I just finished watching the end of the Fractale anime for the 2nd time. I watched it weekly as it originally aired, and now I own it on Blu Ray. (It was on dirt-cheap sale.)
While processing the show’s ending my brain made a very silly, very random connection between Fractale and something else I watched recently: The Black Widow movie.
There’ll be spoilers (of a sort) after this point, just so you’re warned.
I’ll not get into lengthy, gory detail here but both stories:
- Center on events that were set in motion by a creepy self-proclaimed father figure
- Make reference to a pool of “replaceable” girls
- Are driven by one “prodigal daughter” who flies directly into danger to put an end to a tyrannical system
- Reach their climactic battle in a giant flying fortress that gets totally destroyed in the process
- Have main and secondary and various unnamed characters scramble in all directions seemingly at random through a vast structure whose internal geography we’re given no real sense of
- Show explosions and weapons going off all over the place during the final battle yet our principal protagonists mostly come away unscathed
- Don’t really accomplish much in the grand scheme of things
To be clear, I like the Black Widow movie for the most part, certainly far more than I ended up liking Fractale on second viewing. I just couldn’t help being amused by the similarities between two such vastly different pieces of entertainment media.
