12.28
And there was much rejoicing...
So here it is, the final Valvrave. In 25 minutes, writer Ichiro Ookuchi will have to provide an ending that ties up all the loose ends, finally dispatch the villains in a satisfactory way, and explains what the hell was the deal with all those weird flash forwards the show gave us now and again.
Unsurprisingly, he utterly fails at all three, suggesting that my fear last week of a Valvrave Final Plus may be warranted.
I call that a bitch slap!
We pick up where we left off last week with the blogosphere incensed by the revelation that the Dorssian Chancellor is a space vampire. However, the Magius are finally able to cut the transmission, giving Golden ARUS News (a none too subtle parody of a certain American cable network) the chance to whitewash it as JIOR doctored footage. However we completely forget about that as Haruto goes in to fight Cain. Eventually he’s joined by R-Drei and X-Eins, with Q-Vier flanking Cain. The battle increases Haruto’s rune leakage and eventually ends up crashing into the sphere dome where Haruto is rejoined by L-Elf.
...cuz being Alibaba is suffering!
Meanwhile the Royalists are finally making their move on the Space Nazis and lauching a series of coups around Dorssia. Despite their new alliance, ARUS sits on their hands, refusing to jump in and hoping the Magius Council get killed to boot. L-Elf, claiming that Haruto doesn’t have the skill or the speed to defeat Cain alone, offers his neck one last time. X-eins dies rather anticlimactically and R-Drei finally kills that little rat Q-Vier, much to the annoyance of yaoi shippers everywhere. Haruto, in L-Elf’s body, finally kills Cain, but at the cost of his last remaining runes. He briefly asks L-Elf who he is and how did he get there before finally kicking the bucket. …which was pretty damn obvious from three weeks ago.
Good Night, Sleep Tight, Young Lovers
AND THEN THE DENOUMENT… where we finally get to find out who the hell mystery kid is, how did the space empire begin, who the hell were those pirate guys in cattle shaped robots from episode 7, etc. etc. And the answer is… not given. The show doesn’t tell us anything that makes any of these flash forwards have a lick of sense ever since they started to slowly spread them out. What we do find out is Satomi marries Boobs McTits (err yay I guess), Akira is also alive 200 years in the future where everybody wears costumes the cast of From The New World thought were silly, and, most importantly… Shoko apparently became VVVI’s pilot after Haruto died and makes an appearance. There’s also something about an appearance by a “hostile organism” in the form of a half melted gummy bear, but who gives a shit. The show don’t so I don’t.
Why don't you go jump in a river Shoko...
Valvrave ends the way it began, in the form of a chaotic mess. Too many dangling plotlines are left up in the air, characters are shunted to the side, very little is adequately resolved, and ultimately the feeling you get is that of a half-assed message that ultimately doesn’t add up to anything… at all. “Oh but Dalek”, you might say, “This is Sunrise! They never know how to end a mecha show well!” Well that’s true to a certain extent (see Gundam Seed Destiny, which needed an additional 30 minutes to salvage an ending that was already too fargone), its still too much of an excuse to cover general laziness and incompetence on behalf of the production team. At the end of the day, this ending fucking sucked. Hell even MAL, that bastion of sunshine and lolipops which liked SAO 21, hated it, and that say’s more than words I can type.
Yeah fuck this show.
Next time, a wrap-up of season 2 and Valvrave in general. Also my final averages for the show (odds are they won’t be particularly high)
3/10.