::headdesk::

[foxinthestars]

Um, yeah, the whole Shin Sekai Yori thing?

It has now gone from "highlight of my week" to "making me want to throw Wikipedia against a wall."


Per Wikipedia, in the latest episode...

Saki ... learns of an ancient weapon called the "Psychobuster", devised by normal humans with the intention to kill psychics [and our heroes head off] to the ruins of Tokyo, where the Psychobuster is located.

Okay, if I really squint, a tour of post-apocalyptic Tokyo could be mildly interesting and reintroduce a hint of the historic sweep to this thing, but...

FUUUUUUCK.

Because this late in the game you don't want to build your resolution out of all the important elements that have built up to this point or anything, you wanna pull some trite sci-fi shit out of your ass and cram it in before the buzzer.

(Not to mention that a weapon we're going to fetch from the ruins obviously worked like a charm for the poor saps who built it and all, I'm sure it'll save our bacon.)

::headdesk::

::bitter laughter::


PS: Oh, yeah, and! (Still working only from that summary...) The established reason you can't kill a Fiend isn't that you lack the means to do it, it's that everyone who has those means is bio-engineered not to do it on pain of death. So how is fetching a new weapon even going to help?? Apparently they do now have the show's least-irritating Monster Rat in their party and this weapon might enable him to do the job, but a) oh god what could possibly go wrong and b) there's no indication that the person who sent them after the weapon knew they had said Rat with them, so why did they think it was even going to help??

Comments

[smurasaki]

I know nothing about this anime - other than what you've said - but I'm trying to remember if the ancient weapon asspull has ever worked in any work of fiction. (As opposed to just seeming like an asspull.) I really can't think of anything off the top of my head.

Also, reading the wikipedia article tells me nothing about the plot. It's like it just sort of wanders about, changing its mind about what the plot is.

[foxinthestars]

Well, the show probably does meander like that; it's more world-built than plotted really, and what I loved most was how it thought through the implications of humans having this power in a way I hadn't seen before. For me, it was worth it until the last timeskip (except for the Monster Rat parts), but I wouldn't recommend it to you personally because it is really mercilessly dark.

EDIT: It stings that much more after my previous brainstorming session leaves me just imagining that as our Godzilla Threshold last-ditch gambit, instead of a "Psychobuster" (can we have a campier name, please?), they were setting out toward a dangerous out-of-control force of creation and transformation that they were best friends with in junior high but can't remember even though they've been trying.

[smurasaki]

That just makes the random weapon fix even worse! (Assuming it works. In mercilessly dark stories, anything's possible.) It's like pulling something in from a completely different genre.

Your ideas sound much better.

[foxinthestars]

It's like pulling something in from a completely different genre.

Yeah, that's how I felt reading about it.