Final Thoughts: Casshern Sins

Character deaths and a grown-up Ringo.... All that and more in the final episode of Casshern Sins ~ So sorry if it has taken me this long to blog about this. Real life and all.... Anyhoo, fantastic episode!
EPISODE 24: For the Flowers Which Wander and Bloom
More Screencaps from Casshern Sins 24
Luna and Braiking Boss work together in order to rid the world of ruin. Meanwhile, Casshern and his friends find a place for themselves near the ocean where they live happily for a short while. But with each day that passes, Lyuze and Ohji continue to get worse until the day of their final passing comes. After burying his friends, Casshern leaves Ringo with Friender to make his way back to Luna's castle. Meanwhile, Braiking Boss realizes for himself the truth about Luna and they have a falling out. At that moment, Casshern arrives and Braiking Boss goes out to fight him once and for all, leaving Luna alone cowering inside her castle. Casshern eventually kills Braiking Boss and goes after Luna next. In her fear of Casshern, she stabs him first with a sword but once his blood flows into her, she remembers how everything began: that day Casshern killed Luna, her blood which brings life and his blood which brings death mixed together, causing ruin to appear in the world. Casshern then tells her that he has not come to kill her again but only to remind her that death still exists, adding that the next time Luna or the others forget about death, he will return to make them remember. Then he starts walking away. Fast forward into the future, Ringo is now an adolescent with Friender as her only companion. She says that ever since that day, no one has seen Casshern again, but she acknowledges that she, being the first one of her kind designed to die, will meet him again when her time comes.
Whew! After a rather rough start, I made it to the end after all. What a series! What an ending! I was totally right about Casshern Sins not being the sort of anime to have a grand finale. The drama needed for an ending of the grandiose kind requires villains that are capable of true, unadulterated malice. That kind of character does not exist in Casshern Sins. I thought Leda was a good contender because she certainly appeared schemy and devious in the first few episodes of her appearance but later on, and after some development, we discover her backstory and suddenly she's one of the more sympathetic characters in the series. The same goes for Dio (who had too many angst to begin with), Braiking Boss and even Luna, whose cruelty is utterly without malice.

So where does that leave us? An ending that will resolve the inner conflict each character is facing. For Ohji, Ringo provides the answer. For Lyuze, it's Casshern (and what irony it is! but how beautifully that was played out in Episode 18). For Dio, it's himself (though he uses Casshern as a prop). And for Leda, it's Dio (though it takes her until the last moment to realize it). As for Luna and Casshern, because they are immortal, they will always carry the burden of that and they will never find ease. And with that, I feel that indeed this is the only possible ending for Casshern Sins.

What is really striking about this series is its unusual treatment of the life-and-death theme. Now that we've seen the final episode, it becomes clear that Luna is the personification of life and Casshern, death. But it's not the generic representation that we're all used to: life and death, good vs. evil, light vs. dark, hope vs. despair, etc. Rather, we're made to see that depending on where you stand and how you look at the world, one could mean the other. That the the two concepts are interchangeable. And so, Lyuze starts living the moment she accepts that she will die and Casshern realizes that the dying people he met in his journey are more alive than the circus people upon whom Luna has granted eternal life. And Ringo was alive the moment she was born, she, of the first of her kind designed to have a lifespan like humans do.

But Casshern Sins is not without its faults. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the series is hard to get into. The first episode went rather well but the subsequent ones did not come up to par. I blame it on the fact that the first half of the series focuses on Casshern and the people he randomly meets along the way.

Now, I am no stranger to this kind of storytelling approach and actually prefer it to purely plot-based storytelling. However, the character-centric device becomes ineffective when your main character is this weak, lackluster dude who angsts a lot. I'm not saying that these episodes are really terrible. A few of them are quite good but once the story picks up in the latter half of the series, the great episodes came in bundles. In a way, I think that the manner in which the first half of the series was handled was just as well, because after I've seen the later episodes, I felt like the earlier episodes were really necessary to make sense out of the characters. Casshern Sins needed the entire first half with which to explain the character motivations and conflicts in preparation for the eventual character clash and culmination of conflicts in the latter half. Then again, I still feel like they could have done all that in just five or so episodes and therefore save us from spending an entire half season bored to tears.IN SUM: Casshern Sins is less a remake and more a re-imagination, the way Battlestar Galactica (2003) reimagined the 1978 scifi franchise of the same name. Madhouse did for Casshern Sins what Ronald Moore and David Eick did for BSG: totally create a new direction for the series but at the same time maintaining the original premise. And I must say, despite my previous misgivings about this series, it worked.

Casshern Sins is one of those stories that sort of creeps on you. Admittedly, there were many instances where I was tempted to drop the series all together, all because I felt like the plot was not going anywhere. But for some reason -- which I suspect has something to do with the sort of hypnotic quality of nearly every episode -- I never got around to it. So if you intend to watch this show, know that you're not watching a regular show about robots wrestling other robots. This is a think-y series and if you approach it the right way, it can leave you very satisfied.