It’s a rather rare treat when a series give me a moment of rev­e­la­tion: the sud­den leap from “ehh­hhh this just doesn’t fit together” to “OMG it all makes sense now”. Well… I’m glad I didn’t drop Sora no Woto. I’m still not sure yet if I actu­ally like the way this show paces things, but those two lines in episode 7 def­i­nitely gave my brain a short cir­cuit. It’s slightly dis­ap­point­ing that the show went back to shenani­gans in ep8, but ep7 was what allowed me to finally under­stand and accept this series for what it is…

Or as the zom­bie puts it: “The World has ended. You all are just rem­nants… the last remain­ing bub­bles in a ladle of water.”

Some might remem­ber the prob­lems I had with Sora no Woto, about how it’s not tak­ing itself seri­ously enough given the heavy themes pre­sented by the show and how there are sim­ply too many gaps in its world design. Yet despite all the pride I have as a world­forger in set­ting analy­sis, I missed one cru­cial pos­si­bil­ity about this show:

What if this world doesn’t want to take itself seriously?

Human curios­ity always grav­i­tate itself towards the truth. When it comes to his­tory, civ­i­liza­tions have always strived to dig up the facts no mat­ter how painful and bloody it may be. After all, his­tory serves as both the text­book and the crys­tal ball for the future, and the most trau­matic past events also serve as the finest lessons for future gen­er­a­tions. But what if there is sim­ply absolutely no advan­tage for the truth, when igno­rance is 100% bliss and 0% ben­e­fi­cial? Well — this seems to be the case with Sora no Woto. What pur­pose is there to reflect the past or invest in the present when there is no future to speak of?

It’s not just the 1121st pla­toon. Every­one in their entire Sora no Woto world prob­a­bly under­stood this deep within their hearts. When you look at it this way, the atti­tudes taken by dear 1121st pla­toon is prob­a­bly the best one pos­si­ble in this post-apocalyptic scenario.

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I can’t help but think that every time I watch an episode of Sora no Woto, not het­alia as in that Het­alia, but as in the use­less Ital­ian Army of WW2. It seems like a por­tion of the anibl­o­gos­phere is bent on heav­ing praises to the sub­tle hints of this post-apocalyptic world being dropped left and right, but I keep scratch­ing my head over the parts that just feels lack­ing or is out­right miss­ing about the whole series premise. I mean, the first episode was great on drop­ping both phys­i­cal and mytho­log­i­cal intrigue on the audi­ence, but it’s been plum­met­ing to the basics since then. If I had to give an one-liner of my thoughts on this series thus far, it be the following:

Sora no Woto aims to be a mil­i­tary slice-of-life with seri­ous themes; it comes out to be a lack­lus­ter moé series with a con­fused goal.

Each episode begins with an OP that sets the theme of redemp­tion, fol­lowed by mil­i­tary anti-war and treasure-life motifs scat­tered through­out the back­ground scenery: be it the inspi­ra­tion of music to an orphan; the lost joy of the destroyed music class­room; the soft, sooth­ing music played from a tank; or the con­trast of des­o­la­tion and nat­ural beauty in dusk over No Man’s Land. But each theme stay on screen for only a minute or two, while the rest of the time is spent by dump­ing in sev­eral loads of moé com­edy that wrecks havoc with its tone and mood pac­ing. I’m sorry, but these are some heavy con­cepts and sim­ply not meant to be por­trayed in such a light-hearted atti­tude. To exag­ger­ate things some, doing so would be like plac­ing Auschwitz in the mid­dle of an amuse­ment park. It’s why award win­ning movies like Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan or my favorite Assem­bly (Call) drops down to com­plete seri­ous­ness when under­tak­ing the bur­den of such sub­stan­tial themes; same goes to anime like Saikano and Zipang. Even The Third, with its post-apocalyptic adven­tur­ism, but­tons itself down when­ever it tack­les a war-related issue…

And Sora no Woto just— I’m not ask­ing this series to reflect beauty from the dark­est depth like in The Pianist, since it doesn’t take place dur­ing an actual war; but it could at least attempt to por­tray some real­ism and seri­ous­ness. Right now, the pre­sen­ta­tion style which sim­ply makes short, pass­ing ref­er­ences is almost insult­ing to the mil­i­tary genre (not that it’ll be a first in anime). As E_Minor of Moe Sucks puts it:

Oh yeah, war makes orphans out of kids, but mov­ing right along to more stu­pid Kanata

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This is what I wished Sora no Woto is actu­ally about: Cagayake Inno­va­tor Girls

Although maybe K-ON Macross might be more fit­ting, espe­cially given Basara of Macross 7. Either way, I luled too hard at this not to share this, and yes, I’d so watch this.

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