This Week in Anime

Unhappy with Endings

Sylvia
Coop, I have a strong feeling about ending this column right now. Why have you brought this evil upon us? That's not the kind of ending we're talking about, and you know it. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

For better or worse, yes. We've reached the end of another anime season, and that means it is a time of goodbyes. And one of those goodbyes was the goodbye to Goodbye, Lara, a big and bold conclusion which immediately spawned a range of reactions from "I loved it ;_;" to "let's beat the writer with hammers."

We at "This Week in Anime" (specifically you and I) preempted some of those reactions earlier in the season with our Dog Chess column. So I cannot say I was surprised. But I am nevertheless kinda bummed about it.

Before we continue, I'll throw in an extra disclaimer that we can't really do this column without discussing details about these series' conclusions, so from this point on, here be spoilers. You've been warned.

But anyway, with Lara specifically, it's not even the final episode so much as it's the final ~5 minutes. I think most people were on board with the story's climax, which invokes a lot of abstract, Ikuhara-esque imagery with the upshot of Lara confronting the pain in her own heart in order to rescue Mari's. There's no kiss, as it were, but it's a confession of love all the same, and one that Lara reciprocates from Mari earlier.

The show then timeskips 6 months ahead and shows Lara saying her goodbyes to the other characters, culminating in a parting with Mari at the train station.

It's abrupt. It's bittersweet. And its various minutiae have been dissected all sorts of ways over the past week and a change. Frankly, there's too much I'd want to say and write to adequately argue my piece, and that's not really the point of this column. But I do want to draw attention to what you just said: you've seen more discussion about the ending than about the rest of the series. And that, I think, does Goodbye, Lara a disservice.

And that's a perfectly valid interpretation of Lara's ending. You can also interpret it in a way that does not preclude Lara and Mari's romantic bond. Or you can interpret it as betraying their bond as established by the narrative leading up to that point. I think you can make sound arguments for several conclusions, or point at elements that could have been done differently, utilized more clearly, or expanded. We each bring a different set of personal circumstances to art, and in fact, that's why art exists! People love utilizing fictions, abstractions, and sublimations in order to pry at quintessences that straightforward language cannot penetrate. This necessarily creates debates about the meaning of artistic works, and in a perfect world, that's a good thing.

In our social media-poisoned reality, though, tribalism and conspiracy are king. Discussions don't happen. It's all different sides posting past each other, shadowboxing conveniently flimsy cutouts of their opponents. People invent circumstances and motivations out of nothing. People who haven't even watched the show feel compelled to chime in because it happens to be a popular topic, and their voices can be amplified as loud or louder than others depending on the size of their following and the whims of the algorithm. In this way, a contentious ending becomes a different monster entirely, feeding the discourse machine without nourishing any thoughtful conversation. And that's the shit that rankles me.

And I'm not saying I'm above that! Even now, I feel the compulsion to shadowbox my mental projections of what this column's comment section is going to look like. But there's no good reason for me to do that—to reduce the entirety of Goodbye, Lara to a series of gotchas that own my opponents in the marketplace of ideas.

An objectively boneheaded move for sure, especially when they already recast Char! Like, come on, guys. Yet it's also interesting I saw less social media consternation about that than the other more subjectively contentious parts, like the metanarrative or the fact that Machu and Nyaan didn't bump uglies (which they should have imo). But that's an anecdotal observation, so I wouldn't want to draw any conclusions from that. And people certainly had issues with GQuuuuuuX's structure and story before that.

Sometimes, though, you see problems on the horizon and just don't want to acknowledge them. Since you brought it up earlier, and since it was brought up in conversation with Goodbye, Lara, I will swallow my sadness and mention Wonder Egg Priority, which holds the distinction of the most heartbreaking (derogatory) anime ending I've ever had to grapple with. It's in a league of its own. And it legit pissed me off to see people comparing it to Lara's conclusion. Y'all don't even know. I was there. I had to sit down and review that after nearly three months of huffing copium. It hurt me. I hated this.

I will still go to bat for a lot of Wonder Egg Priority, and probably more than most people will. But this is one ending where I believe it truly drags down everything that came before it.

It's interesting, certainly. And not wanting for ambition. Most concretely, Wonder Egg is a lesson in how paramount project management is to making a successful anime series. Like, Lara could have benefited from a few extra episodes, but overall it adapted itself to its runtime well and told a complete character arc. Wonder Egg Priority's structure, meanwhile, collapsed like a house of cards and shoved every mean twist it could think of into its shoddily animated finale. Apples and oranges.

Absolutely. Every anime production only exists as a series of largely invisible compromises, as does any collaborative work of art. It makes tons of sense for any of the various artists involved to harbor complicated or negative feelings about that, depending on the result. But it definitely gets trickier when those compromises become evident to the audience, who bring their own ideas about who or what may be to blame.

Case in point, Hideaki Anno has come up with no fewer than three different endings to Evangelion, each of which represents a distinct creative vision, and each of which inspires a wide array of reactions. The original TV ending is most infamous, though, due to its stylistic and abstract departure from what audiences had come to expect from Eva. Yet if you watch it with an open mind, it stands on its own as an appropriately psychological conclusion to Shinji's arc. It represents a clear artistic vision. However, the consensus continues to view it as an "incomplete" version of the story eventually told by End of Evangelion.

And that's a good point! Once-controversial endings can become less contentious as time goes on and audiences reevaluate things. Like I will still see people recommend skipping Eva's TV ending and going straight to End of Evangelion—which is wrong, mind you—but at least that's better than sending death threats to the director.

I think that's why I gravitate towards more ambiguous and/or "unsatisfying" endings. I like leaving a series with a lot to chew on, and I like seeing how my interpretations change when I rewatch them, because (ideally) I'm not the same person who first watched it. But I can't deny the presence of some contrarianism in there. I really enjoyed Tokyo Ghoul: Root A, for example, despite many fans of the manga expressing disappointment over the many changes it made. So when the finale concluded on a long, unbroken, several-minute-long scene of Kaneki carrying his best friend's dead body, I loved how indulgent and bleak that was. It felt like the perfect mood to end this narrative on. The anime adaptation of Tokyo Ghoul:re then goes on to undo everything that made this effective for me, but regardless, I still respect the moxie.

Again, as a fan of weird big swings, I vibe heavy with FMA 2003's last-minute swerve. And now there's certainly a healthy contingent of people in that camp, which is good. But while I'm generally a fan of adaptations doing their own thing, there are examples where it doesn't work out, i.e., the near-universally reviled second season of The Promised Neverland.

Although admittedly, that's more of a season-wide problem than one concentrated just in the ending.

"Never" should have been the operative word there.

ANYWAY, we should also mention that the "Gainax Ending" used to be a whole thing understood by fandom at large, with its funniest example definitely being Panty & Stocking's original cliffhanger.

Personally, I think the takeaway from most "Gainax Endings" is that women can do anything.

And that includes co-writing a column about controversial anime endings! This certainly hasn't been an exhaustive list (and I am consciously sparing our readers some of the rancor I could throw at, say, The Day I Became a God's rancid final episode). Still, overall, I think it tends to be a good sign when an ending sparks a variety of reactions. That usually means it has something to say. But I also believe the internet as it currently exists has been engineered to foster precisely the wrong kinds of reactions, so that part sucks. Maybe the ending we need most is the end of social media.

Please don't mention "ill-fitting end credits sequence;" I'm still traumatized by how you began this column.