Tokyo Revengers: Seiya Kessen-hen Episode 12 Discussion

BetaMaleUltra said:
Let's put aside the question as to why Mikey went psycho and killed everyone for now; I'm 90% sure that that his absurd motivations will be explained later down the line, to an extent that is at least somewhat believable. The issue I have is that it doesn't seem like Takemichi's actions in the past and consequences in the future are connected at all. It's almost like the writers are playing spin the wheel: "Ok, Takemichi defeated Black Dragon and managed to kick Kisaki out of Roman? Alright, spin the wheel and see what the results will be! ‘Mikey slips on a banana peel and dies’ Bro, that’s pretty lame. Spin the wheel again. ‘Mikey kills everyone for some reason’ Ok now, THIS is something interesting and will get the audience on the edge of their seats. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!” Maybe I’m not being fair; maybe it needs more time to play out and explain itself. But honestly, doesn’t it KIND OF feel like Takemichi’s actions aren’t fully connected to the events that happen when he returns to the future? Maybe it’s just me. Maybe the events are related. Perhaps Kisaki and Black Dragon kept Mikey in check in a way. I WANT to believe that a roadmap was planned in the writers’ room. But it just ever-so-slightly feels like they all went RANDOM BULLSHIT: GO! And finished the script in 5 minutes.

Nitpicks aside, this is the best episode for me so far from this season. Not just because of the big “WTF” moments, but because of a line that Mikey quickly says: “We can’t go back to the past.” I want this line to continuously echo within Takemichi’s mind. With all the loops that Takemichi has made in trying to fix everything and save everyone, he needs to learn that the world was never perfect, and shit will happen in one way or the other. The best ending this series could have is a cliché one, but still the best one: which is Takemichi finally accepting that no matter what he does, he cannot save everyone. That would be leagues better than the redundancy of him going back in time over and over again until he everything is exactly the way he wants it to be. Because then it’s pointless, we know it’s not going to work out, we know something’s going to get messed up in the future, because they gotta milk this story as long as people are invested in it. We can enjoy the action in the meantime, but in the back of our minds we gotta be thinking: “he’s just probably going to fail again probably, so what’s the point??” And if they’re going to be lame and indeed have a happy ending play out in the end with everyone NOT dying, the only anticipation and suspense we will feel through each of the loops is: “is THIS the loop where Takemichi finally succeeds?” Takemichi’s actions then just wouldn’t matter at all. The only thing that controls anything is the manga deciding when it’s time to end things, and to stop milking a repetitive story.

Maybe I’m being narrow-minded and failing to see that they are indeed setting up the bigger picture to this whole story. Maybe it is more than just going back and forth in time until Takemichi fixes things. But I still don’t see it. Haven’t read the manga, but I think I’m going to spoil it just a little bit for myself just to find out if it really is just the same thing over and over again until Takemichi achieves a happy ending.

edit: So I just glossed over the summaries of the remaining arcs, but it seems that