to the other side of the storm
Jun. 11th, 2024 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mikogalateaI finished Yuri Kuma Arashi on Sunday. With that, here's a bit of commentary on the final three episodes, followed by some thoughts on the series as a whole.
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Chouko steps up as essentially the final boss, and her characterisation really is just "homophobe who keeps making puns based on her name". (The frequent "way" in the official subs is chou in Japanese.)
Lulu and Kureha at the end of ep 10 are so bittersweet. Considering I hadn't been all that convinced by Lulu wanting to be friends with her in the show's first half (since she was clearly in this whole thing for Ginko's sake above all else) I thought they'd gone on to form a sweet little friendship by this point.
It's such a shame about Lulu's fate at the end of the penultimate episode. Her death was one of the only moments in the series that actually got tears out of me, which says good things about her but less good things about my attachment (or relative lack thereof) to most of this cast in general. She really was the best character in the end, even if I like Sumika quite a bit as well.
The best part of the ending for me was Uchiko getting up and walking out on the invisible storm bullshit. It may be an obvious rehash of elements from Utena's and Penguindrum's endings, but doing it with a bitpart character does give it a bit of a fresh spin. I also think she's just the first and other girls may steadily follow suit afterwards, since most of them were hesitating to shoot the main couple in the climax despite Chouko's "don't think" demands, though that might be me projecting my Utena-brain on to things.
I also liked Lulu and her brother being together in the afterlife and her finally getting/accepting a kiss from him, plus her hornet circling both of them. (I noticed when rewatching ep 4 that the hornet tended to circle both of them when they were together, instead of only circling Lulu as usual, which I think foreshadowed all along that she didn't actually 100% hate Milne.) I still wonder if Lulu even necessarily needed to die at all, but this scene did give her a nice sendoff and put a nice cap on her arc.
Finally, Ginko and Kureha definitely aren't dead and anyone who thinks they are clearly aren't paying the blindest bit of attention. They just bailed out on the narrative a la Utena and Anthy.
Aaaaand that's Yuri Kuma Arashi!
Now I've finally watched it all the way through, I definitely feel that it's the weakest of Ikuhara's post-Utena anime series. There's parts of it I liked, parts I disliked and parts that just plain made me uncomfortable... which is to say I have pretty mixed feelings on it in general. The writing is wonky, the pacing is wonky, most of the characters felt more like vehicles for the show's themes than actual characters with personalities, and for all they talk about love and not giving up on love and whatnot, a lot of that "love" felt very told-not-shown.
On the other hand, the OST is gorgeous and easily the best thing about this show.
My favourite characters were Lulu and Sumika, as I've already indicated. With regards to Sumika, I think she was Kumaria the whole time, or at least an aspect of her; I noticed going through the series from the beginning that she kept talking as though she was expecting to die soon.
I felt a lot of sympathy for Kureha, as she goes through some terrible things and I know how awful grief and bullying are, but at the same time I felt frustrated by how underwritten she was and how the narrative seemed weirdly reluctant to give her too much of an actual personality.
Ginko was very unlikeable to me in the first half -- it didn't exactly give a good early impression when she didn't say much more than "delicious smell gau gau" at first and the second episode had her sexually assaulting Kureha in a fanservice-y way while literally regarding her as a piece of meat -- but I softened up on her after her actually-quite-good backstory was revealed in ep 7 and she did get better after that.
My least favourite character was Yuriika, by a landslide, which shouldn't be remotely surprising to anyone who saw my last entry. One of the galling things about her is, in a show where most of the villains are basically one-dimensional shitheads, it just happens that the shitty adult paedophile who brought a huge amount of her misery on herself is the one villain we're meant to have any sympathy for. I don't think she deserved any after all she did, and she made the end of ep 9 suck ass; Kureha didn't owe her a single bloody thing. I greatly prefer Mitsuko as far as the villains go, a lot of it being because the narrative doesn't apologise for her like it does for Yuriika, and I had a small smidge of pity for Kaoru by her end despite the shit she pulled even if that smidge is probably still more than I'm meant to feel for her.
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I'm still willing to turn this series over in my head a bit more, and while I do have very mixed feelings about it and I can't see myself having too much fannish attachment to it, I can see myself revisiting this series sometime in the future.
-
Chouko steps up as essentially the final boss, and her characterisation really is just "homophobe who keeps making puns based on her name". (The frequent "way" in the official subs is chou in Japanese.)
Lulu and Kureha at the end of ep 10 are so bittersweet. Considering I hadn't been all that convinced by Lulu wanting to be friends with her in the show's first half (since she was clearly in this whole thing for Ginko's sake above all else) I thought they'd gone on to form a sweet little friendship by this point.
It's such a shame about Lulu's fate at the end of the penultimate episode. Her death was one of the only moments in the series that actually got tears out of me, which says good things about her but less good things about my attachment (or relative lack thereof) to most of this cast in general. She really was the best character in the end, even if I like Sumika quite a bit as well.
The best part of the ending for me was Uchiko getting up and walking out on the invisible storm bullshit. It may be an obvious rehash of elements from Utena's and Penguindrum's endings, but doing it with a bitpart character does give it a bit of a fresh spin. I also think she's just the first and other girls may steadily follow suit afterwards, since most of them were hesitating to shoot the main couple in the climax despite Chouko's "don't think" demands, though that might be me projecting my Utena-brain on to things.
I also liked Lulu and her brother being together in the afterlife and her finally getting/accepting a kiss from him, plus her hornet circling both of them. (I noticed when rewatching ep 4 that the hornet tended to circle both of them when they were together, instead of only circling Lulu as usual, which I think foreshadowed all along that she didn't actually 100% hate Milne.) I still wonder if Lulu even necessarily needed to die at all, but this scene did give her a nice sendoff and put a nice cap on her arc.
Finally, Ginko and Kureha definitely aren't dead and anyone who thinks they are clearly aren't paying the blindest bit of attention. They just bailed out on the narrative a la Utena and Anthy.
Aaaaand that's Yuri Kuma Arashi!
Now I've finally watched it all the way through, I definitely feel that it's the weakest of Ikuhara's post-Utena anime series. There's parts of it I liked, parts I disliked and parts that just plain made me uncomfortable... which is to say I have pretty mixed feelings on it in general. The writing is wonky, the pacing is wonky, most of the characters felt more like vehicles for the show's themes than actual characters with personalities, and for all they talk about love and not giving up on love and whatnot, a lot of that "love" felt very told-not-shown.
On the other hand, the OST is gorgeous and easily the best thing about this show.
My favourite characters were Lulu and Sumika, as I've already indicated. With regards to Sumika, I think she was Kumaria the whole time, or at least an aspect of her; I noticed going through the series from the beginning that she kept talking as though she was expecting to die soon.
I felt a lot of sympathy for Kureha, as she goes through some terrible things and I know how awful grief and bullying are, but at the same time I felt frustrated by how underwritten she was and how the narrative seemed weirdly reluctant to give her too much of an actual personality.
Ginko was very unlikeable to me in the first half -- it didn't exactly give a good early impression when she didn't say much more than "delicious smell gau gau" at first and the second episode had her sexually assaulting Kureha in a fanservice-y way while literally regarding her as a piece of meat -- but I softened up on her after her actually-quite-good backstory was revealed in ep 7 and she did get better after that.
My least favourite character was Yuriika, by a landslide, which shouldn't be remotely surprising to anyone who saw my last entry. One of the galling things about her is, in a show where most of the villains are basically one-dimensional shitheads, it just happens that the shitty adult paedophile who brought a huge amount of her misery on herself is the one villain we're meant to have any sympathy for. I don't think she deserved any after all she did, and she made the end of ep 9 suck ass; Kureha didn't owe her a single bloody thing. I greatly prefer Mitsuko as far as the villains go, a lot of it being because the narrative doesn't apologise for her like it does for Yuriika, and I had a small smidge of pity for Kaoru by her end despite the shit she pulled even if that smidge is probably still more than I'm meant to feel for her.
-
I'm still willing to turn this series over in my head a bit more, and while I do have very mixed feelings about it and I can't see myself having too much fannish attachment to it, I can see myself revisiting this series sometime in the future.
