That was certainly a suitably WTF ending for this series – anything less would have been a letdown I suppose.  I’m still not sure what happened there, exactly.  But at least we now know why this long-finished seinen manga got an adaption in the first place – mangaka Miyake Ranjo is writing a sequel.  It’s to be called “Fish”, and with that title it seems safe to assume Hiroki at the very least is going to be at the center of it.  Even if the ending doesn’t make sense, at least the anime’s existence now does.

I normally get annoyed at head-scratcher endings, but to be honest my emotional buy-in with Pet is low enough that I don’t actually care all that much.  In the first place that twist with Katsuragi being Jin’s father came totally out of left field as far as I can tell.  And his relationship with her mother was creepy as fuck – maybe it was supposed to be heartwarming, but it just felt unsavory and vaguely predatory.  If nothing else we now have an expectation for why Katsuragi ended up being such an unpleasant SOB – the good parts of his personality were shut off.

As for the ending itself?  Well – I’m honestly not sure.  It kind of played like it stopped in the middle of something, but when you have a manga that’s been finished for 17 years I’m assuming they adapted the actual ending.  Parts of it seem clear enough:

• Tsukasa basically gave in to his shame (about time) and decided he couldn’t live with himself.  He asked Hiroki to erase Hayashi from his memories.
• Hiroka pointed out that if he did that Tsukasa would be crushed, because Hayashi was his peak-giver.  So he offered to take Hayashi’s place.
• That didn’t work, and Tsukasa was reduced to an infantile state.
• Satoru asked Hiroki to go into his memories to find the instructions from Hayashi’s destroyed thumb drive.  Hiroki agreed, but only if Satoru erased his memories of Tsukasa.
• Satoru agreed but then reneged, on the grounds (correct, in my view) that it wouldn’t really help Hiroki at all.

After that is where it starts to get fuzzy for me.  Where exactly are Satoru and Hiroki at the end?  It looks like Mongolia but it also looks like Hayashi’s peak, which we’re told he borrowed from someone else.  Did Hayashi guide them to a real, physical place that was the inspiration for his peak, or did he somehow guide them to an actual peak?  And what about Tsukasa?  I think he’s alive but mentally a baby in the real world, but I wouldn’t swear to it.  Is he crushed or not?  When Satoru promises to “take it all back” and bring Hayashi, Meiling and Tsukasa to where he and Hiroki are – just where are they?

I don’t mind open-ended and leaving things to interpretation, but my honest opinion is that some of this is just confusion based on sloppy storytelling.  I don’t sense that this was supposed to be as equivocal as it was, but what the hell do I know?  At least it’s over.  And at least Satoru didn’t die, which was probably the one element of the ending I actually cared about enough for it to matter.  I’ll also stick to my take that Hayashi was the closest thing to a heroic figure this story had, for all the mistakes he made.  He was the one person who saw the big picture and proactively tried to make amends for the sins he’d committed.

And that, then, is that.  There was some good stuff here, no question about it, but ultimately I’d have to say that Pet was a disappointment from my perspective.  That said, it was a genuinely harrowing look at human nature, and its juxtaposition of fantasy elements with very believable human behavior was quite effective (and unsettling).  If nothing else this series never drove me to indifference, which I guess has to count for something.