Garden of Sinners 3: “A Remaining Sense of Pain”

This one gets off to a very bizarre start, opening on a claymation skit that I at first thought was some kind of advertisement. Some claymation people are in a movie theater, watching a black and white film that...is that claymation Rin and Sakura on the screen? I think it's them, yeah. Okay, they're watching Stay/Night at the theater I guess. Anyway, the audience includes claymation Shiki and claymation Touko. It took me a while to recognize the latter, because whoever animated this sketch went for Touko's brunette look from the LN's rather than the redheaded one from the rest of her animated appearances. Sounds like a miscommunication happened. Touko is smoking in the theater, which irritates Shiki.

When she reaches the smoker with her dagger drawn, however, she's embarrassed to realize that they were just candy cigarettes. Aw, how embarrassing for Shiki! Also, there's a claymation catgirl in the audience with them for some reason.

I suppose we'll get what the point of that was once I've finished the actual episode, assuming it had a point. Based on Garden of Sinners so far, I'm not betting on either.

We then shift to a new scene, and the usual art style. It's a dark, gloomy night in a slummy neighborhood whose dying pastel lights just highlight the sopping trash and moldering detritus lining the cracked sidewalks and streets. Inside a half ruined building lit by some improvised torches, a group of tough looking young men are laughing and grinning about something. One of them asks someone if this feels good, and the woman who he's raping on a pool table says that it's uncomfortable and that she would like him to stop. He doesn't stop, because rape.

The victim sounds...apathetic. Almost unconcerned. Very calmly asking him to stop, as if what he's doing is just a minor annoyance rather than entrapment and assault. I'd normally put this down to her just shutting down and disassociating in response to trauma, but since this is Type Nausicaa she could just as easily be an indestructible magic construct who actually doesn't care all that much. The guys laugh and rib each other for a bit while the one continues with the raping, until one of them suggests going to get more girls. The one currently engaged with their current victim says he has an idea to make this one more interesting first, and covers her mouth with his hand.

The implication is that he's going to suffocate her as he finishes, but it could be weirder and potentially less or even more horrible than that. Title card.

Well, we're off to a thrilling start. Unpleasant though that was to watch, I think the creators did a good job of avoiding titillation. There were a couple of breast shots, but they were done in a way that felt more clinical than pornographic, and the visual focus of the scene wasn't on her body or what was being done to it so much as it was on the perpetrators. So, while I think opening on a context-free rape scene isn't the most tasteful approach, it could have been a lot worse.

After the title card, we go to Mikiya standing under his umbrella. I laughed when I saw him, because he's Mikiya.

Hahaha just look at that stupid face.​

In between the intro credit screens (I do like how each Garden of Sinners movie has a totally different style of opening credits), we follow Mikiya as he walks across the rainy nighttime city. He happens upon the purple haired girl who we saw being raped before, curled up in an alley and holding her stomach. Presumably she's just escaped/been released, or this is another of those atemporal things and it hasn't happened yet. This is one of those situations where normal human decency and Nice Guy instincts are in perfect alignment, so he could be acting on either when he walks over and asks if she's okay. She's not very talkative, and denies needing help or being in pain. However, she still follows him when he offers help, clutching her stomach in obvious pain.

A minute later, she admits that she's in a great deal of pain after all, and asks for his permission to cry. He hesitates a moment before granting it, and she continues following him home. The music continues to be extremely sensitive, dramatic, and goth-y, but at this point I guess that's almost like saying "it's the Garden of Sinners soundtrack."

He brings her to his apartment (he's not living with his parents anymore, it seems) and lets her shower before giving her a couch to sleep on. Presumably he called the police, and they told him that they can't come over because it might start a panic. Well, that's legitimately nice of him! Maybe Mikiya's not total trash after all. She quickly falls asleep, and then he watches the late night newscast. There's been a mass murder. Several individuals were found dead in the abandoned bar they'd been seen coming in and out of with relative frequency. All of the victims were torn limb from limb.

The newscast continues in voiceover as we see the girl leaving Mikiya's apartment and walking away through the busy streets the next morning. The killer is unknown, and at large.

I guess she really was just mildly annoyed at them raping her, and only started to take the situation seriously once they escalated to choking. It didn't end well for them, to say the least.

The music calms down, and we're in Touko's office, where she's telling Mikiya that she's not going to be able to pay him until next month. I'm not sure what she's paying him for to begin with, but it seems to be under the table whatever it is, because he has no recourse other than outraged stammering. When asked why she can't pay him, she says it's because she had to buy this antique Ouija board that she found someplace and detected some traces of actual magic in. She also tells him to stop being so mad; after all, she's broke too now. Then, she asks if he can loan her some.

That's enough to get even him to show some rudimentary backbone, and he storms out.

Why is he even working for Touko? Why would anyone?

My best guess is that Touko essentially enslaved Shiki by rebuilding her body with magitech prosthetics that only she can properly maintain, keeping Shiki totally reliant on her to remain mobile. Mikiya probably pestered her for a job in order to be close to his serial killer waifu after that point, and she eventually relented.

With Mikiya out of the room, Shiki - who had been standing silently in the corner as she's wont to do - asks Touko to continue with the mission briefing she'd been starting before he arrived. This isn't the kind of job Touko normally prefers, but with the post-Ouija financial deficit that she's had the ill fortune to be struck by she couldn't turn it down. Their unnamed client knows who committed the recent triple homicide, and is paying handsomely if she can be recovered. Preferably alive, but he'll settle for dead if she puts up too much resistance.

I see what Touco means by "this kind of job." It seems like they're normally a supernatural detective agency, and this is just shameless hired gun work.

She has a dossier on the target to Shiki, but Shiki refuses to so much as look at her mugshot. She insists that their target is "another like me," and that she will therefore be able to find, identify, and deal with her without any intel at all. Um. If you say so, Shiki.

Cut to Mikiya meeting up with his old high school friend Chad to borrow money. Chad asks him why he can't just borrow it from his parents, and we learn that they and he have had a major falling out after he dropped out of college. Let me guess; he left school when Shiki got robocop'd so that he could work with her or some obsessive craziness like that. It's sort of depressing that "he was a terrible student who didn't apply himself, and flunked out" is both a more charitable and less likely assumption. Chad agrees to lend him the money interest free, but with an important condition.

God, they really do look like the Virgin and Chad meme.

A mutual friend of theirs from high school, Keita, has gone missing. Since Mikiya is with some kind of detective agency or something now, Chad wants him to help with the search. Before he went missing, Keita had gotten himself involved in something dangerous, though we cut away before Chad can explain what.

Purple haired rape victim lady tries to call someone, but they can't answer because they're huddled on the floor of their room in pain while their phone sits on the floor next to them. I can't tell for sure, but it looks like they might be tied up. Later, after sunset, we see that Purple has captured some other guy and dragged him into a tunnel under a subway track, and is interrogating him on the whereabouts of Keita.

Well that's a coincidence alright. I'm guessing Keita is the person she was trying to call before, as well. Also, she appears to have torn this guy's limbs off for not answering her questions.

Then, Purple (now named as Fujino) is at a restaurant being chatted at by a friend of hers. Fujino's age was hard to tell before, but yeah, she's another teenager. Adults are seriously at a premium in Garden of Sinners. Also...I think the girl she's talking to might be Mikiya's little sister, as she mentions that her brother is "the epitome of harmlessness" and that "he's really good at finding people, I'm sure he'll find him." Small world indeed. This is interrupted by the entrance of Shiki.

Mikiette is not happy to see her.

She tells Shiki that she refuses to talk to her; she arranged for a meeting between Fujino and Mikiya, not Fujino and the psychopath who Mikiya's been masturbating to thought of being killed and eaten by for the last three years. Shiki tells her that she's not here in his stead, but that she's come to deliver a message on his behalf. Apparently, he called her and said "tell my sister and her friend that I'm sorry, but something came up."

Why didn't he just call his sister directly and say that? Oh, right, I'm dumb, this is the late nineties. Not every teenager has a cell phone just yet.

Mikiette accuses Shiki of being responsible for this. Shiki denies it. Ironically, Mikiya is probably unavailable because he's already busy pursuing the same case for a different client, but none of them have any way of knowing that. Insults fly at Shiki, and Shiki shrugs them off nonchalantly. Then, Shiki notices Fujino, and her eyes start turning mother-of-pearl while she whispers "doesn't it hurt?" Both the younger girls get understandably freaked out, but in a moment Shiki snaps out of it and shakes her head, saying that she was wrong, it's not her after all.

Hmm. Either Fujino has a method of foiling Shiki's magic murder sense, Fujino isn't the only girl with long purple hair looking for the missing Kitei, or Shiki is just plain losing it. I suspect the second option, so far. I'll bet the other purple haired girl is Fujino's own older sibling, or something like that.

Also, I just noticed that Mikiette is Azaka, the girl we saw very briefly at the end of the first movie. Right, so Touko was talking to her employee’s sister there.

More insults fly. Shiki finally asks if Azaka has any message back to her brother, and the only one she has is to get the fuck away from Shiki already. Shiki assures her that she will relay this message. And she probably will, though I doubt it'll be more effective than the last seventy times she told him to leave her alone. After Shiki leaves, Azaka apologizes to Fujino, and tells her that she'll talk to her brother about this herself. Fujino just stares after Shiki, and says "she's beautiful, but I hate her." Hahaha oh man is Shiki about to get another stalker? That would be amazing. "Serial killers, and the teens who sexually harass them."

Move on to Mikiya, who is - as I inferred - already busy with the same case. He interviews some of the missing Kitei's other friends and family. One girl said her brother got a call from him rambling about how "I'm going to be killed." Next, he talks to some shady looking people at a bar pool table room pointedly reminiscent of the abandoned one that the rape and murders took place in. They direct him to a local drug dealer, who Kitei and his friends had been buying from. The dealer says that he misses some of his best customers, but that he was also always kinda freaked out by that exceptionally wild and violent clique, and that he isn't surprised they got themselves killed.

Kitei was one of the rape gang members, then. I imagine he somehow escaped Purple's rampage, and he's been hiding from her since? Something like that.

Next interviewee is a shopkeeper whose store Kitei sometimes loitered around in front of. The shopkeeper doesn't know anything, but says that "some rich looking girl" already came in looking for Kitei earlier.

That night, Purple uses telekinesis to tear someone's arms off for not telling her where Kitei is.

Okay, I guess that's how she does it. There seems to be a lot of that particular ability in this series.

After crudely amputating all four limbs without getting any answers, she whispers an apology before snapping his neck. She hangs her purple-haired head, and says that she hates doing this, but:

There may or may not be some context that would allow this sentiment of hers to make sense.

At that moment, Shiki comes gliding out of the darkness and identifies purple as Fujino. It was actually her, not just a sister or whatever. Shiki just pretended that her murdersense was wrong because she knew that the restaurant wasn't the time or place, and snuck after Fujino to observe her until she saw confirmation.

Fujino starts babbling about how she isn't a freak like Shiki, which is hilarious because she just brutally dismembered and killed a man from ten meters away and hasn't yet seen Shiki do anything abnormal. There's a garbled bit of back and forth about what makes a human a human that's totally incomprehensible and almost certainly mistranslated.

Then, suddenly, Shiki's eyes turn normal again, and she disgustedly says "oh, it happened again. You're not worth killing now. Go home." She then turns her back to Fujino and leaves.

Um. Okay?

Next is a flashback to Fujino's childhood. She cut her hand badly while playing with her toys, but...doesn't seem to notice until she sees the blood, and screams more out of confusion than alarm. Her mother came running to treat the wound and comfort her. After bandaging her hand, her mother says that it will stop hurting when the wound is fully healed, but Fujino didn't understand, because she wasn't sure what feeling her mother was talking about.

Ah. Congenital analgesia.

She goes on to say that now, finally, her stomach actually hurts. She's finally experienced pain. We see that she's saying all this into a cell phone, and addressing it to Kitei. But the person holding the phone on the other side isn't Kitei, but Mikiya.

Maybe he's going through Kitei's voice messages or something.

She finishes the call by saying that while she's glad to finally feel fully alive, she also doesn't want anyone to know that she's become a murderer, so she's got to tie up this final loose end. So, she's going to kill Kitei, and she WILL find him sooner or later.

And um. Kitei is right here. Mikiya found his hiding place. Offscreen.

This is some of the worst direction I’ve ever seen. How can you not show that part?

It seriously took me five minutes to realize what just happened in between onscreen scenes, and to finish WTFing. I could go on about this, but I don't think there's anything I can point out that isn't already obvious, so I'll spare you the wordcount and just say that this was easily the worst and most stupidly avoidable thing I've seen in any Night Mare Moon media so far.

Mikiya manages some impressive calming-down in order to get the crying and screaming Kitei coherent again. Kitei explains that Fujino was "weird from the start," but that it only just now turned out that she was a literal monster. He doesn't expect Mikiya to believe him about her using telekinesis to kill people, but Mikiya's own recent experiences have left him pretty open minded about that kind of thing, and he convinces Kitei of this. Again, Mikiya seems to have some real "good cop" skills. Maybe he really is a credit to Touko's team after all, since she and Shiki are both notably lacking in this regard. So, Kitei tells him the whole story.

He and his friends first raped Fujino about six months ago. And she creeped them out, because it almost seemed like she was "acting" throughout the entire assault. They tried punching, drugging, spitting on, and threatening her with death, but she was always clearly affecting the physical pain, and sort of unconvincingly acting afraid. Huh. The lack of pain makes sense, but why would she not feel fear either? That's really weird. They gang raped her several more times since then, less because she was actually any fun for them, and more to see if they could ever get an actual reaction. I assume that she called the police, but they told her they couldn't do anything for fear of causing a panic. Finally, just this last time, one of them beat her with a baseball bat, and she reacted like an actual human. For the rest of the night, she reacted like an actual human. Then the telekinesis manifested.

Mikiya tells him that he's heard enough.

Cut to Touko's office. Touko and Shiki are both telling Mikiya that he's way too nice. The reason they're criticizing him is...

...

......

............

Mikiya. You. But.

Let me guess: he refuses to believe that Kitei is actually a rapist. He can just look at him and tell that he's never raped anyone, and no amount of evidence, up to and including witnessing the act in progress, will ever be able to change his mind. :)

What is even this kid's problem?

...wait, hang on a second.

...

Okay, so, Shiki. She did the Chara/Frisk split because something robbed her of her innate expectation of kindness and love from the people around her during very early development.

Is Mikiya the opposite? Was he, probably for some similar and possibly directly connected supernatural reason, unable to ever lose his infantile assumption that the people around him are trustworthy and loving?

I thought he was just in extreme denial about his crush due to acute Nice Guyism, but that doesn't hold up in this case unless he's developed a crush on Kitei too. So yeah. This doesn't justify any of the obsessive stalker bullshit he pulled on Shiki back in high school, but it does explain the bizarre denialism. He can understand that people do things like rape and murder in the abstract, but he's unable to reconcile that knowledge with people who he actually knows.

Actually...wait. Does it go even further than that? Is his obsession with Shiki caused by some sort of soul link, due to him having stolen part of her developmental psychology? Hmm. That's a harder sell. The fact that Shiki is pointedly not similarly obsessed with him (Chara was attracted to him, but that seemed to only happen with time, and Frisk never did more than just barely tolerate him) is evidence against it. Call that part a maybe for now. If this isn’t the case, then he really was just being an obsessive creep after all, but if it is then it’s not actually entirely his fault!

But either way, I'm pretty sure that the violence-denialism is due to him having the opposite problem of Shiki's.

...

The three of them start discussing everything they've learned about Fujino, and...okay, this is either too nonsensical, too badly subbed, or both. I'm going to have to watch through this conversation a few times and take notes before I can even come close to understanding it. And, we're halfway through the film anyway, and I've been splitting these in half. So, I'll finish "Remaining Sense of Pain" tomorrow.