Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Angel Heart – episode 9

January 18, 2006 on 10:27 pm | In Angel Heart | Comments Off on Angel Heart – episode 9

“Shanin: her lost name”

With this, I’m out of Angel Heart until who knows when. Come back to me, anime with ambiguously drawn battle lines!

Glass Heart reconciles her feelings for Xin Hong, but still feels that she is unable to smile. Meanwhile it becomes quite obvious that Qinlong is severely split, with the Li faction seemingly against everyone else.

The quest to make Glass Heart more sympathetic has been working very well; as someone who chose to forget the happy parts of their childhood because they had become painful in retrospect, it’s good to see that she actually had a source for her compassion.

Choice is always a topic that has plagued the world of the Sweeper: people like Ryo were born into the world of sweeping, but Kaori had managed to get to twenty without being involved in any of Makimura’s business. Kaori imposed herself upon Ryo’s way of living and, while it was much more sanitary than it had been, it was still a fairly dangerous existence.

Glass Heart and Xin Hong, however, were forced into their circumstance almost from birth. It’s not to say that one can choose to develop a taste for killing, but that in Shinjuku it’s not a vicious cycle. The way that one chooses to live their life and protect their loves is a natural defining point. All of the people who toasted in the previous episode live without fear as they live life to the full of their own volition. Until now, that could not be said of Glass Heart or Xin Hong.

I’ve been having endless trouble reconciling several issues that this series poses, specifically in relation to Li: if his organisation devised the cold assassin program in the first place, how can I feel any sympathy for him? How can Ryo come to his aid? Zheng Dao Hue is admittedly an organisation of split loyalties, but I hope that I can reconcile this fact in my mind. (For a while there, I thought that there were two entirely separate gangs in town).

This story has to be running close to its end, as there’s only so much that Li can do. People will still want Glass Heart, but a vital part of her has been unlocked and that was all that was strictly necessary from this arc. More deaths, I say! More deaths! Then, I get the strange feeling that … well … we’ll go back to case by cases.