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.

Oh sure, it’s easy to dis­miss what the zom­bie sol­dier said as pure post-apocalyptic pes­simism, espe­cially since the young and green Feli­cia was prob­a­bly hal­lu­ci­nat­ing from either post-traumatic stress or some shrooms she con­sumed as emer­gency food. But the truth is pretty sim­ple: Dear Kanata, there’s no easy way around this but… your world is a goner; it will never return to the days of music classes and beau­ti­ful cityscapes. Don’t think too much about it and have a happy life. Love, God.

A fact that can be learned from any basic biol­ogy course: the marine ecosys­tem is the basis of sup­port­ing an Earth-like planet’s bio­log­i­cal life. The cir­cle of life, not to men­tion var­i­ous chem­i­cal cycles, both begins and ends there. I’m not even going to try giv­ing a run­down of all the worldly facts that would be vio­lated if life within the oceans were to van­ish — it’s far too many to list. For once, I’m not sure I want to know how they messed up the world so badly, as the dam­age is beyond even that of wide­spread radi­o­log­i­cal war­fare. A nuclear apoc­a­lyp­tic Judg­ment Day shouldn’t be able to do any­thing like this. Although, I have the nag­ging feel­ing the the author doesn’t know the ‘how’ to this either.

Just what were the zom­bie sol­dier pro­tect­ing the World from? If I were to take a stab, it’s that the robots used some kind of bio­chem­i­cal weapon to ruin the ecosys­tem in their total war against mankind. It’s kind of like scorch­ing the skies in The Matrix. The cliched Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence rev­o­lu­tion? Well — the move­ments of those spi­der­tanks were def­i­nitely defy­ing the capa­bil­i­ties of human pilots, although that doesn’t rule out the pos­si­bil­ity of abstract stick-control com­bined with smart pathfind­ing nav­i­ga­tion algo­rithms or drone weapons con­trolled by human super­vi­sors play­ing Star­craft V. Yeah, the destruc­tion may sim­ply be the sore loser of a global war car­ry­ing out their revenge by imple­ment­ing the strat­egy of Mutual Assured Destruc­tion. Like so many other things in Sora no Woto, we may never know the answer to this. But as Dr. Strangelove once dis­cussed, the dooms­day machine is only meant to be a the­o­ret­i­cal chess piece, a con­cep­tual premise that needs no expla­na­tions. By drop­ping such an absurd premise like wip­ing out the entire marine ecosys­tem, Sora no Woto prop­erly high­lighted the use of a dooms­day machine and thus allows all those log­i­cal apoc­a­lyp­tic sce­nar­ios, like a nuclear holo­caust, to be thrown out the door. I don’t even need to men­tion the sur­re­al­ism of zom­bie storytelling.

So the world is head­ing to ruin either way. They don’t need to know the how or the why. It’s amaz­ing how many pic­tures were com­pleted once this piece of the puz­zle was put into place. Of course there are mas­sive dis­crep­an­cies in tech­nol­ogy when there’s lit­tle pur­pose in research­ing for a future that doesn’t exist. Of course the econ­omy is in sham­bles when there’s lit­tle rea­son of putting it back together. Of course they would keep wag­ing war despite not hav­ing the resources to in order to gain what few pieces of land that can still sus­tain life. When the ‘future you’ is too dead to be a jerk, plans tend to take a turn for the unex­pected. I think this applies to soci­eties even more than individuals.

It’s funny how my opin­ion of this show took took a one-eighty turn from just two lines of dia­logue. Hey Sora no Woto, I’m sorry about what I said, you’re actu­ally pro­ject­ing the right bal­ance of mood here, and I think I finally under­stood your elu­sive goal:

(Slice of) Life is about liv­ing and enjoy­ing the present, and noth­ing por­trays this bet­ter than a post-apocalyptic world head­ing for the sec­ond impact.

Of course, some­one who sim­ply sat back and enjoyed the show rather than scratch­ing their head out over ana­lyt­ics prob­a­bly could have told me that ages ago.

That being said, I wish it didn’t take the show seven episodes to explain this premise. I mean, it’s not like this is a plot-driven show that needs to build up to its cli­max. A slice of life can cause seri­ous mis­un­der­stand­ings if the first few episodes didn’t prop it up accord­ingly. In this case, it might need to hit the but­ton labelled ‘log­i­cal analy­sis off’ that’s shaped like a dooms­day device, what­ever that’s sup­pose to look like. Then I can return to sim­ply bask­ing in the sym­bolic impres­sion­ist scenery and Kanata’s kind incompetence.

I’m not cut out for this type of jig­saw puzzles…

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