Headscratchers / Air

• Okay. Someone who's played the VN can probably drop in with an easy answer - is Kanna still trapped in the cycle of reincarnation? Crow-Yukito's monologue at the end of the series sounds an awful lot like he's planning to seek out all her future reincarnations and spend the rest of eternity with them, but that just raises up all sorts of Unfortunate Implications. Sure, it helps to have that awful "make all who love you miserable" curse lifted, but I thought that most of Misuzu's symptoms were due to the fundamental incompability between human bodies and winged being souls - a problem that no amount of lifting of curses is going to solve. Having to repeatedly die a painful and meaningless death before you turn 18 sounds like a pretty dreary existence to me.
  • Well, at least you can try to have as much fun as possible before you die, knowing you will always have a next life. One could even view it more positively as Kanna's eternal youth. The part about not being loved sucks harder, though. Nether the anime nor the game are very conclusive about what happens after Misuzu's death, concentrating more on those left behind (especially Haruko). In any case, the girl the viewer got to know as Misuzu is gone forever, since any reincarnation will likely not be the same person—which makes it quite a downer ending in my view.
    • I personally believe that with the curse broken, Kanna will simply cease to reincarnate, or reincarnate as a totally normal person and not as someone that would constantly dream about being Kanna.
  • I don’t have the foggiest idea how you can end up dying very young just because you reïncarnated into a body with just the standard four limbs instead of also having a big pair of wings grown out of your back like your previous body did. It seems to me that your soul should adapt nicely to whatever body the fickle hand of fate gives you each time around. Seriously, women don’t croak in their teens just because they were men in their past lives and thus had an extra body part back then. Or is this another instance of CPDD (convenient plot device disorder)?
    • The implication is that winged beings have larger souls because of all their super special magical powers. It's also implied in the end with those two kids that Misuzu (but not Kanna) reincarnated in order to have a normal life.
  • This Troper's played the game. To answer the OP's question, the game strongly implies that there's exactly one way to break the curse: if someone under the curse successfully finds "true happiness," then after their deaths, their reincarnations will be free of the curse. The problem is that finding true happiness also includes either love or family, which the curse causes you pain for seeking. What Misuzu has to do is to seek love with Yukito and family with Haruko, despite the pain. This results in the curse killing Misuzu off...but now all of Misuzu's future reincarnations are free from the curse forever. So Misuzu's life sucks, but because Misuzu triumphantly chose happiness that caused her pain, her future lives will not suck.
• Also, what did the curse of the Buddhist monks actually do? The page makes it out to be the main conflict of the series, but the "make all who love you miserable" curse wasn't laid by the Buddhist monks; Kanna inherited it from her mother. From what I gather from the anime, all they did was give her an all-expenses-paid one-way trip to the afterlife (hence the disappearing into magic pixie dust). Uraha explicitly states in episode 9 that though Kanna now dreams terrible dreams in the sky, the curse will eventually break and return her spirit to the cycle of reincarnation, and both her and Ryuuya seem more concerned with the curse she inherited from her mother and the fact that there aren't any compatible winged being bodies for her to reincarnate into anymore.
  • I think it was a curse for her to be reincarnated as a normal human from here on.
  • One can assume, that the curse basically split Kanna into two. The actual Kanna who was forced into immortality and constantly flying in the sky (as seen at the end of the series) and whatever human she reincarnated into. Because the actual Kanna is still flying around, the part of her that can actually "live" so to speak, is cursed that if she feels love or is loved in return, she will die and another one will be born to take her place. So by breaking the curse, it is possible that the flying in the sky Kanna will disappear and merge with her next reincarnation and put an end to the constant cycle.
• Why is it that Kanna and Misuzu look nothing alike?
  • Because Misuzu is her future reincarnation, and not her clone. Read a little about reincarnation in Buddhism, and you'll understand.
• So what's the story with the girl on the beach at the end of the anime, the one who's holding hands with Mysteriously Knowledgable Boy and who turns out to be the icon in the show's logo? Is she the next incarnation, the one who will survive the curse because Misuzu died happy? That's how I've always interpreted the show, which is nuts because it means we've been watching the story of the wrong girl all along.