Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Kiba – episode 6

May 10, 2006 on 11:14 pm | In Kiba | Comments Off on Kiba – episode 6

“Premature Outcome”

When your B story is so much more interesting than your A story, and when your B character is infinitely more interesting than your A character despite the fact that he’s only capable of being horrified about what’s going on around him, that’s when you’ve got trouble.

Kiba takes a jump off the subtlety train and conveys messages about government responsibility that are about as delicate as a brick to the head.

Spoilers for Noagate within

Gale beheads Carter in front of everyone then decides that, as it was not officially sanctioned, the Lato park must be destroyed and the people of Lato relocated to different towns.
Then Kis goes sort of crazy.

Yep, “the problem isn’t with me, it’s with this country”. It sounds fair enough, but then you’ve got the people saying “we deserve this, as we committed a basic wrong”, which is actually a fairly nice look at citizens under the thumbs of their dictatorial rulers. After that Kiba becomes “Didacticism Tonight!” and you simply have Gale and Kis throwing ideas at, and ultimately killing, each other.
What this show lacks is effective rhetoric. What is has is leaden slabs of manipulation.

The park thing is a way to get Noa off the hook, so that he need not feel guilty about the total ravaging of Lato, but the cost of this is that there is no logic to the situation. Carter’s decision not to report Noa was a matter of protection for the young fellow, so that the government wouldn’t chop him up and examine his innards, but the decision not to report the construction of a park – a standard issue park for children to play in – is just stupid. If your country is so petty in its control of its citizens that they can not cut down a tree without a warrant, you go and get a warrant. Damnit, people, you’re just stupid and deserve to be killed by your irrationally evil government.

So what can we get out of this? What is the positive aspect? We can see that Noa is not afraid to cry at senseless slaughter, and that when a man lets his country override his personality he is likely to adopt the militant badness and become a total bastard. Also on display is that old standby, berserker amnesia.

If there was a time to abandon Kiba, now is it: when I saw Zedd come back on I found myself thinking “whatever”, and I spent a good deal of this episode cleaning my glasses and my watch with an expired train ticket. Yet I keep coming back to the well, though I am completely aware that the water is poisoned.