ShiningLion said:This episode got more than a few eye rolls out of me. Everything feels forced and inorganic, and utterly predictable. A while back I found myself saying "If it ends up that they simply change the world by singing some inspirational song it's going to feel so naive, meaningless, and disappointing.
Why? Because in real life, throughout history, there have been countless songs about hope and resolution of political conflicts. There have been countless "fight the system" style gatherings and concerts put on by musicians. Isn't it basically every day that Hollywood and the entertainment industry harp about the world's problems and blame everything on conservatives? So why hasn't the world changed, if it's just that easy?
The reality is singing your feelings is a great form of expression, and may even reach others and help them through life, but it doesn't create change throughout the world on the level this show is going to try to portray. If anything, it's going to be Tao and Spencer's double whammy of exposing the bombing incident and corruption that opens people's eyes, not the concert. But even then, this is something we see almost weekly in the news. Corruption is exposed about politicians all the time, sometimes even involving violence, destabilization, and war crimes due to the choices politicians made. But we live in the age of fake news, and many people refuse to believe things that are true, or don't know what is true, so they go on with their lives largely unaffected when these things occur. There's almost never a majority public movement to recognize and deal with the corruption. It's usually split pretty evenly down the bipartisan line, depending on the affiliation of the corrupt politician in question. People care more about the identity they form through political affiliations than they do about fairness and correcting corruption.
And despite all that, the focus of this show is the musicians. It's naive, dispensable, not inspiring. I'm disappointed, to say the least. This show is going to teach a lot more naive millennials and Gen Z to keep trying to change the world through art instead of getting their hands dirty and going to actually work directly with the people in communities they claim to care about.
I'm sorry to say this show could have used a few more editorial passes by some people who don't have their heads in the ridiculous cloud of liberal Hollywood and it's foreign affiliates. Earth to Watanabe. Come in Watanabe. This show handles the issue of immigration with such vagueness and indirectness as if to treat it like it's just some kind of societal bad mood that needs to pass, like it's only really a problem when it happens to celebrities and stifles their expression, and like it's not an ongoing problem with measurable struggles for both immigrants and communities receiving them, struggles that lead to a diversity of political attitudes about immigration.
What a horrible bait and switch. The show's premise said it was about independent musicians trying to succeed in the age of AI-produced music. It isn't. It's about independent musicians working their way up the corporate food chain (through their visibility on a televised talent competition and their serendipitous connections to industry insiders) to get in on the daily grind of a politicized elite cadre of entertainers who think they not only know better than everyone else, but can change the world simply by forcing their ideas through the media.
So, basically nothing new, another day in the office for entertainers and news media, and a troubling portrait of the political stalemate the Western world has been in for decades now. Nothing in there even vaguely resembling a solution to the real world crisis the show is meant to reflect. It's like Watanabe didn't write any details about the immigration conflict in the show because he doesn't even understand these problems in real life. Just sad.
I don't know if there's any way this ending is going to actually feel like a "miracle" now. The events are looking to loosely echo the ending of Terror in Resonance, which, oddly enough, did have quite a "miracle" of an ending, but it worked a lot more because their plans were shrouded in mystery and gradually became more high stakes, rather than hyping us every episode to say "something big is gonna happen!" Also the show had a clearly knowledgeable approach to its subject matter. I consider that show a near masterpiece, but Carole & Tuesday is a fish out of water. Maybe Watanabe should stick to Japanese politics.
Yeah, I'm not really thrilled with the direction this show went either. I agree with most of what you're saying, but even so I would be willing to overlook a lot of that (naiveté is pretty forgivable given the type of anime it is IMO) if the characters had really good, meaningful development. Unfortunately, that development... just isn't there, no matter how much I want it to be. So all of it feels kinda half-baked.