vraik:
They Fought Aliens and Fell in Love: Why Samurai...
They Fought Aliens and Fell in Love: Why Samurai Flamenco is Important
-Vrai Kaiser
Of all the things people were expecting from the Samurai Flamenco finale, a naked marriage proposal probably wasn’t at the top of the list. But I can’t think of a better way to cap off a show that thrived on plot twists both totally out of left field and bizarrely true to the characters and world of the story. It’s not the events of the ending I want to talk about so much (though I pushed back another post on Samurai Flamenco as a whole to stage a discussion on recent events). The show isn’t rare for having romantic tension between its two male leads – KyoAni will tell you that that’s a pretty sweet way to fund your retirement. What’s damned unusual is that they followed through on it, a move so unprecedented that not to talk about it would be to miss a golden opportunity.
Would you like to know how rare this overt love confession is? So much that a not-insignificant portion of the viewing audience has tried their hand at arguing that it isn’t a real confession at all, but rather a situational bit of confused-friendship, played to earn the dollars of the Free! audience I alluded to above. I find this fact deeply disturbing. Now, I could talk about a number of things that point to Masayoshi’s feelings as definitively romantic (even if the proposal itself was spur of the moment, as befits the character), as well as Goto’s implied reciprocation: the deliberate visual and scripting parallels between the Mari/Moe (who are explicitly shown to be physically intimate) and Masayoshi/Goto fights and reconciliations, not to mention visual imagery such as umbrella sharing (shorthand for romantic intimacy in Japanese culture, not unlike writing initials inside a heart); the use of romantic lyrics pertaining to the characters’ situation in the epilogue (and deliberately cutting to a second verse to time the lyrics in that way), or the official supplementary material that describes their relationship in overtly romantic terms. Even putting all of those things aside, the show was perfectly clear in its intent from early on – it’s just that no one took it seriously.
With all that in mind, it’s fairly mind boggling to see the amount of backlash and attempts to turn the relationship into something ambiguous. What on earth’s going on, you might say, where an overt proposal is painstakingly interpreted as platonic affection?
Read the rest over at the blog!
