Part 4: Falsetto Of Fatherhood
I'm fine. I'm fine, really. I had a lay down and a Gatorade. We are going to ignore... that plot twist for the immediate moment, and jump back in time with the series to poke at the events we skipped while discussing curses and powerups. Before that, some flavor context. Symphogear GX has multiple plot threads and character motivations/personal growth arcs dealing with the characters' fathers. The specific running undercurrent connecting them all was the challenge Carol laid down for Hibiki in their first encounter: what these girls' fathers have passed down to them, and how they come to realize those legacies to learn and grow from them. We'll start by dovetailing into the curse/powerup discussion and talking about Tsubasa's personal growth episode, because it's all about her relationship with her father.
While Kirika, Shirabe, and Chris are off with their mission to the Undersea Dragon Palace, Tsubasa and Maria are put on guard duty at the Kazanari household. As it turns out, this place is also a shrine. This is important because... okay, we have to explain Carol's plan a little. Right, so the Autoscorers have been fucking up traditional Japanese shrines for a while now. They're doing this because the shrines are part of a supernatural defense system from the Meiji era, and breaking the seals that the sacred keystones are holding will allow Carol to dissect the world. Tsubasa and Maria are here to guard the keystone, and after an icy reunion with her father (where Maria tries to interject because of how goddamned cold they are to each other) the Autoscorer Phara attacks. Tsubasa tries fighting her off, but Phara has a particularly nasty alchemical trick up her sleeve; one we haven't seen the other Autoscorers use. They don't need to though, because this is a specific hard counter/obstacle for Tsubasa to overcome. Phara's blades are philosophical weapons, and able to instantly destroy anything which is defined as a sword. Tsubasa's relic is a sword, and more to the point she had that hangup in the first season about being a blade and a tool for fighting Noise. So, yeah. Hard counter, but in an absolutely wild alchemical way we haven't seen up until now.
Maria doesn't fare much better since her relic is also a sword, we get no cursed melody, and bang boom there goes the keystone whoops. Tsubasa passes out from the battle, but is well enough to get on her feet after a quick rest. We see that her old room is just the way she left it (a goddamned mess, which is another Season 1 callback) and learn some really weird shit about how her father isn't actually her biological father, and her grandfather is because they needed the perfect heir to the house of Kazanari. Y'all. Y'all. It's a high-society Japanese household. You're not making the fucking Kwisatz Haderach here. What the fuck. Anyway, because of this Tsubasa has been working hard to gain her father's acceptance, which is why she devoted herself to becoming a blade. Phara comes back, Tsubasa's dad tells her to follow her dreams and be an idol, and Maria points out that the messy goddamned room was still dust-free; Tsubasa's dad kept it as is for ten years because he really did love her and wanted to preserve her memory. That's enough for Tsubasa to activate the Ignite Module, but what about that philosophical weapon? Power up all you want, but you're still wielding a sword against a breaker of the very concept of swords. What will Tsubasa do there?
Clearly the Ignite Module isn't the only alchemy going on here. Tsubasa, in the face of being destroyed as a concept, reinvents herself and her weapon to defeat Phara. This is sort of the wrapup to the cursed powerup arc, so some quick final thoughts: I really like the concept. On first watch I admit to being a little annoyed that these characters were grappling with the same anxieties that they seemed to overcome in the first and second seasons, but that's just how anxiety is. It ain't a character arc, it's a real and constant struggle and sometimes you slip. The flip side to this is if you keep repeating these same mistakes, and I'm crossing my fingers for the last two seasons of Symphogear. After all, characters not learning jack and shit from utopic idealism and reverting to their old ways for the sake of drama is what fucked over Sailor Moon at the last minute. I'm okay with it here, but I'm wary. Now then. On to the biggest fatherhood arc of the show. On to Hibiki and her relationship with her dad over the series.
Well, the first time she sees him face to face at the end of episode 7 has her running away from the sight of him. Clearly that relationship's a bit rocky, then. The opening of episode 8 resolves this in media res, of sorts, with Miku being the one to have helped Hibiki face it and agree to meet her dad for lunch. It goes about as well as you'd expect. With meeting his daughter again, Hibiki's dad wants her to be the olive branch to her mother in order to help their family reconcile. Hibiki isn't having it. He hurt them, and so he has to be the one to reach out. Not by proxy, but by himself. Hibiki storms off, and immediately after this is the aforementioned fight with Micha where she, Kirika, and Shirabe get beaten. What I neglected to mention is Hibiki is clearly not all right in this fight, far more aggressive than usual and punching everything in sight while yelling about how it was his fault their family broke apart to begin with. Hibiki not having her shit together is what hurts Kirika and Shirabe in the fight, and she blames herself for this before getting beaten up pretty badly herself. Hibiki will spend the next few episodes in the hospital because of this.
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| Can't hold hands if you're clenching them due to being pissed off at your deadbeat dad. |
We'll deal with that, but first we have to hit upon Miku for a moment. Hibiki, in the hospital, has been ignoring her dad's calls after their disasterous meeting. She shakes it off with her usual "it's fine, I'm all right, everything's just fine" and Miku calls her on it. You're not alright, Hibiki, god damn it! You weren't alright at lunch with your dad, you weren't alright yelling and crying and smashing shit in a fight with an Autoscorer, and you're not alright here in the hospital ghosting your problems. Hibiki's arc is on the backburner here to focus on things like Tsubasa's arc with her father, Chris's cursed melody, and the return of Dr. V--
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Sorry, still working up the mental fortitude to get to that. Jumping ahead then, so we can focus on the resolution to this arc, it's thanks to Miku's kind words that Hibiki decides to give lunch with her dad another go. There's a lovely scene where she's lacking the courage to speak up, and we see her hand shaking while holding her phone, an encouraging text from Miku giving her the bravery to say what she needs to say. She tells him he has to be the one to reach out to his ex-wife first, and his reply is that he's scared to do that. Hibiki was scared to come here, too, but she worked through that and came here because she wanted to start over as well. Their family's broken. Things can't go back just like they were before, no matter how much her dad wishes it. This conflict resolution is briefly interrupted by all hell breaking loose and Carol beginning the process of ending the world. Hibiki and her dad are at ground zero of the chaos, and Carol appears after dealing with some unfinished business to come and crush Hibiki's dreams herself. In the struggle, Hibiki's Gungnir is knocked aside before she can transform, and Carol gleefully goes for her cowardly dad with alchemy bolts as he runs away in fear. Running away, just like he did before. Some things never change.
What doesn't change along with that is the fact that he's Hibiki's father. Hibiki has been focusing on the sad memories, but there's one happy one that comes to her when he says a certain thing here. An oft-repeated phrase-- no. Not a phrase. Magic words he said to her whenever something bad would happen... like, as we see in flashback, him cutting his thumb while cooking. (Just like Hibiki in cooking class, THE BEEF STROGANOFF SONG WAS RELEVANT THIS ENTIRE TIME) "It's all right. Everything's just fine." As Hibiki's dad throws rocks at Carol, like that will do anything against the master alchemist, he has one more trick up his sleeve. The rock ruse was a distraction. HIBIKI, CATCH THIS GUNGNIR, HONEY!!! This leads to the final realization for Hibiki:
Her boundless optimism. Not just that, even. Everything that goes with it, including the goddamned utopic ideal. The very heart and soul of the series, the thing which drives Hibiki as a person. The thing which his daughter sings as a Harmony of Hope. That's what he passed on to Hibiki, despite seeming like the complete opposite of what those ideals are. Magic words. It's not much on its own... but words have power. Songs have power in this world, too, and those magic words power Hibiki's songs. That sounds like some pretty goddamned powerful alchemy to me. Hibiki's emboldened as she heads into the final battle, but before we delve into that mess headlong, we should talk briefly about what Carol's dad supposedly left her. I'm saving a lot of this talk for the finale here, but it's important to lay down her changing motivations over the series. As we piece together over time, Carol's dad was an alchemist hundreds of years ago. He wanted to use his alchemy to help people, and when a plague came to their village he was quick to gather reagants and use alchemy to cure the people. They repaid him for this by accusing him of witchcraft and burning him at the stake. His last words to his daughter were for her to understand the world. Carol's whole goal with the dissection of the world seems to be an alchemical corruption of that wish; destroying the world and putting it back together to literally understand it. No, we can see the pure version of this in a flashback scene where Carol and her father are out collecting herbs:
Which, hey. That's the theme of the series! In the fucking Middle Ages! The wise alchemist understood it, in his own way. Carol does not, or rather chooses not to. As she burns away her memories to power her alchemy attacks versus the Symphogear users, her motivations change. It's no longer about dissecting the world to understand it. It's about revenge for her father's death. We'll deal with how we resolve this for poor Carol, but first...Oh god. Really? You really had to add him back in here so I had to do this again? Fine. It's fine. Everything's just fine. First we have to talk about Dr. Ver again, and how he slots into all this. Pray for me. It's gonna get messy and I'll probably swear a lot.
First of all... Fuck's sakes. I really cannot believe we've got to talk about Dr. Ver again. After the Frontier incident where he almost destroyed the world trying to rule it like an alpha male, he got thrown in the deepest darkest gulag they could find under the sea. Okay, part of that was because the Dragon Palace is a vault for dangerous relics and Dr. Ver's monster arm is technically still the relic Nephilim, but he was locked up. Then in all the fighting down here he got set free. The way he describes his imprisonment to Carol makes me want to grind my teeth into a fine powder. He calls the people who locked him up down here and erased all record of his """H E R O I C S""" nothing but a bunch of selfish jerks who only care about themselves. Yyyyyyyou hypocritical motherfucker. I only know one selfish jerk who cares about themselves here and it's you, you veiny-faced bastard. Even despite all this, the narrative also kind of treats Dr. Ver as an absolute joke? He busts out, immediately spewing his bullshit about being the greatest hero who ever lived or whatever twisted shit Dr. Ver actually believes. Kirika and Shirabe are just grimacing at this shit, and Carol's reaction amounts to... well, this is as good a summary as any. When Chris is ready to perforate him he runs and hides behind Carol's alchemy shield. That's the Dr. Ver I remember. Not the top dog alpha male leading himself to glory. The big baby who can't do shit against a high schooler with superpowers. Either way, Carol decides for whatever godforsaken reason that Dr. Ver will be useful, peaces out with him, and leaves Leiur to deal with the magical girl trio. This leads to Chris and her cursed melody, but yeah. We should touch on those real quick again.
As it turns out, Carol has been playing us like a damned accursed fiddle. Elfnein being a homunculus copy of her means that Carol can see and hear everything they were planning, including the Ignite Module. That was just fine by her, because the cursed melody of Dáinsleif was actually a key component to powering her world-dissecting Château. The Autoscorers, then, were keeping the Symphogear wielders alive and just toying with them long enough for them to sort out their shit and activate their Ignite Modules. The cursed melodies they sang were then imprinted into their bodies, the alchemical power sent back to Carol when they were defeated. We were singing the Dirge of Despair to face our anxieties and fears head-on, but that only harmonized with Carol and her plan. The final piece of the puzzle she needed was a relic in the Dragon Palace, but that did get destroyed in the fighting. It's a good thing she doesn't have that last piece so she can't-- Oh wait. That's what Dr. Ver is getting dragged along for. Since Nephilim can control any relic, and alchemy and relics and whatnot are all related, Dr. Ver is able to activate the Château now that all the cursed melodies are active. He has some more waffling with Carol about BEING A HERO which just makes me want to scream, but he actually does get under Carol's skin when he points out her grand plan to understand the world by dissecting it doesn't make much sense. When Carol asks his grand plan as a hero, we get the typical shit from Dr. Ver until...
YOU TELL HIM, CAROL! YOU TELL THAT FUCK! He was cut off there by her big harp stabbing the fuck out of him (did I mention before that Carol has a big harp? Because she does.) but I'm pretty damn sure his grand plan was to do the same shit he was trying to do last time: dissect the world enough that he can "save" it and rule over whoever's left. Of course, he was dumb enough to put the Château on auto-drive so Carol had no further use for him. Before she can atomize him with alchemy, he takes a tumble off a balcony and falls to his doom. Oh well. That's it for Dr. Ver. SO LONG, YOU FUCK! ...is what I would say if the selfish prick couldn't even die properly from that. From this, Carol goes off to wreck all of Hibiki's dreams. This is where we were before, when Hibiki realized what her father had passed on. Now we're back, and everyone's here to face off against Carol once and for all to save the world. We've grown so much since we first faced alchemy. We overcame power creep and our own personal hangups. Now, once and for all, we'll save the world.
(Continued in 3.5)
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