it's maybe worth writing down my lagrange thoughts for later, since my first instinct was to simply stop thinking about it completely. but then i'll just forget what the whole deal is
spoilers and such, but written to be understood by anyone
the majority of the series centers around the relationship between three girls, with an eva-esque mecha setup forming the background for their relationship developments. there's basically no way to read the characters at all other than as a three girl polycule. part of the eva setup is that their mecha (the Vox) are part of a legend relating to the apocalypse, and there are moments akin to ideon/eva/et al where the Vox unleashes a beautifully destructive power due to the emotional intensity of the pilot etc.
these are of course familiar components, but using them in this context is novel. because the tension the show is setting up is, is this chill and lowkey show about the love between three girls going to end in the end of the world... or could their love avert this fate? could summoning giant flowers of light over the earth be used for a better ending than third impact???
almost everything in the first 3/4 of the show builds towards this idea (with one exception of a particularly bad taste 'joke' at the end of the OVA which breaks the tone if you think about it at all) and it's genuinely smart. it's suggested many times that the protagonist's whole thing is a kind of repression mechanism, laying the groundwork for whatever choice it is she'd have to make in the end
completely inexplicably, almost halfway into the second season, everything suddenly becomes written like someone was given the plot points of the show and told to resolve them, thinking only about plot and with no regard for character or theme. the characters act out their programmatic roles without much sense of the character-focused humor and lighthearted interpersonal tension that the show had focused on before. any sense that this is 'yuri' (or whatever you wish to call it) is turned off like a lightswitch and even the transfem character, as played for comedy as he was, no longer has his transfemininity even mentioned, reverting back to his male outfit from the beginning of the series by the end.
with some of those things in mind, it feels distinctly as if they got abruptly censored mid-writing - and perhaps they did, the queer content really did feel at times like they were seeing how close to the line they could run up against. but that doesn't really explain everything, because even a show that is forced to stop doing completely ostentatious displays of lesbianism doesn't actually have to restructure its plot to be uninteresting.
because in the end, the fear that the Vox could cause a third impact doesn't actually matter, and the villain instead gives a different Vox to a villain. that villain causes the impact instead, just by being, like, evil and stuff, and the protagonists have to beat him up. this ending does not derive from their characters or relationships in any way whatsoever, but then, they have no characterization anymore anyway. moreover, the ultimate story of the whole galactic war is reduced to the story of two of the girls' older brothers, who end up treated with so much more narrative gravitas than the actual protagonists. in other words, yes, this is straight up a series about girls who love girls that turns around and makes it about empty man pain instead at the last minute, a move i can truly only describe as "evil"
this isn't even mentioning the absolutely bizarre structural move where the war between the brothers is stopped midway through the season by getting them to make up, and then multiple episodes are spent on empty slice of life (HUGE distinction here from the genuinely great slice of life earlier in the show, which was driven by characterization) before the war breaks out again and then they have to make the brothers make up by making them realize the thing they already realized because they literally just do this twice for no reason. there's something to the idea that the slice of life interlude is a kind of creepy dissonance, i.e. you the viewer know there's too many episodes left for the story to actually be over, but the way in which it isn't over is just arbitrarily "they start fighting again" so it doesn't make any sense. there is also a thing where they tease this new character starting in the OVA, putting her in every single episode, and then having a next episode preview have the characters finally acknowledge her as having been following them around mysteriously... just for her to be a one-off for a generic slice of life story and then never appear onscreen again for the rest of the show. genuinely, what happened here? there is no way any writer would structure things like this on purpose, but including her in every episode can only be planned structure.
there is some cool mecha stuff and visual effects in the last parts still
so that's rinne no lagrange i guess
i don't think i've ever seen an anime from pre-2010 that felt like it shied away from its own purpose - pretty much everything i've seen is, at the least, confident in its own holistic selfhood. but with stuff like this, or flip flappers, or g-witch, there is a recurring reticence that is baffling to me - a tendency to start off bold and then get scared and become more normal by the end, retreating into the safe haven of "plot". it's incredibly frustrating stuff
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