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I can see why a lot of people are reading the ending as representing Ginko and Kureha's death, but especially in the context of all of Ikuhara's previous work I think it can reasonably be taken at face value: if being with the person you love requires you to walk away from your whole world, it's possible to do that, find people willing to follow you and maybe even change the world you left behind in the process. If we were supposed to think Ginko and Kureha had died, that one girl walking out on the speech at the end and following in Kureha's footsteps by caring for an abandoned bear wouldn't be presented in such a positive light. The whole show symbolically connects social exclusion with death, but I think it's possible to read the ending as making the point that that the two aren't equivalent, even if it looks that way from the perspective of those inside the system. Hell, considering the appearances of Sumika, Lulu and Milne in the ending, I think it's possible to see all the death in the series as symbolic rather than literal: the excluded girls are ultimately the ones who escape, while the invisible girls make their own world smaller and lonelier (look how empty the classroom is in the last couple of episodes!) I think that's still an important and relevant message for plenty of queer people today. I guess if I have a complaint about the ending it's that thematically it's kind of a retread of the Utena movie's ending, although I do feel like YKA does a little more with its setting rather than just using it as a backdrop for the protagonists.
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Mar 31, 2015 07:55
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I get where you're coming from and I do think some of the metaphors got away from themselves at times to the show's detriment, but I don't think "martyrdom" is the right way to describe that ending. I didn't see it as saying "it's okay if we die because one day people will realise the world is poorer for our absence", but more like "we don't need to seek outside acceptance by fitting into other people's ideas of what we should be: even if we have to give up a lot along the way, we can build our own world for ourselves where we can love each other the way we want to, and if other people don't like it then that's their problem". The whole scene with Kureha becoming a bear doesn't make any kind of narrative sense to me if both of them are just going to die anyway; if we're just supposed to read that as Kureha choosing to share Ginko's fate as part of an "ordinary" lesbian suicide pact, it wouldn't have the worldview-shattering effect on the invisible girls that we see it having. The very fact that lesbian double suicide is a cliche in Japan is one of the things that convinces me there has to be something else going on there, because whatever we're looking at in that scene it's definitely being presented as a miracle beyond the invisible girls' comprehension. I dunno, maybe I'm reading different things into the show than you are, but as a lesbian who mostly hangs out with other queer people it resonated with me on that level, anyway. edit: given the cultural context I do understand why you'd be uncomfortable with YKA using death as a metaphor in the way it does, but I guess I'd say that I see it as acknowledging the cultural and historical background of the genre rather than condoning it. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 10:55 on Mar 31, 2015 |
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Mar 31, 2015 10:43
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Yes_Cantaloupe posted:I'm glad I finished it, but the ending didn't cause dramatic reassessment of the earlier parts of the series or anything. If you were enjoying it, you'll probably enjoy the ending. Yeah, it's the kind of show where it spends so much of its time setting things up and promising they'll be meaningful later that a bad ending easily could have retroactively ruined the whole thing and I'm pretty happy they didn't drop the ball, but if you didn't already care about the buildup then you're probably not going to care about the resolution.
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May 26, 2015 01:07
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