Will you be my friend again?
What They Say:
“Summer and the Demon”
Kossetsu reads the minds of others passing by in a train station world using her true power. She pines for Asakaze, knowing that he is interested in Nozomi, and that Nozomi is the only one who can change him. Asakaze is given a world-changing assignment.
“Boy and the Sea”
After learning of Nozomi’s death from Kossetsu’s letter, Nagara and Mizuho hold a celebration for her. As the project to return home progresses, they are visited by an old friend who tells them the story of when he met the man who invented death.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Mindreading is perhaps the most terrifying superpower. It’s a very interesting one to explore in a story like Sonny Boy, because it’s not entirely clear how much is a consequence of supernatural phenomena nobody has control over and how much the characters actually know and can affect. A theme that has been prominent throughout the series is characters lying about their powers, therefore misrepresenting their potential culpability in ongoing events. That means that the only one who can truly discern the secrets hidden by the other students is Kossetsu, who happens be able to read minds. Ironically, she lies about it herself; after all, she’s right to think that nobody wants to know their mind is being read.
Putting a character we don’t know in the starring role of an episode this late in the game feels like a strange move, especially given the relative lack of Nagara throughout it, but because of how her power ends up factoring in and revealing the true personalities of characters we haven’t seen much of, it ends up working quite well. Seeing her power at work reminds us that the series doesn’t do a great deal of playing character’s thoughts like anime often does. It makes sense both for keeping the audience guessing and keeping the series as sparse as possible.
Kossetsu is in an interesting situation. She gets to experience what her crush really thinks, not the stoic persona he presents externally. As it turns out, her crush is Asakaze, and he’s actually quite pathetic and childish underneath, only thinking about Ms. Aki’s breasts and his own crush on Nozomi, with his feelings for Kossetsu ranging from apathy to annoyance and ultimately seeing her as a tool he can use. Despite seeing all the worst possible traits a person could have laid out for her, Kossetsu is unaffected. It stands to reason that she’s used to the real personality of the boy she’s spent the most time listening to since acquiring this power, but it’s still baffling that she could still feel the same way. I guess that’s love, as twisted as it is, and as much as he doesn’t deserve her.
Kossetsu has some amount of selfless faith, though, believing in Asakaze’s potential and Nozomi’s ability to make him a better person. The three of them and Ms. Aki end up together as Asakaze attempts to fulfill his mission, and several threads begin to weave together. The revelation of the castaways being copies was such a major part of the episode 6 climax that we could almost forget the other very important twist that was dropped in that sequence, that being that Nozomi died in the real world. With recent discussions about the cats’ copying powers working on living creatures, the topic comes up of whether the life of the original can affect the copy. Nagara and Mizuho experiment on chickens, but that’s just the sideshow to the main event that the stars of this episode experience in a moment of startling abruptness. This world is full of abstraction, but somehow, this feels more real than anything.
The latter episode is largely the aftermath, dealing especially with Nagara’s reaction and ultimately Rajdhani’s return. One of our own students has experienced one of the fabled millennia-long journeys, and he’s back with plenty of stories. The concepts he discusses as they relate to the elements scattered throughout the series are intriguing, as are the general philosophical implications therein, but such an extended period of “telling, not showing” is a bit much compared to the emotional resonance and opening montage of the episode, much less the majority of the previous episode. Using a copy of the classic Apollo spaceship to transcend dimensions also makes no sense, but we’ll see if their plan works soon.
In Summary:
Sonny Boy has been building up the themes of war and death as they relate to the abstract reality of the series for a while now, and they come to something of a climax in these episodes. The first of them also plays with the power of reading minds to interesting effect, revealing very different personalities from otherwise stoic characters, most notably Asakaze, and progresses the plot while delivering a stronger gut-punch than the series usually offers. The second is mostly back to the status quo, with very long sequences of Rajdhani talking about the grand adventures we don’t get to see, and reflecting on how different groups have treated the idea of death in a world where it hardly applies. With one more episode, I still have no idea what to think of this series. Let’s see if that changes next week.
Episode 10 Grade: B+
Episode 11 Grade: B-
Streamed By: Funimation