High school girls sure are complicated. Haruko Haruhara Episode 6 880https://i.ur.com/5mt6Ra3.png And so ends one of the most profoundly odd trilogies in the entire medium. FLCL FLCL Progressive and FLCL Alternative. Whats maybe most striking about the three entries in what is now a franchise is how different they are from each other despite working off the same core premise. The original still exists to some extent upon a pedestal. It is a bizarre evershifting thing both literally the series was originally conceived as a way to experiment with animation after all and thematically and any analysis of it that attempts to be brief and snappy is doomed to fail. Progressive is a darker and lord help me for using the word positively grittier take on the idea. Recasting the villainous but charming Haruko as the much nastier Haruha and replacing the selfimportant but lovable Naota with the deeply depressed violence fetishist Hidomi. Those two form a part in of themselves as much of Progressives raison darte is to cast a skeptical leering eye toward the original FLCL sometimes seeming to question as to whether making the villain so charming is a good idea and whether maybe the series is a bit too open to interpretation altogether. Where does that leave Alternative? The final entry in the trilogy and in some ways a bit of a rebuttal to Progressives audienceantagonizing take on the series. More than that though Alternativeat least initiallyseems like it has much less to say about FLCL and much more to say about well stuff in general. In a strange sort of sense this makes it rather traditional to the extent that a franchise like FLCL has traditions to return to. 880https://i.ur.com/AGI6i6B.png If Alternative has an overall theme it is probably something like this People fuck up. Specifically our protagonist 17 year old Kana fucks up. A lot. In a broader sense so does almost everyone else in the cast. Kanas three friendsHijiri Mossan and Petseach get a focus episode in a halfcour series really in which they make some kind of mistake. Hijiri is caught in a hookup with a collegeaged boy Mossan attempts to shoulder the burden of working up enough money to attend a fashion school on her own and Pets.is rather complicated. Kanaand Haruko here in a much more heroic role than her turn in Prog and indeed even the originalhelps to solve these problems in her own way which turns out in the grand scheme of things to be something of a fuckup in of itself in the last episode she admits her propensity to help others at the expense of her own wellbeing to be basically an act. Something done for her own sake. The last episode interestingly brings back some of the metatext that made Prog as good as it was or more properly reveals whats been there from the start and at the end FLCL one of the most strikingly original anime of all time has its sequel duology go out like a shonen series. All stammered speeches about the power of love and 11thhour superpowers to rewrite reality and scratch together a happyish ending at the last minute. Does that sound like a complaint? It isnt though itd be foolish to expect answers from FLCL of all things the final episode of Alternative is jampacked with conversation with the shows predecessorsnot just Progressive the I dont know what I want segment of Kanas speech echoing Hidomis theres nothing I want to be and the original FLCL fullon flashbacks as Haruko appears to be flung sideways in time at the series conclusionbut the rest of the Daicon lineage too most saliently Diebuster whose ending this series finale somewhat mirrors. Nonos black hole sacrifice recontextualized as an act of selfempowerment and seizing control of ones life. 880https://i.ur.com/AlCEiTr.png This is without even getting into the minor details The fan bait that is the Steve Blumvoiced soba shop owner talking about making soba until the end of the world a statement its hard to not read on a meta level as being about the perpetually halfdying anime localization industry. The scarily prescient idea of the richest and most powerful citizens of Earth fleeing to Mars in the face of a doomed planet.The knotted timeline which I can only imagine the most devoted fans will be trying to untangle for years. Alternative even in parts of Kanas speech in the finale and an earlier conversation in the same episode joins A Place Further Than The Universe as the second series this year to openly criticize the endless everyday concept that is foundational to the slice of life genre and subsequently much modern anime in general. Theres a lot to Alternative which is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. If anything I suspect Alternative will work for even fewer people than Progressive. Prog relied on having a working knowledge of the original series and hearts in your eyes for Haruko. Alt cranks that up to eleven and rips the dial off. Invoking the original Prog Diebuster anime youth dramas and so much more. Its a lot to ask of the audience and depending on how you view these sorts of things you could argue that Alt doesnt really stand on its own legs. After spending four of its six episodes seeming like it was unconcerned with the series legacy Alt turns out to have the most relationship to the rest of FLCL out of almost any other work in the franchisethe manga adaptation of the original included. This structure can also make the first half of Alternative feel a little aimless so its definitely not a strategy that works perfectly but of the three sixepisode series Alt mightif only just barelyactually prove to be the most rewarding in the long run both in how it interacts with the rest of the series and its commentary on the real world. Its a hard thing to call but if the original FLCL proved anything way back when it aired at the dawn of the new millennium its that you can be weird be difficult be obtuse even and still have people respect what youre trying to do and maybe even love it. If theres a note to close on it should be this In a world that feels doomed works like Alternative are cathartic even important. A hardfought struggle for love on a planet that seems like its lost it in 2018 by design or by simple applicability is something worth praising. 880https://i.ur.com/N9T6z3u.png