I guess I’m pot-committed at this point, with only three eps of MoE left. Many thanks to those handful of you following these Aquarion posts. They’ve been fun to write, because this show has been fun to watch. It’s just so earnestly goofy in the way only sincere mecha anime can be. Sincerity does seem to be a key for me in whether a mecha series works or not. The minute calculation starts to take over the writing, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards, maybe more than with any other genre. Fortunately I don’t think that’s going to happen here.
This was the most eventful episode yet, and certainly one of the best. Among other notable events:
After passing through the rift, the elements children have their missing emotions restored. That means Sakko immediately turns into a scaredy cat and Momohime realizes she loves him. Rimiya is impacted too, but as he landed in the “Womb of the Goddess” we don’t to see his empathy form for a while.
These emotions are represented by the wings which immediately sprout from the kids’ backs. Which certainly seems to imply that the flashback scenes we’ve been seeing are all from this universe.
Sakko and Momo encounter talking masks, which explain that they’re merely forms the “thoughtform” beings of mythic space took in order to speak to them. Momo has also encountered some blobs who refer to her as “a flesh” and try to take over her body before disappointedly declaring it “full”.
Another mask tells the pair that the fleshy universe is stealing mana from this one.
Sun is apparently the one trying to cause the two universes to gattai (no surprise there).
The triangle the mythical beasts made ironically leads to the flesh babies having a chance to escape back home, as it shows them where to rift back to our universe will eventually open up.
Eventually Churoko (the robot Sakko, Momo and Sayo made) arrives, announces that it’s the physical form of the warrior element, tells its mom and dad it loves them and tells them to get ready for battle.
Sayo leads the pair to where Rimiya is, and also to where they had a meeting 12,000 years earlier and buried something.
Sakko realizes that in order to get back home the three kids are going to have to gattai, and in order to do that they need to rip out their wings (and with them their missing emotions). This raises some interesting philosophical questions about what they’ll be like on the other side. How does the memory of an emotion differ from the emotion itself?
The connection between love and killing here is certainly a fascinating one, and it’s interesting that Hana’s quirk pretty much matches the mythic thoughtforms’ worldview. They’re outraged that humans kill them without even loving them, but are fine with killing humans because they see their coveting of flesh as a form of love. There are definitely some larger themes at work here – the Elements are incomplete, yet they fight the unification that would make them whole. A bit Eva, that – and in this form at least Aquarion reminds me more of Evangelion than, say, Gundam.
The final reveal here is that upon their return to our world – after having seemingly killed Churoko, who followed them – Sakko, Momohime, and Rimiya are greeted with quite a spectacle. A black mecha, and at its controls Toshi doing his best Emperor Palpatine impression. Has Toshi-kun become Myth of Emotions’ big bad? If so that seemingly makes Sun (who’s pulling his strings, surely) an even bigger bad, but that cuts against what the series has been hinting at.
The post Sousei no Aquarion: Myth of Emotions – 09 appeared first on Lost in Anime.
