Oooooh this is so trippy!!!
I have watched 9 episodes in one day and I am very tired. Here goes.
So here is my version of what happened. Never Island’s (NI) Rinne put Setsuna into cold sleep where he woke up knowing that he had to save someone and kill someone. After fumbling around, Rinne died and he realized he had to kill the other Setsuna inside of Rinne. Setsuna then puts himself into cold sleep and woke up years later with another amnesia and was found by a reincarnation of NI Rinne. After NI Karen and NI Sarah’s death, NI Rinne puts Setsuna into her time machine hoping that he will go back into the past and set things right. However, as we know, the machine she built wasn’t a time machine to go back, it was a cold sleep machine which put Setsuna into another 20,000-year sleep. Realizing this, NI Rinne either built another machine or put herself into the machine Setsuna woke up in. Both of them slept for 20,000 years where mankind went through another Ice Age and history repeats itself exactly when NI Rinne woke up 23 years before Setsuna did and had an amnesia, remembering only Setsuna’s name.
The head of the Ohara family found her. When he heard her mention Setsuna, he thought it was his son (the baby he was holding when he found her) and took NI Rinne in as a maid. NI Rinne gave birth to Setsuna’s daughter, who was also named Rinne. Rinne fell in love with her non-biological brother, the other Setsuna, and the two meet in the shack his father used to hide him away. (Or maybe she just wanted to spend some time with her brother). The father, realizing that the daughter who was supposed to succeed the Ohara household is staying with his good for nothing son, pushed the other Setsuna into the sea. He then died from the blight he either contracted from NI Rinne or inherited from 20,000 years ago, when mankind lost the ability to resist UV after spending such a long time underground. Rinne jumped after Other Setsuna into the sea and they washed up on Boryujima. They spent some time together, and when Other Setsuna’s mind began crumbling, he put Rinne in the cold sleep machine and NI Rinne found her five years later, not aging a single day.
A few months later, Setsuna woke up, and bla bla bla he realized history has been repeated itself for a hundred thousand years and that Rinne is his daughter and got married to NI Rinne and lived happily ever after. The end.
It was sort of disturbing to think that Setsuna almost had an incestuous relationship with his daughter and that NI Rinne said nothing about it.
Island took 10 episodes to get any interesting, and somehow the ‘change the title and make it into another anime’ thing didn’t go all the way through and it felt half-hearted. Sara and Karen were just there in the original timeline, mainly because Sara never speculated anything right (and thankfully did not give birth to herself) and Karen was just a plain runaway girl with little significance to the actual plot. In the Never Island timeline, they were given more importance but in the end weren’t any interesting either. Rinne’s character was sort of your standard cute loli.
The whole sci-fi ordeal felt like it was shoved in there just to make the whole thing interesting. It clarifies a lot of things but somehow it doesn’t feel right. That huge ass red herring with Other Setsuna and Rinne is something I will give Island some credit for, but the real plot feels lacking in something. The ‘Rinne I am your father’ is a line I will remember for a while, though. It would take the 40-hour game to fully appreciate Island’s story, which is not something I want to do, so bye, Island.
Island has good animation and soundtrack, but the pacing and the story seriously needs something. It’s not something I can recommend to other people, and though I did enjoy the plot twist, I am very glad I am finished with this anime.
bonutzuu 