#though once he left the animals the career kinda fizzled because he got more into merc work and offering his muscle elsewhere too

[a-gay-little-cat]

"An excerpt from an interview with boxing legend Tiger"

I saw this post again and I just felt inspired to redraw it with Tiger so here we are :]

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Sarazanmai Episode 11 [Finale]: “I Want To Connect, So Sarazanmai”

Do you ever just watch an anime episode that’s So Much in so many different ways that it makes you immediately want to lay down and sleep for a hundred years, but in like a good and hopeful way?

Yeah.

It’s very fitting that the final episode title is technically self-referential nonsense that in practice makes complete emotional sense and leaves everything feeling neatly tied together. It just Works [tm].

Thoughts under the cut.

Even though they were in like 5% of this episode I just wanna immediately point out that Reo and Mabu are ALIVE and IN LOVE and my SKIN IS CLEARED. It didn’t exactly happen in the way I expected, but I was hoping that they’d get revived, and here we are. The finale gave absolutely no shits about actually explaining any of the lingering mysteries about them, but I can’t fault them for it when they gave them such an unambiguously happy ending together. And in practice it perfectly fit the dreamy, surreal, intensely emotionally-driven vibe of the whole finale. Seeing their connected rings morph into them flying through the air while holding hands and the sheer power of their gay love literally paving the way for the main trio to finally connect was one of those moments where you just gotta sit back and accept that Ikuhara’s throwing at you, lmao.

Realistically I thought they might get left off on a pretty bittersweet note like a lot of Ikuhara characters, but nah, they’re just straight up back to being alive and happy and they pretty much got to attend their daughter’s magical furry wedding, lmao. They didn’t even get their memories erased like I thought might happen, so the whole confession scene from ep10 is still perfectly intact and now that the whole otter thing’s dealt with, we can probably safely assume that the two of them made up and are back to being The Ultimate Couple. It also looks like the two of them and even Sara and Keppi are still hanging out in the human world, which is kinda unexpected. I thought that even in the best case scenario they’d all just head back to the kappa kingdom, but I guess since that doesn’t really exist anymore they’re just gonna stay in the human world. Reo and Mabu seem to be working as rickshaw drivers now, which makes it even more clear that they’re probably back to being more or less regular people and being part of regular human society, and they’ve probably given up their jobs as cops, which is nice.

None of this answers the still lingering question of ‘how the fuck does the manga even fit into the timeline aaaaaaa’, but I don’t care as much about finding out the answer to that after this finale, so it’s not a big deal. I guess we’re meant to think that it happened before the anime, though. My best guess is that Sara was intentionally sent into the human world as a baby to protect her from the kappa/otter war, or something, and then Reo and Mabu raised her, she magically turned into her teenage/adult self [in an instantaneous fairy tale-y kind of way], then she went back to the kappa kingdom for a bit, and I guess she arranged things with Keppi and had them get recruited into the kappa kingdom? I still think they’re humans that got roped into this like the main trio, so I think that makes sense to me.

Even more so than with the main trio, I think that those two getting a 100% happily ever after with no caveats or drawbacks really spells out how fundamentally optimistic and hopeful this series is, and how they were one way or another victims of a harsh system that didn’t deserve the shit they went through, and so they got given a happy ending. It’d be understandable if people feel upset that they got such a happy ending after having done undeniably awful things, but I don’t mind.

And on the topic of the main trio, hoo boy they sure were the main focus of this episode, lol. And by ‘them’ I mean ‘Toi’ because let’s be honest he was basically the actual main character of the show by the end, and the finale was like 99% focused on his character development specifically. Which isn’t a bad thing. Kazuki’s whole deal had already been more or less resolved by the end of ep6, so it makes sense that the second half in general focused more on Toi.

On the flip side, Enta kinda got the short end of the stick in terms of screen-time and development, and things end in a sorta wishy-washy way in regards to his feelings for Kazuki. It makes enough sense that his whole ending was about choosing not to drown himself in fruitless delusions, even if it feels kinda lame and disappointing compared to the more climactic and intense resolutions that Kazuki and Toi got.

Though tbh a big part of why I don’t feel too negatively about how Enta’s crush on Kazuki kinda fizzled into irrelevancy is because Reo and Mabu got their happy ending that preserved all of their character development, with the obvious implication that they’re back to being in a happy and stable romantic relationship. The fact that there’s at least one happy gay couple at the end of all this makes me much more willing to forgive Enta’s story being handled a bit differently. I mean, that’s part of the whole reason why diversity in storytelling is so important. When you include multiple different gay characters/relationships in your stories, you have the freedom to do different things with them, instead of having all the narrative burdens and expectations being placed on just one character/relationship. It’s annoying when the ONLY gay character in a show ends up having to repress and move on from their feelings, but it’s fine when there are other gay characters who get to have their own happy relationships.

Anyway, I really liked how Toi’s story wrapped up here. A lot of what actually happened in the finale was full on bizarre dream logic nonsense, but the emotional undercurrent of Toi being faced with the prospect of effectively committing suicide in order to free himself from the pain of human connection once and for all, and him coming to the realization on his own terms that he doesn’t want to let go of those connections, got through perfectly clearly. They actually went a lot further with his story than I expected. Literally further, in that we had a whole timeskip epilogue detailing how after the main story ended he went to juvie for a few years and then reunited with Kazuki and Enta when he returned. I’m going to assume that he turned himself in, since there shouldn’t have been any concrete evidence tying him to any of his crimes, except for maybe him shooting Reo [though even then, Reo’s corpse immediately transformed into one of those rings so I don’t think that counts as lasting forensic evidence, lmao]. It was definitely the most brushed-over part of the finale, but it didn’t need to be focused on that much, since the more important part was him reuniting with the other two afterward.

And in terms of timeskips and whatnot, I really loved the whole potential future flashforward sequence showing a what-if scenario of the three of them becoming professional soccer players and being slowly torn apart by interpersonal drama, while the different episode title cards are re-used in this new context to show how their emotional issues and hang-ups might lead to that sort of negative outcome. It did a really nice job of illustrating how they’re willing to face the possibility of future pain in order to hold onto their connections with each other. Which is what the entire show had been building up to, really. It was all about them becoming able to face the harsh realities of being known in order to lead fulfilling lives with meaningful personal relationships.

I do kinda wish their older selves looked a bit more distinct from their base designs, though. Aside from the difference in outfits you can barely tell that they’ve grown up, lol.

I was initially planning on rewatching episode 1 after this, but honestly after what actually happened I don’t really think I’d actually get anything new out of episode 1 now. The very first scene of the show is still a bit of a mystery, even though it’s obviously based around a lot of visual imagery and cinematography from the finale, and the whole deal with the ‘A’ signs is still up for interpretation. But I don’t really think it’s super important one way or another.

I’m actually very happy that the ending didn’t involve any sort of time travel, and that that’s not what the first scene of the show was hinting at. Especially with how this finale really hammered in the importance of living with the consequences of your actions and accepting the future for what it is, it would have felt very cheap if anything got reset in the end.

I guess it’s also worth noting that, at least with the main trio, there weren’t any romantic developments, which I think was fine. With how the story had been building up to this point I think it was fairly obvious that their ending was gonna be more about friendship alone. Which might disappoint some people [and the whole topic of Enta’s unrequited crush on Kazuki is it’s own whole thing], but at the very least, Reo and Mabu got their happy romantic ending together, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out, lol.

Part of me wants to be disappointed that we didn’t really learn anything new about Sara, and that she didn’t exactly, uh, DO anything even in this final episode, but honestly I feel like that’s kinda ‘the joke’. Like, she and Keppi come across as a super tongue in cheek joke about the fairy tale concept of princes and princesses. Sorta like how the Utena movie made the ‘prince’ into a complete joke, Sara and Keppi are just there to be funny plot devices, and their big ending is that they have a big fat furry wedding and that’s that. And honestly that’s fine by me. I feel like Ikuhara’s whole artistic career has involved him becoming more and more flippant and dismissive about the concepts of princes and princesses and how much importance is placed on them in fiction, and that’s valid. It reminds me a bit of how all of the actual major characters are all queer dudes and their relationships with each other are the actually important part of the narrative, whereas straight characters like Sara and Keppi and all the different faceless kappa zombie dudes are mostly just joke characters. There’s something both deeply amusing and deeply vindicating about how this show turns the tables like that, with how it frames different types of love and relationships.

The main trio’s story ended up being not super tied into what the show has to say about sexuality in general [and overall the show is less specifically ‘about’ that than Yuri Kuma Arashi was, from what I understand], but there was definitely a whole lot of social commentary about homophobia going on with Reo and Mabu, and thankfully that part of the narrative came to a satisfying and genuinely subversive ending, with them overcoming the death imposed upon them and regaining their happy lives together. 

Now I’m hoping that Ikuhara will ‘complete the set’, so to say, and have his next anime be about trans/non-binary characters, especially after how Kazuki’s whole cross-dressing thing ended up being kinda unimportant and not about gender identity to begin with. Which is still kinda disappointing to me, but oh well.

Overall, this ending was almost aggressively happy and optimistic compared to what I was bracing myself for, so thankfully it’s left me feeling warm and fuzzy and content. All in all, it was a surprisingly straightforward story in terms of it’s central messages, in spite of it’s over the top and abstract framing, and I think it really benefited from that inherent simplicity, especially in this finale, which was so singularly focused on it’s central trio [and mostly just Toi’s perspective alone]. I was a bit worried the finale might turn into one of those things where a deeply personal conflict gets blown up and tied into literally world-ending stakes, but thankfully they didn’t go unnecessarily far with it. Even the kappa/otter war resolution barely involved the main trio themselves.

At least in hindsight, I think the anime was very tightly woven and was paced surprisingly well for it’s short episode count, and it’s hard to imagine how they could have spent much more time on the main trio, but now that we have a better idea of the timeline of the series, I really think that episode 6 should have been followed up by an episode that basically adapted the ReoMabu manga, plus parts of the twitter account, and the short chapter from the first light novel volume about how they met. That way it would have ended up with a nice round 12-episode length, and I don’t think it would have ‘spoiled the surprise’ of the later reveals and developments with Reo and Mabu. I just think it would have been really good to actually cover that in the anime itself, especially since even in the finale, the whole fact that they literally raised Sara as a baby never got addressed, so it feels like anime-only viewers are missing out on a big chunk of their story. But it’s not a huge deal.

I guess at the end of the day my feelings about the finale boil down to ‘Reo and Mabu are alive and happy and that’s literally all that matters to me’, lol.

I was really worried about how I’d be left feeling after this, but I’m happy that I’ve been following this series ever since it was first announced. This is the only time I’ve watched an Ikuhara show as it’s come out, and oh boy has it been an emotional roller-coaster. The fact that it ended in a satisfying way makes it all feel worth it, though.

I probably won’t get to it immediately since I think my brain needs time to recover from this one, but sometime soon I want to finally get around to watching Penguindrum and then Yuri Kuma Arashi. I don’t think I’ll liveblog them like I’ve been doing with Sarazanmai, though, if only since I’ve already been spoiled on bits and pieces of what happens in them, but we’ll see how it goes.