Just a reminder: The future of LiA is very much in doubt, and it’s up to you to decide what happens next.  Thank you for all your support!

Well, as usual lately with this show I needed a bit of reflection before I could jump right into writing.  There are certain anime where the experience is so singular, one can’t in good faith measure it against any other series.  The things  that bother me about Made in Abyss are not trivial, but when one takes a step back and considers that only MiA could evoke that in me, it’s more a token of respect than criticism.  If it were less profound than it is, it could never unsettle the way it does.

That said, my reservations are no less real.  I have reservations about this whole arc (and thus, season) to be honest.  I don’t know where Tsukushi is going with this, and if pushed I might say the whole thing feels rather misguided.  But then, fairness dictates that I reserve judgment on that until the resolution.  How can I decide whether it’s misguided until I see what the point of it all was?  As brutal and terrible as the Bondrewd arc is, it felt essential and organic to the larger story in a way Retsujutsu no Ougankyou doesn’t – yet.  But the “yet” part is the key to that sentence.

The way I see it, there are two minefields that Made in Abyss eternally has to navigate.  The first is fetishism, which tends to become a bigger issue with the intensity of plot slows down.  That hasn’t been much of a factor for a few episodes, not surprisingly as the plot has been in high gear.  The second is torture porn – which is a type of fetishism I suppose, but where this series is concerned rather in its own category.  Prushka’s story flirted with descending into it constantly, but for me managed to avoid it because of how interwoven with the larger plot it was.  Right now, this season has yet to achieve that balance.

It seems as if Wazukyan – and where Tsukushi is going with the character – is the key to everything.  What does he represent?  Even Bondrewd had nuance enough for some to argue against his evilness, but compared to Wazukyan he was pretty cut and dry.  What Wazukyan is doing here – effectively cooking and eating Irumyuui’s children alive – is horrific.  Not only that, he’s used the Cradles of Desire to manipulate her into the position of being a factory for sustaining his flock.  But whereas Bondrewd did what he did effectively out of greed – intellectual greed if nothing else – Wazukyan can be argued to have done it to save his party from certain death.

I think Wazukyan represents in the end the prophet, the true believer.  Unlike most prophets he actually is what he claims to be – he sees things others cannot, and is guided by what he sees.  And he clearly believes that any action is justified if it enables his visions to come to life.  So for him to force feed two Cradles to Irumyuui knowing (or at least suspecting) what they would do to her was fine – his flock would die in this place otherwise.  While Vueko and Belaf checked out and preferred to die – or lose themselves – rather than pursue this course, Wazukyan was unwavering.  And it’s clear from his interactions with Vueko that he had no reservations about anything he’d done.

The upshot of all this, then, is that  Irumyuui herself is the village.  In a perverse and warped expression of her wish to be a mother, she becomes a literal sanctuary for the entire group (and presumably others eventually, as delvers descend into the area).  The price the others must pay is to surrender their bodies to her and become hollows, never able to leave her again.  Unable to follow this path Vueko becomes a part of her in another way, linked with her now inhuman mind, and providing solace to the souls of her lost children.  All but one of them, that is.

This is where Faputa enters the picture – the last and most perfect of Irumyuui’s offspring.  She takes the Cradles with her when she leaves, effectively banished, but Irumyuui is somehow sustained by the presence of the hollows inside her.  One can only imagine the hatred Faputa was literally born with, presumably most of all for Wazukyan.  In the present she speaks to Reg of the promise he made to her, which of course he cannot remember.  One can guess that it involves his doing what she cannot to destroy the village, which the Reg we know today would be horrified at being asked to do.  But Reg is becoming expert at being asked to do that which horrifies him, and it seems as if what happened with Nanachi and Mitty was history repeating itself.

The question the final four episodes of the season will hopefully answer is what Tsukushi’s point for all this has been.  What message is he trying to send through this scenario, through Wazukyan – and how will what happens in Iruburu connect to the story as it moves forward?  Season Two of Made in Abyss is certainly no less brilliant than the first (or the film), but my assessment of it is more dependent on its ending than the first season was.  I expect a journey with these characters to be as full of pain as it is of wonder, but at the end of it, I need to be able to understand what all that pain was for.