Garden of Sinners E5: “Paradox Spiral” (part one)

Been a while since I last saw any Kara no Kyoukai, hasn't it? I guess it's a good thing that the queue worked out this way; we have a bunch more Fate/Zero episodes coming up soon, and I might have been at risk of forgetting that sometimes Nasu really fucking sucks. Well, the pact is all written. Time to sign it in the pulped remains of another hour and fifty minutes worth of my brain cells, and give the cringey, incomprehensible devil his due.

Okay, there's a chance this one might actually be better, and start redeeming the series in my eyes. It won't, but there's a chance that it might.

Where last we left off...it doesn't matter, because Garden of Sinners is atemporal both between episodes (and even sometimes within episodes) for no narrative or thematic reason that I've been able to discern. So, this is whenever you feel like it should be relative to the others I guess. What's that you said, Garden of Sinners? Go fuck myself? Okay, jeeze, you don't have to keep repeating it, I heard you the first dozen times.


Open on Shiki asleep in her apartment, while an unfamiliar young man who reminds me a lot of a carrot sits by the bed and eats one of those unwanted ice cream tubs that Mikiya has been bringing her like the world's most frustrated penguin.

I guess Carrot is either a really desperate burglar, an informant who Touko wants protected, or a planned holiday meal that Shiki is fattening up.

Cut to Mikiya and his police detective uncle riding around in the latter's cruiser. For about two seconds, until they appear to hit something. Then it's back to Shiki. Then Carrot whimpering in a dark room as blood flows from a stab wound on a dead someone or other's neck. Then the dead person gets up and thrashes his slashed-open head around in a Silent Hill monster sort of way. Then more random cutting imagery and blobs of reddish to imply blood. Then a...junkyard? Fallen-apart boiler room? With steam flowing purposefully through a ventilation duct and into Carrot's brain...then him being beaten by what looks like it's maybe supposed to be his father, then more cutting, then...you know what, I'm just going to ignore the rest of the mysteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerious montage and jump ahead to when there's an actual story happening.

The first spoken lines of dialogue are from a woman who comes into carrot's bedroom and tells him to die, before stabbing him in the chest. Then we see Carrot straddling her in a very familiar way and cutting her throat.

Same MO as Shiki. Guess there's a reason the two of them are rooming together now. Kindred spirits.

Which probably means Mikiya is about to call Shiki and threaten to cut his own balls off unless she gets rid of Carrot.

Or maybe it's just that Carrot and Shiki are partially possessed by the same demon or whatever. In which case, maybe Mikiya will just start crushing on both of them.

Then Carrot is running through an apartment building hallway. Oh, I see, this is still the montage of disjointed imagery, the movie tricked me by including dialogue in part of that. Shit, I think it might be gaining self awareness. Shortly (unless there's a secret timeskip) thereafter (unless it's a secret flashback), another person comes the other way and tries every door along the hallway until he finds one that opens. Either stumbling home drunk, or an opportunistic burglar. The newcomer finds his way into the apartment at the end of the hall that Carrot seems to have come from, and collapses in stunned horror when he finds a dead body in it.

The maybe-drunk comes back with a cop (oh wow narrative continuity! Isn't that something!), who tries ringing the doorbell. The door is answered by the man who drunky saw laying dead in a pool of his own blood across the kitchen table, now alive, unharmed, and confused about what the cops want with him. Dun dun DUUUUUUUUN.

Cut to the police precinct, where Mikiya's intel-sieve uncle, Detective Leaky, is on the phone with another officer. That other officer tells him about what a strange case this was, with a serial petty burglar coming to them with a fake crime. Um...should this even count as a "case" at all? Even if there really was a murder victim who came back to life there, as far as the cops know this is just some drug-addled petty criminal's hallucination, right?

Apparently, his account was too detailed to be a mere hallucination. Which I guess means that these people don't know how hallucinations work.

And...okay, the burglar was apparently a homeless man. And they're marveling at how he could possibly have seen something that wasn't actually there. A homeless person being mentally ill would just strain their suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.

What the fuck am I even watching?

Then, Uncle Leaky suddenly asks if "the bodies" were just of the couple.

I rewatched this scene a few times. I'm still not totally sure, but I think that they're talking about two different cases here, and he just rapidly changed the subject without any indications. Because it's KnK, and making things pointlessly unclear and confusing is how it lets you know what a deep and philosophical work it is. And to be fair, there'd otherwise be no way to tell.

Anyway, this other(?) case had them finding the bodies of a married couple, whose son is still unaccounted for. Uncle Leaky looks down at the records, and the missing son is Carrot. DUN DUN DUUUUUUUN.

Cut to the city streets by night, where some delinquent-looking young men are chasing Carrot into an alley. They've apparently been on the lookout for him ever since he stopped showing up at school, where I imagine they'd been bullying him or something up until that point. As he flees them, he happens to drop a key while stumbling over a fallen dumpster. Housekey or something, presumably. They finally corner him in a graffitti-covered old garage, only for him to suddenly turn around and drive his fist into his closest pursuer's face with his own momentum.

...actually, he didn't punch him. He gouged his eye out. Like, straight up stabbed his fingers into the guy's eye socket and let his momentum drive them into his skull. The eyeball is completely destroyed. He then bangs the guy's head into the wall hard enough to make it bleed from the back as well.

Carrot starts laughing maliciously as the guy drops to the floor, gurgling, bleeding, and quite possibly dying. He's still laughing when the other two catch up and beat him to the ground. I'm starting to think that maybe they actually have a good reason to be gunning for him. If the pattern holds true, then Carrot will have some kind of implausibly complicated dual personality thing going on that causes him to randomly Dio people in the eye sometimes.

...and also kill his parents.

Okay, yeah, his alternate identity is confirmed. He's going to start pontificating on the virtues of infantivory any second now.

The other two pursuers beat him down and start kicking. They show no concern at all for their fallen comrade though, so...I guess they're not particularly bothered by that. Or, like, concerned about their ostensible friend/gang member. Okaaaay then. Anyway, these guys are apparently drug dealers or something, and Carrot owes them money. Just now, the leader of the trio found Carrot asleep in an alley, woke him up to ask for what he owes, and was stunned when Carrot punched him in the face and ran away laughing, leading to this chase.

Okay, definitely fits the split personality implications. Why the hell are the other two dealers not remotely concerned or even shocked at what just happened to the third, though? They're that monofocused on getting the money right this second? I know the Japanese economy isn't what it used to be, but seriously?

Carrot asks them to kill him. Um, okay. Unfortunately for the remaining two drug dealers though, they made the mistake of cracking a steam pipe while beating up Carrot, which created a suitably otherworldly cloud of mist for Shiki to make a dramatic entrance through. They never learn, do they?

Either she recognizes Carrot/Dio as a kindred spirit, or Touko told her to recover him for some reason, or he pinged her murdersense and she's here to killsteal.

The remaining pair of toughs try to stop her. She gives them a partial/nonlethal Shiki-ing, and proceeds to ignore the guy missing the eyeball just as they did. In fact, that guy seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth after falling to the ground earlier. She then taps her foot on the floor as if doing some kind of sonar-type thing, tosses Carrot the key that he dropped earlier, and then turns and starts to walk away.

So, she was just playing good Samaritan for a fellow psycho? I guess? Either that, or she and Carrot already know each other from somewhere. The second one would make much more sense, so it's probably not that.

Before she can leave, Carrot staggers to his feet and asks Shiki to help him hide somewhere. She tells him no, and that there's nowhere in the city where he can hide from everyone except his own house. Okay, so they do know a little bit about each other, I guess, if she knows he has a private and secure home? He replies by yelling angrily that he can't go home, and he has nowhere to go unless she takes him in, and then calling her an idiot. This convinces her that she should take him home after all. Like, turning on a dime.

Did we just see her do a Chara/Frisk flip? If so, it's probably Chara who just took over. She's attracted to the most obnoxious people, after all, and I doubt she'd have subdued those dealers without killing them, so yeah, we just went from Frisk to Chara in response to him lighting up the asshole signal.

She approaches a few steps closer and gives him a creepy stare accompanied by her leitmotif. He drops to his knees. Is there some kind of telepathic whatsit going on between them after all, as their identical murder methods hinted? As he looks up at her, he tells her that he is a murderer. So, I guess she didn't know that, or at least if she did he didn't realize that.

Then he's being stabbed to death by the woman who I think is his mother again. Then he's waking up from that nightmare in Shiki's apartment. Then we're back to the alley, where Shiki is putting her hand on his stomach and declaring that he's not pinging her murdersense. Where are we? Who is Garden of Sinners? When am I? He protests that no, really, he did stab someone to death with a kitchen knife and then use it to mangle their innards. Her response, predictably, is "lol, who hasn't done that?" He follows her out of the garage type place, and then there's a flash...back?...forward?...who even cares, time is dead and meaning has no meaning. Anyway, it's daytime, and Carrot is walking along a busy street asking himself why he confessed to Shiki. Or maybe why he asked her for shelter. He regrets saying something or other, but it's not clear what.

He gets a newspaper, and wonders to himself why his familicide hasn't made the local news yet. I'm guessing you're new to this city, Carrot. If you'd been here longer, you'd know that the local police are so neurotic about preventing panic that they won't even close a school that they know has a serial killer in it. It takes some getting used to, I know. He then looks up at one of those outdoor TV newscasts that Japan is so fond of, and imagines himself in the place of some track runner who's onscreen. Maybe he ran in high school, idk. The camera strobes between the screen and Carrot's face at epileptic speeds. Then an ad for a lock and key company comes on, and it prompts him to take out the key that Shiki gave back to him and stare at it. Time speeds up around him until evening. We see his mother stabbing him again. Then Shiki comes home to find him back in her apartment. She kinda shrugs and tosses him the latest ice cream tub that Mikiya forced on her, telling him that she guesses he can stay longer, as it'll be a while before Mikiya comes by her place again. Did she break his legs and wheedle Touko into not replacing them? Hopefully. Carrot asks Shiki if she's "in trouble or something," apropos of nothing that I can decipher. When she just laughs and asks him why he cares, he gets angry and growls this:

Um. Carrot. Turnip. Root crop. Bruh.

You begged her to take you in.

Then you came back without her invitation or permission.

And now you're...what? Trying to slut shame her for having you in her room? Really passive aggressively trying to get her to fuck you? Getting indignant at her functionally nonexistent family for letting her be this charitable and tolerant toward you?

Unless he has, like, three or four different personas rather than just two, I cannot make any sense of this. It really says something about the supporting cast that almost every time Shiki is having a one-on-one conversation with someone, I find myself sympathizing with her even knowing that she's a fucking serial killer.

Anyway, Shiki turns it around on him by saying that no one can reasonably expect anything to happen tonight when he hasn't even taken her on a dinner date or done anything nice for her whatsoever for that matter. Heh, well played Shiki. Reminding him of what an entitled little ingrate he's being while also shutting him down. And also subtly informing him with the "dinner date" detail that if he DOES want to get with her in the future, he'd best be prepared for her to eat him afterward. He's given pause for a moment, but then angrily asks her if she's sure it's okay if he sleeps here, even though she already said as much.

Also, he remembers to show her the extra key that he made. Erm. I guess that wasn't his own dropped key that he was fondling before, but a room key that Shiki left with him? He tells her that he broke into a locksmithing company he used to work for and stole this extra to give to her, but...wait, how was there already an extra key of HERS there for him to steal? How would he even know...what? How is?

There's some pseudo-philosobabble about the importance of locked doors for one's home, and then a two minute montage of Carrot spending his days sitting on some outdoor bench and watching the news, empty ice cream tubs piling up in the trash as he works his way through the landfill worth of ice cream that Mikiya's been foisting on Shiki over time, him watching her laundry machine work, etc, while moody music plays. Literally two minutes. With a lot of reused footage, some of it appearing three or four times unaltered. I don't think I've ever seen a work that values its audience's time as little as Kara no Kyoukai seems to.

One image that sticks out at me is this one, because in context of the rest of the series it just says so damned much:

Carrot and Shiki chatting about something. Both looking relaxed, perhaps even playful. But we don't get to hear a word of what they're saying, nor have we seen anything to indicate how they've come to warm up to one another, what they have to bond over, etc. Which is almost exactly how it went with Mikiya a couple episodes ago.

Almost as if the author's only frame of reference for heterosexual dialogue was "boy whining and begging at girl, girl sort of backhandedly tolerating boy," and he knew his limitations. Just a hypothesis.

...

God, if I met a late teens/early twenties version of Nasu, I'd be not just tempted but morally obligated to take his lunch money and leave him duct taped to the flagpole. I know he got better later on, but geez.

...

The time-wasting, animation-saving montage ends with Carrot having another nightmare about being murdered by his mom, and then Shiki abruptly coming home and telling him that "even he won't work." When he asks her what the hell that's supposed to mean, she explains that she's been looking for someone to kill, and she thought he might be a good candidate, but her murdersense is just not pinging for him.

She explains that she feels alive and strong, and that killing people is the only way to really give that aliveness any meaning or fulfillment. Which makes Carrot a problem, because, well:

He asks her if she has any friends to talk to to help get her feelings off her chest in a non-murderous fashion. She replies that she has one, but he's unavailable right now, and she's angry at him for not being available right now. Well, don't worry now Shiki! When Mikiya isn't available, you have Mikiya: Carrot Edition to stand in for him! She stabs the pillow in frustration with Mikiya for um...not being there?

I could interpret this to mean that he never acknowledges her emotional realities are believes anything that she tells him about herself, thereby making himemotionallyunavailable even as he relentlessly tags after him. But that would be giving the show credit that it pissed away long ago.

Speaking of which, just now she says the sentence "I guess I just like killing people," and he reacts thusly:

I swear one day she'll meet a guy who isn't constantly telling her how she feels about things with no regard for her input on the subject. Actually, I don't, because this author can't not do that when writing his idea of a sympathetic or likable male counterpart.

She shuts him up with a glare. He stares morosely into Mikiya's ice cream.

Cut to what I think (hope?) is the next day. Carrot is on his bench watching the big TV screen. It's been a couple of weeks now, and the police are breathing a sigh of relief at no one having found out about those bodies they hid and started a panic. He happens to spot Shiki walking along the bustling sidewalk. Then, a moment later, he sees an enemy stand user cunningly blending in with the local population as he stalks after her.

Sutando-Tsukai gives Carrot a winking hush signal, and then vanishes in the literal blink of an eye.

That evening, he tells Shiki about the weirdo he saw following her. She's surprised, but seemingly unconcerned. That's understandable; Shiki knows that there's not much out there that can physically threaten her at this point. She thanks him for the update, and tells him to take out the ice cream tub filled trash. He reacts with indignance at her failure to acknowledge what's really important about this situation.

Shiki. I'm begging you. Just kill him. Please, just fucking kill him. I don't care if Touko put a gease on you that'll make your ovaries turn into flesh eating maggots if you kill a non-murderous human, trust me, the spell will make an exception for Carrot.

She irritably asks him why he's being such a little bitch. He explains that being an insufferable dickrag is how he shows that he's in love with someone, and he's in love with her right now. Shiki reacts with an uncontrollable laughing fit.

...

I'm pretty sure that the intent here is that Shiki is reacting weirdly and coldly to a tender, compassionate expression of humanity.

What's actually happening is that Shiki is reacting like a normal (if exceptionally patient) person to a comically deluded, narcissistic fuckwit.

Literally backwards. Amazing.

...

She asks if the weirdo in the red outfit cast a spell on him that makes him even stupider and more pathetic than he was before. Carrot begs her to take this seriously. Take what seriously, Carrot? The strange man, or your stupid feelings? Seriously, which of those two things are you referring to here? I actually want to know. Turns out it's the latter, hahaha, of course, I knew it. He goes on about how she's the first woman he ever feel like he understands and vice versa, how beautiful she is, etc. He says he'd do anything for her, absolutely anything.

Shiki looks positively delighted to hear that last bit, and immediately forces him onto the bed, straddles him in the same murderpose that she, him, and his mother (at least in his dreams or whatever) all like to use, and draws her knife.

Finally.


Would you believe I'm only twenty-some minutes into this two hour monstrosity? It feels like hours. Probably because ittookhours to actually review it. I don't even know how many parts this is going to have to be. Anyway, this is a good Hope Spot to leave off on; next part should be up tomorrow.