For some time I’d been storing away a draft in which I somewhat indignantly detailed the flaws of Bounen no Xam’d. Having taken Ryan A’s excellent advice from back here, I’d started watching Xam’d in batches. After a somewhat disappointing few episodes, I wrote the critical draft. Then I more or less forgot about the show. In the last few days I went through episodes 18 to 25, and rediscovered a quite brilliant story.

I’m right on the cusp of the grand finale, and I couldn’t be more excited. Every one of these recent episodes has been massively involving. Xam’d is one of the few shows that can bring me to tears when I’m stone cold sober.

Where previous episodes would generally get me thinking, now virtually every episode takes over my world for its duration.

The business of watching bunches of episodes back to back or within a day of one another is a big part of my reconversion. This method negates the scheduled pleasure of the week to week fix, but allows the story to develop a traction which suits Xam’d’s (ech) style. Perhaps it suits it because for some time the cast of the show were on the cold side, with a few notable and noticeable exceptions.

This mode of characterisation meant that I found it much easier to follow the emotional lives of the characters without the weekly wait. I think part of this is that Xam’d speaks in a cinematic language. For all that I find myself frequently comparing anime unfavourably to modern cinema in terms of sophisticated character development, it’s the 25 minute weekly runtime that dictates many of the customary crudities. This show frequently ignores those dictates.

Xam’d has a presentational formality and deploys frequent narrative disjunctions which don’t really suit the mindset which I’m used to taking to television. It calls for unusually careful viewing, and rewards it.

The cinematic mode combines with a good deal of crossover in action between episodes. A show like Michiko to Hatchin is every bit Xam’d’s rival (perhaps even its better) in terms of artistry and sophistication, but uses a more episodic format which contains its messages within ordered packets. Xam’d is defined by a combination of cinematic style, anti-episodic plotting, and complicated characterisation.

The respective difficulties and differences of the characters meant that at first we were peering at them through veils.  In the later episodes it’s noticeable how the veils are stripped – we see Haru opening up once reunited with Akiyuki, Tojiro loosing his cool and bursting into tears (and even moving on Prois), Akiyuki’s parents making the breakthrough, and so forth. When Akiuyuki finds and shows his true self he reaches an enlightenment which sees him revert to the ‘pure’ Xam’d form we saw earlier; there’s a return to simple personal truths which are the more beautiful because of the journey through obscurity. [And I can't help but like the fact that with Xam'd carapace an enlightened man of action looks exactly the same as someone who's mentally running away.]

I’m thinking that with this opening up of personalities at the heights of conflict, I didn’t necessarily have to watch these individually satisfying late episodes the way I did, although I really should have been using batch watching during the earlier, subtler stages.

Not that Xam’d has lost its grace with the development of open heartedness. There are still those visual and thematic parallels pulling the cast together – lost children, bicycling pursuits, self-sacrifice, letters, the impact of a third party upon a relationship etc.

Xam’d moves a great deal. It has multiple loci depicted with differing levels of clarity, and the lines which tie them together are similarly variant. At times I found the symmetries artificial, but the show is dealing with the challenge of a vast story. The occasional feeling of artificiality is the price paid for scope, and this scope provides its own pleasures and opportunities.

My recent watching has basically overturned my earlier issues with the mannered managing of the narrative, and shown that Xam’d can make its characteristics into strengths. Or at least negate their potential weaknesses.

Case in point: the setting. Initially fascinating in its vagueness, the resulting world has never fully satisfied me. The charm is in the details, but the big picture was too often a pile of individual places, not one feeling.

With far more time to show itself off, it still feels less immersive that the Miyazaki works it ransacked for inspiration. The world of Xam’d is not a place that provides pure escapism, because our business is so tied to the emotional lives of the cast. I think the focus of the story means that it was not intended to be an original and welcoming location. Xam’d doesn’t have Miyazaki’s organic charm, but is able to develop its themes and messages more properly and avoid some of those film’s more jarring simplicities.

Seirei no Moribito is another series I mostly watched in batches, and is in some ways similar. It uses realistic characters and it has an essentially unoriginal fantasy setting which keeps clear of the mundane through exuberant exoticism.

Moribito made its location more involving by introducing fallow periods, while Xam’d retains a movement and interconnection that prevents similar feelings from growing. Where Xam’d decisively overcomes Moribito is in the emotional strength of its cast. With less old school fantasy characterisation, and more inner turmoil, it finds a strength which pulls it far above the crowd and lets it hit peaks I never found in that other fantasy show. Or, in a manner of speaking, I find the flawed Ishu to be far a more involving badass than Balsa ever was.

The one area which I haven’t entirely reinterpreted in retrospect is The Furuichi Episode. The arrival of the deadly mutating metamorphosis of despair was absurd in all the wrong places. The manner in which Furuichi disintegrated just didn’t feel real to me. I got no feeling of threat or tension from his breakdown, the final moment was certainly surprising, but honestly just made me laugh.

It did however set up the brilliant scenes with Midori in the Death Egg. The revisiting of her mother’s death with Nakiami as guide left me utterly wrecked. The Furuichi bit contributed to this magnificent moment, but that doesn’t quite make up for what I think was a case of poor characterisation.

I guess post-Furuichi the characters who carry on his legacy are the Captain and the Scientist. The mother-maniac and the self-loathing exile also don’t do much for me. Tojiro does improve during his face-off with Raigyo. Well, it’s not improvement as a person, but improvement as a developed personality.

These human villains aren’t a strong point. Their major function is to serve as faces of the darkness captured in pure dramatic essence by the emperor – a desperate and nameless foetal-monster forged out of a refusal to accept death. I think that the emperor is effective, far more so than most ‘dark side’ manifestations. The fact remains that the psychological approach to explaining regular villainy in Xam’d doesn’t quite satisfy me as much as the existential one represented by the monster.

If Furuichi, Tojiro, and the Scientist define what I disliked, there’s also someone who sums up what I care about. For OGT, Haru seems to be the big draw. For me it’s Nakiami. Cue enthusiasm.

For a start, visually, her design is just magical. Then there’s her combination of hardness and kindness. There’s the way her various relationships are depicted comparatively but without crudity. From her dealings with Akiyuki, Ishu, and to some degree Raigyo, we move onto a form of redemption in which she finds not romantic love, but (in Yango) a person who provides what she needs. Who can learn from her, but can also hold her back without lashing out. When we meet with her sister it’s as if their relationship epitomises the difference between what she runs from and what she’s found with her de facto foster-child.

Undoubtedly my liking for Nakiami is a lot more to do with sympathy then her depth relative to the rest of the characters. Indeed this is the inevitable nature of shows with big casts, and makes me think that another good thing about batch watching is that I don’t get disappointed when an episode focuses on those individuals for whom  I care less.

But that’s a disappointment I wouldn’t suffer on a second viewing, and in the midst of the current action, I think this going to be something I’ll want to revisit, at the new pace and with my eyes open to foreshadowing.

Whether or not I do so will depend entirely upon this one last episode, which has a hell of a task to fulfil. As the show has upped the quality levels, it’s begun to shoulder a colossal weight. Whatever note it ends on, it’s going to hit some people better than others. When Bones did this with RahXephon I didn’t like the answer. It seemed to me like that Evangelion-inspired show had failed to find the right answer to Anno’s fatalism. The pure (musical) romance which emerged didn’t capture or convince me.

When Akiyuki gave his name to the emperor, when Haru communicated psychically with her love and I didn’t feel a gag reflex at the romanticism, I began to think that Xam’d might have what it takes to deliver a truth that overwhelms. With the weight of the world, with questions so fundamental as the basic line between self and other and the relationship between responsibility and sacrifice, come stakes intimidatingly high. But then, as a show with such ambitious production and cinematic storytelling, Xam’d has always had to deal with heightened expectations. And if it finally overwhelms them at the climax, then I imagine it’ll feel like dancing.