No-no-no. I was agreeing with everything till the last part. The Nodokathon was the absolute massacre of some of my favourite characters. May that never happen again.
Agree! The Nodokathon seemed so out of place.
Its the thing with Io, it really shouldnt have happen after that thing with Io. That is what ruined it for me.
I liked the Nodokathon, but Selebus messed up. That it happened after the shit she pulled with Io made absolutely no narrative sense. Like, I only enjoyed it on my second viewing cause the first time I was like "how are these girls even here after that?".
Yeah. I get what you're all saying, absolutely. When the Nodokathon started, I had to walk away for a couple of days. It really wasn't something I was in the mood for at all when it first happened -- and I couldn't imagine most of the girls going along with it after
what Nodoka did to Io. Noriko especially, but most of the others seem as if the last thing they'd have wanted to do was be anywhere near Nodoka, let alone agree to play one of her...
games.
When I came back to it, it still bothered me, but the fan-service-ness of it, as if Sel were saying,
Geeze, you pervs, you want these girls to have sexy times? Here you go! actually made it funny to the point of being more palatable. I could enjoy the ridiculousness of the whole thing. And
Sana finally showing the other girls her inner freak really was wonderful. (I'll be shocked if Rin and Kirin don't hook up at some point -- probably with Akira along for the, um, ride.)
Man, I feel for Yasu so much. Someone commented the other day about how they didn't like her, and I missed out on replying. But she's so close to some real life situations, where the person is a shell of themselves and throw themselves completely into a specific belief in order to survive - and specifically her last event (the doctor appointment ones) broke me.
Absolutely. That was actually too painful for me do in AVN form. I had to open the script and just read the text -- which was brutal enough. It was hard enough to think of her as a conduit to a crazy-ass deity. Good for occasional comedy, occasionally creepy as hell. But that?
A bunch of the characters make me feel this way -- even Akira. As someone else said, the only main characters who haven't dealt with some major mind-fuckery are Otoha and Touka. And I'm guessing, based on what we've seen so far, that that's just because we don't know about it. (Nodoka may not have, but she's already batshit insane. Not sure that Futaba had struggled with anything worse than
body image issues, which are bad enough... but then Nodoka moved in. And Karin has now
weathered Hurricane Sensei.)
Honestly? What about half of the cast needs more than anything is serious, professional clinical help. The girls are dealing with loss/abandonment, sexual assault (not all of it from Sensei), and various forms of PTSD. None of the adult women (excepting
maybe Tsubasa) is exactly sane -- with reason. And some of the characters... Ami? Yasu? Miku? Io?
Sensei? These people are not capable of caring for themselves. I'm not going to say that psychiatry offers any kind of guarantee, but aside from Io's overflowing pharmacopeia, we don't see any sign that any of the grieving, fucked up women (and one man) are getting any help at all.
Which, I don't know, may be the point? I mean, this is a horror AVN. And what's scarier than a broken mind?