I really liked the storyline in the books as compared to the anime -- that the Pope was arranging a holy crusade against the elves in order to relocate the human population away from an impending natural disaster, and all the resulting conflict with the elves -- the anime just brushed all that aside, even though it was a really convoluted and cool conflict where both sides could be described as the good guy or the bad guy.
However, in the final volume, all the tough choices that lent complexity to the situation were simply deus ex machinad away. It turns out the catastrophe threatening the human kingdoms was not unavoidable, so there was no need to invade the elven lands. Then it turns out the Pope was lying and he actually intended to invade Earth, an idea so ludicrous given the difference in strength between our high technology and their lowly magic that it just deflated the entire situation to clowning around. Then it turned out that Saito was suddenly dying due to his new rune, when before we were told he would only lose life energy if it was overtaxed. And then suddenly it was revealed that the only cure to this rune illness was for Saito to kill Louise (why? why would that be the cure? It makes no sense!) And then in another twist even after Saito does kill Louise and his rune-curse is removed, Louise is just brought back to life by his magic sword, which, until now, had never had any resurrection magic (indeed, no one had ever had resurrection magic of any sort until now), but, now it does!
There's only so many lame, out of the blue, completely nonsensical plot twists an author can throw at the reader in a row. The whole series is now just a garbled mess. Perhaps this is because the author died before he could finish the series and the ghostwriter who took the sequels up could only operate on Noburu's notes. But I honestly think the author had these plot twists planned from the start so even this is no excuse.
An author, via foreshadowing, is making a contract with the reader. The contract reads like this, "This thing I previously wrote is important and should be paid attention to and struggled with and emoted over, in exchange I'll provide closure concerning it at the appropriate moment."
When it turns out none of the previous dramas actually mattered -- because people can just be brought back to life, or the Pope was just lying about everything, or the elves weren't even the enemy, etc, etc -- the author has broken his side of the deal. It's no different from a cheating spouse. He said it was appropriate to care about x, but he himself didn't care about x, and just threw it out the window with a giant 'fuck you' to the audience he'd been playing up until now.
If you treat an issue in earlier books as tremendously difficult requiring great sacrifice and commitment to resolve -- and then just randomly flick your wrist and resolve it in a couple sentences -- you're an adulterer. You just divorced your audience. It's not just bad writing, it's a complete betrayal of the relationship you had built up with your readers up until that point. You just used and abused us with foreshadowing you couldn't actually deliver on -- and never intended to deliver on. You're a con man.
I liked the Zero no Tsukaima novels because they were more realistic, gritty, and struggling with the 'hard questions' than the happy go lucky anime. Only to find that the novels only pretended to be that way, but in the very end turn out to be some sort of loony tune.
At this point the filler anime ending is now the superior version of the franchise and the novels can just be discarded. That's just how bad this final volume was. I can see why it's taken the translators years to translate -- it's so bad that no one wants to deal with this shit.
Strangely enough, if the novels are no longer worth reading, then the value added of the anime version of events rises dramatically. Now the anime is the go-to source for this story, which means it isn't nearly as dispensable as I imagined it to be up until now. I will have to dramatically lift it in the anime rankings to offset the dramatic lowering of its novel version ranking. In fact I'd now be more than happy to cut Zero no Tsukaima's novels in my good books rankings just as soon as I find a newer and better series to replace it with. I don't want to deal with this shitty deus ex machina shit a second longer than I have to.
Previously I had on my anime wishlist a desire to remake the anime to more closely follow the books. That's all gone now -- the anime is better precisely because it deviates from the books. Instead I just added in an innocuous wish for a sequel to Major 2nd. Anything's better than an anime that actually shows this horrible ending.
This was as bad as A Memory of Light.
Meanwhile, the 22nd volume of Index NT has mostly been translated, and can be read over at baka-tsuki. The remaining content will be available any day now. It's not an especially good book in the series, but at least it doesn't screw around with the reader like Zero no Tsukaima's 22nd volume so we should just be counting our blessings.
You know what had a good ending? Junai Sensation. As a result, I rejiggered my manga hall of fame as well, with Junai Sensation shooting up while others dropped like a rock. It just goes to show that half of any series' worth is its ending. If you don't have an ending -- or if you don't have a reasonable and satisfactory ending, you're just worthless. Everything good that came before is completely obliterated, totally undone -- just like there's nothing worthwhile in a marriage that ends in divorce. It was all lies from the very beginning. It was just fool's gold from the start, we were only being conned into thinking it was a good story. But the jig is up, and now the whole thing is nothing but a farce, a charade, a sick joke, best forgotten.
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