The revelation that the Queerats are in fact humans doesn’t fundamentally change anything, in part because it’s something many of us have suspected all along. I don’t think Kishi-sensei is interested in absolving anyone of the responsibility of their crimes, only in showing us that decency does try to struggle on even in the darkest of times. They’ve done terrible things to survive, most obviously the pre-emptive murder of countless of their own children. The sins that lie at the feet of the remains of civilization are grave and SSY has made no attempt to gloss over that fact.
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The meaning of this series isn’t in finding answers, it’s that there are no good answers. In terms of Mamoru’s child and her death, I think perhaps the fault is with me – because I’m probably trying to project a redemptive quality to Shin Sekai Yori that it has no intention of shouldering. In the larger scheme of things it’s a fairly small issue, but it does represent the closest thing to a stumble over the course of 25 mostly brilliant episodes, and it’s probably coincidental neither that these are the most important changes from the novel, or that the character in question is the biggest name in the seiyuu cast. The common thread here is Maria and an attempt to make her into a kind of spiritual focus of the series, especially when the change in ED is factored in. It’s also odd that Mamoru effectively disappeared from the timeline for a long stretch, never even being mentioned when talk turned to “the friend who died” and “Maria’s child” only to be remembered at the very end. This is very odd, frankly, because what we got was a situation where there was obviously a deep personal bond and trust (even if it wasn’t romantic love) between the two of them at 12, at 14 and at the very end – and an inexplicable hole in the middle where they acted like strangers to each other. I don’t really understand the quite obvious distance that was placed between Saki and Satoru after the final timeskip, given the fact that they ended up together in the end anyway. Indeed, there are a couple of elements that puzzle me in this fashion.
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Was there no meaning to Saki’s realization that the child was no fiend but merely someone who – in Saki’s own words – had “done nothing wrong” apart from a strategic one in figuring out how to kill it? And to further highlight the sense of tragedy? In the end, the akki that wasn’t is just another innocent who died for the sake of preserving what was left of civilization. No, if there’s anything that bothers me about the conclusion of the fiend storyline (apart from the fact that A-1 apparently did make the minor change of having Maria and Mamoru’s child be a girl, presumably for no other reason than to further fetishize Maria, which makes the fiend theory somewhat less plausible) it’s that killing the akki seems to invalidate all the soul-searching Saki has done over the last few episodes. But at the very least it’s no easy task to take a novel with perfect pacing and not screw it up by trying to make it more suitable for anime. So it’s hard to know just how much credit A-1 and the director and writer should get, and how much should go to novelist Kishi Yuusuke. There was always a sense that we were watching historical events play out through an act of memory, never too fast and never too slow.
Of course, SSY is adapted from a novel and as I’ve stated many times it, more than any series of recent memory, has been exquisitely paced.
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