Little Busters! - 21

"Fifty Nautical Miles Into The Sky"

An arc with a huggably adorable heroine and a focus on astronomy? Kud is officially my favorite of the Little Busters.

This is the week that like turned to love when it comes to a character from this series, which seems pretty odd for someone like me, who tends to protest against girls as cutesy and silly as Kud in anime all the time. Still, there's something irresistible about Kudryavka for me, and somehow the fact that she has an intimate link to space doesn't surprise me in the least. For all the moe pandering and the "wafu~" remarks, Kud is a smart girl, and she's certainly one of the most worldly-intelligent characters I've seen in a long time. Yet there's an element of mystery and mysticism to her, the sort that Key does best but which fits perfectly on somewhat absurd characters like this one. As such, the fact that she's named after a dog that went into space and that her mother is an astronaut seem to fit perfectly with her persona, seeing as she's so otherworldly in the first place.

Of course there's no better example than the little ceremony she and Riki performed, and I'm actually quite astonished at the way this scene was pulled off. Normally when a girl's shirt comes off in a harem series, all sorts of pandemonium breaks loose for the protagonist, but that wasn't the case in Little Busters! this week. While Riki was a little thrown aback at first, he didn't throw a fit, he didn't objectify Kudryavka, and he helped her out without having a mental breakdown about touching her (oh no, the horror!). Kudos to you, Riki, for having a backbone and more respect than I thought you did. The end result was not only free of harem ecchi conventions, but it was also beautiful and surreal, just like the night sky and Kudryavka herself. It's really a mark of how good this series is at portraying idealized friendships, because to portray such a scene this innocently and honestly is certainly unusual, though the only way this series could have done it in retrospect.

The real focus of the arc seems to be the relationship between little Kud and her space-obsessed mother, which I think is oddly fitting for several reasons. Firstly, as a former astrophysics major, I completely understand what it's like to love space and the night sky. There's a terribly beautiful loneliness in the concept of the universe beyond our atmosphere, and that this loneliness is at the heart of Kud's personal pain seems to be perfect for her odd personality. She's a larger than life character, she doesn't seem to fit in anywhere, and her mother was taken from her (perhaps even literally) by the greatest representation of loneliness in existence. As for Kud's mother herself, she seems to me to be terribly selfish. I can understand wanting to follow your dreams, but when you become a parent, you have a responsibility to look after and raise the child you brought into the world, and Kud's mother (never mind her unmentioned father) more or less abandons her for the sake of her career. Then there's the crest she bestowed on her daughter, so that she "will become a good gear for this world of ours"; to me that sounds almost cruel, in that it seems she's condemning Kud to looking at herself as nothing more than a piece of a greater society, which, while true, is still something harsh to tell a child. However, we'll find out soon enough if I'm wrong as to all of this, and we'll also see if Kud has lost her mother in the most literal sense possible.