10 Second Anime - Akame ga Kill! - Episode 24 [END]

Akame ga Kill! - Episode 24 [END]



Akame and Esdeath face off in the final episode. A new nation is forged through the sacrifice of Night Raid's members.

Geh.

All the people who needed killing, got their killing. Especially Onest. His head got beaten in by Leone Mai Waifu, without the benefit of her Emperor's Tool. I'm still mad she bled to death. Just another aspect of that Japanese ending.

 

Akame's and Esdeath's fight was everything I hoped it would be. From Akame having to use her trump card, to multiple fake outs, to just an all out brawl by this show's two strongest fighters.

Let's get it on!

It appears that Akame never used her trump card before, because it actually involved letting the cursed sword cut its wielder.

It looks like those marks never fully go away. Is it similar to Esdeath's mark on her chest that she has taken demonic properties into her body?

 

Esdeath is as ruthless to her limbs as she is to anything or anyone else she deems weak. Get stabbed by Muramasa in the arm? Cut it off.

 

It did slow her down a little bit. Just a little bit.

 

In the end, Akame fooled Esdeath's frozen time trump card, and got slashed down the middle. No way to cut body parts off of that wound.

 

Esdeath still had time to say goodbye to her true love Tatsumi and take his body with her into oblivion.

 

After all that, Esdeath was still mai mistress. She just had to say "Tatsumi" in her lovey-dovey voice one more time.

 

She got to do her signature boot smash one more time too.

 

Esdeath mai mistress, RIP. Leone mai waifu, RIP.

 

Heh.

The epilogue scenes were nice, bringing back Boris' wife and daughter, and even showing Tatsumi's village receiving all his pay from his Night Raid missions. It was bittersweet to hear that the villagers still didn't know that their three young adventurers were all dead.

 

Leone's epilogue was bittersweet as well. Without her healing ability, she decided to bleed to death in the slums she grew up in. But before that, she said goodbye to Akame in a way that hid her inevitable death, very much like common folklore that a cat runs away from home when it knows it's about to die. That was Leone's last gift to Akame - just a little less weight on her small shoulders from missing her comrades and friends.

 

Akame kept Tatsumi's little statue, the very one that saved his life from her blade in the first episode. And Najenda kept Lubbock's goggles. Maybe his feelings did reach her after all.

 

Hmm.

I can say the ending to this show was very satisfying in the sense that it made me uneasy. Even though the deaths of these characters who were central to the story all had a meaning and were all believable, I still wanted them to make it past the end of the tale. But the story of Akame ga Kill! was always that death came when it came, no matter how much you prepared for it. I wanted these guys to have a happily ever after. Perhaps it was more important for them to have a happily during instead.

 

Only Najenda and Akame escaped the story of Night Raid. Najenda stayed in the new nation, while Akame continued to seek death for those who deserved it. For her, it will always be Akame ga Kill!, not Akame ga settle down raising orphans.

 

Final Thoughts.

From the very beginning of the series, it was made clear that at any moment an established character could die. Not just the villains, but even the ones through whom the story is being told. I very much liked the first two-thirds of the series, because we were given time to learn about the world, get to know the heroes of Night Raid, and even mourn their deaths. Each of the villains gave us a chance to discover how corrupt the empire had become and who was actually controlling things, and then celebrate their deaths.

 

Unfortunately, the last third of the series was compressed, and no longer had the earlier narrative flow. I get that the story had changed. In the beginning, Night Raid was working in the shadows, very much a covert wing of the rebel army. Covert actions need a lot of preparation and intelligence gathering on the targets, which fit the narrative flow of teaching Tatsumi how the world actually worked, refuting the idealized form he learned in his faraway village.

 

After the assassination of the fake bishop, when the Church openly sided with the rebellion, it was no longer an assassination squad story, but a commando raid story. All the targets were military targets, and fighting was out in the open. We didn't need story time to know how bad these people were, mainly because we'd already seen them in action as the bad guys. There was no longer time to decompress between battle sequences to have fun with our loveable characters or to watch them struggle over loss. It was open rebellion and lots of killing was needing to be done.

 

It's a good sign for a story's characters, where their deaths are believable, even have meaning to them, but still feel the loss of their presence. Akame ga Kill! made us care about the characters before they were killed off. With the accelerated pace of the end game, I was almost cringing at the start of each episode because I knew somebody I cared about was going to die. I'm still raw over Tatsumi and Leone. I had hope those two would end up together. That's good character development.

 

The ending for the series was anime original since the manga is still going on, and is not in any danger of ending any time soon. Perhaps at a later date Akame ga Kill! will come back with a longer series to tell its full story, like Fullmetal Alchemist did. That retelling won't save Sheele, Bulat and Chelsea, but at least Tatsumi, Mine, Leone, and Lubbock could give us a few more cute moments before their resolutions. I would watch this story again, but only after I've calmed down about the deaths of Tatsumi and Leone.