Well, that was pretty damn depressing.

As I noted last week, in the broad sense there was no suspense about what was going to happen in this final episode of Angolmois: Genkou Kassen-ki.  Tsushima was a massacre, the Mongols moved on to a few more of them and seemed an unstoppable force, then…  Stuff happened.  Tsushima is remote now, never mind the 13th century, so we don’t exactly what happened there – I don’t even know if the postscript about Hachiman temples referring to exiles being on Tsushima is true.  But presumably a few locals did survive, hidden in the forests and caves, just as happened in this final episode.

But somehow, as much as I hate to say it, I feel kind of cheated by both Jinzaburou and Teruhi surviving.  With the overwhelming majority of men, women and children on the island being slaughtered, for both the main characters to have that sort of plot armor feels like a bit of a cop-out.  Hell, even Amushi kicked the bucket (in the act of saving Sana and the other children) and poor old Onitakemaru didn’t even get the dignity of an on-screen demise.

Apart from that matter of personal taste, though, the final episode of Angolmois delivered what I would have hoped.  It was tragic, it was poignant, it was terrible – but it didn’t oversell the moment too much.  With events this awful in scope, the more the narrative lets them speak for itself the better the story is going to work.  And while there were a few moments that pushed a little too hard, for the most part the series let those events speak for themselves.  And they did so in a pretty powerful voice.

If anime (and by extension manga, since this series is based on one) wanted to show Japan faring well in the Mongol invasions, there were other historical chapters it could have chosen to adapt.  In the end the Mongols didn’t win – I mean, that’s obvious, I’m here now typing this.  But this part of the Battle of Bun’ei was one defeat after another for the Japanese, and not a scraped knee – total annihilation.  Admittedly there was a tremendous amount of luck (or divine intervention, depending on your belief system) involved in the Japanese repelling the Mongols – but that part of the story could have revelled in some serious moments of glory.

Choosing to focus on this sad and terrible defeat took a lot more guts, because there was glory here too but it required considerably more effort to communicate it.  Angolmois is pretty much a story of courage and dignity in the face of (to use an overused expression that actually fits for once) certain defeat.  Those qualities weren’t always on display, and it certainly wasn’t pretty – but on the whole, Kuchii and those who were swept up in his wake displayed remarkable bravery and tenacity in fighting for a homeland that actually hadn’t been very good to them.  And if you can’t see glory in that, Angolmois isn’t the series for you.

But boy, this was a depressing slog along the way.  Kano, raped (presumably) and killed in shielding Teruhi.  Amushi stabbed and drowned saving Sana and the others.  Pretty much everyone in Teruhi’s retinue and all of Jinzaburou’s fellow exiles wiped out.  And all for a Mongol victory which, as I said, was never going to yield them much in the way of spoils.  This was mere practice for them, to gain their soldiers “experience”, and a battle for glory between competing factions.  The real prize lay far to the north, in Kyushuu, where the smarter among the invaders knew much sterner opposition awaited them.  And the Japanese on the mainland were only too happy to let their outlying islanders be slaughtered in order to gain them an extra few days (which would, as it happened, end up proving critical).  There’s not a hell of a lot of glory in that.

You can quibble with elements of Angolmois, certainly.  The production values weren’t exactly consistent, and that screen filter was a questionable choice to put it charitably.  But my main criterion for this series was that it avoid the trap of over-embellishing what were already epic events, and stick as close to the historical record as possible while telling an original story.  I think for the most part it achieved that admirably, and the story it told was extremely engaging as a result.  Good historical drama that can pull that off are pretty damn rare in anime these days, and that just makes me appreciate Angolmois all the more.  The tale of how the Japanese actually won the Mongol wars would certainly seem prime fodder for anime, but it would be hard to tell it with as much intimacy and impact as this humbler, bleaker tale.