Menma, always there yet out of sight… [Ayazaka]

Ever won­dered what AnoHana would be like if we, the audi­ence, couldn’t see Menma either? Would we believe Jinta from the start? Would we, like the rest of the gang, feel that he was hal­lu­ci­nat­ing, stuck in the past, and slightly out of his mind? It cer­tainly would be a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence, watch­ing the reunion of friends unfold from the other (and major­ity) per­spec­tive. But would it still be as inter­est­ing and gripping?

Asym­met­ric infor­ma­tion, a topic mostly stud­ied in the con­text of decision-making per­tain­ing to busi­ness, pol­i­tics, or war, occurs when one party has supe­rior infor­ma­tion access or con­trol than another. It’s one of the focal points of any con­flict and an impor­tant part of Game The­ory. But in the field of enter­tain­ment, where view­ers usu­ally find them­selves with a dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion than char­ac­ters within a series, this trans­lates to empa­thy, sus­pense, and drama. Most of the time, the audi­ence is given a higher van­tage point than the char­ac­ters them­selves, and are eagerly antic­i­pat­ing when a tick­ing time bomb will explode. But there are also times when char­ac­ters know details that the viewer does not, anx­iously await­ing the Just as planned moment of revelation.

It’s not really any dif­fer­ent in a coming-of-age drama like AnoHana… here Jin­tan is the one who holds the great­est trump card— he’s the only one who can see Menma, the only one who could inter­act with her with­out obsta­cles. It gives him a tremen­dous advan­tage in the cen­tral con­flict of the series— this game of guilt and blame that’s been tear­ing apart an once irre­place­able group of friends for years. It’s part of the rea­son why Jin­tan, com­pared to both Yuki­atsu and Anaru (the two other friends directly affected), is climb­ing out of the past quicker and with arguably the least men­tal bag­gage.

It would have been even faster if the oth­ers had believed him…

We’ve spent much of the series being frus­trated by Yuki­atsu, eagerly await­ing the moment when he would real­ize the truth. At the same time, we’ve also been shocked by his own (and very messed up) ‘method’ of cop­ing with the past. But we knew that Menma’s spirit had been around from the start, and that his antag­o­nism towards Jin­tan had never been any­thing except mis­di­rected rage born out of sor­row and guilt. How­ever, to turn the tables around— if we had always seen Jin­tan talk­ing to thin air while avoid­ing real­ity through his hikiko­mori lifestyle, approach­ing ex-friends only to pour salt on old wounds that no one wishes to touch…

Still enter­tain­ment by asym­met­ric infor­ma­tion, just from a dif­fer­ent direc­tion. A per­spec­tive where cer­tain other dis­agree­able char­ac­ters may pos­si­bly have became a lot more reasonable.

Per­son­ally, I would love an OVA like that~

“…when I talked to a diary float­ing in midair…”

.

Post­note: I’m also becom­ing a real big fan of Yuki­atsu (ever since he saved Anaru). He might be bit­ter and blunt and a big hyp­ocrite, but those ‘uncool moments’ really shows just where his courage and heart lays~

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