LAST EDITED ON Sep-08-14 AT 11:15 AM (EDT)
 
>So that was how season five ended, and Zero's descent into basically
>complete nihilism continued all through season six. (...)
>It was a logical character progression; Zero had
>kinda had the Mark of Doom on her from day one, with her whole "Last
>of the Breed" samurai persona.

This is probably going to surprise you, but I actually thought that was kind of brilliant. I mean, it's painful to watch, but there's craftsmanship in it, the way they kept her true to herself while her world stopped making sense. What do you do when your three highest priorities are your honor, your country, and victory, in that order, and then your country abandons its honor in the name of victory and is still obviously not going to win?

If you're Hayabusa, those weren't your priorities in the first place and you don't give a shit about anything other than the fact that your side is losing; you just get more and more vicious and underhanded as the war comes down around you and you do that cornered-animal thing. But if you're Zero, there's only one reasonable response: You kill yourself. Except you're one of the stars of an animated show where the named characters never die,* so you can't kill yourself. But you keep trying. Because your honor demands it.

It's bleak as fuck, but it's so well-constructed. And it does ultimately work out, at least in the manga. One of the relatively few things I'm seriously disappointed in the TV series for was the way they built up her internal conflict for the whole season and then didn't show its resolution. In 623 she's grappling with an obviously agonizing decision; in 624 she has her epic duel with Haya, and then just... flies away. In the movie, she's crashing (as it were) on P-40's couch, and there's basically no mention of what happened in between. You have to go and read Volume 41 of the manga to find out. Poorly played, script editors!

Heck, you could get a whole spinoff out of Zero and 40 going freelance, trying to survive and make a difference in the chaotic closing days of the war. Rōnin Zero. I'd watch the hell out of that.

>... come to think of it, the Pacific Conference matches were really
>where Fly Girls put most of their dark shit, weren't they?

Most, but not all. Me 109 had a similar internal struggle to undertake toward the end of the European Conference finals - say from "If You See Aircraft, They Will Be Ours" onward - when the German team was so strapped for resources that she and the other fighters didn't even get to play most of the time and she had plenty of time to contemplate what the school's administration had been up to the whole time. She could ignore it while she was on active duty, but once she's benched for lack of supplies, that doesn't really work any more, so she has her own "what can I do when my country's honor is gone?" thing to confront. You're right, though, that even then they played it more for laughs than Zero's problems ever were. Guessing they weren't willing to explore exactly what Germany did to make 109 question her patriotism, which isn't really a surprise under the circumstances.

--G.
* Well, almost never. Ohka was a special case.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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