Fumetsu no Anata e 2nd Season – 06

I really don’t know about Fumetsu no Anata e.  I’ve watched a lot of anime over the years, but I’m hard pressed to think of many with as much of a multiple-personality disorder as this one.  There are times where to me at least it literally plays as if it’s literally written by a different person from week to week – which of course it isn’t, as all this material is straight from the manga.  I just don’t get it, really.  Why is this show the way it is?

Things started off more or less in the same broadly weird mode they’ve been since Bon’s posse arrived on the scene.  Which I generally haven’t minded – it’s left me more bemused than anything.  That whole business with Kahaku proposing to “Parona” only to have her lose her lunch was a fitting capstone to that twist.  Kahaku was really creepy and unpleasant throughout that whole sequence.  I mean, “no means no”, Man – take a hint.  Fushi cycling through all the clubs in the bag trying to free himself before finally settling on Booze Man was pretty hilarious, I’ll say that much.

That’s when things took a really irritating turn.  The Church of Bennett sends one of its flunkies to tell Fushi that Bon is about to arrested and executed, and that the only way to save him from being hounded by the Church for the rest of his life is to surrender.  And Fushi buys it, no questions asked.  Then the Bennet bishop (or whatever he’s called) Cylira (Miyamoto Mitsuru) tells Bon that he’ll support his bid to be king if he sells Fushi out – and he does.  The stupid stick is never a good narrative device, but you rarely see it wielded so clumsily as it was here.

After this it’s just basically a bunch of stuff happening for plot.  Iris (Todo) foments a riot against Fushi’s capture, and gets stabbed.  Fushi is unable to bring the just-dead Bennett elder back to life.  Bon gets knocked out and locked in a cage.  And Fushi is thrown into a solid iron chamber (where he becomes ill and the Creator suggests it’s because “his body isn’t getting something it needs”), which not even Gugu’s flame breath can make a dent against.  The man in black proves singularly unhelpful, and seems almost giddy when molten iron is poured into the chamber, pushing Fushi into an ever-repeating cycle of agonizing death and regeneration.

I’m not saying there’s no way To Your Eternity could have made this chain of events convincing, but it would have to have been executed a hell of a lot better than this was.  It all happened too quickly, very tail wagging the dog kind of stuff, and I didn’t buy any of the principals making the decisions they did.  Ooima Yoshitoki has a way of occasionally making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, spinning dubious events into interesting new twists, and I suppose that could happen here with this new layer of the Fushi mythology being explored.  That would be very much in character for Fumetsu, where you just have to take the bitter with the sweet.