Allison & Lillia: War Ends, War Starts

Lookin’ sharp, there, Allison. Adds an air of mystique to your general personality.

So,  having just seen episodes 4 and 5, the first of which is the final part of the “treasure hunt” arc, and the second of which is the start of the “you thought the war was over PRANKED” arc, Allison & Lillia is getting decidedly more complicated than I thought it would be, especially given episode 5.

In episode 4, the revelation of the treasure (which wasn’t really a revelation for the audience as it’s right in the middle of the OP) illustrated the important fact about conflict that everyone needs to keep in mind: we may have our differences, but we’re all humans. Sigsawa has been hammering, by proxy of the anime adaptation, this point in hard up to this episode. Facts and histories are exaggerated by governments/the media/other people (often unconsciously, as I honestly doubt that there’s a vast media conspiracy out there that all the network execs have to pledge to before becoming an exec that dictates that they intentionally warp and skew things; warping and skewing is what happens when one person tells something to someone else, it just gets out of hand when one person tells 100 million people something), leading to a perpetuation of a state of conflict, and it often seems as if people have lost track of the fact that we’re all in this together. The “treasure” of the mural of the two sides of Roxche and Sous-Beil cooperating (instead of being enemies forever, as everyone had been brought up to believe), as well as the fact that military officers from both sides (Allison and Kar) cooperated to make it to the treasure all point to one thing: people should get along. Perhaps Haro was not so wrong after all!

This isn’t to say that we should all be a bunch of tree-hugging Woodstock-attending hippies and gather around a big campfire and hold hands and sing Kum Ba Yah for eternity and anon, or even that we shouldn’t be allowed to dislike other people, but there’s a difference between “dislike” and “hatred”, and, while the former is perfectly fine to feel, the latter tends to cause more problems than it solves. I’ve seen lots of people (myself included, lest you think I am riding Big Brown rather than Eight Belles [people from Kentucky will get this. Everyone else won’t.]) totally throw logic, reason, and rationality out the window as a result of the burning hatred they feel for something. And often, you hate something you don’t understand, or can’t even begin to comprehend. It’s a difficult emotion at best, and completely unstoppable if left unchecked. And, if left unchecked, Terrible Things (such as the war between Roxche and Sous-Beil–see, it ties in!) result from it.

This seems to be the next step for Our Intrepid Heroes Allison and Wil as they stumble headlong into what appears to be a terrorist cell of some kind, which illustrates another point: you can’t please everyone all of the time, and as much as I hate to admit it, it’s practically impossible to acheive the lofty goal of World Peace unless aliens come down and replace us all with emotionless robots. Which just goes to illustrate the terribly complex nature of the world in which we live. Allison & Lillia, for all of its plot simplicities, is managing to make this incredibly hard-to-grasp concept clear for all to see. How is it accomplishing this? Through same plot simplicity, through skilled writing, and through delivering it all in a package with a spunky-yet-cute Air Force pilot teenage girl.

And people say that cute girls in anime are bad. Shame on them. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.