Info
- Title:: Casshern Sins
- Studio:: Madhouse, Tatsunoko Production
- Year:: 2008
- Format:: series
- Episodes:: 24
Log
2019-11-30
currently on ep 5?:
i’m enjoying this quite a bit, even though emi feared it wouldn’t be my thing. but i like the premise, emo though it may be, and am ok with the pacing too. the art style took a bit to adjust to admittedly (after thinking about it, i realized it reminds me of mirai nikki!), but at least it’s kinda unique.
it is maximum emo though. i mean, you can’t make an anime where the protagonist wants to die for pretty good reasons and not have it be emo af.
2020-01-09
at ep12.
i really hope this holds up, because i think i love this. it is entirely an existential meditation on how people (or, robots) deal with impending mortality: the hopes they cling to and the delusional actions these hopes make them pursue, the despair that comes with rejecting these false hopes, the erratic attempts to define the meaning of life now that the inevitable presence of death makes the question important for once, and casshern at the center of it all. he represents an extremely immediate promise of salvation – so tantalizing that they cannot help but try for it, despite it being certain death. and yet he stands outside this mythos, fundamentally unable to comprehend it, and yearning to escape it completely.
oh, and friender is also there.
this might be a story that can only be told through these robots, since the shock of ruin has been so traumatic to them as to define their current existence (whereas humans have learned to subconsciously normalize this reality, and never truly had an immortality to lose).
also it’s starting to more overtly be revealed that the mass majority of the robots left over were braiking boss grunts, who lack the ability to act outside a nature formed in a brutal decadent era. i still don’t know who the more humanoid bots are, other than that the comments about friender hint that they might be entirely custom-made, and designed with specific intent.
my current prediction is that luna is either gone or in an impotent state, or that her fate will never be fully resolved (in the same way that one cannot prove the absence of something). but that’s a pretty safe one to make, since i don’t see this one pulling out a luna that is the perfect healer these robots have been looking for.
2020-01-14 - eps 13–16
i think they decided to make luna a healer the robots have been looking for. i’m not sure how to feel about this development yet, since not much is shown about how she actually works. she claims to still be able to heal people, but the prevalence of the ruin at least speaks to the limits of her power. interesting things can still be done here.
and casshern finally finds something to believe in, which is a good development, even if it’s also very anime and also kinda straight.
also i’m not sure how to feel about things actually happening in this half of the anime, but then again, i’m probably one of the few people who could tolerate 24 episodes of wandering the desert and slipping into ennui. everyone else would see this as the show spinning its wheels.
2020-01-15
ep17: even when they make forward progress the show finds a way to make it heartbreaking. although i’m still hesitant about this idea of stopping the ruin, because it seems like an easy way out. the ruin itself doesn’t seem as bad as the the poor planning going into it, and so undoing the ruin means removing what makes it so especially interesting. (i guess i don’t want this show to pull a happy ending out of its ass, which is quite probable given that it’s anime…)
ep18: i think they let the art director write the whole episode. i guess we get to see lyuze’s paranoia and mental contradictions (and the not-subtle fact that she’s horny for casshern), but part of me wonders if a filler episode is the best way to show that.
2020-01-16
ep19: i can’t believe they made them all robots, but still gave them gender.
also i’m actually ok with this turn in the second half. i feel like, through lyuze, it’s showing the ruin in a very personal way, and how it influences her feelings about herself.
also that end almost made me cry. casshern’s one line choked me up.
ep20: of course, this raises the question of whether luna was always like this, or if the years have jaded her.
2020-01-17
ep21: death is more of a mindset than anything, really.
but forcing a little child to accept their eventual death is a bit much.
and having casshern succumb to an absurd death to prove a point is kinda dumbass moments too.
ep22: wherein we learn how casshern received his immortality.
and i think i can be ok with luna being something of an indifferent god – like the sun they have referenced.
ep23: whoa dio went 3d for a second. i hope that didn’t blow the budget too much.
and wherein the moral of the series gets dropped for all to see.
although the mention that death was inside her implies that her days might have been numbered anyway?
ep24: i sorta question this ending, but i don’t know how they could’ve wrapped everything up in just this episode anyway.
i think maybe it hit a point for me where everybody kept saying the same things over and over and over again to the point where nothing really could happen. luna and casshern were acting according to beliefs so rigid that it could almost be predestination, and honestly it really becomes clear that casshern’s development as a character went from being a mindless angel of death to being an angel of death who has justified it to himself on a moral level. and that’s just not too fun to watch. it’s not fun to watch an ending where it feels like everybody is hitting the requisite beats needed to resolve the plot, like mashing through the textboxes in the cutscene.
but also, it wouldn’t be an anime i really like if i didn’t object to the ending.
do i even like any animes where i also like the ending? (i think maybe just madoka. i say i like eva’s ending more than i actually do, and i remember utena’s being fine, but that’s about it.)
in retrospect, i think my misgivings with the ending are largely a result of these sorts of existential questions being extremely my shit, and so i was bound to have opinions about them beforehand.