Short rambling post as usual, not a proper review or anything.
Also, Spoilers!!! 100% Spoiler, I pretty much just write the plot of the whole thing.
As usual I’m always late on anime, so I’m going to talk about anime from 2014. (could be worse…)
No ground-breaking opinion or insight, I just feel like writing a bit, it’s strangely cathartic.
Pretty decent anime.
7/10 at least
Since I haven’t paid much attention to anime in the last 3-4 years, I’m impervious to hype (which Zankyou no Terror had lots of)
(940 words of pure spoiling)
I’m also impervious to it being by the Cowboy Bebop guy, since Cowboy Bebop is my pet hated anime. (I kinda like it, but I feel it’s way overrated)
And Shinichiro Watanabe’s works since Cowboy Bebop are seen widely as inferior (and I agree, Samurai Champloo was a 6/10 at best, I should watch Sakamichi no Apollon, tried a couple of times but I get bored during the first episode)
But I watched Zankyou no Terror today.
And my reaction was much better than to Sakamichi no Apollon.
100% Spoiler, I pretty much just write the plot of the whole thing.
It follows two 17 year old boys (the art style, the appearance and demeanour of the two at first made me think I was mistakenly watching a boys love anime) who are terrorists, but strangely kill no one in their attacks.
One is named Nine, the other Twelve, together they form Sphinx.
They were orphans, brought up in a cliché übermensch producing institution that is so usual on this kind of anime, they somehow managed to run away. (engineered übermensch or not, when your top secret facility’s security is breached by 10 year olds you have to ask some questions…)
So after some years in obscurity they raid a nuclear facility and steal what was supposed to be nuclear fuel. (wasn’t, was actually a bomb)
And shortly after that raid, they bomb a Government building (with normal explosives) in a very contrived plan to make sure no one died.
Enter the cliché great detective who is too good and honest for his own good and was demoted to the archives, Shibazaki.
Then comes the part I didn’t like at all, the also cliché love interest that comes up out of nowhere.
The entire anime is done in a way that (perhaps wrongly) makes it seems like the bulk of the action happens in less than a month.
So all it took for Twelve to betray (well, it was a betrayal) the only person he had in his life for the last few years (Nine) and fall in love with Lisa — a useless, harebrained girl with no redeemable characteristics — was a couple of very short conversations.
Having blue balls makes you do things…
Well, I guess childhood emotional neglect does make you kinda thirsty for human warmth. (and Lisa despite having no redeemable characteristics was not a bad person, just useless, you know, like a pet)
Then the plot thickens (about as much as this plot could thicken) as we are presented Five, a girl who is also a product of the same institution.
Who is working for the Americans (because if there are engineered übermensch, the americans are the only ones who have a right to them, it seems), who in turn are meddling in internal affairs of Japan.
At first Five seems like a match to Sphinx, even superior, seeing how she attacks their computer and sends a bomb to their hideout. (thanks to Lisa, who disregarded the only instruction she had: “Don’t go outside for any reason”, she goes and opens the door for the mail man)
Our heroes run away from what seems like a mighty foe, taking Lisa with them.
She then runs away (for the second time in the anime, I said she had no redeemable characteristics, didn’t I?) and gets caught by Five.
That leads to Twelve betraying Nine, because the love of his life (Lisa) was kinda…strapped to a good amount of explosives.
Nine, now alone goes and surrenders himself to the cops, with the condition of having a press conference at a certain place.
But Five will not let anyone else take Nine! Bitch be crazy!
And goes after him, trying to intercept the car that is transporting him to the place of the press conference.
Twelve makes a comeback, helping Nine.
Then in what is possibly the most anticlimactic scene of the last 20 years, we learn that Five only had a crush for Nine, who she was never able to beat (at chess?) while growing up (could have fooled me). As a goodbye, she kisses him and tells him to keep living for her.
And then she blows herself up.
After this, we see a video clip that Nine prepared to be broadcast in case things went wrong, turns out the delivery system for the nuclear bomb was automatic and the bomb itself was on a timer.
More exactly a meteorological balloon that would get the bomb way up before it exploded, which would cause an EMP that would fry everything electronic in a pretty decent radius.
And that makes me ask, what was the point of that?
Simply shedding light on the project they were part of?
A forced return to less technologically advanced times? (Ted Kaczynski and his Industrial Society and Its Future say hi!)
Making it so everyone would suffer the same disconnectedness that they felt when they were kids?
In the end Nine and Twelve end up dead.
The entire anime can be summed up in one word: anticlimactic.
PS: Almost 1000 words. Not bad, considering I said nothing of value.