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「Century of Shame」
To be honest, I didn’t expect the ending to turn out the way it did. I guess I was expecting a bit more “piew piew”… or at least some glimpse of the “New World”. We don’t end up getting that glimpse in the end, but at the same time, I gotta say: I actually quite liked how they decided to do things here. It just felt right—so Jormungand-isque for lack of a better term. Because while Jormungand had a significant portion dedicated to action, there was always a bit of extra going on in the background (especially with the coming of the second season). It wasn’t just about a charismatic (and quite nutty) arms dealer running around. It was about guns and the people that wield them, with a bit of exposition about the world and human nature on the side. But more on that in my final impressions.
Shifting back to the finale itself, perhaps the most notable of developments was the fact that Koko held back the activation of her Jormungand system for two years. Granted, her plan wasn’t exactly complete and you could argue putting the miniaturized version of Jormungand had a part to play… but for me, it was particularly notable because of how it seems like Koko was intentionally waiting this time frame in order to give time for Jonah to make his decision and return of his own volition. Who knows though, it could’ve been a coincidence… or perhaps just another point to show just how well both Koko and Kasper know Jonah and his tendencies (perhaps even more so than he knows himself). Either way, this and the whole reunion scene where everyone prepped their own “I’ve been waiting for you” line set up some great emotional dynamics, and it’s one big reason why the finale still felt good despite it being different than what I expected. To top it off, everyone else of note in the cast made their own appearances too, and it certainly gave this episode that finale feeling that a series’ end should have.
Moving on, there’s really not much extra to say admittedly about the finale. I suppose one could discuss Kasper, his views on war and himself as a character, but at this point, it’s pretty clear we all know what a suave beast the guy is. In the end, the finale was one of those that just wrapped things up fairly well, and gave off the feeling necessary for some sort of closure. I’m sure some (or perhaps many) of you dislike the fact the series went the “open-ended” route (and I myself am admittedly not completely on board with it), but it just goes back to the fact that there was always something extra in the background. The way Perfect Order ends just makes it a great testament to human nature: that you just never know what the future holds… we all have differing views of what makes an ideal vs. a realistic world… and that humans have the potential to do limitless things, but our own nature is something that we will run into at some point in time. Depending on your view, the future could be one indeed filled with more peace than any other time period (although forced by humanity having their wings clipped), or it could just be the one Kasper talks about (one where we’ll just find new ways to kill each other and profit off of it). Either way, it sets up the foundations for some intriguing discussion about something we just can’t know about, but of which everyone has their own views regarding (and their own reasons for believing it). The question now is: which side do you fall under? Koko’s? The world as is? Kasper?
Some other notes:
Full-length images: 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12, 18, 22, 24, 27, 29, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 41, ED 04, ED 05, ED 06.
Epilogue:
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ED3 Sequence
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ED3: 「虹航海」 (Niji Koukai) by かの 香織 (Cano Caoli)
End Card
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Final Impressions:
Looking way back to the start of the first season, Jormungand was one of those series that just screamed “YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS” the moment you see it. The PV’s promised high-octane action that drew comparisons to the well loved Black Lagoon, Guardian Enzo spoke glowingly of the source material, and there was just nothing really going against it in terms of reasons to watch it. Now that the series is over, the question is: did it deliver on its promise?
Suffice to say, it sure did. For one, it gave us a great cast of characters that were not only memorable, but also filled with enough back story to really make them come to life. To say the least, there’s just nothing like knowing exactly why each individual character does the things they do, possesses the skill set they have, and how they ended up at this point. Look ahead to the future some six months or maybe even a year or two from now and it’s just going to be hard to forget the the craziness of Wilee and his bomb antics, Valmet’s blood-soaked revenge story, R’s final moments against Hex, and the fun moments we had with Schokolade, Scarecrow, Kasper, and Chequita (just to name a few). Still, all of these pale in comparison to that one person we haven’t mentioned yet, the one who linked everything together and pretty much single-handedly powered this series to the heights it did.
Yes, we can’t forget about Koko Hekmatyar, our charismatic white haired, blue-eyed arms dealer. Undoubtedly a contender as one of the best characters of the year, she was just ridiculously fun to watch week-in week-out, and it’s going to be hard to ever forget about her (or her jingle HER NAME IS KOKO, SHE IS LOCO), let alone a few years from now. Because who else can better show off the arms dealing business and aim for world peace at the same time? Admittedly though, it can be said that almost everyone one in the main cast could have a case for being mentioned in a short list for best character. That’s just how great of a cast this series had, and it’s a testament to how good the series was to be able to manage such a large cast, as few series even manage with just a handful of characters. Heck, even the “enemies” were memorable—because who could forget about Chinatsu!?
I guess this means there’s no 3rd season 🙁
Would be fun, but alas, I believe this is pretty much it. :X
Am going to miss Koko and her team for sure. The character dynamics are great, even between enemies and the gunfire sequences, MY GOD!
Thanks for covering this, it’s been a pleasure reading.
Is this how the manga ended also? :/
Yes anime has adapted the eleven volumes of the manga pretty faithfully up to the last page where we see Koko’s hand pressing on her ceell’s key.
I love this series but am disapointed it ended with us never getting to see her plan in action.
Also I always wondered why Koko didn’t announce to the world that at a certain time all aircraft would no longer work and try to keep most of the 700,000 people that might have been in the air on the ground?
That would give the people that guessed her plan right plenty of time to launch some major offensive against her and all of her assets. Not to mention someone might just be smart enough to just F it all and nuke her and her toy factory 🙂
Actually the ship is an Independence Class Littoral Combat Ship which uses a trimaran hull for high speed.
And although the Su-35 and Su-37 both look almost the same, from the yellow/brown splinter camo, I think the animators were going for the Su-37.
Ah. I see on the ship. As for the plane I was wondering about SU-37… but it felt like it might’ve been more SU-35. Hm… but similarities are quite close indeed. Well, it’s a Sukhoi at least. Lol.
Am i remembering this wrong or is Chaquita not Lehm’s on-again-off-again wife?
She was Lehm’s wife yes.
married > divorced > remarried > redivorced.
Just gotta say that koko’s plan is so childish it’s almost stupid. The plan has a ton of loopholes and would in fact kill more people than it would actually save. I’ve already ranted about the points of it on another site some im just gonna copy my reasoning why. (sorry for the following language that site doesn’t have any rules so i just went at it when i was replying to somebody)
Basically all she’s trying to do is rule the world. She can cover it up with what ever speech she has but it’s basically just her controlling the world using all of technology.
Remember when she made that speech about how wars will start over water and resources. Well her “genius” plan doesn’t do a fucking thing about the resource shortage which will surely grow even worse without humans culling our own numbers through war. Hell all she’s managed to do is isolate people in a specific place with little resources and an uncontrollable population growth. And even if countries decided to end war and work things out they could still doom a country to starvation by not sending them any food or clean water. This would be on of the MANY loopholes that can occur in koko’s plan.
Also just because she controls information doesn’t mean shit. Humans will just build a separate information network and continue on. Ever heard of land lines? And just because she controls info doesn’t mean she controls guns. When the hell have you ever heard of a computerized shotgun? People will still have guns so that point about no wars is invalid.
Now that the world’s country’s are pretty much isolated from each other order will deteriorate once food and water run low and the population continues to grow rapidly. Anarchy will be widespread and just see how fast you once friendly neighbors will kill you for food and clean water. No to mention that they still have guns. Unless Koko can support an army so large it’s more than the world population she won’t be able to control every country by force. Unless she’s willing to commit a few mass genocides to cull the heard when resources spread too thin and fighting occurs over them.
The whole point at the end is that you believe that you want in terms of your thoughts about whether her plan works or not. As mentioned by Kasper, Koko’s plan may or may not prevent wars from happening, as alternate ways of killing are always possible.
You seem to be underestimating the power of Jormungand though. It’s more than just informational control. It’s control of any tech that has a chip that can be tampered with by an outside signal. She might not be able to control guns themselves, but she can knock out and control all air, all ships, and any ballistic warhead once it’s launched too. You can only coordinate so much with landlines, because then you’d need a hard line to everywhere and everyone if you wanted to coordinate. Just one cut in any part of the line and your effort is done (heck, Koko could use Jormungand to trash it or counter any military by seizing current tech that can be controlled by Jormungand). Wide-scale war just isn’t possible or can be prevented by force.
Also, you have to note majority of the world doesn’t even know Jormungand exists and/or how it works. They won’t just suddenly switch to landlines because 90% of the world can’t even comprehend the mere existence of the system. Remember, even Bookman called it akin to “magic”. Most people will keep trying to use their normal Jormungand alterable tech and get trashed without knowing why, which makes it so Jormungand will forever have its omnipotent capabilities and reach. That’s what she meant by being able to prevent the military from invading at the end of this episode. You can’t stop guns, but you can use their more sophisticated technologies back against them if they don’t know you can control/alter them.
It can be used as a rule the world device, but she obviously ain’t trying to do that. She’s trying to force the world to live under a New World Order where you cannot fight with one another. Thus, it forces cooperation. Combined with her control over virtually everything, she could theoretically also make it so that people can supply food wherever and whenever it’s needed. People will still want to make a profit, so there will be people willing to cooperate with Koko. Even if this doesn’t occur, the population will automatically stabilize corresponding to available resources. Furthermore, you have to remember that air travel is a key development that lead directly to human expansion and played a large part in resource usage and human population growth. Without air travel and its reach, the world population will not grow at the same rate it does now and resources won’t be used as fast either, so the issue you keep pointing to most likely won’t even exist for any time period except for the initial adaptation to life without planes.
Or maybe it won’t. Again, you still have to deal with people who try to counter the system anyway, but this is where your opinion comes into play. It’s not a guarantee this will lead to peace, but it will force something to happen. At the very least though, from what way I see it, it doesn’t have nearly as much loopholes as you think it has.
More like the plan was so poorly thought out that they could’ve never actually executed it realistically in the context of the story.
The plan is silly indeed. There will never be any adaptation to anything! The Russians and the Americans will blast the entire system out of the sky the next day. Or as soon as it takes them to reassemble their 1950s era rockets which were purely mechanical analog devices and therefor are literally unstoppable by anything less then physical damage or nullification of laws of physics as really the only thing that the rocket needs to fly is reaction of kerosene with oxygen. Using this technology USSR put a man in orbit and does it to this day on variations of that same rocket. So no doubt within a very short period of time this entire system will be blown out of the sky.
Not to mention WW2 was a fairly technological war and again, unless Jormungand nullifies basic laws of physics it can’t stop a WW2 era airplane as the only thing that could stop it is to cease oxygen reacting with kerosene. Otherwise they were machines that were purely mechanical and are unstoppable with anything except physical damage.
So while the anime was quite enjoyable the ending kind of dropped the ball. Sealing the sky from humanity is essentially impossible at this stage and would do nothing then rile up the entire world to figure this one out and they would very quickly.
There was potential in some deep physcology in the ending perhaps more about revealing gov’t secrets: something that a quantum computer would actually be useful. Would a gov’t without secrets be able to or even able to wage war? Such would be a more interesting and a very sane conclusion to the story.
So a sad end for a rather good story. However, while the ending does take away some of the luster of the anime at the end it’s not a big issue even with my rant above, after all it’s not about the end it’s about the journey.
Right. The fac that you have a big opinion on the matter just proves that this show was pretty deep and nicely ambiguous. (If that makes sense)
Allen has some interesting points as do you Zephyr. I myself lean more towards his viewpoint that if anything, Jormungand would make things worse. The greatest conflicts, in terms of scale, in the last 100 years were all waged before the computer age. One could argue that computers have helped to minimize the destruction of conflicts and kept rogue nations in check.
Well, we finally got confirmation of the scariest thing in Jormungand: Dere-dere Chiquita being pissed off. Kaspar is a brave man. 🙂
Koko will always be Loco. I really like that they ended on that, haha.
The series was awesome! However, Black Lagoon still remains my favorite. IMHO, no one can beat Revy 🙂
An awful ending to an awesome series. We go from “omg jonah pointing a gun at koko? this is going to be amazing” to “this was the end? seriously?” This ending was so bad it even puts a damper on the rest of the series. I really wanted Jonah to show koko the error of her ways, the worlds top scientists and a genius arms dealer unable to think of the answer that jonah a self proclaimed “not very bright” soldier came up with. Instead they went with the “sorry koko can’t lose at anything” route.
Not only that but there really was no resolution to the series climax. It has the climax of jonah pointing that gun at koko. And then over 2 episodes gives us nothing of worth. We don’t even get to see Jonahs thought process on the whole thing because the entire 2 years he spends thinking on it is summed up with “koko was right”. Now Jonah doesn’t care that almost a million innocent people are going to die at the click of one button by a mad woman.
Literally the only thing I liked about this ending was Kasper. He basically told Koko that nothing she does will matter. Which is true, I mean when it comes to the worlds bloodiest wars most of them happened before mankind even had computers. Is she and her band of merry men going to travel around the world and stop millions of people from clubbing each other to death? So Kasper gets another awesome point from me. Where as Koko lost major points here for acting exactly like she is called “the little princess”
What was Jonah’s answer? He thought it wasn’t right to kill a million innocents by knocking them out of the sky, regardless of reason (or potential future casualties that may or may not be spared). Whether he thought that any slaughter of innocents was inexcusable, or whether the cure was worse than the disease, or just that the sacrifice wasn’t worth it for an uncertain and unknowable future, we will never know.
What we do know is that 2 years should have been enough time for Koko and her supercomputer to devise a means to either guide the existing aircraft safely to land or prevent takeoffs for a while before activating Jormungand.
I believe you are missing the point. The point is your supposed to feel that Koko’s plan is either a good one or if it was just loco. (I really will miss that tune too) And remember that there is always more to Koko’s plan then what had ben said. Sometimes you have to think outside the box. Anyway, I didn’t find the ending awfull at all. There was no anticlimax really (If Episode 10 were the second to last episode it would have been)and as Zephyr said, it was Jormungand-isque. And since many thought that the destruction of the air crafts to create world peace was nonsensicle and impossible got their answer with Kasper’s speech, which as you say was the best part of the episode.
I think it was loco because no matter what more it could include in the system, world peace is impossible through those means.
Am I getting the point now?
I don’t think you guys get it. Jormungand purpose is to change the world. Seeing as how something has caused any type of air travel impossible can change the world. Just like how the Nuclear Bomb changed the world after World War 2, Jormungand will change the world after its activation. Whether it be good or bad Koko thinks it is necessary to stop the world from destroying itself threw World War 3. Also note its better to do something than nothing at all. Koko realized that if the world kept going as it was everyone was doomed, as they say in the beginning of the episode, so many wars have broken out and a new Soviet Union has popped up. Koko was right all along about that wars will start in the coming years for resources like water. and even though we will most likely never know I do think Jormungand will do more good than bad.
But her goal was to bring world PEACE, not just any change.
Just because that was her goal, doesn’t mean she though it was possible. She even said that herself, the only thing she knows for sure is the world will change
But if she just wanted to change something, she didn’t need a big-ass computer to do that. Considering how many people the system will kill, she could’ve just kept doing what she was doing. Kasper pretty much nailed it on the head: She’ll never change war, just how wars are fought, until mankind eventually works it’s way back up to where it was when she activated it.
That’s not much of a counter-argument. I understand you don’t like the idea because it’s so drastic, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s not a nonsensical as you portray it.
How is continuing selling weapons going to change anything? You understand that she doesn’t like selling weapons, unlike her brother.
In order to create a paradigm shift something drastic needs to happen, that’s what the big-ass computer is for. Following the status quo doesn’t add up to anything. Kasper doesn’t know anymore about the future than Koko, sure he could be right, but maybe he’s not. Again the point is, the world will change and that was the ultimate goal, what happens after depends on how mankind reacts.
Okay, maybe it’s a bad example. But it’s not that the plan is drastic, it’s that it’s trying to make the impossible happen. No matter what drastic change it makes happen, there will still be fighting. That alone completely contradicts its entire goal. The fact that Koko was so bothered by Kasper’s words (and the fact that she calls it her “compulsory world peace”) shows she seriously thought this could work. By comparison, here’s some similar plans in fiction.
Lelouch’s Zero Requiem was to build himself up as the worst dictator in the world so that he could give the world a common enemy and make period of peace after arranging his own death. He wasn’t looking for eternal world peace at mind control or world peace at gunpoint, like his father and his brother were respectively. Ozymandias in Watchmen made a fake alien to make mankind believe that aliens were attacking so they would stop attacking each other (or that Dr. Manhattan was attacking them, going by the movie ending). This doesn’t stop the fighting entirely, but it was supposed to bring mankind together against an otherworldly threat, fake or not.
Koko’s plan is simply shutting off the power and pointing a gun at everyone else in the world. It doesn’t bring factions together, it doesn’t give them a reason to stop fighting, and it makes her an inevitable target. These are the biggest flaws in her plan.
Let me also point you to Enzo’s take on it:
http://www.lostinanime.com/2012/12/jormungand-perfect-order-12-end-and.html
My best wtf moment was when Koko mentioned the impetus of possible future wars would be clean water. My parents have been saying the same thing for about 2 years, which is why the place they bought has a large stream bordering it. Most of the water they use comes from that and since its very close to the spring they pretty much got first dibs, till it drys up….
Interesting way to end this anime. At first, it was hard for be to believe that that was the end. Still, the open ended nature of this anime leads to more fun to be had by us. We can analyze and maybe people can create their own ending.
Jormungand has been a joy to watch since the beginning. I’ll be sad to see this go 🙁
You know those vest Koko’s team were wearing? They’re actually filled with C4 explosives and the satellite phone was the trigger… So, after this scene, the whole team exploded…
Show Spoiler ▼
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!
I LOLed so hard at this. That is a possibility too. Great catch there MrRei.
Hmm I didn’t like Koko’s new hairstyle, preferred it when she had long hair 🙁
It seems like all our favourite shows are ending too quickly, Btooom, Zetsuen no Tempest, and now Jormungand is leaving as well. Well I won’t say that I didn’t see this coming but I hope for new seasons sometime in the future for all these series. I really enjoyed them and it made my Christmas Holiday more fun. Oh well maybe I will see them again next Christmas. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone.
Zetsuen actually has another cour. 😛
2 years has past kasper talk with koko things going on the world from battle fight increase, big ben clock kaboom, to new soviet union, & etc point koko invite kasper to rocket launch of koko’s plan.
so after seeing rocket launch even if koko’s plan works yet kasper said other ways the cycle of arms dealer still go on & sorts with after johan tell kasper want to leave so they part ways with gift help 3 kids that johan to help support.
after all left is johan to wonder is shouting for koko cue koko hearing to lead the “wind of change” days later johan still wander see food & whole gang of koko’s crew since they also miss johan.
& koko herself appear give ask did johan got his answer yet also who ask who crazy one koko or world with still hmm johan still want to be with koko with that lead the adventure continues.
Boobs. Huge ones at that
Nice end to Jormungand like in the manga. I heard from another forum that he/she got the message that we need to do our part to achieve world peace.
Also a lot of fanfic material! XD
Guess we won’t any other Takahashi’s works animated unless if the future can allow the animation of Destro 246 and/or Ordinary Plus Minus.
PS – Anyone doing fanfiction for this?
That was surely an unexpected ending, i really loved the character montage they did in the middle of the episode (with the song), but i was really surprised when the series ended the moment Koko activated Jormungand, i was expecting a short epilogue of some sort showing us a some of the impact of Koko’s plan .. but alas, they chose the open-ending path and stuck with it, it kinda works and gives food for thought but like many others i was hoping for a little bit more.
That said it’s not 100% impossible that there could be some OVA episodes with the BD release or even a full-length Jormungand movie showing the aftermath of Koko’s plan (that would be awesome IMO).
Shut up and take my mone- Ugh. Feeling when an anime you love ended.
I am with both Kasper and Bookman on the Jormungand.
Sorry, Koko, but you won’t change the mental disposition of humanity itself (which was so well showed in another notable anime last season, namely MLA-TE). People will be killing each other as they have done before 1910s, when first bombs were dropped. Countries will play their power games as before. And the Jormungand system will become ultimate prize of every major power in the world. And the odds are within few years human ingenuity will find a way to get a way around the system – especially as it is built around the satellites which to say it politely are fragile targets with predictable trajectories. Off the top of my hat land based lasers, EMP warheads, and massive jamming of signals can render all that tech unusable.
What I find appealing though about this ending, is that I understand and can at least partially subscribe to Jonah’s view: Both Koko and the world at war are loco, but at least Koko tries to change the situation, cries out against the cruel fate and rebels against the horrible status quo.
I don’t think you guys get it. Jormungand purpose is to change the world. Seeing as how something has caused any type of air travel impossible can change the world. Just like how the Nuclear Bomb changed the world after World War 2, Jormungand will change the world after its activation. Whether it be good or bad Koko thinks it is necessary to stop the world from destroying itself threw World War 3. Also note its better to do something than nothing at all. Koko realized that if the world kept going as it was everyone was doomed, as they say in the beginning of the episode, so many wars have broken out and a new Soviet Union has popped up. Koko was right all along about that wars will start in the coming years for resources like water. and even though we will most likely never know I do think Jormungand will do more good than bad. Still I really liked this series and found more enjoyable than Black Lagoon (which I dropped because it was boring)
I want more KOKO!! sad to see it’s ended and I’m glade i watched this show. Koko’s Jormungand plan did make me laugh but it was a show worth watching. I’m sure gonna miss this.
After seeing so many comments debating about the effectiveness of Koko’s plan, I thought I might add something in. Now obviously I definitely do not have a whole lot of experience or knowledge so whatever I say might as well be treated as lightly as a quantum particle. Here goes.
I really think that the effectiveness of Koko’s plan in either the Jormmungand world or the real world depends heavily on one’s understanding of the concept of peace. One could argue that peace can be achieved by removing all uniqueness. In Koko’s case her idea of peace was by total control. If someone shares her views on peace then her plan just becomes that more effective, vice verse for the opposite of course. In essence it boils down to how many people in the world will agree with her.
Except that Koko could never have controlled mankind to the point that they would’ve stopped fighting.
Koko looks younger, and more attractive in my opinion with shorter hair. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for great heroines with black suits on. -COUGHSABERCOUGH-
I very much enjoyed the series, would be epic if there was a movie to see how Jormungand affected the World, but the closing in the series seems pretty proper that having a movie would probably kill the impact it made on us viewers. I’m pretty happy with the way it ended which is rare for anime endings, and Jormungand has that rare ability to pull that off.
I think that the only way this could have ended better is if the cafe where they had their reunion at was owned and managed by those three assassin’s from the first season. The big guy, the girl with the awesome razor-blade necklace, and the guy who came out of a magnificent car chase alive.
Want more Koko-Jonah luv luv time.
Ah, I really hate to see this show end!! No matter what you all think about Koko’s plan and the unrealistic action scenes and whatnot.. You have to admit that this show was epic on so many levels. Koko herself was just amazing. Ahhh I don’t even know what to say anymore lol. Her name is Koko, she is loco!!!
As for how it ended though… Hmmm. I’m on the fence about it, but I can see why they thought it best to leave it open ended. Proof that this entire story was meant to be an entertaining yet truly provoke a serious and candid conversation about one of the ugliest traits of human nature. I know you all think that Koko’s plan is crazy and unrealistic, but aside from something crazy and drastic, what else could be done to remedy the problem? It’s true what Kasper said, people like him will always find another way to get weapons of any caliber into the hands of stupid people ready and willing to take lives for a price. But that doesn’t mean you have to allow it to be easy for them. While her plan might not create the kind of world peace she’s hoping for, I do believe a New World Order would come to pass. Her system would certainly make it harder for people to wage war and orchestrate violence across the world. It would hinder them greatly I believe. With that much, you’ve probably saved a few small nations. And like someone else mentioned, her plans are never so simple. She said it was the first phase. Anyways… Hurray for Jonah coming back to Koko and Koko cutting her hair!
My Valmet x Koko fantasies never played out, sadness. . .
how good is this show? Its gonna take an outstanding to look past dem eyebrows
The plan is crazy but not as crazy as in The Watchmen.
Being able to control and shutdown all the technologies for waging modern warfare is like banning guns. You won’t prevent people from killing others with knives and whatever but they’ll have a harder time to reach the double digit.
I loved Jormungand up until episode 24… Easily in the running as one of the worst endings of 2012. I thought Joahan was going to do something epic to stop the awful plan, but he did nothing and just rejoined them. I don’t know what you guys know about the technology argument she is using, but it is completely flawed. She brings up WWI and WWII as an argument, but if Jormungand was active back then, it wouldn’t have stopped anything. Old planes use mechanical gauges, people communicated through radio transmissions, and paper maps with compasses were used to find their way. I could write a thesis on how the world would adapt to a closed system so that a quantum computer couldn’t do anything to effect it. Sure some things would make it more difficult, but the world will still go on killing. Kasper said it best… If she locks out everything, people will kill each other with wooden clubs. The only thing Jormungand would do is cause more chaos and collapse entire economies bringing the world into one large depression.
and the secret of the krabby patty is……….ROLL CREDITS
I think most of us are focusing too much on what Jormungandr does and too little on what Koko said to Jonah towards the end of the story.
Will the world achieve peace with the awakening of the World Serpent? So asked Jonah.
Koko’s reply?
“Hell if I know!”
With this, she admits that no matter how precise her plans are, the future is still something she has no absolute control over; a kind of resignation to the futility of trying to play God. Maybe it was different two years ago when she revealed her plans to her team (and the viewers), but the Koko two years later seem to accept the validity of her brother’s point: no matter what she and her big Snake do, people will still find ways around the system for their violent pastimes.
But Koko’s real goal is not simply to keep humanity in line with bans and limits and a god-like grip on their throats. No, her intention is to etch a sense of shame into humanity, to remind it that the wide heavens where it once flew so freely was sealed due to its foolish warmongering ways. She hopes that whenever humanity lifts its head to look at the now unreachable sky, it will be reminded of this disgrace that it had brought upon itself and be provided with an incentive to end or at least reduce its violence.
“People are very afraid of being shamed. That’s what differentiates humans from apes.” – Koko.
That is why the title of the final episode is “Century (Age) of Shame”. This is ultimately what Koko hopes to achieve with Jormungandr, to build the motivation to end wars, one that comes from within humanity itself and not from an almost all-powerful but ultimately external entity.
……. and jourmungand is the beginning of super computer oriented control cybil system in psycho-pass._.
Incoming wall of text that no one’s going to read, it being a month since the episode aired and all.
I’ve been reading a lot of opinions on this show, and I honestly can’t believe how different they are. Some people (mostly here at RandomC) believe that it’s a brilliant show that does everything extremely well, while the others see nothing worth praising aside from the OST (you must be loco to deny the greatness of that). Because of that, it’s very difficult to form one’s own opinion, without just parroting what the others said. After spending all this time watching 24 episodes of the show, did I like it? Well I certainly don’t regret watching it: sometimes it was entertaining as hell, and Wiley might be one of my favorite characters of the year. But sometimes it was a total bore (mostly because it tends to ignore the “Show, don’t tell” principle), the oh so subtle social commentary was propaganda-level obvious, and many, many characters and events didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Even R’s death (which wasn’t the first one in Koko’s team) didn’t change anything: if you just assume that he was never there, nothing would’ve changed. And don’t even get me started about the Jormungand plan and all the reasons it’s impossible.
Jormungand is a very detailed, wordy action show, and it is exactly because of the sheer amount of details that you can’t ignore the faulty ones. When the writer pays so much attention to the nuts and bolts of the story, it feels weird when it misses a whole muzzle (okay, perhaps this weapon analogy isn’t appropriate, even for this show). If I were to recommend it to anyone, it would be because of the OST and the characters, not the story or the action. And just in case, I’d tell them to lover their expectations a couple of notches.
Well, I read and agree with everything you say. And I think the writer was aware the story was lengthy without much base when he showed that scene where Jonah fell asleep during that guy’s speech.
Most people hate stories that wave ideas and opinions in the viewers’ face all the time like this. It makes light of the viewer’s intelligence with “propaganda-level obvious” social commentary, as you say.
Reading your post now convinced me to also ask others to “lover” their expectations a little as well. 🙂
Damn, I’ve read that post three times before sending it, and a typo still got through.
At least you know some people are reading your post thoroughly despite your expectations, which is a good thing.
Show had it’s deficiencies, and as a military geek I was despairing at some of the fights and the way they were conducted, but as someone put it, real wars are not subject to rule of cool.
Still, despite blatant “hammer in your face” moralising, the show made for a few moments when some thinking was required, especially with the open ending bringing up heated discussion. Still it is a rare example of show nowadays that goes above and beyond middle-to-high school romance and characters, so it has my vote of confidence! (Yea, Jonah is still a kid, but he’s been forced to become mature by the very life he had… so I dont consider him a shounen hero)
What was the point of showing Koko’s father in one of the OP’s when he never appeared in the show? I expected him to show up in episodes about Lehm’s past, but nothing. Anything in the manga that didn’t make it into the anime?
All in all though, one of the best shows of the past year. Looking forward to the studio’s next work.