The Harmony Of Hope And The Dirge Of Despair: Part 4 (Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ) [4.3]

(Continued from 4.2)

Part 3: Precipitato Of Problematic

Well, that header's not ominous at all. To make matters worse... God. I really cannot believe I have to say this for the third time in the row. Deep breaths, everyone. We have to talk about Dr. Ver again. Yes, I know. That massive prick. He's dead, so thankfully we don't have too much to say... but let's think back to that moment where he died. No, not the part where it's dangerously close to giving the prick a heroic and noble death where he saved the world. In fact, never play that bit again. No, I mean the part where he left Maria a mysterious futuristic SD card with some cryptic dying words. A plot hook, in other words, for this season to tug on. As it turns out, what he had on that card was a formula for creating LiNKER. A parting gift so Maria, Kirika, and Shirabe can continue to battle the Noise. Unfortunately, Elfnein hasn't been able to crack the formula as of the start of the series. This gives us part of a little arc, and something we can really dig into for a start here... but I don't think it's going to end pretty. Let's begin.

Well, during the battle at the Val Verdan airport in Episode 2, Maria gives off a sudden glow which causes a spark of an idea in Elfnein as she looks upon it. Come to think of it, we haven't touched on the issue of Elfnein yet. Let's square that away. Right, at the end of the last season, an amnesiac Carol came to visit a dying Elfnein, and gave her the alchemy kiss of memory transference. So Elfnein is currently in the body of Carol, but still has all the memories of being Elfnein. Everyone just calls her Elfnein, but since Elfnein had all of Carol's memories to begin with... she's kind of both Carol and Elfnein? I don't know if this counts as a face turn for Carol or a revival for Elfnein. Let's just say it's both. I'm going to make like everyone else in-universe and just call her Elfnein too, for simplicity's sake. We got a paragraph out of that confusing bit of lore, how about that? I could look it up, but again I'm spoilerphobic. In fact, the inspiration to get me back on the horse and writing this part of the writeup again here and now was seeing a screencap from the final season which I've not seen, as of writing this sentence. I need to hurry up, and so you're seeing my hurried efforts unfolding, word by word, as you read it and I write it. Eerie, huh?

Okay, let's stop rambling and focus. Jumping ahead to Episode 4, and all that business about tomatoes. We're going to get into how that metaphor's important, but Elfnein is also looking into the Receptor Children. For reference, these are the orphans FIS kept and raised to be both Symphogear users and potential vessels for Finè. Kirika, Shirabe, Maria, and her sister Serena all grew up in this place, under the guidance of Nastassja, Dr. Ver (Prick.), and Finè as Ryuko. It is, to be clear, a terrible place to have grown up. No wonder they were so jaded in the second season. Maria briefly flashes back to a moment where she's racked with pain while trying to tame Black Gungnir, and Nastassja tells her to endure and be strong in spite of the pain. Story of their childhoods, really. Episode 4 ends with Adam Weishaupt doing his Gold Transmutation, but Maria activates that weird glow again and gets everyone just out of blast range. Phew. Lucky break there, but this isn't going to cut it. The Frontier trio cannot maintain their Symphogear forms for long without LiNKER, and now we've got super-powered alchemists to deal with. Something's got to be done about all that.

That something isn't quite "recklessly train without LiNKER to try and endure in spite of the pain", but Kirika and Shirabe are just going by what they know from their childhoods in that hell orphanage. You can tell they're clearly hurt and troubled by this, and there's discord going on between everyone when the others burst into the training room to scold them for being reckless in their training. Kirika and Shirabe are tired of being powerless, and want to power through their weakness of needing LiNKER to fight well. It's not a good spot to be in. Elfnein can't crack the LiNKER recipe, everyone's feeling hopeless, there are snappy comments here and there... We need a little something to help. Luckily, Elfnein has been formulating something. Not a formula, but a plan. A crazy plan, but no other plan will do. What's this grand idea that's inspired her?

Oh, just jacking into Maria's brain, Matrix-style, to find the neural trace that leads to the part of the human brain which Symphogear compatibility acts on. It's a good idea and gives us some trippy mindscape visuals for the B plot of Episodes 5 and 6. Really, that's not all bad, I just have some real problems with where we're going to end up. This is dangerous stuff. As they say, if you die in the dream you die for real, and somehow deep diving into Maria's subconscious has Noise in there. The id of the discordant soul? Who knows? Either way, a version of Maria that can fight shows up to bail Elfnein out. Before that, actually, we get a cute reprise of the Apples song as Elfnein first shows up in Maria's headspace. I like that callback! What other kisses to the past have you got for us--

sssSON OF A BITCH PRICK FUCK EVEN WHEN YOU'RE DEAD YOU HAUNT ME! I FEEL LIKE LADY FUCKING MACBETH TRYING TO SCRUB YOU CLEAN FROM MY WRITEUPS!!! Okay. It'll be fine. Even though he shows up in the post-credits of episode 5 like the world's worst MCU teaser, he's only here for a minute. Besides, he's just a memory. A weird composite of Maria's memories of him, babbling on and on about BEING A HERO and other stupid stuff. He's here, though, as a clue from Maria's subsconscious to help her and Elfnein know where to look. The clue comes from some of his babbling being his dying words. Now, look. I've been around the block on this friendship and hope stuff. So, when this prick bastard was dying and saying that it was love as he handed the SD card over... I got it. Maria and Elfnein are taking two episodes of B plot to mind dive and find it, but I get it. In fact, I'll just say it. The part of the brain which resonates with a Symphogear and is thus powered by LiNKER involves the strong emotion of love. Now, that should be lovely! They're literally powered by love! This is what Dr. Ver was raving about like an absolute loon when he shackled Miku to a fucking mirror relic two seasons ago. Her love for Hibiki powered the thing and made her compatible, and it was his major breakthrough. Quite when he got the time to write this shit down is questionable, but we'll roll with it. Him knowing beforehand makes little sense either, because why rant about it being love like a madman on your helicarrier? Whatever. It sounds good, but the way we come to this realization is a real fucking problem. 

Here in Maria's mental deep dive, we get flashbacks to Maria and Serena's time in the aforementioned hell orphanage that FIS ran, and are repeatedly shown a younger Nastassja being an absolute hardass and lightly whapping the kids with a riding crop to keep them in line. So that sucks, but we've established that their time in the hell orphanage sucked. No, this is unfortunately the key that unlocks the revelation for Maria. We see a hardass Nastassja in the first half of the B plot, but after Dr. Ver shows up as a grim memory, we sink away further and get what Maria was hiding from herself. Nastassja looked sad while she was doing it, and Maria takes this regret as evidence enough that Nastassja cared for them. There's also the realization that Nastassja never allowed them to fail, and now's when we get to hurl Chekov's Tomato into the stew. Maria was the tomato, grown under harsh conditions to become the sweetest. It was Nastassja's hardass nature which allowed Maria to thrive and become stronger, and Nastassja silently suffered so her Receptor Children could thrive. That's what helps Maria and Elfnein come to the truth, that the missing piece of the LiNKER formula and the thing that connects a Symphogear to the brain is love.

And I fucking hate it. Not the love part, as I've made clear. This power to protect those you love being powered by that love is an absolutely beautiful concept, one that should completely sing. It's hampered by the small fact that we appear to be lionizing the actual abuse the Frontier kids experienced, simply because their abuser felt bad about it and also that the kids came out the other end of it stronger. I'm sorry, but no. Nuh uh. I don't like that. Maria, as a character, is free to forgive whomever she likes. Maybe if it had more of a whiff of overcoming trauma and healing, I'd be more on board with this idea. That reading's sort of there, if you wish to grasp onto it. Hell, we've seen Nastassja do good enough things in G when she tried to stop Dr. Ver and got blasted to space for her efforts. Adding in the fact that she was directly terrible to the Receptor Children, but it's okay because she was really sad about it does not help matters in the slightest. I can redeem a lot in this show because of my love for it (and sunk cost fallacy) but not this. Here we are, then. It took three and a half seasons, but Symphogear has hit its first true sour note for me. There was a way for this to work for me. They didn't do it. Two seasons after teasing betrayal before rejecting it for the utopian, Symphogear took a crack at it, missed, and betrayed my trust in it.

That's not the only misstep this season. We might as well make part 3 here the part where I air all my dirty laundry, as the show fucked with me once more. Let's jump ahead a bit, back to where we've been before. The resolution of the Chris/Stephan subplot, in which their heartfelt reunion and trying to understand each other was rudely interrupted by a Noise attack led by Cagliostro. I'm going to get into the thematic resonance of this bit later, but for now all you need to know is that the 3/4 mark of this show has a three-episode theme of unlikely Symphogear pairs working together. The Bavarian Illuminati thinks splitting them up into "incompatible" pairs will make it easier for them to win, and to that end this episode's big fight becomes Chris and Maria vs. Cagliostro. We'll be back for the resonance, but the long story short is that Chris and Maria win. Oh, and from the looks of it they obliterate Cagliostro with their power. Anime white lines and big explosion and everything. Uhhh. Look, I already raised the objection last season with the Autoscorers. It kind of sucks to have a show that's all about understanding each other and redemption, and then pulling back on that just so you have some bantering baddies for the girls to kill in a big flashy battle. That being said, at the very least the Autoscorers were bad robots. Cagliostro was a quasi-immortal alchemist, but she was alive and an interesting character with depth and doubts and the possibility of redemption. This would be like if Symphogear GX blasted Kirika into a million pieces in episode 8 because "oh well she's a baddie". It sucks... but not as much as what happens next.

I again have to seed for the part where I'm nice to the show, but episode 9 is all about Shirabe and her struggles with the incompatible pair training; Kirika is doing fine working with others, but Shirabe just can't cut it in a teamup without her beloved Kirika. The group head out to a shrine for recon, relaxation, and meditation. Shirabe ends up doing a lot of soul searching and lovely pondering with the old priest, trying to understand and overcome the limitations of her heart. While this is happening, the Bavarian Illuminati's Prelati has found out that Adam Weishaupt is an absolute bastard who's going to betray them all, and she escapes to rush to Saint Germain and warn her of the betrayal. She does this by riding at high speed across the highway, our Symphogears get the call that an Illuminati member is going apeshit, and it's Shirabe and Tsubasa who end up having to work together. In any other circumstance, I could focus on the good here; how Tsubasa, being a former lone wolf herself, is the one to help Shirabe understand how to lower the barriers to her heart and accept help from others. It would be so good! Unfortunately, this battle is also the antithesis of Symphogear; a sympathetic antagonist is trying to warn her friend that they're being betrayed. Neither she nor the Symphogear users try to talk to each other, or understand each other. She doesn't have time for a fight, and they don't even ask. It's a fight, and Prelati gets killed too. 

UTOPIAN UNDERSTANDING BY 
TALKING AND NOT FIGHTING

In many ways this is even worse than the Cagliostro thing. At least Cagliostro was attacking civilians and acting a baddie. Prelati's violation is speeding on the highway while riding a giant kendama. (Yes, really.) Worse yet... you can see how and why it has to go this way. This is Episode 9. If Prelati warns Saint Germain that Adam's scheme is to betray them, it won't happen and the show will be over. This is a different set of circumstances, but it's exactly the same motivation that led to the betrayal I still haven't forgiven the final episodes of Sailor Moon for. Oh fuck, we need the show to not end here, so Prelati has to be killed before she can warn Saint Germain. To hit this as a time-staller in Sailor Moon, a monster of the week show, is one thing. To have it crop up in a 13-episode season is something else entirely. To have it cut against the entire goddamned moral theme of the show, either because someone wrote themselves into a corner or because someone thought we needed more tragic murder... I can hardly express it. What the fuck, Symphogear. I thought we were better than this. There is one mild saving grace to this I've not told you about yet, and I'll say it now to help soothe the pain where I had to wait multiple episodes. Cagliostro and Prelati aren't dead. Cagliostro conveniently teleported away before being blown up, and she whooshed Prelati away before she was blown up. We'll deal with what they do after that later, but the point stands.

This should not have happened. Neither should the other thing have happened. Symphogear's beginning to slip here in Season 4, and it makes me afraid. I'll have nice things to say as we go on, very nice things, and I still love this show with all my heart... but I am afraid. Two more parts of this writeup, and I get to edit this thing and post it. Once I finish posting it, I go to the final season. If the ball is slipping in Season 4... what will Season 5 do? Frankly, I am terrified. I love Symphogear. It hurt me here. I forgive it overall, but that hurt will stay with me. It was unneeded. Unlike this show, even. Cutting against its values to create artificial drama. That's not the path to a future where everyone can understand each other... but perhaps Symphogear's teaching us something here. Perhaps we need to learn a lesson about perfection. 

(Continued in 4.4)