As for people bitching about Mirai’s brattiness, well some people tend to be defensive of their own faults (and see the dust in someone else’s eyes instead of the plank in their own eye), no? * grins * :)

@ghostlighting: I can relate to the ‘wandering around Tokyo with stomach cramps’ thing…I think it was the jet lag that did it. OTL And yeah, no matter what situation you’re in, the need to go to the bathroom blanks out pretty much everything else. It sounds like a minor thing to get upset about but damn, when the indigestion is happening to YOU it’s very important indeed. I didn’t get as much out of that issue as you seem to, but it highlighted to me how individuals prioritise problems of various sizes in crisis!

@shneider: it’s one of his quirkier ones, yeah. I love his surrealism but stories like Honey Pie and Thailand are Murakami at his best from a dramatic POV.

@Peter S: I think Mirai is reacting as your typical kid would react, as opposed to how a TV or movie hero would do. That makes it a bit uncomfortable to watch, but I’m sure viewers can relate to someone like her more easily than some fearless heroic archetype. I was a bit worried about being caught in a quake when in Tokyo – there was one in the UK a couple of years ago actually, but it happened at 1am so I slept through it!

@2DT: absolutely. As much as it pains me to admit it, I’d probably be getting stressed out, running around looking for the toilet and generally being very un-heroic in those circumstances as well. When I was Mirai’s age I was probably wimpier still, so an event like this would’ve scared the hell out of me!

Perhaps because no matter what many people say, we usually aren’t looking for “for realy-real” realism in anime; we need just enough to input ourselves. So it can be hard to get over the ugly parts of the people we’re watching.

I don’t know why so many people bag on Mirai for her behavior in this series. She’s a kid, a realistically drawn one at that! I don’t know what I’d do if I was in her situation when I was that age. And how can anyone say she’s so selfish when, after the main quake, her first instinct is to find Yuuki? Her heart’s in the right place; she’s just at an age where it’s not always cool to acknowledge it.

One thing I love yet dread in this series are the aftershocks. They’re like wild cards of terror. They strike at random and you can’t tell what the result will be.

I understand Tokyo had another mild earthquake a few hours ago, a 4.5. As one blogger put it “Better a series of small ones than one huge one.”

The lack of external conflict in the form of human malice, or human threats in general, allow the show to show different kinds of privations. Here we see the most intimate kind: our own shit, our daily shame. Shit is something dirty and smelly that we have to deal with every day, and more: it’s ours. There’s no going around it, we make that smelly crap.

For Mirai to publicly have to go through all that was more than just a privation of discomfort, hardly. It was the decimation of her dignity itself.

To take otou-san’s cake metaphor even further: if the round cake was the opposite of the fragmented cake of her mom’s birthday: it’s the complete opposite in that the Onosawa cake is fragmented as the Onosawa family is intact but fragmented; but the Kusakabe cake is whole and complete but comes from and is for an incomplete family.

Mirai ate the round cake, and she can’t deal with it. Her very body rejects it, as a kind of conflict within her; like how she couldn’t accept Mari’s praise about being a good sister after she believes she almost killed her own brother by wishing that the world should just break.

To think that Mirai’s shitty day has such far-reaching consequences (I won’t get into these here), it’s just remarkable. And by far, it’s my favorite bit in this very interesting show.

But, as Mirai travels through the disaster with Yuuki & Mari she starts to changing from a self-centered person to a person that is more in touch with her duties to her brother, parents, friends, and the society as a whole.

So, I think that’s why the events of episode 8 struck some viewers so hard that some people said they were going to stop watching the show, they had come to really like the new changed Mirai and episode 8 was like a kick in the groin.