Concrete Revolutio

Episode 24

Can you believe that Concrete Revolutio is over? I feel like I've dedicated so much time to figuring out this always ambitious, often confusing, usually rewarding behemoth of a show, that it being over feels like a major accomplishment. It's certainly the end of something big for me. Still, here we are, and now it's time to piece together the series' finale, and evaluate Concrete Revolutio now that we've seen it through to its end.

The final episode opens, puzzlingly, with the world after it "ended." It's two years after the final battle, known as the "Okinawa incident," and Fuurouta and Kikko are still around at least. The world has largely moved on from superhumans. It seems a little strange to me that Concrete Revolutio spoils its own ending, but of course, this doesn't reveal what happened to Jiro or Emi, and it gives us a lot of new questions to answer going into the last battle. Jumping back to the past, we find the superhumans mobilizing for one side or the other. Most of them side with humanity and Satomi, planning to fight Jiro, Emi, and the yokai. Over the course of the episode, we learn a little bit more about why Jiro picked this side, and more about our villain, Satomi.

Concrete Revolutio has a knack for introducing explanations that you didn't think you needed until you do. I was a little puzzled when this final episode started digging into the "why" of Jiro deciding to fight alongside the kaiju and yokai, something that felt self-explanatory (he is a kaiju, and his strong sense of justice would take offense at the way that Satomi planned to exploit the more animal-like "superhumans"). Still, in retrospect, there were signs in his behavior that didn't fit this assumption. He kept giving in to his kaiju powers to the point where he didn't seem to know who he was attacking, and Jiro's lecture to his enemies emphasized making sure that their sense of justice allowed for shades of gray. It turns out that Jiro's grand plan is borne out of love (or at least affection) for Kikko, to make himself into the ultimate monster so she can kill him and regain people's good will and her own previous idealism. This makes sense from the standpoint of Jiro's self-loathing, but having such strong feelings for Kikko came out of left field, another example of Concrete Revolutio's difficulty with developing its main characters. If the relationship between Jiro and Kikko, or even just Kikko herself, had been better explored, this would have felt like a natural progression instead of just plausible. Major character revelations like this should provoke something more than "Hmm, I guess that makes sense."

The episode does much better with its villain. Satomi is not a particularly original character, but the reveals surrounding him do manage to answer a lot of lingering questions. Initially, Satomi is surprisingly fine with the yokai and kaiju using Jiro to leave for another world. It turns out that he plans to use the more humanoid superhumans he claimed he would spare as fuel in their place. His true motivation is to cleanse the world of all superhumans because he sees what they represent as childish; he thinks society can only "mature" into a more adult point of view without them. Essentially, Satomi rejects Jiro's ideals of justice, thinking that a more cynical take is a more "adult" one. My first instinct was that this was a flimsy motivation for the amount of effort Satomi has put into eradicating superhumans, but there's more going on with Satomi than meets the eye. Like so many of the anti-superhuman fanatics on this show, Satomi is a self-hating superhuman himself.

In fact, he got his powers like Jiro did: Satomi was the child at the impact site of a meteor that would have destroyed a whole country, but he absorbed its power and saved everyone. He has far more control over his powers than Jiro does though, able to make himself stop aging at will. Jiro turned his hatred for himself into a drive to help others at his own cost, but Satomi decides that everyone like him should be eradicated instead. Concrete Revolutio leaves these last few things to implication, and they're certainly hard emotions to imagine from someone who possesses the swagger and overconfidence of Satomi. Still, it's a rare level of character-writing for this show, and Concrete Revolutio pulls it off with less than an episode's worth of character development. It makes me wonder how fascinating Satomi could have been if they'd started exploring him earlier in the show's run.

Luckily, Satomi's similarity to Jiro means he can also be used as a portal to another world. This allows Emi and her subjects the ability to travel there without sacrificing Jiro, but first Satomi pours his Bio Destroyer on Jiro, causing his arm to start warping as the Fumers encased in it are destroyed. This leaves Jiro at the mercy of his kaiju powers, but he gains enough control over them to throw his transformed self at Satomi, fulfilling his goal of becoming a hero of justice. Satomi's portal opens, and Emi and friends, along with Ullr, set off for the new world, as Ullr says goodbye and gives Kikko permission to grow old in this world. The show jumps forward again two years, and we see how superhumans like Kikko and Fuurouta still improve the world in small ways with their powers. Jiro has become some omnipresent spirit for justice, and as the world potentially faces a new threat from outer space, Kikko knows she will see him again when justice must be done. This final episode isn't quite as bombastic as the one that preceded it, but it was still powerful thanks to its themes and well-animated battle scenes.

With that, Concrete Revolutio comes to an end. That means it's time to walk back through it, and ask ourselves: what does it all mean? What is Concrete Revolutio ultimately trying to say? It has dangled so many ideas over the course of its run, but its conclusion is surprisingly simple. Concrete Revolutio is ultimately a defense of the optimism that superheroes represent and the kind of justice they fight for in their stories. Even when recognizing that justice must be complicated and gray—as Jiro does in this episode, showing how much he has grown since the beginning of the series—that doesn't mean justice isn't a worthy goal. That's why the final villain is a cynic who hates superhumans and sees them as an impediment to society's growth. Of course he's wrong, because excessive cynicism can be just as childish as excessive optimism. Holding on to hope and a belief in justice even in the darkest circumstances can be a mark of maturity, requiring experience, compassion, and resilience.

Despite being so heavily influenced by Watchmen, you could say Concrete Revolutio comes to the opposite conclusion. Watchmen uses its historical context to explore how much worse the world would be with superheroes in it, how they make it more violent and put too much power in the hands of just a few people, exacerbating existing problems. Concrete Revolutio covers a similar time period, showing how superhumans influence social changes, but the world mostly stays the same in spite of their presence. Superhumans can raise the stakes, but it's still the same battle. Instead, they give people something to dream about and hope for, by creating the possibility that one person can change the world for the better. They also help people believe in justice, as powerful beings fight purely for their beliefs without being corrupted by outside influences. Of course, alignments become muddy anyway, because superhumans are ultimately ordinary people, and many others want to exploit their powers, but superhumans can still exist as an ideal. Some of them will always resist the systems around them, like Jiro, or will be built in a way where they can't help but resist, like Earth-chan.

By the ending in 1976, where Fuurouta and Kikko meet again, the remaining superhumans largely seem to be living for their own ideals. With the battles between superhumans and humans largely over, Satomi's dream of a superhuman-less world seems to have come to pass, with people forgetting them except as fictional characters. (That's a little puzzling for something that happened only two years ago, but okay.) Still, it's not really the world he envisioned. Superhumans still exist, but without outside systems corrupting them, they can go back to their original role of just existing to help people out. We see this with Kikko quietly using her Meteortail to help a falling baby back into its stroller. The characters still wonder if the other world might be better off than the one they live in, with their global conflicts over issues like energy, but we know that isn't true; our world has its own complicated international conflicts. Maybe they'll be able to change the show's version of it as ambassadors of hope and justice, giving people something to believe in who will help them to make it better.

I still think that Concrete Revolutio took an overly long and winding road to get to this message. It's been cool to see how the show ties all its loose ends into its final act, but that doesn't mean it needed to dangle every single one of those in the first place. There were even parts of this final episode that felt like they were purely there to give everyone something to do (like Jaguar's role in the final conflict). Worldbuilding for its own sake can be fun, even in thematically-driven shows like this one, but Concrete Revolutio's was never strong enough on its own to justify all the time spent setting up (then scrambling to explain) various little details and minor characters. Meanwhile, most of the major characters apart from Jiro were hard to empathize with as people and not just vehicles for the writers' ideas, even after the credits rolled on this final episode. I'm still not entirely sure why Emi and Kikko are so drawn to Jiro or who Kikko even is outside of her attachment to him, for that matter. Emi does at least have a commitment to being leader of the yokai and a concern for their rights to motivate her as well, but even that is underexplored.

Still, I'm willing to forgive a lot for a show with interesting ideas, and Concrete Revolutio has consistently delivered. Every episode has been like a puzzle to solve, trying to piece together all the references and metaphors to find out what the show is trying to say. Not many anime reward viewers with that kind of intellectual engagement on a regular basis. That made it one of my favorite shows to review, even when I didn't love the episode itself, because it's always such a rich show to analyze. So I was initially disappointed that it settled on such a simple theme in the end, but I think Concrete Revolutio would be weaker if it tried to go for something highly specific rooted to its time period. It used superheroes like the ones in 1960s-70s anime to explore why people in such turbulent times were attracted to these simple heroes of justice. At the same time, it needed a takeaway that would resonate with 21st-century audiences, and I think that Concrete Revolutio's faith in hope, justice, and the goodness of humans (super or otherwise) more than delivered. I will miss writing about this show, but I'm happy that it went out on such an uplifting note.

Rating: A-

Concrete Revolutio is currently streaming on Funimation.

Rose is a music Ph.D. student who loves overanalyzing anime soundtracks. Follow her on her media blog Rose's Turn, and on Twitter.