Recap: The girls meet some survivors who have decided to stay in the ruins of Tokyo

Gee’s Thoughts: Definitely not the best follow up episode. While I found the idea of there being survivors living in the ruins of Tokyo to have a lot of potential as an interesting premise, Coppelion fails to truly capitalize on it. It doesn’t help that the survivors have one of the dumbest justifications for their self-imposed exile that I have ever heard. The twist of them being former criminals is a pretty common one in fiction, and seeing them go on to claim they can’t return to society despite the fact that nobody has been looking for them for 20 years…well, really fucking stupid. I mean seriously, if you just kept your goddamn mouth shut, nobody would even know.

Ibari’s tearful confession and Aoi’s self doubt were also rather trite. We get it, you’ve been genetically modified, you’re not “truly” human. You don’t have to repeat this over and over again. As if to make matters worse, they’re literally the only ones who feel this way. Not a single other character we’ve met so far has explicitly treated them differently. The three’s personal drama is basically a product of their own mentality, which just comes off as ridiculously stupid to me. It certainly doesn’t help that Ibari is basically the only one with a likable personality. Aoi is annoying as hell and I can’t even remember what’s up with the other girl other then that she wears glasses.

That said, I still really dig the setting so here’s hoping things will pick up later down the road.

Lifesong’s Thoughts: Well that was disappointingly heavy-handed. Maybe it’s just me, but when characters write their own tragedies I have a hard time feeling bad for them. I can see what the story was going for, and I probably should feel bad for these people, but it’s hard to feel bad for awful people who are too stupid to live. Is this a tragedy? You can’t save people from themselves.

I’m sure that I’m missing the moral of the story here, but I think that even if I had it explained in detail I wouldn’t feel any different. I think the biggest problem here is that this anime is trying really hard to humanize these three school girls when they are already the most human aspect of the show. When you push that kind of thing up against some stupid criminals it’s creates a nasty contrast that doesn’t work in anyone’s favor.