Season 3 was a roller coaster for me.
Marked spoiler just incase someone hasn’t seen it yet but here’s the post:
In my opinion, Season 3 started off great! It was finally time to get into the world he made by sacrificing centuries of his life of getting rid of the nokkers we come to find out that the Guardians are still kicking and the nokkers haven’t been eliminated, but just evolved past where he could sense them. All of this was a great premise to the story I enjoyed thus far and we’ll get back to this.
The main issue I had was the whole Mizuha storyline and not really about Mizuha, but how fushi reacts to her and everything about her. Mizuha, being the reincarnation of Hayase, and have the original nokker inside her arm, is depressed because her mother wanted to keep her from the guardians and to prove that Mizuha could live a successful life without the support of the Guardians, she expected and demanded perfection from Mizuha. So she could be strong enough to be independent of them. This of course makes Mizuha depressed and want to kill herself. Which is all fine.
But then it gets to the part where the nokker takes over her body and kills her mom. And Mizuha is shaken up over it but then decides to manipulate Fushi to protect her. And fushi just kind of agrees..? Then he finds out the a nokker infected Mizuha’s mother and took over her body and is willing to torture her and burn her from the inside out in order to kill her but the crazy Mizuha begs him not to so he stops. Like I get the fact that the nokker is being a “better” mother to Mizuha but he just feels like she has control over him.
Then, some time down the road, Mizuha’s dad is killed by a nokker took over his body and is killing his forms over and over again and taking VERY important to fushi from his memory but he just doesn’t seem to care? Then he fights the nokkers in Mizuha’s body and doesn’t kill it even after it took his memories. It took so many of his memories of people and he just kept letting him. It just felt like he wasn’t really the person we came to know about and the time it took to have such a shift felt too fast for me.
Now, the part about not all nokkers being bad and accepting them into society and sharing the world with them is a development I like. And I understand we needed something to facilitate the change in Fushi’s understanding of the nokkers in order to take the steps to accepting them but I just felt like this plot with Mizuha was too contrived and forced to feel like it was a natural development. I loved the first 1/3 and the last 1/3 but the middle bits were hard to get through(hence why im making a post about it now It took me about a month to get through episodes 12-17 after they finished airing them.)
The other great thing about this season was Fushi having to come to terms with his friends possibly choosing to not want to spend eternity with him. Now THIS is what I came to truly love about this season. This dynamic of Fushi trying to navigate his feelings of not wanting to be alone while trying to let them live their own lives and respect their wishes. While at the same time dealing with the turmoil of failing of riding the world of the nokkers and trying to deal with it himself since he promised his friends to bring the back to live a peaceful life in a peaceful world. I mean this plot is the only thing that managed to keep me invested in the middle episodes.
But the new world and the way the world is developing I think is a good way to end this season off and I’m very much looking forward to next season
Anyway TLDR for those who don’t want to read it; it just felt like Fushi had to come to terms that the nokkers were here for good and so they had to make a situation where he was willing to listen to them and accept that he’ll have to fight the bad ones while accepting the good ones. And this is completely fine, I just felt like the way he went around the situation with Mizuha wasn’t in character with my understanding of him. But i loved everything about the dynamics with his friends and navigating through respecting their choices for how they want to live their life or not. I give the first and last 1/3’s of this season a 8-9/10 and the middle bits a 5-6/10. But overall a 7ish
Sorry for the essay!