Katanagatari - 12: Gun, the Firearm / entō・jū

Title:	Katanagatari
Episode:	12: Gun, the Firearm / entō・jū
Synopsis
Stretch: (Spoilers like crazy) So, Togame was going to betray Shichika all along? There was never any hint of that, or at least as they got to know and like each other, the hints vanished long ago. When Togame revealed this I felt confused and didn't know whether to believe it or not--especially given her even more confusing dying speech. She never seemed to me like the sort of hateful person who might be carrying out a meticulous plan to assassinate the Shogun. What was going on from this point was unclear to me; is Shichika trying to destroy the Deviant Blades to undo Shikizaki Kiki's 'twisting' of history? But how do you twist history anyway, and why would it be bad? It turns out that he was a ‘soothsayer’ who used his ability to foretell the future to acquire more-or-less modern technology. He then built it into the swords, with the idea of using them to change history. That’s what I was told at least. But except for Emonzaemon’s pistols and the solar energy operated robot, I didn’t notice any futuristic technology, and since like I said swords do very bizarre things in anime, I just shrugged those off. Maybe I’m an idiot, but the ‘secret’ to the story not even registering in my mind doesn’t speak well for the way it was told. So, the impression I got was that this concluding episode was a mess. It seemed as if the people who made it had been thinking 'let's just scramble everything up; nevermind if it makes any sense or not. The viewers will think that our unconventional approach was cool'. Shichika fights a series of bizarre opponents to recover the blades; he says he has come to the castle to die, but he kills everyone he meets. The problem is, he seemed the bad guy here, since his opponents were only defending the castle against an intruder. Physics didn't apply to these fights, and I guess they were just to get most of the blades out of the way quickly. This was explained away by him being declared ‘supernatural’, but that seemed a cop-out to me. It just meant that however hard he was trying to ‘die’, he couldn’t, and just slaughtered others instead. It was hard to be moved by Togame's flashbacks near the end, since everything we thought we knew about her had been unceremoniously dumped at the start of the episode. I knew which way the fight between Shichika and Emonzaemon would go--that was too critical to change--but at that point I found myself not really caring. Shichika is riddled with bullets, but that doesn't even slow him down. And all of a sudden the Shogun is declared to be the real villain--that is nonsense, what did he ever do wrong? Did Togame expect her father, who was a rebel leader, to be let off with a slap on the wrist when the revolt failed? The explanation I got afterwards was that this Shogun was an alternate history person, thanks to Shikizaki Kiki, who would screw up Japan and needed to be done away with, but that was news to me. And I'm supposed to be thrilled when the Shogun buys the farm? On the contrary, I felt sorry for him--and angry at Shichika. When the climactic scene came to an end, with an awesome (and ludicrous) display of Shichika’s ultimate martial art, I could only think that was stupid. Princess Hitei, the person who has been built up over numerous episodes as the villain, gets off scot-free--in fact, I seem to be supposed to like her now--while someone who I have absolutely no grudge against dies instead? I think that this final episode made mincemeat of the basic rules of storytelling, even if there was a sort of logic to it after all. Likeable characters should come out OK, or, if they die, there should be a moving lesson to their deaths; I didn't feel that. Shichika became a villain, killing people left and right just so that he could ‘die fighting’ (and he turned out to be so supernatural that he couldn’t even do that). Togame died in a confusing and meaningless manner--it became meaningless when she admitted her plan to kill Shichika. Was she telling the truth or making it up so that he wouldn't be heartbroken by her death? There's no answer. And I'll never understand how the princess wound up as Shichika's new sidekick--I had thought that maybe he was attacking the castle to kill her as revenge for Togame. More accurately, I’ll never understand how the people making this show thought that viewers would be pleased by that twist. She was the one who employed the murderous bastard Emonzaemon, for God’s sake! I am so frustrated by this episode that I am downgrading the series as a whole to 'Watch' status. What a mess Katanagatari turned out to be; and what a tragic waste of potential.

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