Well, it probably marks me as evil, but I wasn't too fond of the Jinchuu arc as a whole, as I found the supporting villains mostly uninteresting and sort of pointless, and more difficult to believe then in the Kyoto arc.
I think they had some inklings of an idea in how they wanted to put together a darker ending. Kenshin has two central tragedies that they tried to use in his twilight years. The first is his inability to say no, and his sense of responsibility, and how that would eventually tangle up his happy ending; after all sooner or later something will come up that Kenshin feels he has to deal with, and off he goes, leaving Kaoru, and the others, behind. The second is a much darker and less personal tragedy, touched on only briefly in Reflections. If Kenshin lives twenty years after the end of the show (not saying he does, but if he did), Japan has already fought and won the first Sino-Japanese war, conquered Formosa, assassinated Empress Myeongseong, and turned Korea into little more then a puppet state.
I thought the story seemed on the verge of mirroring this; Kenshin is asked to go overseas to deal with Japan's "enemies", IIRC, those who would capitalize on her weakness. But as months turn to years, those enemies are not so much opportunists as victims of a nation that is more Shishio then Kenshin, and that Kenshin's wasting away was supposed to be a symbolic mirror of the wasting of his dream. I expected him to eventually return to Japan to die and leave the flame to the next generation. But this theme is far too dark for an anime, because it touches on the whole issue of pre-war Japan, something that they don't talk about even academically without a great deal of caution, so I could be totally wrong.
But the problem is, you can't tell. They spend so little time on the "new" story, and so much time on things that had already happened, that you can't actually tell what the story is about. I thought, for some of the first part of Reflections, that this had real potential to deal with what I always saw as the historical tragedy of Kenshin, that he overthrows the old order to create a new order that turns even more bloodthirsty and genocidal, that the warrior spirit he represents must die in order for the country to move on. And then Reflections refused to do anything with that lead, and in fact basically refused to do anything period except "random cameos help two sick people find each other to die". There are tantalizing hints of a story buried in there somewhere, but I wonder where it died along the way.
Well, I probably have a different perspective then most, but I think everyone was disappointed.
no subject
I think they had some inklings of an idea in how they wanted to put together a darker ending. Kenshin has two central tragedies that they tried to use in his twilight years. The first is his inability to say no, and his sense of responsibility, and how that would eventually tangle up his happy ending; after all sooner or later something will come up that Kenshin feels he has to deal with, and off he goes, leaving Kaoru, and the others, behind. The second is a much darker and less personal tragedy, touched on only briefly in Reflections. If Kenshin lives twenty years after the end of the show (not saying he does, but if he did), Japan has already fought and won the first Sino-Japanese war, conquered Formosa, assassinated Empress Myeongseong, and turned Korea into little more then a puppet state.
I thought the story seemed on the verge of mirroring this; Kenshin is asked to go overseas to deal with Japan's "enemies", IIRC, those who would capitalize on her weakness. But as months turn to years, those enemies are not so much opportunists as victims of a nation that is more Shishio then Kenshin, and that Kenshin's wasting away was supposed to be a symbolic mirror of the wasting of his dream. I expected him to eventually return to Japan to die and leave the flame to the next generation. But this theme is far too dark for an anime, because it touches on the whole issue of pre-war Japan, something that they don't talk about even academically without a great deal of caution, so I could be totally wrong.
But the problem is, you can't tell. They spend so little time on the "new" story, and so much time on things that had already happened, that you can't actually tell what the story is about. I thought, for some of the first part of Reflections, that this had real potential to deal with what I always saw as the historical tragedy of Kenshin, that he overthrows the old order to create a new order that turns even more bloodthirsty and genocidal, that the warrior spirit he represents must die in order for the country to move on. And then Reflections refused to do anything with that lead, and in fact basically refused to do anything period except "random cameos help two sick people find each other to die". There are tantalizing hints of a story buried in there somewhere, but I wonder where it died along the way.
Well, I probably have a different perspective then most, but I think everyone was disappointed.