I watched Mawaru Penguindrum recently...

[rubyprism]

Just putting this here for later reference, since I'm not sure if anyone who follows me has seen it, but I'm sort of disappointed in the way they handled Sanetoshi's exposition at the end. By which I mean... the way they didn't handle it.

The last thing we really heard from him, exposition-wise, was that he wanted to destroy the world. But the thing is, bombs in the subway don't destroy the world. They might throw the technical infrastructure of society into a bit of brief chaos / slow functioning, but they don't actually deconstruct the way society pressures people (and so on-- the things Sanetoshi was complaining about), destroy it, or bring it down to the point where people are forced to think of/about/around alternatives. And I think that Sanetoshi is smart enough to realise that. So I was expecting to hear that his plan wasn't just "ha ha, bombs in the subway!" but rather something more complicated, something that was stopped by Momoka before we ever found out what it was.

(I briefly even thought that perhaps bombs in the subway had nothing to do with Sanetoshi's plan at all, but were brought about as the price of Momoka's fate transfer, which was something so huge that it required the price of not just her life but that of the people around her as well!)

As it turns out, none of this is addressed. So we're left to assume that it was, after all, "let's destroy the world by blowing up a subway train." Wow, that's really electrifying, Sanetoshi-san. I seriously expected a bit more than that...

Another thing that bothers me is that both because of the historical reference (1995 was the year of an actual nerve gas attack by terrorists in the Tokyo subways) and because nobody ever addressed it in the series, a lot of viewers are going to go on assuming that the Kiga group were terrorists. After all, that's what the police said in the show, and that was never questioned; furthermore, when people hear "bombs" nowadays, they automatically think "oh, of course, terrorism!" But when you actually think about it, they're not. Terrorists have a specific demand. They want something, and they try to scare everyone into giving it to them. The Kiga group, however, issued no demands and weren't even known to the police prior to the incident, and everyone was really surprised when the subway blew up. Furthermore, they didn't have any goals besides destroying the world. And that's not... really... a terrorist demand? It's just like, "Let's blow stuff up."

Well, I'm kind of disappointed that it all came down to, "The bad guys are blowing stuff up, for vague world-destroying reasons that don't make any sense because their actions wouldn't actually bring that about, and nobody is going to explain this because we can handwave it away and say 'it was terrorists' and everyone will pretty much accept that because they think that terrorists are inexplicable/don't need motives."

I was secretly hoping that Sanetoshi actually had some cool/positive plan, and that Momoka misunderstood it and tried to stop him, and the subway explosions were the unfortunate result of that failed/backfiring incident. And considering that we don't know what the world was like before Momoka changed it with her fate transfer, perhaps that once really was the case. But I wonder if anyone will even think about it this way? Because the ending of the series didn't suggest that we bother to think about it at all.