Just finished DtB! I don't know how I went for so long without watching this series. It was a good ride. A very good ride.
Overall, I was hooked on this series from the very beginning, albeit I was very confused. Too many unexplained terms at times, and there were so many alliances and organization names being thrown around that I had difficulty remembering who was who, what was what, and who belonged to what. I may have to re-watch the series later to get a better grasp over them. Also, yeah, the ending left a lot of unanswered questions. Sometimes, this can be a good thing, other times it can be bad. For DtB, I found it was a mixture of both. For example, I still don't know what in the heck Hell's and Heaven's Gates are or what the meteor shards do or where they came from. However, some of the questions, such as what happened to Pai, I think are nice to speculate over.
DtB I will remember for its superb animation, distinct character designs, and solid soundtrack and voice acting. Also, the plot was very interesting and the concepts felt fresh and original, despite sharing some characteristics with those of other series. However, some of the two-episode story arcs could have been expanded - I normally complain about series being dragged out too long, but DtB was the opposite! I think some plots were compacted a little too much. Still, I absolutely loved the series overall. DtB gets a score of 9/10 from me ^-^
wateries said:
What did Hei mean when he replied to Misaki saying that "Li doesn't exist anymore"? I thought that the entire time, Li was the manifestation of his human side and the emotionless "Hei" was his contractor personality. There was a scene where all the dead contractors were present with Huang saying that if he couldn't choose between being a human or a contractor, why not just choose both? I thought that this meant he could continue living the way he was living, as a Li/Hei duality. But when Hei said Li doesn't exist anymore, does that mean he chose to be a contractor, foregoing his human nature? If so, why?
I've actually been thinking about this, mulling it over and whatnot. Basically, Hei is the middle-ground between contractor and human; therefore, throughout the entire series, he dealt with the pain of being caught between the two worlds. At the very end, Hei was forced to make the decision: did he want to give his loyalty to the contractors or the humans? Because, ultimately, by allowing the humans to destroy Hell's Gate using that odd particle machine (ugh, physics is definitely not my forte), he'd be saving humanity but destroying the contractors. On the other hand, if he sided with the contractors, he'd allow the events of Heaven's Gate in South America to repeat themselves, resulting in the deaths of many, many humans. Hei chose to give his loyalty to both. In other words, he found a third solution that saved humans AND contractors. However, he did so at the cost of his friends (after all, Amber used up the last of her powers to rewind time to allow Hei to make such a decision).
As for the "Li does not exist anymore" bit...I figured this was a poetic way of saying "Goodbye" to Kirihara. I don't think she had any way to be 100% sure Hei/BK-201 and Li were the same person. Rather, I thought that her shouting out "Li-kun!" was based purely on intuition - she's been noted to have a sharp intuition several times in the series by people like November 11.
His answer is rather ambiguous. It neither confirms nor denies the fact that Hei and Li are the same person, but at the same time, it does hint towards it. However, to me, it also sounded a lot like a "goodbye" or a "don't follow me" sort of message because, one, he's forced to go on the run and can no longer be with her, and two, he's a changed man. An interesting part of Hei is his dual nature: Hei, the spy/assassin contractor, and Li, the normal, slightly clumsy human. Perhaps Hei's final message to Kirihara is also that he can no longer return to any semblance of his "normal" life that he lived as "Li". The events in Hell's Gate, too, have changed him. Before, Hei was solely bent on finding his sister, but after the events in Hell's Gate, I assume that's changed. |