Eurius said:
idiotsite said:
firekites said:
Rou (not the OAV, the manga) is, to me, a big epilogue. We all knew what was going to happen - Yuuko was finally able to pass away, and Watanuki took her place. That's it.
We were able to see how the rest of the characters grew older and still took care of him.
What did you want to read? Did you want Yuuko to come back to life and screw space/time again?
I don't get you, people. I really don't.
No, I didn't want to read Yuuko coming back to life. Never. That would've been plain stupid. I wanted to read Doumeki Shizuka using that damned egg, making Watanuki right and mortal again and the shop in ruins. In my book, that'd be a perfectly reasonable ending, setting things right. (Which was kinda the message of TRC and Holic: don't mess with the natural flow of time and setting of world cuz it could turn out disastrous.)
Maybe I'm trying really, REALLY hard to find a way to accept this as a good ending to one of my all-time favorite manga/anime series every, but I guess Ro was really just a huge epilogue to xxxHolic.
I think maybe CLAMP wanted this to be a tragedy or something. Though I have to agree with everyone's view that this was too darn rushed for such a long series, I think it sort of worked. What I got from it was mostly the dream sequence in the last chapter. As someone noted, Watanuki used Clow's magic circle. Not even that was able to keep Yuuko (the butterfly) from being encaged. I guess that what Yuuko was trying to teach Watanuki is that she herself was able to let go of her most precious person, Clow, and live freely after so long. She had waited all this time, perhaps even more so than Watanuki, to grant Clow's wish. She knew her end would come after that, but just like Watanuki, she was willing to wait.
In a way, I guess she kind of got to see Clow again in his descendants (namely Syaron and of course, Watanuki though he's not a literal descendant). She showed him that dream to let him know it was okay to forget her. That, inevitably, it had to happen but, inevitably, they would meet again. Yuuko kind of died a tragic death, as Watanuki is leading himself into. Already all the people he knew had to die, being regular humans, but in the least they were willing to wait with him.
....
Like I said, maybe I'm just trying too hard to give sense to this ending, so most of what I just said may seem like to total bogus to most. I still can't in no way say I liked the fact that Doumeki's ancestors kept visiting Watanuki and in some way still had the same egg, or the fact that Watanuki never noticed the first Doumeki's death, but I guess, in a way, Doumeki tried to grant Watanuki a wish in return: to allow him to remain in eternal bliss where he had met Yuuko.
There are still a lot of lose ends (more of which I noticed as I wrote this). But I guess even another way to think of the ending is that Watanuki became like the customer that wanted to date Doumeki. Her "yearning" separated her true self from her body and he ultimately became lost.
Ugh CLAMP, you've got me trying to defend you again. Never do this again please. And if you do, I might even prefer you putting it on hiatus like X/1999 and come back to it years later.
Really interesting read; glad you posted it.
Interesting idea of sort of living for someone, but needing to forget them so that you are able to reunite with them at a later point. That's dedication I'd say.
