Once again, we come back to the theme of community. Iori tries to be the hero. She tries to do everything by herself. And she can’t.
But once again, Iori is ahead of the game. She actually asks for help. No one else has done this so far.
I’ve already discussed community in Kokoro Connect at length, so I’ll breeze over the first half of this episode since it mainly reiterated these earlier points.
Making Choices
In the second half of the episode, Heartseed makes an interesting proposition to Iori: she has the opportunity to start over and redo part of her life.
Earlier, Iori had been worrying that she’d made the wrong choices in her life. If she had done something different as a child, her mother would have been happier. If she could be her “true self”, whatever that means, things would have turned out differently.
But when given the choice, Iori makes the decision not to redo anything. She comes to accept her choices and to accept herself, whether her choices were wrong or false or true or not: they were still her choices. If anything defines Iori’s “true self”, it’s the choices she made.
This idea is quite similar to Camus’ take on choices:
“I had been right I was still right I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well lived it another. I had done this and I hadn t done that. I hadn t done this thing and I had done another. And so? ” — The Stranger, Albert Camus
For Camus, the problem isn’t what choice you make so much as accepting those choices and their consequences. Your choices are what define you.
The most interesting part of this whole discussion, however, was Heartseed’s reaction:
For a guy who’s so expressionless and dead, I think this smile reveals more than anything he’s said so far. Again, I can’t bring myself to see Heartseed as evil or even as a troll. With this smile, I think we can see that he’s proud of Iori’s choice.
Now, I said earlier that Iori was ahead of the game in respect to living in community. But she still has a way to go too. She hasn’t even talked to her mother about this before? It turns out her mother was letting this guy back in the house to try to make Iori happy.
But happiness is a communal affair.
Excellent note to end the series on. This is my favorite of the season by far, and sad to see this end.
This episode also reminds me of a quote you made before. It was a reply to a question: Do you regret anything? Your response was along the lines of: No. Regrets are for people who make mistakes.
Oh, my mistake, only this arc has ended. I thought this series was 13 episodes, but now I see 17…? Good news!
I think this is the end of the series airing on TV, and the rest will be extra episodes on Bluray only.
Yep, this was my favorite of the season too.
I honestly don’t have any regrets. Don’t really see the point.
So both Iori and her mother endured that abusive guy b/c each thought the other would enjoy his company? At first I found it ridiculous but the longer I think about it the more I think it is not unrealistic. Children go super great lengths to get their parents’ affection. And Iori’s mother might have felt some pressure to provide a proper dad and to pretend they were happy family. Alas the resolution was too quick and easy for my taste again.
I don’t know, I kind of like the quicker resolutions. Usually miscommunications like this will take an entire season to resolve. And really, if it’s just poor communication, you should be able to fix it pretty quickly.
Why does Taichi suck so much? He is the only main character that we know so little about. Everyone else got character development and a past while all he got was just some line that says he is “insane in a gentle way.” Is he there just to solve people’s problem and move the plot forward?
I wouldn’t mind his boring personality if we could just see how he got to where he is and how his past plays a part in it. Other than that and some minor pacing issues, this series is good.
If anyone has read the novel, please tell me that the author did a better job of representing Taichi. It could be the anime that is not presenting him properly from his novel counterpart.
I can tell you that Taichi gets a full arc coverage on his hero syndrome in the 7th Volume of the novel. Though the chances are we’ll never see it on TV.
Taichi’s problem doesn’t have anything to do with his past. His problem stems in a form of future.
I highly recommend the novel if you want to see a full coverage of the author’s take on Taichi’s hero syndrome. Though translation will take some time to get there (only up to Vol 4 atm, it’s going to take at least around 2 months to get to the late volumes if all goes smoothly.)
Well that’s good to hear. In your opinion, having read the novel, did the anime do a good job of representing Taichi? How does he compare to his novel counterpart?
Well, I have my complains, but it can’t really be considered as complains as the reason is mostly due to medium limitation. The anime, needless to say, missed out a lot of what’s going on in Taichi’s mind, aka the inner dialogues (that applies to other characters too for every arc).
It becomes very obvious in the Kako arc especially. In the novel you can see a clear view of how Taichi was struggling to carry the burden of a “knight” alone, and what he thinks of the situation of his companions. The revelation to Taichi in this arc is pretty much along the lines of “being powerless” and “carrying the weight.” In the anime he seemed a lot more shallow in that department.
It’s hard to blame the anime though (minus Kako, which I do think they rushed it,) it’s difficult to adapt these kinds of details on screen without making it long-windy and boring.
Ah, that makes more sense knowing more of what’s going on with Taichi. You’re right, I didn’t really get that from the anime. I wasn’t entirely sure why only Taichi was left out of turning into a child.
You didn’t review this in the review index?
No… I still haven’t finished watching the OVA episodes, amazingly enough… Really need to get on that.