Eureka Seven

*SPOILERS* After a very promising start, this show went on at a reasonably good level for a while. In the second half it started to drag, and this got worse as the show went on, really drawn out over the last couple of volumes – 50 episodes was really too long. A few of the episodes had notably bad writing, which typically involved characters acting like they were in a cliche drama anime. Worst of all was the premise, which dawned on me as the plot was gradually revealed: the heroes were doing the usual stuff, fighting to protect people they cared about, but it turned out they were also fighting to protect an alien organism which had covered the entire Earth and absorbed every living thing on it. By the end I was really rooting for the “villains”. The happy ending is that “only” half the human population are absorbed into the alien. After watching End of Evangelion, I think I’m seeing an anime pattern – for socially isolated, emotionally repressed Japanese, being absorbed into one big gloopy world-soul seems to be only a good thing. For less alienated people, however, it seems like a scary way to lose your individuality and freedom. This is especially paradoxical in Eureka Seven, where, in the first half, our freedom fighter heroes express their individual freedom through the symbols of surfing and underground techno. This element of the show would’ve been better served by a more down-to-earth plot.