Me finishing S2 of Alice in Borderland: Wow!!! God, what an emotional gut-punch. The Land wasn’t some sci-fi virtual reality or any of the other cliches Mira was peddling, but rather a limbo where the games represent the characters fighting for their lives in the real world. And sure, an afterlife-esque explanation isn’t the most original, but often the most common endings are common for a reason. And this one fits perfectly. Rather than a cop-out “They were already dead from the start,” I interpret the games as being their actual deaths and those who had the will to live (alongside some inevitable luck and, as Karube points out, help from others) end up pulling through in the real world too, rather than the real world dictating what happens in the games. Which means everything we witnessed still keeps its emotional significance. We get that perfect, happy ending without erasing their hardships because the hardships are what got them that ending. It turns out they were really playing the games for the same reason they always have: to survive. And everything else seems to near perfectly line up with our explanation. We know now why some characters hung on despite numerous, horrific injuries and others perished from comparatively minor stuff. It’s not just a suspension of disbelief on the audience’s part, but an in-world representation of who is fighting the hardest to come back from the brink. If the Land is a limbo--one seemingly created for this specific tragedy--we know now why people are arriving at different times (their hearts aren’t all stopping simultaneously), and the limbo decays as fewer victims of the strike arrive and more make their choice, slowly eroding as it nears the point when no one else will need it. We see those who choose to test future “players” before inevitably passing on themselves. We see how even though Anne “dies,” Kuina deciding that they’ll go back together gives her the strength to pull through her surgery. We know now how they’ll meet again and become friends! That’s also just an awesome example of how you can kill a trans characters for the “realism” (everyone in that fight came out the worse for it) without actually removing her from the narrative/denying her a happy ending. We understand what the woman meant about those not being fireworks. We have a resolution that actually allows the survivors to return home in a way that makes sense (seriously, if people just popped back into the real world having remembered the games, wouldn’t they be talking about it?) while still keeping the core of what they learned. None of them need to remember the exact events because they’ve maintained both their newfound hope and just enough residual connection to recognize one enough and re-establish those bonds--perhaps an explanation for what we’d otherwise call “fate” or “soulmates.” They played the game of life and they won. They get to live! All they wanted was to do extraordinarily normal things together and now they can!! Walking out that door and the cards blowing away is the perfect endi--
AiB:
Me: what.
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