Garden of Sinners 3: “A Remaining Sense of Pain” (part two)
Okay, so. As best I can parse the conversation that I gave up on yesterday:
Mikiya wants to reason with Fujino, and thinks that they can convince her to stop killing.
Shiki is sure that Fujino won't stop even if she avenges herself on all of her abusers, because murdersense I guess. She tells them about her encounter with Fujino the other night, but doesn't explain why she didn't engage the target, and weirdly neither of the others ask her (even Touko, who explicitly ordered Shiki to capture or kill her). Also, she claims to really hate Fujino and what she's doing, despite having pointedly not acted to stop her when she could have.
Touko thinks that spinal trauma during the final rape might have temporarily allowed Fujino to feel pain. And, seemingly out of nowhere, comes up with this assumption that anything that reminds her of the incident will make her feel that pain again and cause her to randomly lash out in a fight or flight panic. Despite all her killings so far being targeted and purposeful.
In addition to telekinesis, Fujino may have a healing factor. She was stabbed in the stomach when she turned on her attackers and they fought back, but when Shiki and Azaka met her at the restaurant she was completely uninjured. Her recent phone call that Mikiya listened in on suggests that she still feels stomach pain, in contrast to that.
The stomach wound tips Mikiya off to Fujino having been the girl he helped a couple nights ago. Apparently looking at the photos of her wasn't enough.
Touko makes another bizarre assertion that Fujino couldn't feel any physical sensations at all until this incident, which is not at all how congenital analgesia works. And also goes against what we've explicitly seen so far, with Fujino having told one of her assailants that what he was doing was "uncomfortable" before things escalated. And makes it unlikely that Fujino could have even survived this long. Also, Touko thinks that Fujino might now be addicted to pain, again with no evidence whatsoever.
Fujino has not returned home or showed up at school since the incident; no one knows where she is, and she arranged that meeting with Azaka unilaterally.
So yeah, this conversation was a mess. Some things, like Shiki's contradictory feelings and actions, are obviously supposed to be puzzling and mysterious. Others, like their musings on the nature of Fujino's painlessness and motives, are incoherent in a way that doesn't suggest intentionality or self awareness. I'm also not sure if Touko is supposed to be wise and knowledgeable, or if we're supposed to be seeing her out-of-nowhere baseless assertions as just that and judging her accordingly. I'm sure at least some of this is down to bad subbing, but I don't know how much.
The scene ends with Touko being unsure how to proceed from here (I guess she isn't purely mercenary, if the unclear moral situation of this case is making her hesitate completing and getting paid for it), and Mikiya saying that he's going to go research Fujino's history some more. He tells Shiki not to do anything reckless, and she laughs at him because he invited a violent serial rapist street gangster to stay with him and he's calling her reckless. She has a point.
Mikiya travels to Fujino's rural town of origin and inspects her family's old house.
Looks like it's been abandoned since they moved out, and not bearing it well.
As he investigates, he notices a crowd of weirdos staring at him and whispering among themselves.
From there, we cut back to the city, where Shiki is roaming around the streets. She eventually looks up at the evening sky, and slips into some sort of trance where she hallucinates about a glowing, monochrome version of Fujino. The next morning, Touko is informed by a contact of hers in the police that there was a bizarre traffic accident during the night, and the coroners are sure that the driver's head was twisted off before the impact. This victim doesn't seem to have had any connection to either Fujino or her tormentors, which means that Fujino is either hunting down and killing innocent witnesses of her targeted killings, or she really is just learning to like it.
Shiki says that this is the last straw, and she's gonna go kill Fujino now. Still no idea what's motivating her in this case; maybe it's a Chara/Frisk thing, with each side of Shiki having a different agenda in this case? Touko gives her some counterfeit keycards that should help with the hunt for Fujino, and tells her to hurry up and do it before Mikiya gets back and starts whining about it, and she's off.
Once Shiki is out of the room, Touko muses on how Shiki might die if she faces Fujino alone. Okay? That sentence is also addressed to a "Ryougi." So, she's talking to someone in Shiki's family, I guess? Did she pick up a phone when the camera was pointing away? IDK.
We look at some nighttime buildings for a while, to eat up screentime. Then Fujino being curled up in pain somewhere. Then a flashback to her elementary or middle school days, either in that small town she came from or the city, it's not clear which. She runs into...wait what? No, this...what?
She has a friendly meeting with Mikiya, who doesn't appear to be any younger than he is now. He notices an abrasion on her ankle that she didn't (it looks like she just finished a game of sportsball, so she likely got it on the field), walks up to her and asks her if it hurts out of the blue, and then starts putting his hands all over her leg before she can say anything. He also convinces her that she's hurt enough that she needs to be carried, and she's too afraid of letting everyone know about her disability to refuse.
Then we snap back to Fujino in the present, and she says that ever since that day...something.
So, was she just having a random dream in which she superimposed Mikiya's face onto the pushy boy who "helped" her that one time years ago? Or did this actually happen? Is this yet another villain of the week who has a totally unnecessary obsession with Mikiya shoehorned into her backstory?
Do they handle any cases that don't involve people who met Mikiya in his earlier teens?
...
Okay, new theory. Mikiya is some sort of extremely lame trickster god, and this entire series is about him toying with mortal women in a manner that would be really horrifying if he wasn't so limp about it.
...
Mikiya surprises Touko by reporting back to her in person that very night, rather than coming back in a day or two like he said he would. An incoming hurricane forced him to hurry it up, but he still managed to gather some potentially critical data.
He interviewed a smalltown doctor who treated Fujino's family when they stilled lived there. The doctor last treated Fujino when she was preschool aged, and at that time she felt pain normally and had no sign of any neurological issues at all. What she did have was early onset telekinesis, and her father apparently...wanted the doctor to treat that.
He took his daughter to the family doctor. To cure her telekinesis.
The wording/translation is ambiguous here, but either her father just asked the doctor for a bunch of unusual medications and he applied them himself using some occult knowledge of his own, or telekinesis is on the books as a rare congenital disorder in this world and you can be prescribed pills for it. I choose to believe that it's the latter, and you'll have to put in some serious effort to convince me otherwise.
Touko concludes - and I swear, I honestly have no idea how much faith I'm supposed to be putting in these conclusions of hers - that the drug treatment that Fujino's father and/or doctor gave her to suppress her telekinesis had the side effect of numbing her pain receptors. She's amused by how this is a total mirror image of Shiki; Shiki's own parents deliberately sensitized her in early childhood in an attempt to give her powers.
Okay, so THAT'S what happened to Shiki that led to the emergence of Chara and Frisk. Magical experiments by her parents that removed part of the "safety system" in her developmental psychology as either an intended part of the process or as an accidental side effect. A basement full of symbiotic worms may or may not have been involved.
Touco's musings seem to make Mikiya realize something, and he looks alarmed. He says they need to warn Shiki about whatever he just realized, but Touco informs him that she's already out on the hunt. So, they drive off to find her, without us ever getting to see Mikiya explain what it is he just realized. Instead, during the car ride we hear the most batshit thing to come out of Touko's mouth yet; somehow, she's now got it into her head that Fujino was never actually stabbed in the stomach, but experienced perfectly accurate and intense phantom pain from almost getting stabbed.
In a world full of ghosts, spells, and magical cybernetics that you yourself know how to make? QUITE FUCKING POSSIBLY YES.
I don't know what to say to this. Once again, I feel like anything I could talk about here is already obvious. So. I guess I'll just move on.
Cut to Shiki encountering Fujino on an empty highway under the drenching rain and gale. I'm not sure where Fujino was going, or why she's dressed like that in an intense rainstorm, but whatever she was doing Shiki's murdersense guided her to the target.
Shiki accuses her of having learned to enjoy murder. Fujino denies it, claiming that she hates killing and only does it when she has to (verifiable false, given how many people she killed interrogating when she could have just worn a mask and tortured them nonlethally). Shiki just shrugs, and says that third time's the charm; the way that Fujino is now, Shiki can finally kill her.
Fujino apparently has some kind of...state of being?...that she cycles through, presumably related to whether or not her sense of pain is active or some such. And one of those states makes her Shiki-proof, for whatever reason. Maybe Touko put a geas on Shiki that prevents her from killing in certain circumstances, or something.
The dissonantly emotional and melodramatic fight music kicks in, and Shiki charges. The music turns out to be even more poorly matched than it seemed at first, because this fight is both extremely slow paced, and chopped up by music-free cuts to Touko and Mikiya's car ride, which totally ruins the flow and energy that that kind of scoring needs to work. As far as the fight goes: basically, Fujino can TK-grab Shiki, but Shiki is able to shake it off before she can use it to do any damage. So, it's just Fujino grabs Shiki and throws her at something, Shiki manages to twist her body or break apart the thing she's being thrown at to avoid a damaging impact, Shiki hides for a while before trying to lunge out at Fujino again, rinse, wash, repeat. It's a very slow moving wack-a-mole game, not a flowery cinematic duel.
During the interludes with Touko and Mikiya, meanwhile, Touko is now going on about Fujino having appendicitis, and that being the cause of her intermittent stomach pains. She learned of this from Fujino's current doctor.
...
Oh for fuck's sake.
If Fujino's doctor knows that she has appendicitis, then Fujino herself would also know that she has appendicitis. She wouldn't attribute her abdominal panels to a stab wound that she NEVER FUCKING GOT when her doctor has already told her that she has a painful abdominal disease! Maybe right in the moment, before she got a chance to realize that the knife hadn't actually connected, sure, but days after the fact?
...
Eventually, Fujino starts getting frustrated and just blows up the structures Shiki's hiding in. This forces Shiki to make a lunge straight at her face, and Fujino latches on long enough to destroy one of Shiki's arms. However, Shiki then does...something...with her knife, and it causes her to break free again, and she takes cover. Whatever she did with the knife seems to have messed with Fujino's TK, because she doesn't go right back to destroying Shiki's cover. Pretty sure this is the same ability Shiki used against Kirie during the hallway battle in "Overlooking View."
Touko cuts in again here to explain that the reason Shiki hates Fujino so much is because Fujino has no sense of restraint or purpose when it comes to murder, unlike Shiki. Amazing, Touko! You managed to conclude the exact opposite of the truth based on everything we've seen of those two! Shiki killed what seemed to be totally random people during her pre-accident murder spree, with her attempt on Mikiya being a notable exception. So far, Fujino has only killed people she had a beef with or who threatened her secrecy, with one *possible* exception.
I'm just going to take this as the show informing me that I should just ignore everything that comes out of Touko's stupid trap. So, I'm not going to bother relaying it to you guys either at least for the remainder of this episode.
Shiki finishes binding her crushed left arm with an improvised tourniquet (I guess that arm was still organic, then. Shiki must have an ability to ignore pain herself to be so nonchalant about this; she didn't even grunt or gasp. This could be an innate Shiki thing, a result of her parents' experiments, or another of Touko's augs). She comes out and confronts Fujino again, but this time doesn't even bother with mobility or evasion, and she's looking much more confident. This time, when Fujino tries to grab her, we can see that she's actually shooting a transparent bolt of magical energy at the target, and Shiki uses her +3 dagger of ghost stabbing to parry it.
Shiki then, in the tradition of fighty anime characters, explains her most potent supernatural ability. When her eyes go into mother-of-pearl mode, she can see the vital weaknesses of anything she beholds. So, if there's any possible way to destroy something, she can learn what it is just by looking at that something. And with her supplemental abilities and equipment, she's usually able to put it into practice.
It took a few times of watching Fujino shooting out her invisible-to-most-people TK blasts before Shiki understood what she was being shown. She figured it out when she saw one of them wrapping itself around her organic arm while crushing it, and she broke free by slashing at the energy construct with her +3 dagger of ghost stabbing.
Fujino keeps shooting, but Shiki just keeps parrying them as she advances toward her, until finally she's close enough to initiate the death straddle. Fujino begs for her life, and makes a completely incomprehensible excuse for herself.
Yeah, right, you were crossing the city time and time again to pursue specific targets who could lead you to the guy you wanted revenge against because you were in physical pain and couldn't control yourself. Sure.
Shiki manages to one-up her though, and tells her that her enjoyment of killing is what caused the abdominal pain to persist. Maybe she means a psychosomatic thing, where Fujino convinced herself that feeling that pain somehow meant she was allowed to kill, and she liked killing enough to convince herself she still had stomach pain. So much for the appendicitis theory lol. Before Shiki can deliver the killing blow though, Fujino strains her TK beyond the limits and collapses the bridge that they've fought their way into the tunnels of.
Shiki falls into the sea amidst a rain of rubble. Whatever, she'll be fine.
Fujino crawled onto a section of bridge that wasn't totally collapsed, but is now immobile on the floor. Either due to overcharging her TK or because she injured herself in the collapse itself. She's bleeding quite a bit. Also, she thinks about Mikiya while dying, because why make sense?
Is the show trying to say Fujino has been in love with Mikiya since she met him in middle school? If so, WHY DIDN'T SHE RECOGNIZE HIM WHEN HE TOOK HER INTO HIS DAMNED APARTMENT A COUPLE OF NIGHTS AGO?
...holy shit yeah, a second later it makes it explicit that she's in love with him. Calls him "senpai" and everything during her dying whisper. Which is addressed to him, because apparently no woman he's ever met besides Shiki could resist his insufferable, pushy, condescending Nice Guyism and they've all been obsessed with him for years after their meetings. Whatever. Unlike with "Overlooking View," this isn't even CLOSE to contributing anything to the story, either plot or themes. At no point in this story did Fujino knowing Mikiya - much less loving him - have even the slightest bearing on absolutely anything that happened or the plot-effecting decisions made by any character.
Finally Shiki climbs back out of the water and puts Fujino out of my misery. Thank you Shiki. Anything to just get us closer to the end of this fucking movie.
Shiki walks back into the city, apparently circumventing any first responders attracted by the collapsing bridge, and Touko and Mikiya pull up next to her. Shiki reports that Fujino's powers had been escalating rapidly before the end, and she'd even started to manifest a new sensory ability that she was using to track Shiki behind her cover toward the end of the battle. Touko has something to say about the nature and scope of Fujino's powers, but everything she says is bullshit so who cares.
Then Shiki says that Fujino's insensitivity to pain returned just as she was bringing down her blade for the killing blow, which is annoying, because she can't kill her when she's in that state. What. Seriously what? She didn't actually kill her there. She performed a field appendectomy.
So, she actually did have appendicitis.
Which only hurt her because of her love of killing. Somehow.
I'd say this is supposed to be another split personality thing, but Fujino didn't show any behavioral differences or pursue different goals while feeling and not feeling the pain. The only indication it was even happening, if it even WAS happening, was Shiki's murder eyes turning on and off.
Shiki tosses Mikiya a cell phone and tells her he can call an ambulance for Fujino or not, up to him. End on Shiki and Mikiya having a romantic moment for some reason. Whatever. It's over.
I'm sure some of this is due to translation errors. But that alone can't account for all of it, or even most of it, by the end. This isn't just the worst Type Moon work I've seen so far. It's probably one of the worst fantasy movies I've seen in my life.
If you took the direction of a particularly bad RWBY fight scene and applied it to plotting instead of fight choreography, you would get something a lot like "Remaining Sense of Pain." This was the Cinder's NoClip Adventure of plotting. Get half a dozen sophomoric M. Night Shyamalan wannabes in a room together, have them each come up with their own stupid 11th hour twist, and then use all of them one after the other without even checking to see if any were mutually invalidating, this movie could easily be the result. It's fifty minutes of almost pure non sequitur.
And, of course, where this movie isn't completely incoherent, it's tone deaf to a frankly offensive degree. From casting the serial rape and torture victim as the villain for no clearly explained reason, to Mikiya's obnoxious behavior apparently being intended to actually be likable (?!?!?!?), to the vapid pseudo-philosophizing about why Shiki is a less bad murderer than Fujino...god, it's just a perfect trainwreck from beginning to end.
I now care less about these characters and the world they live in because of "Remaining Sense of Pain." My enthusiasm to continue Garden of Sinners has been reduced to ambivalence. It's recoverable, but holy fuck will it take some doing.
