Excellent series...but

Written by Ysabel on November 26, 2011 at 7:43 AM

This contains spoilers, tho I won't name names.

This is a great story that, like Harry Potter, sort of ages/matures along with its title character and all his friends. I really like that. I like the fact that people involved in life and death battles actually stand the possibility of, like, dying. (Normally not...this is an anime after all. Most are sort of infinitely resurrectable---they don't die, they just get really big boo-boos.)

I do not like the WAY they die. They die because they or their partners do stupid things in battle. As in so many anime, at key moments when they s/b acting, they stand around staring and because they stand around staring, (or worse, explaining to the enemy how they just beat them) said enemy has the time to recoup and get away, possibly killing someone in the process. This cheapens the death because it leaves you feeling you're dealing with stupidity rather than the inevitable consequences of life and death battles. At a time I s/b mourning the fall of a character I'd really come to love, I'm sitting there thinking he's dead because (a) just stood there staring or (b) told the bad guy why he was winning (giving said bad guy a means to figure out how to get loose) or (c) said dying protagonist did something totally out of character in order to hit his death scene as dictated by the script-writer's outline.

When a character dies, it needs to feel inevitable. Animators writing death scenes should study a master...like Akira Kurosawa (Samurai 7/Seven Samurai), not just for the battle tactics/set up that make the death inevitable but for the handling of each and every character involved.