- Kanon had the feels, Clannad has the feels, Angel Beats! had the feels……this does not.
- I made a pretty solid prediction last week, in that I’d stopped caring about Yuu the moment he left Japan…well even though Charlotte‘s finale was meant to close everything and mean their world would be a better place, that still didn’t stop me from caring less about this one-man army. Yuu fled to travel the world, just as Nao suggested him to, and did his part in procuring everyone’s abilities. Only for Nao’s prediction to come true: the sheer mass of abilities stored in his head would make him become something not too distant from Keanu Reeves…only without any real morals or sense of justice. And yes, this was another one of those episodes that centred around Yuu, and once again this was understandable, since there wasn’t much to fall back on, aside from Shuusuke wondering why he wasn’t taking his calls, and the extremely soppy ending……which I absolutely hated!!!
- I really don’t know if it’s me or not, but I feel like this episode, or even the ending of the show, was completely rushed. As if Jun Maeda/P.A. Works had almost run out of ideas, and gone with something that sounded sort of/kind of plausible, and still had an ending that people would appreciate, because Nao and Ayumi would be okay, and everyone would live like one big family (even Joujirou and Yusa, who had stopped being useful episodes ago…), with the atypical Jun Maeda ballad playing in the background. And even if this wasn’t a rushed ending, did it have to turn this extreme for Yuu? He effectively turned into a traveling one-man army on his sole mission to take the abilities of every wielder and then come home so all the abilities he’d manifested would disappear once he grew into an adult. The more he gathered, the more omnipotent he became, and the more he forgot his reason to do it. Reminiscent of the episode where Ayumi ‘died’, and he failed to see the reason to live, only this time he failed to see the reason to care about others as time went on…until he saw that phrase thing Nao made him.
- And even as time went on, he forgot the person who made it, and even the reason why he had it, it still kept him going, and gave him the motivation to see his mission to the end. So even with this (which can only be really described as something that’s very Studio Key), why didn’t I get the feels when he’d completed his mission, got rescued, and got his happy ending with imouto and his new girlfriend? I think it’s rather easy: people I actually cared about (Nao and Ayumi) didn’t die/weren’t permanently disabled/got amnesia/had anything bad happen to them. And I am disappoint…
Series review
…which makes me remember that other P.A Works show I reviewed. Glasslip was my first review for OASG, and whilst I was constantly saying how confused I got throughout the show, I hated the ending so much. But here in Charlotte, it’s a little different. It’s a lot different, in fact. Because there were a lot of cases where I really felt for the characters, their backgrounds and their instances. Yuu started off in episode 1 as a con man who was more than happy to cheat his way into the best schools, and land the cutest girlfriends, while the only good thing about him came in Ayumi, who was practically perfect in nearly every way (she couldn’t nail the family’s secret ingredient). And while time went on, Nao changed him completely into someone who wanted to do the right thing for his ability-wielding community, even with the dangerous and potentially lethal consequences. But Nao is far from being Nagisa (from Clannad), or Ayu (from Kanon), or Kanade (from Angel Beats!); while her cynical self exudes radiance, she just doesn’t have what it takes to be a Studio Key girl to get the feels for.
Not even Imouto had what it takes, despite her ‘death’ halfway through.
I will admit that watching Charlotte was very…tiring for me. But I’m not completely sure whether it was because I wasn’t entirely enjoying it, or whether the content itself was touching on subjects I didn’t really want to watch. Makes me sound like a complete softie; hell, there were a lot of stuff I wasn’t expecting in a Studio Key show. Bloody violence, girls getting beaten up, psychotic middle-school kids brandishing box-cutters, innocent girls getting crushed to death, gangsters being gangsters, MCs losing their minds in both remorse and having the power of a god…
Perhaps I’m just too used to what Studio Key is normally about: the extremely kind high-school MC, and with various harem girls having incredibly distinct circumstances which are solved in the most melodramatic way. Then again, Charlotte isn’t an adaptation like the others are; it’s an original. As of now, there aren’t any plans to make a game out of it; it would be rather difficult to do one if it wanted to do the same old visual novel format. So I’m giving off the impression that adaptations work better than original shows, perhaps. Well at first Angel Beats! didn’t do it for me. I’m not sure whether I’ll give Charlotte another go (like I did with Angel Beats!), since while I enjoyed watching Nao being cynical and best imouto being best imouto, I just could not completely immerse myself into this.
Sorry.