2013-09-11
Two things from Valvrave's first season
(There are some spoilers here up through episode 12 and it's going to be relatively opaque if you don't know Valvrave.)
Evirus (sort of via Author):
[...] And [the school] elected a flibbertigibbet as their leader? Seriously? And the deepest desire of the refugees is to engage in traditional school functions after reaching safety? [...]
Yes, yes they did elect a flibbertigibbet. It was probably a terrible mistake. But here's the thing: Valvrave totally sold me on the emotional logic of the situation. Let me set the scene to show you why.
The two candidates for student council chair and thus leader of the whole place were a stuffed shirt technocrat and the aforementioned flibbertigibbet politician's daughter. Both gave speeches to the assembled student body. The technocrat went first and his speech was full of how he'd organize increased production of this and better living conditions through that and so on. It had about as much emotional connection with his audience as a project presentation.
Then the politician's daughter stepped up. She gave an emotional 'whoop up the audience' speech and in the course of it she promised to organize a school festival. Or, to put it another way, she offered everyone the chance to pretend for a while that they were all normal students doing normal student things, to set aside that their country was occupied, their parents distant prisoners, every aspect of the life they had known before was gone, and that they themselves were working ceaselessly to try to keep an increasingly ruined environment limping along while some of their friends had actually been killed. Oh, and they were being hunted by people who would cheerfully murder the rest of them.
So, yeah. They elected the flibbertigibbet.
(And I could see it coming like a freight train from the moment that Shouko started her speech.)
The other thing I've seen questions about is Saki's tears when Haruto offers to marry her in the aftermath of the infamous rape and she rejects him. My theory is that the tears are because, to put it one way, Saki didn't want Haruto to propose to her out of duty (which is what he makes it clear that he's doing), she wanted him to propose out of love. She's crying because the offer shows that the shadow of the rape and Haruto's feelings about it have killed any chance for genuine, unforced love from Haruto (at least for now). She has no choice but to reject Haruto's offer and basically renounce him because the alternative is an empty relationship built on top of Haruto's feelings of guilt and duty.
Or in short, Saki's tears are about the death of a relationship that could have been but is now not going to happen. She's giving up on something she wanted, not because she doesn't want it any more but because having it is impossible now.
(I don't know how serious Saki really was about Haruto before the rape but she did seem to be interested to some degree.)