Forum - View topicRahxephon: The Ending *warning: Contains spoilers*
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The Mad Manga Massacre
Posts: 1172 |
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Was anyone else disappointed by the ending for this show? I just finished watching this show a few weeks ago and it was so beautiful... until the ending came where everyone started killing each other and they commit the biggest no-no a series should never do... hit the reset button. Maybe I'm biased because I hate conclusions which include the "end of everything" trope but it just felt like they ran out of space so they had to wrap it up as quickly as possible and, thus, we ended up with this.
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Shenl742
Posts: 1525 |
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Nope. Wasn't disappointed at all. A wonderful, beautiful ending.
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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I loved the ending. It made sense in context, wrapped virtually everything up, was emotionally powerful and moving, and was just the perfect cap to a dang-on perfect series. As for The Mad Manga Massacre's claim that it was wrapped up as quickly as possible, I would like to point out that this is entirely not the case. The ending partially began in episode twenty-two (with the Kiss and the start of the Final Battle), perhaps arguably even episode twenty-one, which meant that we got five or six episodes of ending. Hardly rushed now, right? The ending proper really got going in episode twenty-four if I'm not mistaken, which still leaves three episodes.
Usually reset button-endings are lambasted, and for good reason; they almost always suck. However, RahXephon's ending is uncontestably an exception. |
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darkhappy1
 Posts: 495 Location: PA |
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The reset at the end was heavily hinted at frequently, and you could never forget about it while watching the series once you understood what they meant by tuning the world. It might've seemed rushed because of the sheer number of kills and twists, but I thought that everything fit together well enough. It certainly made me want to rewatch the series, so I'd say it was a lovely ending.
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zawa113
 Posts: 7358 |
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As dtm42 said, most reset endings do suck. I think it's because they feel like a complete and total cop out, like the writers went "uhhhhhh, have an alien pick him up in spaceship!" (Monty Python ref, except they did it for laughs). Kinda like when they were ending the series is when they got caught in a corner since they must not have had it well planed out before, which is quite possibly the worst time to get caught in a corner.
Now, resets themselves don't necessarily doom a show, that's kinda how shows like Family Guy and South Park usually work; the status quo is restored inexplicably for the next episode. But, say, Higurashi is a show that has inexplicable resets spoiler[for every single arc], but they make them work too. But now that I'm rewatching RahXephon, the fact that I know the ending will reset makes certain dialogue in the show make a lot more sense, it's like for once the reset ending made the show make more sense because of earlier dialogue (there's plenty of double-meaning lines in the show, like when Kamina says something like "I've never stayed with a relative before" to Haruka's uncle, just a common sentence the first time, ironic the second). Granted I am having trouble thinking of another time when resetting at the ending has worked. But the real question is: could they have achieved the same ending without resetting the world? I say no. One of the main goals of the show was to get rid of the Mu, and by association, that would also mean the bubble over Tokyo Jupiter. They eventually do get rid of the bubble over Tokyo, but that only makes more pop up all over the world, actually making things worse. By the time we got to the ending, Kamina was essentially humanity's last hope and the RahXephon did have the power to restore time. It's like, have you ever seen the movie Donnie Darko? In that movie, spoiler[time splits off of the main time for the month of October in the late 80s and the main character does things in the timeline that end up affecting other people in the reset world], although in Donnie Darko spoiler[the main time line can only be restored if he dies, but he was still the only person who could fix the timeline, because if it went on and kept cycling it would end up destroying the world, as the Mu would have destroyed the real world but only Kamina could stop it]. I looked at the whole ~15 (or ~3) years of Tokyo Jupiter and the world within that (both normal and TJ time) as a time split where events within that would not only affect the primary time line but be essential to it. Also, we get a happy ending from a romantic standpoint  Maybe I view the ending like that because I have seen Donnie Darko so many times, actually that might be another ending where a soft-reset kinda worked.
Granted, I'm trying to figure out some things myself this time around, the internets say that Quon's genetic information was used to make Kamina, but Quon is clearly his child in the new future. Is that a new Quon unrelated to the other one except in name or a reborn Quon? And I missed that Quon was supposed to be the genetic provider the first time around, I knew it wasn't Maya, she flat out said that. I'm trying to figure out just how far back Kamina reset time, since the Bahbem Foundation (sp?) had apparently been planning this Mu thing for ages. But these are part of the reasons why I want to rewatch the show so bad, I didn't need to know them the first time to enjoy the show on a more basic level, I just like that there's more stuff for me to find, including some more details about the time reset. It gives the show an awful lot of rewatch value for me personally. Also, I disliked the OP so I skipped it all the time, so I had no idea spoiler[Mishima was Kamina's memory of 14-year-old Haruka ]until right at the end! Also, rewatching the show, I have this strange hankering for Ramune sodas.... |
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