So last week I re-watched Last Exile. For the most part I really do enjoy that anime and the story building they put into their world. It’s a little slow paced, but over all exciting and interesting..until right about the ending when the plot kind of gets tossed out of the window a little bit to try and incorporate the bad ass.
It’s bad when the character that everyone else tells is the LAST AND FINAL HOPE OF FIXING EVERYTHING is late to their own ending.
It’s also bad when a character dies for the sake of plot pacing or did they?
This anime has no less than two, count them two, character deaths that miraculously get better by the ending. One of them not even on the screen! You have to find out through reading the wiki or having heard of a conversation between two technicians and an obscure art book reference (incidentally this reminds me of the post series canon interviews Rowling has done for the Harry Potter series. This is what happens when you can’t be bothered to actually write in these “surprise” twists in canon, in a few years no one knows about it unless they find the Wikipedia.org entry). I personally subscribe to the” if you couldn’t be bothered to put it into the anime or book than I don’t consider it canon” school of thought because usually it’s hard to get access to this additional information. So while I’m happy they gave one of my favorite characters a reprieve, I don’t really count it BECAUSE YOU DON’T FIND OUT IN THE FREAKING ANIME!
Then there are two other deaths, one of them purely for the plot “Yeah I could kill you right now, but then I’d mitigate the angsty death of this character in two episodes and spoil the badass death of this other one…crap I’ve got to take the RING!” and one of them that’s purely for the “I’m so tired of waiting for you bitches to do anything productive. Do you know how long I’ve been hanging here? Fine, I’ll just freaking take care of it myself!”
Never mind the countless attrition deaths that could have been avoided if one of the main characters hadn’t been a slow ass at the end that was more interested in showing off every single blade of grass around their house than, doing something useful, LIKE GETTING THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN SAVE THE WORLD TO THE SCENE!
Yeah you know the character is taking too long when the crazy character who started a day after them makes it to the Grand Stream at the same time and they’ve been flying without a navigator or planes changes the entire way.
That said the anime is still a fun and enjoyable re-watch and even has a perfectly satisfying ultimate ending, it’s just the two or three episodes leading up to the epilogue where I start to wonder what crack they were smoking.
