Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we return to a scene of epic tragedy, as the young two-time hero Togo faces off against all the forces of the cosmos. Everything she once believed in has been proven false; rather than noble defenders of her proud homeland, she has learned they are actually just human sacrifices, destined to torture themselves in pointless battles all for the sake of the Divine Tree’s sustenance. They are pawns of an arbitrary conflict between gods, and what’s worse, it was Togo herself who was utilized as the instrument of Yuna’s demise, guided into friendship entirely so Yuna might eventually be exploited as a “hero” as well.
It is a hard thing to learn your home only sees you as meat for the grinder, particularly for someone as civic-minded as Togo. Her desire to support her home and Yuna’s general concern for those surround her were both ruthless exploited by the Taisha; drawn away from their genuine community-oriented club activities, their selflessness was instead directed towards an arbitrary conflict of and for the gods alone, a shortsighted response to heaven’s own shortsighted failings. Given all this, it is no surprise that Togo now wants only to burn it all down, and at least ensure no future heroes are similarly betrayed by their own kindness. Let’s see how her battle fares!
Episode 11
We drop directly back into the action, with Yuna in the divine tree’s realm facing off against an infinite swarm of purification-hungry vertexes
I quite like the use of her scanner to convey the unimaginable scale of this attack in an easy-to-parse visual format. Something about the device reading so many signals it becomes useless in terms of seeking them out neatly conveys the hopelessness of the situation, a trick also exploited magnificently by Aliens
This show is also smart about its implementation of CG creatures. There’s only so much you can to do mitigate CG looking inherently out of place next to traditional animation, so Yuki Yuna instead leans into it, making deliberately inhuman monsters that resist any efforts to apply human standards to their forms or motions
“Passion”
Togo admits she broke the wall, stating she won’t let Yuna suffer anymore
And of course Karin is the next to arrive, always quick to jump into battle
To explain herself, Togo leads the other two beyond the wall and into the hell that is the larger world. Love the imagery of these purification drones mashing themselves into a recreation of their dead god; Yuki Yuna has done an excellent job of conveying the idea of “celestial dictates in translation,” of the actual concerns of the gods needing to be reframed in individual terms in order to make sense to humanity. It feels a touch Lovecraftian, and also like Evangelion – we cannot really parse, much less understand the horrifying scale and alien intentions of the deities floating around us, we can only contextualize them through useful yet misleading frameworks like the hero system
“This is the true state of the world. Everything outside of the wall is destroyed.” And while this worldbuilding flourish seems to raise some natural questions outside of the scope of the narrative, it’s nonetheless a dramatic and chilling twist. Certainly one way to make your seemingly provincial conflict feel apocalyptic – revealing your battle is not just one of many, it is the only front still standing
“At some point we’ll lose even our memories of our precious friends.” It seems very like these inhuman deities to not see any value in the things mankind holds most sacred
Even now, Karin clings to her identity as a hero of the Taisha. Her lack of anything else to ground her made her a perfect tool of the Divine Tree, but her time with the hero club is causing her to doubt that fundamental truth
As Karin and Yuna are forced to retreat, we cut back to Itsuki and Fu. Fu has of course lost all will to fight – not only does she blame herself for leading her friends into this situation, she now must grapple with the fact that it was all for nothing
Oof, brutal moment of Itsuki attempting to shake her out of it, but not being able to speak – a gesture of concern that surely only makes Fu feel worse
Also like how the sound design echoes Itsuki’s silence, even as the vertexes descend upon them
After all this, Yuna can only chide herself for not recognizing how much Togo was suffering
Her device warns her that her unstable emotional state means she cannot currently transform. Such a perverse little detail – in order to be properly exploited, the heroes must have a strong conviction and sense of purpose. It is only when they believe they are saving the world that they become proper food for the divine tree
Fu looks up, and sees her little sister still fighting. The allegedly weak and dependent Itsuki, still determined to prove she is not a burden, still maintaining her conviction even in the face of this impossible situation. You helped her grow strong, Fu!
And Fu rises to fight beside her! “I’m proud you’re my sister.”
“Let’s show them the Inubozaki sisters’ girl power!” Goddamnit Fu. Well, at least she’s finally come to acknowledge Itsuki’s “girl power”
The designs of these vertex swarms are great – they evoke something between maggots and piranha swarms, with “teeth” like the flowing ends of ceremonial robes
“Friendship isn’t something you can pass or fail.” Excellent words from Karin, who originally thought of herself as a failure in all fields but heroism
Nice emotional symmetry across these two conversations. Fu was always the one who put on a brave face for their heroic duties, and Yuna was always the emotional rock of the group, but seeing the true face of their adversary brought both to despair. It then fell to the two they’d inspired to put the lessons they’d provided into practice – Itsuki by taking the lead as the frontline warrior, Karin by acknowledging Yuna’s feelings and guiding her towards resolving them
“Yuna, I’m going to stop fighting as a Taisha Warrior. From now on, I’m going to fight as a member of the Hero Club.” It was not their gallant heroism that was misguided, but merely the banner they fought under. Karin takes the brave step of discarding her prior source of certainty, and embracing the defense of the actual home she has found in the hero club
“I don’t want to see you cry.” Only our individual acts of personal charity can stand in the face of our overseers’ indifference to humanity – the original pledge of the hero club, now embodied in its adopted champion
Another excellent cut to silence here, as Karin stares out across the absurd battlefield, briefly glancing at a photo of the Hero Club together to remind her what she’s fighting for
And so at last the final member of the hero club blooms
Oh my god, now she’s using the Five Tenets of the Hero Club as her battlecry. Of course Karin wouldn’t simply switch to fighting for the hero club, she’d make an entire fuckin’ aesthetic of hero club samurai to accompany it
Goddamn. Brutal scene as she continuously blooms, the Taisha wrapping one limb after another, claiming its quarry even as she holds off the advance. The gods will not side with us, even it means their own destruction
The last “adornment” is a cloth fitted around her forehead, presumably implying the loss of her eyesight. Seems fitting for the cruelty of this system that all of her sacrifices would be visually conveyed as “blessings” of holy fabric
“Sorry, I think they took both my eyes and my ears. It’s you, right, Yuna?”
And despite it all, Karin has nothing but gratitude for Yuna, for giving her something to live for beyond fighting
“This is the only way we can stop it!” “Even then… even then!” Ah, that classic “even then,” which Symphogear even embraced as an overt catchphrase. This world is too cruel to warrant any sort of “logical” hope – hope in the face of the world’s true nature will always be irrational and aspirational, always an “even then” arrayed against every conventional argument. The irrational endurance of human hope is our only weapon against the darkness
And so Fu just clobbers Togo with the side of her claymore
Togo rises in bloomed form, a grand collective vertex behind her! But then Yuna the hero arrives in a flash!
And Done
Whew, the hits just keep coming in this show, don’t they? The first half of this episode actually seemed to be bordering on hopeful, with Itsuki and Karen each completing their personal arcs in appropriately heroic fashion, by taking on both the lessons and the duties of the club members who inspired them. But Karen’s boss rush and subsequent conversation with Yuna was just too damn cruel; even if she was finally fighting for something worth defending, seeing her proudly make such a terrible bargain really emphasized how little she has come to expect from this life. The original hero club represented the best instincts of humanity, our ability to care, connect, and nurture on an individual level, cruelly harnessed to the impersonal amorality of patriotism and faith. In the end, all we can truly believe in is each other.
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