Fractale 8…

My nominee for one of Season's Best Shots

Hey there!. I watched this episode last Friday. I watched it again last Saturday. Not because it’s interesting, not because it’s shocking, and definitely not because I liked it, but because I just couldn’t find any way of putting it together with the rest of the show and I had to write about it for all of you (you thought that a blogger’s life was all girls and candies?).

This show really had my best expectations 2 months ago. I picked it up after watching the trailer and reading who the staff behind it were gonna be. I even read some comments and gossips about the director and writers putting their careers on the edge for this anime. Well, I think the studio is gonna have a massive exodus after the season ends, cause this has not reached even half the bar (shows like Madoka, Level E and Yumekui airing in the same season don’t help it, either…).

I know I’ve been complaining about this for every post during the last what?.. 6 weeks?, but there’s a reason behind my tears. First 2 episodes had shown such potential that I thought for myself “Dude, you’re gonna earn a Blog Pulitzer with your very first show reviewed, you lucky bast…!“. All the ideas and possibilities that were created in the first chapters were totally and miserably wasted in the rest of them. Nothing is coherent, nothing is clear (and this isn’t always a bad thing, I like to think, but whenever I “solve” a mystery, another 10 facts appear that contradict it, and that’s call “ramble”), and unfortunately, nothing is interesting anymore.

Saw something you didn't like or is it just jealousy?

I read a couple of posts about this episode before publishing mine. Not for piracy, I just wanted to confirm that I hadn’t lost any important information provided during it while I was whining for my frustration. Some of those posts called this the best Fractale episode so far, some of them even said that this might save the whole series from sinking into oblivion. I don’t like to disagree (no, wait, I actually do..), but well, I’ll do it this time anyway.

Yeah, we got some more perverted and incestuous  allusions (no jokes this time). Sure, we saw some complicated genetic plot involved. Of course there were even some lives sacrificed for the ratings sake. But it’s all senseless and used as cheap plot twisters to attract viewers as bees into honey. On last episode’s end we saw how Clain was dramatically shot and that was an interest change, since so far nobody (and I mean the main characters) had ever suffered a scratch after jumping from a flying aircraft or getting involved in a gunfire. Guess what, he was miraculously healed in the first 30 seconds of the episode. Heads up, writers!, we’re not a bunch of careless boys watching cartoons, we actually pay attention to what comes out of your story, and this is totally valueless!.

There is no real uncertainty about the protagonists well being since the show itself gives us the feeling that they’re invincible. Passing on from a cheesy and over-moed route into one full of battles, Nessa becoming Neo’s successor (blue pill, red pill, c’mon!),  and Phryne almost being raped by her own father (I still have my doubts on him being her biological father..) in a single episode makes me feel dizzy and insensitive. Now I don’t know what to expect from the last part of the show, it could be some more fillers and a hurried up final episode with all the answers packed up in 20 minutes and a whole bunch of new questions for us to hallucinate until Judgment day, it could be that this show was only meant to be 5 episodes long but studios don’t make personalized contracts and hence they had to come up with 8 fillers out of nowhere, or it could be that this is just a psychological experiment to test how impressed we can get after being depressingly disappointed (Sounds to me as one of Baka Ouji’s jokes…)

Anyway, on the good side, art got a little bit better. Action scenes are actually nicely driven. Dias came back (hell yeah!). The plot showed some interesting serious points again. Pervy Daddy got killed in the explosion (hope he did!). Oh yeah, and apparently we’ll be able to get our own Nessa in the future (mass production lines were shown and looks like they already have enough to start packing and shipping…).

"Only $10.99 + shipping. No batteries, moeness or super-techno-powers included"

Want some conclusions after this chapter:

1. Well, Phrynes (younger ones) are clones. Nessa is a doppel. Most probably from Old Phryne. They’re not the same and is hard to define which one is more important (old, younger, doppel).
2. Chastity is important for anime heroines. As in horror movies, they become useless once they loose it.
3. Clain is a wimp.
4. Lost Millennium is only there to cause more confusion. They feel empty and valueless.
5. Erin is in love with Clain. But it’s shown so obviously that it’s hard to believe it.
6. Life can be as horror movies sometimes (hope you got it.)

If anybody has some clearer ideas on what the “key” stuff is meant to be, or any other smoking notion about where this story is moving on to, please enlighten me!

Ja ne!