Lycoris Recoil

Episode 13

We can celebrate right up front here: Chisato does live through the Lycoris Recoil finale. It was her birthday just the other day, they aren't going to kill her on her birthday! Of course, what's also likely is that the Spider Lily crew is fully aware of the kind of hit they have on their hands, and it's a lot easier to set up for spin-offs and ancillary material when you haven't bummed everyone out by letting your marketable main character get killed off. Or perhaps it's just that Lycoris Recoil was never that kind of story to begin with. They were happy to tug at our heartstrings in the ninth episode, dangling the idea of Chisato's impending mortality as motivation for her and Takina's actions all the way through to this ending. But this series' most constant concept has been its celebration of life as lived, and thus the ultimate victory for Chisato to achieve in all her struggles is to keep on living after all. In that respect, the place she and the others ultimately arrive at here, and the notes the series closes out on, feel earned.

That's the other celebration, of course, that Lycoris Recoil does indeed stick the landing. There's trepidation, concern at its choice to go with this eleventh-hour extension in a thirteenth episode after so many of the story elements seemed to have been soundly resolved last week. Chisato's rematch with Majima initially brings questions of artificially-extended repetition to the proceedings, prompting as it does yet another instance of Takina ditching the D.A. squad to run to her partner's side, alongside the threat of a ticking tower time-bomb. But as with so much of Lycoris Recoil's storytelling, that's a calculated reflectiveness. Hell, that impending explosion is set up by Majima in particular pursuit of his perceived rivalry with Chisato. The tenor of that choice of action is taken in by Chisato, as she receives Majima's exposition with a look on her face summing up just how done she is with this whole exercise. Last week's episode featured some incredible facial expressions for the characters showing their raw emotional anguish, but don't count out an artist's ability to effectively convey exhausted annoyance just as well.

Majima is probably the most conceptually compelling part of this LycoReco finale, as entertainingly endearing as everything else is. They've referenced the philosophical underpinnings of Majima's efforts before, pitting him against D.A. in provocation of 'makes you think' responses to their social-control efforts. In the intermission of their fight here, as he and Chisato split a soda, we get the most direct interrogation of his interiority in the story, courtesy of Chisato herself. It is definitely easy to take Majima's side in the exercise: State-sponsored clandestine violence against dissenters isn't exactly conducive to the kinds of liberty anyone would want to enjoy. But while he's not as much of a one-note Joker-wannabe as he seemed to be for so long, I think we can also understand that Majima's engagement with this kind of opposition is hardly altruistic.

For one, Majima clearly genuinely enjoys the thrills he gets out of enacting these various terroristic tenets. He's pushing himself to seek gratification by the idea that it's in pursuit of some higher purpose, but as with arranging this whole final situation in the tower just for a shot at a rematch with Chisato, it's all ultimately in service of himself. There's a grand irony to that, in that he's actually so close to recognizing Chisato's philosophy of living in the moments of simple joys for yourself and others—it's just that Majima's simple joys involve wanton murder and destruction. Conversely, Chisato's brand of living isn't inherently 'selfish', as we see her and the rest of the Cafe LycoReco crew providing help to others right up to the very ending of this finale. Rather, it's about understanding the scope of how you can help without messily affecting the world for everyone else or entirely burning yourself out. There is a sense of a sort of benevolent libertarianism at the heart of that and the show's general thesis, which isn't necessarily a philosophy I'm aligned with, but it's articulated so strongly and consistently in LycoReco that I feel I can critically hand it to the writing, regardless.

There's also the point that Chisato (as well as the other Lycoris) is still a child, still growing and learning even by the ending of this season. "Children are the future" is an effective societal platitude even when those kids aren't also acting as a government death squad, and the sentiment is most soundly articulated by the actions of Mika here. I, naturally, cheered when he made his move partway through, revealing that he had not gone back as Chisato had advised him to, and also his leg has worked properly this entire time, letting him do to Shinji what he knew Chisato couldn't let herself do. It's a beautiful closure for Mika's character arc, coming back to his previous failure to fire on his former lover, the complex circle of emotions reflected in the colors and feelings in his face rendered as well as anything in Lycoris Recoil. It also provides the most effective way they could have for securing Chisato's replacement heart and letting her survive the show. It's an acquisition of Mika's efforts for his child, and he was absolutely right to remove Shinji's note before passing the gift to her. Her life is to be lived for herself, she doesn't need to carry the weight of either man's broader ambitions or beliefs. She is, as Mika shoulders that burden and confirms as he puts her kimono away again, still a child for the time being.

It all makes for a neat trick of a finale for Lycoris Recoil, wrapping things up with this sort of clean, happy ending in a way that doesn't feel like it's contrived or a cop-out. Like Majima's fireworks set off, this kind of enjoyable celebration was what the crew were planning for all along. And make no mistake, there's a hell of a fireworks show at the end here. The tone of the fight between Chisato and Majima is heavier and tenser this time, as befitting of a 'final' showdown, yet the action still finds time for that little half-time sit-down that also feels natural to how we've seen the characters interact before (remember their casual conversation about action movies back in Chisato's house?), which then ramps up as it gets going again, accelerated by Takina's eventual arrival. The shredded scenery of what's left of the tower, the seamless transition between evening and night depicting the passage of time, the clear setup of the shattering glass giving out that still lands as thrilling when it pays off—so much of this episode shows that the A-1 Pictures crew didn't let up on this series until the very last minute, cementing its status as a lasting winner here at the end.

They also, of course, recognize what was so distinctively effective about Lycoris Recoil itself by the end. The momentary questioning of whether Chisato is still alive at the very end quickly gives way to knowing that she's obviously the one Takina is going out on a job after, and their reunion illustrates the exact stylistic strengths of the show: A keenly-directed tense action scene giving way to adorably goofy character antics. It's only right that our reward for seeing the girls struggle across so much compounding combat is getting to watch them chill out at a cafe or frolick at the beach. They and the others in the cafe crew earn the right to retire to Hawaii by the end, far away from the demands of the D.A. and reckoning with their sociological questions or efforts to clean up all the guns that are still out on the streets. There are other people in the world that simply need a cup of coffee and cute entertainment, and that was what Lycoris Recoil knew it was best at providing.

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Lycoris Recoil is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is a freewheeling Fresno-based freelancer with a love for anime and a shelf full of too many Transformers. He can be found spending way too much time on his Twitter, and irregularly updating his blog.