Something tells me that the fairies would enjoy the Civilization game series.
This is the most straightforward episode of
Jintai yet, and also one of the best standalone anime episodes I've ever seen. Everywhere you look in this episode there's some sort of joke or commentary about the world we live in. I hesitate to say that this is just the author talking about Japan (although I do think that it was the inspiration) since I saw a lot of America in this episode and I've seen others on Twitter and in their own blogs relate things to their own countries as well. That success seems to come from simulating the rise and fall of a nation and cramming as much as they possibly make fun of into 24 minutes rather than point fingers at any specific nation. The butt of the joke here (and of the entire series) is the developed world and our complacency.
I'm going to leave it at that, since I think this time around personal interpretations are more interesting that whatever I have to say about it, but I will focus on something that's come up a lot yet we still don't have much information on: the fairies. They've served multiple purposes for the show so far, from creating problems for the plot to work through to the humor that makes their :D faces all the more sinister. But for the race that has allegedly taken over the world, the show has established very little about them.
This episode takes the little pieces we've gotten here and there about the fairies and demonstrates them in a small-scale nation that collapses within nine days. For a while I thought that the fairies were meant to represent us, humanity before the decline. However, after this episode, I think it's a little more specific. I think
Jintai is satirizing the idea of "sheeple," those who blindly follow the crowd without any individuality. That seems to sum the fairies up pretty well.
To begin with, they all have the same face. The only way to differentiate them is by their clothes. When an idea gets suggested to them, they won't let it go. In the last story arc, the idea of having multiple Watashis make them sweets leads to "time paradogs." This time around, her accidental response when they adressed her as "queen" puts her at the center of their government. There's an all or nothing mentality with them, although they get bored and give up (even on life) very easily. They can't even mangage to limit themselves when it comes to building monuments to themselves, cutting off their own food supply.
That said, they're very industrious when they put their minds to it, creating items that are beyond our own logic and taking pride in it (one fairy laments the "stone age quality" of the lighter that took two minutes to make). They built an entire country on basically nothing but trees, water, and rare spiders. That's amazing. However, their own tendency to go too far ended it all in record time. So if humanity has declined and the fairies mirror the impressionable masses, is the world now doomed to repeat its history?
Jintai isn't the happiest anime out there, but the sentiment expressed at the end of the episode--"Learn to clean up the mess"--does seem to say that all is not lost. I don't think that an anime is going to contain the answers to life's problems, but I do feel that anything that gets you think about your place in the world and what you contribute to the future is a good thing. Maybe, through all the randomness and the laughs, that's the point
Jintai is trying to reach.
Images from Crunchyroll.com.
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