny dark airless space, where she suffocates to death over the course of several days. Her sisters can hear her plaintive cries but are not strong enough to shift the masonry. When the defending army finally shows up they force Aruto to use her skills as a writer to produce patriotic pamphlets and conscription posters; when she refuses to write a document praising the increasingly Fascist leadership of the nation, she is tortured until she expires. Kokoro is drafted into the army and after brutal training sent to the trenches; there she develops gangrene in her right leg and wakes up one morning to discover that the rats have eaten most of it. As the enemy’s poison gas begins to inundate the town she once loved, Kokoro tries to kill herself but her father’s diary (which she has always carried with her) deflects the bullet, leaving her merely paraplegic. She spends the rest of her days, right-legless, in a POW camp with nothing to do except think about her misery.
Within the first ten seconds of the second-to-last episode of Gankutsuou, Mondego will swing his giant sword and pound the Count flat. With no one standing in his way, Mondego decides that he really ought to forgive himself for murdering his wife and son and institutes a military dictatorship of the cruelest kind. (When a postmortem is performed on Albert, it is discovered that he was actually a girl all along. The news shocks both Eugénie and Peppo, who are driven into each other’s arms and marry after a fairytale romance.) High Lord Mondego makes Caderousse his Minister of Finance and Cavalcanti his Chief Advisor, and together they work to stamp out the rebellion led by Mazimilien and the Count’s old servants. After capturing Haydée, Mondego forces her into becoming his queen and his power seems unbeatable. But Cavalcanti still hates everyone in the world, and he kidnaps Eugénie and defects to the Empire. He leads the imperial ships back to Earth; they blow it up and only Cavalcanti and the enslaved Eugénie survive. Cavalcanti lives to see his children to the fourth generation, although many of them have some highly unusual genetic abnormalities.
And in AIR… wait, I can’t think of anything more depressing than the actual ending of AIR. A lazy trick, or am I telling the truth…?
See you all there!
—Matthew
