Tuesday 16 December 2008

Kannagi - Episode 11

After light relief aplenty in recent episodes of Kannagi (I shy away from calling it filler as a lot of it was too damn good to be tarred with that particular brush), it appears that we're back to the "serious" business of the series again as of this instalment, although with only two episodes left to go I can't help but wonder how they can hope to achieve anything much in this time frame.


Anyhow, after all the fun of karaoke and so on, Nagi decides (with a little coaxing from Jin) that it's time to return to her "work" of catching and destroying impurities... With Jin's help of course. This generally involves Jin getting injured (being hit on the head by a "magic wand", falling out of windows and so on, all while still being talked about by everyone in the school due to the "love square" they think he's involved in), and to be honest it's enough to make a grown man snap, let alone a teenager.

So, having reached breaking point, Jin snaps, quizzing Nagi on what she's actually doing and what her purpose is. He gets no answer, Nagi instead running off in tears, and from here on in the episode takes rather an introspective turn - Is Nagi a god at all? Who, or what is she? Does Nagi herself even understand what she is or her real purpose? So many questions, and not a lot in the way of answers, so confusion reigns amongst many of the main characters by the time we reach the climax of this instalment.

After all the fun and frolics of recent weeks, this episode of Kannagi is actually a rather sobering one, although it still manages to be relatively light-hearted and fun when it needs to be (with the Clannad-inspired dating sim parody the pick of the bunch). I have to admit that I prefer Kannagi when it's being laugh out loud funny, but I can't really stand here as some kind of enemy of plot progression and character development, so I'm still suitably intrigued as to where this particular story line is headed, and indeed what the series is going to do with its remaining episodes. Surely it's going to be a case of when, not if, for a second season of this series?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, more seasons to come seems like an inevitability, being relatively popular and still having a wealth of source material to cover, but you never know. Look what happened to Haruhi Suzumiya.

AstroNerdBoy said...

Well, with the manga-ka having had to go into the hospital for surgery, who knows when the manga will get back on track to provide more source material. I think there are only six total volumes of manga materials (plus whatever hasn't been placed into a tankoubon) so with some filler, there could be another 13-episode series.

As to "Kannagi" itself, I too prefer the comedy aspects more than the serious ones because as a comedy, this series ranks pretty high with me for pure laugh-out-loud funny stuff. However, I am going to wait and see where this serious line takes us. I hope this is stuff covered in the manga and not the production team going off on their own.