That's one kid saved(?). Looks like he confessed to killing Marina-chan though. Shizuka is heading down a bad path... Now I'm really curious how this all ends in just 2 episodes.

the message is that women are EVIL

next episode will be kinda unusual, last episode kind of a rushed conclusion, but it was like that in the manga too

>>8710
why are the women in animes so nice then?????????

>>8710
We love evil women.

>>8709
Had a feeling things would turn out like this with his brother, Azuma's just way too dense and hard on himself to notice.

>>8714
Yesssss

>>8714
Data from recent public surveys does not support this assertion.

>>8717
I don’t believe it! Show me the data!

>>8729
It's two blocks down: >>>/poll/7355
As you can see, the women we love are overwhelmingly of neutral to good alignment. Of 19 votes, only 3 are for evil women (hara/sado/yan).

In this episode, we learn about Takopii's Genzai! And his past/future.
That was a surprising turn of events.

>>8708
>>8709
>Shizuka is heading down a bad path
Shizuka turns into a seductress just like her mother, but with deader eyes that scares Takopi.

Interesting that, in the original timeline, Shizuka would not have died, even if chappy was killed, it was Takopii's interference that actually lead to her suicide being more than just an attempt.
We don't get to see how Shizuka's life was in the future, but Marina's was still the same, but she had a good heart.
I don't know what to feel about either of them.
Marina's future-self was a good girl, I felt like, while Shizuka is painted to be the "villain"; even in the current timeline she's acting all evil.
However, being bullied in school, her mom not caring about her, and losing her best friend (chappy), that would make anyone snap. She had no-one on her side growing up, while Marina at least had a good school life. Had chappy not been killed, I feel like Shizuka would've turned quite fine herself, once she graduated shougakkou.
Really excited for the finale, I'm hoping it ends with a 40 minuter.

They did this one well.
Best episode.

Also that Ferry she goes on mid episode is pretty neat. You can plan an interesting Japan trip around it where you arrive in Sapporo, then go to Oorai to see the Girlz und Panzer city and tourism, then head into central tokyo to see Akihabara and other such stuff.

I'm glad it ended well, and it was heart-warming to see Shizuka and Marina getting along but what was the point of the show...
How does Takopii not existing make it so that Shizuka and Marina get on good terms... Wasn't the reason this show exists that original timeline Marina wished Shizuka dead? But now that it's back to the original timeline, suddenly they get along? Does sharing faint memories/fantasies of something non-existent change you that much? Marina didn't even have any interactions with Takopii by that point in the timeline. In the future, sure, but why does past Marina know about Takopii?
Am I too retarded to get it?

>>9419
It's not explained. I guess having something in common to bond over was what they needed, so it worked for them. It's more or less a meaningless ending.

>>9419
You're not retarded, the ending is.

Yeah that ending was not satisfying at all.

The moral of the story is that if Takopii just died then all missery in the world would be solved

Was the message talking works? Pro tip it doesn't Or was this a meaningless message? That it is what it is? I don't mind that message at all as long as your honest about it. I enjoyed the show for what it was. Shizuka is a sl0t like her mother. The biggest victim was the takopi. The shota too even though he was a prick simp.

>>9433
I think it conveys a very common pure land buddhist sentiment of trial and error and learning to accept and love the dirtiness, and love, of your condition. I don't think there's a real message and it's probably more meaningful to examine individual segments of the story over focusing on the whole.
Talking it out doesn't work and the beginning of the story has Takopii trying that himself, there wasn't enough common ground for it to lead to anything fruitful. Takopii himself didn't understand what was happening to begin with.

>>9433
The message is that parents suck, glasses never should have been involved in the first place and that Marina and Shizuka could have become friends if they had some way to talk.

Let's talk theory.

There are times when a character in a story will have a certain goal or values, but the world differs from their hopes, so they set out to change the world accordingly. This requires some degree of effort, there is resistance, so that presents a problem which needs to be solved. A problem may be trivial to solve, in which case its narrative and emotional impact may be low, or it may be difficult, due to obstacles demanding resources, skills, and/or information beyond what the character has, making it something serious, a big deal. Something with weight, which is the requirement for payoff.

It's common to set up a problem that would be hard for most and then easily solve it to show that the character is capable (see: jobbing), but it is also possible for a character to only partially succeed and not fully achieve their goals, failing in some aspect and needing to accept this, changing themselves instead. They may even fail entirely, truly demonstrating the difficulty of the problem and/or their own shortcomings. The message of a work is generally expressed through the means the author chooses to solve this problem with, or by suggesting what the correct course would've been. They ask the audience "how could this issue be solved?" and give their opinion via the values conveyed in the narrative. They're answering the question they've set up, usually with some degree of ambiguity or else it risks becoming too preachy.

By having Takopii fail many times, by showing that bullying persists and leads to death despite trying to take different measures, by failing at trying to talk things out, the story is demonstrating that the problem is complex, gives it weight. It's beyond the alien's ability to help: Takopii can't grasp the situation, he's too dumb to solve it and doesn't have the necessary resources/skills. The message is clear: the tako can't do it. He can't magically bring a happy ending.

We would therefore expect change to take place inside of and through the other characters instead, the ones who are not a walking joke. This does happen with Azuma-kun and his brother, but it's a subplot, not the real meat of the story. With the two girls, what we have a twofold betrayal. First, a betrayal of in-universe laws, where suddenly the gadget can do something entirely new that, for no reason whatsoever, breaks the precent of Takopii's previous 100 attempts. A deus ex, simple as. Second, a solution to the situation that comes about through magic rather than through the characters we are invested in. First there is a random magical act, then a sudden reconciliation that tackles precisely zero of the previously established problems. Both of these things are a rug pull, which destroys the potential payoff of the story, and makes its message into something incomprehensible that seemingly no one can agree on, as everyone shares a different interpretation while they try to put together the scraps of this failure. Sad!

For me, the message is clear: sex with shotas.

>>9436
The only possible way it could've tackled the reconciliation is if they explained what went through Marina's head that made her stop being a bitch. Something clearly happened, but there's no solid indication of what. Takopii being a magical being that just does magic isn't too far of a stretch.

>>9441
What matters is not that Takopii is magical, it's that magic was established as a failure repeatedly, until suddenly it solved the core conflict effortlessly. That's what breaks its internal logic. It's not problematic when the Ghost of Christmas Past magically takes Scrooge for a trip, the story is doing its thing and consistently uses it to make him gain insight into his situation, gradually and logically. What would've made more sense was for change to take place in the real characters and that being what serves to propel the magic, but the author wrote themselves into a corner by maximizing the cast's cocktail of suffering, malice, and stupidity.

saw

It's fine for it to be inconsistent, it's slop anyways.
There's no "message". It's just a story that the author crafted up based on some thoughts he had towards bullying

TL;DR/DW, it was dumb misery porn with no "moral of the story" to it as that one anonymous had claimed.
A better ending would be where Takopii realizes his interference just made things worse and uses his Happy Power® to revert time, leading to the original timeline taking place. One could say the author copped out with this happy ending instead of giving us the true ending. It wasn't the best, but everyone was alive and living their life, no matter how unchanged it was.
If you think about it, the only reason Marina's mom tries to kill her was because Takopii brought Marina and Azuma together, which then leads to Marina wishing Shizuka's death, which then leads to Takopii meeting with past Shizuka, and so on.
It was all the dumb tako's fault.

Maybe the message was that the PTA sucks

Forgot to give my final opinion of this.
Eh, it was okay I guess, maybe 5 out of 10. The high production values is what elevates it to that level, though. That money would have best been used elsewhere for a better story.
They never gave the boy a chance to shine >>8201 , but he did end up as the only redeeming part of the show; the only character that was empathic and fleshed out in a way that made him human. There was no feeling of weight to anything in the story despite what should be lots of trauma and misery.
Meh. Nice visuals and some good music.

>>9482
Voice acting was good too.

People really reach hard to "justify" not liking something this good when it's simply a genre they don't like in the first place.

>>9419
I think I lean towards agreeing with >>9425 in a way that it it's similar to where in Higurashi the normal bad end routes were avoided through a miracle in the space time continuum or whatever. Takopii left a lasting impression on the both of them the manifests through the loop.

>>9436
>>9446
I think you're missing the point that Takopii did actually end up saving the two of them through his actions. That little speck of memory shared between the two of them was what allowed for a connection to take place further followed by Shizuka and Marina reconciling over their respective situations given a chance to see the whole of one another. It may be offscreened and some will say that this reduces the impact, but I think that showing it fully onscreen would be a bit redundant because the entire anime is about setting up and explaining each of their situations that lead them to becoming the way they are in the future. The message is that by understanding their respective situations through connecting instead of demeaning one another, they're able to form a friendly bond and come to like one another. A bit of a nice and optimistic take on humanity as opposed to the "misery porn" people have been trying to call it. I think Punpun is far more misery porn than this could ever be.

Maybe there could also be a religious tie-in for the way this played out given the title. Takopii's original sin was acting out of vengeance and going to murder Shizuka, and in that sense maybe that's why the author has him take on a more jesus-like role in absolving the two of their respective sins through his sacrifice. It seems a bit off to say, but I don't really get the Japanese interpretation of Christ.

>>9516
on topic sager

>>9516
vagueposters will be executed

>>9516
I think people just get an idea in their head and will defend that their idea of what something was was right until the end. This series wasn't just misery porn.

>>9554
The problem with your interpretation is that most of this "shared memory" isn't a shared experience to begin with, and was known prior to any time travel taking place. In Higurashi this move works because there's an extensive SoL part where the characters grow close as friends broken up by things going wrong, and when they tap into those memories they can see how things went wrong and realize the value of what they have and the risk of losing it. In this show that's not what happens, Marina and Shizuka never share any positive moments together throughout the loop, and even if they began to share memories through a rule-breaking asspull there's still nothing worthwhile to bond over, just the piles of suffering that they both knew already each other had, and which had been shown before to not be solvable through any form of communication. It would be even worse, because Shizuka would remember the hundred times that Marina drove her to suicide. In that sense it's a double-layered deus ex, because not only is the asspull a magical solvent, it doesn't even face its own implications.

>>9554
It isn't very optimistic, the situation that requires someone to understand who someone else is to an appreciable degree takes so much effort that it's best shown to be essentially magical. All any of the characters could do for each other is to be aware of them and to just be by them, to be aware of who they are and why they became what they are, there is no easy solution provided. The nature of that message alone would lead to an anti-climatic end, I feel.
The miseryporn aspect comes from how comedically cruel the characters can get, mostly.

>I think Punpun is far more misery porn than this could ever be
I don't remember Punpun being anything other than a downward spiral for no point, so yeah.

Really enjoy my JP lessons with my Sensei, we can always find interesting things to talk about. Like I didn't actually know that Shinto has its own kuso practices that soil it like any other religion. Quite glad that we're both mainly non-religious so we can freely discuss these topics. I wonder how much subtle cultural stuff like this influences the way that stories like Takopii play out where the bullying seems so bad and exaggerated but because Shizuka's mom is a prostitute it carries a lot more weight than we'd think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinin

>>12601
Dubious. You don't need religion for a literal whore to be considered filthy, and avoiding those related to undesirables is just a normal Japanese practice tied much more to politeness and social standing than to religiosity. Corralling people into a subhuman underclass is indeed awful, and I knew about it beforehand, but there's not much indication within the story that this is being done as a form of conscious social organization. Either way, it's subtext at most, and even if it were true it wouldn't affect my opinion of the story any more than trivia and neat details would.

>>12602
Religions are baked into the culture. Shinto is very purity coded and you see this in how people react and respond to social drama.

>>12603
Yes, but for Shinto to ever become purity-coded, more so than other forms of nature worship, it requires a surrounding culture prior to it already holding such values. You can't use Shinto as an explanatory factor without also considering its own origin, it didn't suddenly spring up fully formed for no reason.

>>12604
are you trying to say something like... because prostitution is an objectively disliked trade(it's not, see India) we can't draw ties to it and compare how it could be different in a culture that saw anyone, even butchers, as filthy people.

Anonymous, it's bullying because the whore mother ruined Marina's family, nothing religious, nothing cultural. Any kid would make fun of you if your mom was a whore. In this case Marina hated Shizuka because said whore mother caused her family to collapse.
Anons fight over anything these days...

>>12606
i'm trying to understand his position

>>12604
There's no reason to believe culture and religious beliefs do not inform each other in equal measure.

>>12601
I thought tanners and executioners especially are considered untouchables by most cultures. I don't see anything mentioning prostitutes in those wikipedia pages.