I was planning to make this a carefully written coherent entry, but that's
not happening. So this is going to be more or less point form notes before
more of my thoughts slip out of my mind.
I was previously somewhat ambivalent on Jinrui. I
take that back because in retrospect there were only two episodes
that I felt were beating me over the head and I've become convinced that those episodes were necessary. I now feel
that Jinrui was the most interesting show of the Summer 2012 season;
it was the one that most consistently fascinated me and made me think
and it had the highest number of moments of awesome. It was at least
sometimes
subtle and beautiful, which is more than most shows ever manage.
I wrote my theory of decline partly with Jinrui
in mind. I think that a low birth rate is the best explanation for
humanity's decline, but that's partly because Jinrui doesn't really
explain the decline. There's some evidence for it, especially in the
school episodes (11 and 12), but I think there's also some counter
evidence. In particular, in both the first and third episodes we see a
fair number of other girls and young women of Watashi's rough age (and
in the first episode they're all in one village).
(If anything, young men seem to be the missing element. Although we
do see some of them other than the Assistant.)
As I tweeted,
I think that the school in #11-12 isn't there to educate the students
but instead to socialize them, something that's necessary because many
children are growing up without other children around (as suggested
by Watashi's opening narration in #11). One strong reason I feel this
is that both Watashi and Y are clearly both very smart and quite well
read (Watashi from the very moment that she shows up at the school);
'unschooled' clearly doesn't equal 'uneducated' in their cases. In any
school that really wanted to put them in an appropriate grade, they'd
rapidly be moved up through the grade levels. But instead the school
forces them to sit in various early grades for a fair amount of time,
which makes perfect sense if the real goal is to socialize the kids
instead of just teach them.
(As noted, I kind of think that the school shut down because it wasn't
working. As demonstrated by Watashi and Y's experiences, its pupils may
have been getting progressively weirder and more disturbed over time
and the school environment itself may have been feeding that. This is
probably taking this theory too far.)
For the record, if people have any doubt by now:
Liked: absolutely, at least right now. Once I got going with it, it
was the highlight of the season (against strong competition from
Eureka Seven AO).
Rewatch: quite possibly, because I strongly suspect that there are
things I will pick up on a second watch.
(I do hope for someone to do a roundup post on Jinrui commentary and
analysis. I want to read it all, because I'm sure there's things about
Jinrui that I missed.)
Sidebar: Jinrui and Eureka Seven AO
The quick summary is that these are both good shows but they are so
different that I can't compare them directly. Jinrui is a show that is
very much about (meta-)commentary, analysis, and paying close attention
to the non-obvious. AO is a much more conventional show that is at the
same time somewhat less obvious and more subtle about things; it never
pushes its themes to the forefront in the way that Jinrui sometimes
does. You can enjoy AO purely on its surface narrative while I'm not
sure that Jinrui is always interesting at that level.
Despite all this I found Jinrui more interesting and fascinating
than AO; it made me think in a way that AO didn't. Jinrui
also had more straight up awesome moments than AO did (eg, eg).
This is not to say that AO has been without awesomeness; AO
just spreads it out over more time rather than concentrating
it in focused moments.
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