#kagerou daze
Heart Crisis by Tori
Kagerou Project Official Anthology -FUTURE-
Scans, translation, etc. by me
note: page 10/11 was a spread over 2 pages! I’m kinda proud of the cleaning job I did on the middle seam ✨
We’re Bored, So Let’s Become Heroes by Yoko
Kagerou Project Official Anthology -FANTASY-
Scans, translation, etc. by me
Please support the series by buying the anthology!
Continued under the cut!
(I know this is not a usual post for this blog but I really wanted to analize this)
Okay, so with Additional Memory we can finally see Ayano’s version of the Kagerou Daze. At first I thought it was just an aesthetic PV without much meaning other than to look nice, but after watching it a couple of times I’m pretty sure it shows what she had to endure inside her Daze.
At first, we are shown her death: she is on the edge of the school roof, and moments later, she jumps off.
This is where the proper song starts, and we are shown Ayano inside her personal Kagerou Daze: a monochrome, upside down classroom, where the only color that pops is the red on her scarf and eyes. The classroom is filled with a field of flowers on the floor where Ayano stands (which would be the actual ceiling), these flowers are the same ones that their classmates put in a jar on her desk after her suicide. On the ceiling (the actual floor) there are lots of school desks, both of these elements are usually associated to Ayano in other PVs and in Mekakucity Actors.
Ayano is seen with a very serious face, it seems like she’s been there for a long time, like when Hibiya had already been through many loops an was starting to get really tired of them; they have the same apathetic face. She is also standing still, yet her clothes and hair move constantly and very violently like if there was a lot of wind, this is probably just a representation of what we see later, using the same animation.
After that, we see Ayano looking at the usual TV with the Lost Time Memory scene on it, this is a representation of what is inside Ayano’s mind: she is very regretful of the things she couldn’t do when she was alive.
Her trial inside the Kagerou Daze starts after this, she is seen falling upside down, like if the gravity (or maybe, her point of view) is turned around, she falls through the sky, passing the school windows until she hits the bridge where she last saw Shintaro and dies again.
She wakes up again where she was at the start, but laying down on the field of flowers, in a posture similar to the one people put the corpses on a funeral.
This is probably a parallelism of Kagerou Daze, Hibiya/Hiyori and Ayano’s trial seem to have the same base: they keep dying and waking up on the same spot everytime they fail.
In Ayano’s case it seems like she has to keep jumping off to the void and falling to her death, she also looks like she has been doing this dozens of times. The thing is that it seems like she always falls upside down, so she has to turn around the situation.
After she wakes up she sits down in a posture showing that she is actually really depressed, regretful and tired, she has been trying to get out of there too many times now, she is mentally exhausted, as the lyrics say “If this was the wrong idea, I didn’t want to know”, she is questioning what she did, regretting her sacrifice, she wants to go back and do everything she didn’t do, “the overflowing tears are soaked into the sky”, she stands up and starts crying, and when the tears go up instead of going down, she starts to realize the situation, her point of view starts to change, and so, her mindset, “even though I can’t return anymore, even though I can’t go back anymore, now it only aches, it became upside-down”, with this, we get to the climax of the song, she looks up and finally realizes everything is upside down, literally and metaphorically. And with this new realization, she jumps off to the void again.
“Falling, realizing”, the scene changes to Ayano finally falling down instead of up, this is because she finally accepted her situation, she finally accepted her feelings and turned her point of view around, which the Kagerou Daze manifests as the whole world turning around. She even has her eyes closed this time, she is more relieved. “Don’t erase them, remember them, the real feelings I left behind”, even though she feels regret of the things she didn’t get to do and say, even if there is a possibility her sacrifice was useless, she can’t do anything about it, so she has to accept it.
The PV finishes with Ayano’s empty desk in her Kagerou Daze, this could represent that she finally passed her Kagerou Daze trial and arrived at the one we see on Mekakucity Actors: the classroom inside an eternal sunset, where she will wait for Shintaro to help her.
I really liked this song and PV, since it shows us the real feelings Ayano had towards her suicide/sacrifice, we know because of Mekakucity Actors that on her last moments she was terrified, but now we know that after arriving at her Daze, she felt a lot of regret of what she did, I think that makes Ayano a more tridimensional and real character than before. Jin and Sidu really did a great job again!
TL;DR
Ayano’s Kagerou Daze consists in a monochrome, upside down classroom, with a field of flowers on the floor (the ones her classmates put in a jar on her desk after her death) and school desks on the ceiling. Her trial consists on her having to jump off to her death repeatedly, even though she keeps falling upside down, since the gravity seems messed up inside her Daze. She has to keep doing this until she finds herself and realizes her actual feelings towards her sacrifice (she is terribly regretful about it) to finally turn around her point of view, metaphorically and literally, since her Daze manifests this turning the whole world around, so she can finally jump off to the void one last time, and fall down instead of up. This gets her out of this trial, to arrive at the classroom inside an eternal sunset where we see her appear on Mekakucity Actors, where she will wait for Shintaro.
°°~Black Azami~°°
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do be cute
°°~Yellow Kokonose~°°
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have some more uwu
°°~Blue Hibiya~°°
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°°~Black/ Red Shintaro~°°
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°°~Blue Takane~°°
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Very simple but very nice OwO
°°~Orange Momo~°°
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she do be cute tho UwU
°°~Blue/Pink Mary~°°
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mk but why he pretty
°°~Green Seto~°°
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°°~Gold Kano~°°
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