“If you turn your eyes away from sad things, they’ll happen again one day. If you keep running away, you’ll just repeat the same mistakes. That’s why you have to face the truth straight on.”
Impression
They sure decided to pile on the angst, didn’t they. You know shit has gone down when even Masato looks serious. Komari remembers everything – the death of the cat in the gutter did turn out to be a trigger for her memory, and Komari ended up having all her “dream” memories come back to her at once and couldn’t take it. It must have been some serious mental trauma for her body to have decided to lock everything away as a defence mechanism – maybe it was how close she was to Takuya when he was alive, as well as her age that resulted in his death being a mental shock. It was clear that the younger Komari didn’t understand at all that her brother was hospitalized because he was ill, or the concept of dying either – I got such a shock when Takuya started coughing blood on her face, and she didn’t really react or notice that something wasn’t right. Takuya himself knew he was going to die, and I think it was the enforced concept that “it’s a dream” that made Komari actually think it was a dream, and so fragments of his hospitalization and death pop up from time to time.
What broke my heart, though, was Komari’s blank face calling Riki her onii-chan – it was the point when I realized: fuck, she’s lost it hasn’t she. Her state of mind was in an absolute mess for the majority of the episode, and even worse was the vicious cycle it was destined to repeat. A death will trigger Komari’s breakdown, her mind will slowly repair itself, and eventually she forces herself back into the state where she thinks it’s a dream. Unknowingly, the picture book that Takuya made creepily ended up foreshadowing Komari and her state of existence, where she forgets about Takuya after “growing up into a hen” and has her own chicks. To me, becoming a hen represents the destruction of that childhood innocence in life that everyone will go through one day as part of growing up and becoming an adult – it was just really harsh for Komari, who had lived her life as a child thinking that entire world was just as happy as she was. For her to find out that this isn’t how the world works in that kind of way must have hit her hard, especially for such a bubbly little kid. Oh why…
With the original picture book soggy (or rather symbolically, just the Kamikita Takuya part) Riki’s decision to make a sequel to the book is a good idea – because at the end, the hen finally remembers that it was once a chick. Even though the rest of the Little Busters couldn’t do much, it’s the thought that counts, and both Komari and Riki should be reassured that they have so many friends willing to help them out. As Riki pointed out, Komari’s surrounded by lots of friends, and what he says is right – sometimes you have to find the good things in life and concentrate on them, writing your own story even through the saddest and hardest times. Komari is a character I never want to see mentally broken again, and I’m glad that she got the conclusion she did – we all want to see her smile like the sun after all.
