Summer staples are here! Beaches! Shaved Ice! Time Abnormalities! I’m not sure why that last one is such a staple, but here we are on Island.
Island is a 2018 anime based on a visual novel of the same name. 2018 is a little after the heyday of doing straight adaptions of seemingly random gal games like H2O. Not that Visual Novels – even ones with heavy dating sim elements – or anime based on them have gone away, but it’s not quite the schlock mine it was in the past. Nowadays if you want to make money with neither effort nor creativity, you go elsewhere. So, dated such as it is, and especially given that the game itself was a relatively recent 2016 release, I’d expect Island to do something new and interesting somewhere along the line.
I guess they do invert the genders of the opening trip-and-fall-into-compromising-situation event, giving a girl a face full of sausage rather than the guy meat buns in both hands.
So, even though we know basically nothing when we hit that point, let’s quickly go over the setup.
Island takes place on the fictional island of Urashima. If the name of this largely idyllic-looking yet somewhat backwards and isolated community sounds familiar, that might be because you’ve heard the story of Urashima Taro, a fisherman who was (per folk tale) rewarded for his kindness to animals with a trip to the fantastical realm of the Dragon Palace. After enjoying the hospitality a little while, he asked to return home, and this was allowed despite the host’s misgivings. Returned to the normal world with a magic box to not open, Urashima Taro found that hundreds of years had passed and the world he knew was gone. In despair, he opened the box and rapidly aged to a “proper” state, passing shortly thereafter. Whether this is a matter of folly or a kindness given to him by the Dragon Palace depends on who is telling the tale.
That legend is not really referenced in Island, but it might hint at some of the themes that await us.
So, the boy who was randomly naked on the beach? We don’t know who he is, and neither does he. He has a sense that he’s traveled time to save the girl, save the world, and maybe kill somebody, but seems conscious of the fact that even if this is all he “knows” it might be more of a delusion than anything else. He ends up going by “Setsuna”, so that’ll do.
This is still a visual novel, but how about those heroines?
The girl who gets what I assume to have been a fortunately flaccid introduction is Karen. She’s got blonde-ish hair and twintails, so if you guessed she’s kind of the tsundere of the lot, you get no prize, it’s obvious coding. She’s the daughter of the major, and therefore of one of the island’s three important families. Her biggest issues are that her mother ran off to the mainland five years ago, and that her crazy controlling father is crazy and controlling.
We will ultimately also meet the island’s miko, Sara. She looks like she’s ten but like all these heroines she’s supposed to be in her late teens (in fact, she turns seventeen during the story. Karen, for reference, is old enough to marry and becomes concerned with college entrance exams so presumably she’s a high school senior) and is the dirty-minded one of the lot. She seems to be a sci-fi nut who “knows” things about time travel theory as well as the island’s lore. Her big issue seems to be that she’s the sole survivor of her family (second of the big three on the island since time immemorial) after their shrine burned down five years ago.
Finally, there’s Rinne. Rinne is without a doubt the central heroine. I don’t know if she’s a railroaded pick or just the most critical, but she’s not quite as small as Sara and has long white hair so she’s obviously the plot-magnetic mysterious and possibly supernatural waif. Since she’s so plot magnetic there’s no sense in recounting her “big issue”, but suffice to say that things went down five years ago. After wacky hijinx involving Karen allow Setsuna to slip a summary deportation, he meets Rinne on the beach at night. This is where he becomes Setsuna – he recognizes her by name, and is able to reply that he’s Setsuna when she asks.
Thus, Rinne ends up taking Setsuna in and vouching for his amnesiac self as a hired housekeeper. Karen later picks up the same job since she needs to earn money to escape the island. Technically the head of the household is Rinne’s weird, shut-in mother, Kuon. But since Kuon seldom leaves her room and more often communicates by shoving notes out under the door than speaking, it seems like day-to-day affairs are more left to Rinne.
We then start off learning about one of Rinne’s big issues. She only goes out at night, and claims that if sunlight touches her, she’ll die. This is said to be because of a local illness known as Soot Blight Syndrome. Soot Blight is real in this universe (it’s fictional to ours, dear reader) and it’s said that the most severe cases can mean being basically allergic to sunlight. However, Rinne doesn’t actually have it, and has instead convinced herself that she does because of her fascination with a particular local legend.
Since the legend ends up being referenced a great deal, I might as well relate it. It concerns Rinne, Sara, Karen, and Setsuna. Not the ones we know, but appropriate names placed with the appropriate families. The three girls we know have those names because the families periodically reuse them. In the legend, Setsuna is not an outsider but rather Rinne’s elder brother, who she strikes up an incestuous relationship with. This is disrupted when a jealous Karen goes to a bad witch and has Rinne cursed to turn into a monster. Ultimately, the best countering good magic that Sara can accomplish is that Setsuna is sealed away to wait for Rinne to be reborn in a future where they can be together. Somehow this ties in to Soot Blight and a mysterious magic island that only appears in storms, it’s not totally clear how.
Thus, the first task that Setsuna is set to, with the help of Karen and Sara, is to convince Rinne to come out during the day so she can live a happier life. They do this by pretending to have fun on the beach where she can hear, eventually inducing her to appear…
The spacesuit gets dealt with after just a moment, proving that Rinne is not in fact a vampire. She accepts the truth surprisingly easily, but passes out from a fragment of lost memories assaulting her when they discover a mysterious locked shack on the private beach.
Oh well, enough of that for now, we have other heroines to putter around with.
Now is as good a time as any, though, to mention the visions in this show. Now and again, Setsuna will see something, either in a dream or a daydream daze, that seems to be the past, the future, or some sort of alternate world-line. Sometimes it seems pretty divorced from reality, like interacting with a womanly Sara. Sometimes it seems prophetic but wrong, like imagining having an intimate moment with Karen and then finding her in the hiding place from the vision to a much more tsun reaction. Other times, it seems like maybe they’re writing in other dialogue options from the game, like having a vision of telling Rinne off about her fake illness and her reacting badly to that, before the scheme to make her face reality.
Most of these glimpses aren’t very long, don’t amount to much, and seem to be in there to try to keep the time travel theme as a thread through the early episodes where we’re mostly not dealing with anything in the speculative fiction bracket.
First of those dealings is Karen, whose fight with her controlling father comes to a head. In a desperate moment, hoping to be banished from the island if it means she can leave, Karen asks Setsuna to “mess her up”. He, oddly enough, agrees to her request. Contrary to the charged setup, they don’t screw. Rather, they hatch a complicated plan to disrupt Karen’s arranged marriage (that had never been mentioned) with the help of Rinne, Sara (who is of course officiating), the groom (a random young cop we saw earlier), and even Karen’s wise older brother (who had never been mentioned before this).
Thus, Setsuna spirits Karen away to the mainland, where everything fascinates her and brother has given them the way to Karen’s mother. We learn that Karen’s mother passed away in a traffic accident, but that she ran away to be a researcher, not to elope with another man (the male name was a pen name of hers), and that she left an avid little apprentice behind to act as a link between Karen and her late mother.
Thus, wiser and with closure, Karen and Setsuna return to an island that has been forced to accept Karen’s way of living and hope for a broader future.
Next we turn our attentions to Sara, who is pretty concerned about Setsuna, Time Travel, and her upcoming 17th birthday. We learn that Sara was, until the fire five years ago, the “Child of God” whose presence seemed to prevent any children from being born with Soot Blight. Without that “power” she feels helpless and lost, like she’s not serving the island enough even though everybody seems to love her.
She also thinks that she’s got a personal relationship to time abnormalities. She has one surviving picture of her mother, who she looks pretty similar to except where the mom has big boobs (tying in to some of Setsuna’s visions)… down to the two having identical birth marks on their chests.
She thus believes that by the time she turns seventeen, she’ll be spirited into the past to get busy and give birth to herself, and by this point she believes that Setsuna is the destined father. She hopes to do her life over, with different results.
Setsuna decides to look into the past of Sara’s family and discovers the sordid truth, that her uncle (never before mentioned) was behind the “Child of God” nonsense, and forced her parents into a pretty awful mechanism for keeping the faith: since they evidently handled delivering babies on the island, they would use a hitherto unknown mechanism for diagnosing future Soot Blight at birth, and dispose of any infants who would become afflicted as stillbirths. After about ten years of this the parents got fed up with the infanticide scheme and resolved to end the bloody history of their family, burning themselves and presumably that evil uncle alive in the shrine, but protecting the innocent Sara.
History repeats itself as, on learning this by overhearing, Sara decides to burn down the shrine with herself inside. Setsuna goes in to rescue her and it ends up being the same mechanism that saved her the previous time: the shrine’s Go-Shintai, a treasure box that is evidently fireproof enough to allow the two of them hidden away within to neither burned nor suffocated nor simply cooked to death in the fire. Sara comes to with her birthday past and one more piece of family history coming to light, that the mark on her and her mother’s chests was not a birthmark but a brand, applied by the family to infant daughters.
With the love and support of all the people on the island she’s personally helped, Sara comes out of her funk and is willing to move forward happy.
So, since that about wraps the satellite heroines up, it’s time to go after our white-haired waif, yeah? Indeed, Rinne is up, starting as she and Setsuna seem to become romantically entangled. It doesn’t seem really serious but most of the other characters are concerned about the two of them screwing, so clearly they’re giving off vibes. They have some nice scenes, but Rinne decides that she has to confront her past.
This starts with that shack. When they open it up, she retrieves memories that she used to see a different Setsuna there until, five years ago, her father found them on account of them getting trapped by the tide. At first it seems as though dad killed that Setsuna and then succumbed to severe soot blight himself with the advent of dawn. By Rinne’s report she remembers jumping into the water after Setsuna, and then coming to, alone, in the island’s clinic.
It’s revealed, however, there’s more to the story than that. Rinne recovers memories that she spent time on an isolated island (the magic “only appears through storms” island) with her original Setsuna, who sent her back to reality alone. Our Setsuna, meanwhile, learns that Rinne was missing for most of those five years, returning to Urashima only slightly before he arrived, and that she should be 23 but neither her person nor her clothes had more than a few days of wear and tear, suggesting that there is an actual time abnormality in this anime.
Rinne angsts about how she left her real Setsuna to die. While she’s passed out, Sara theorizes that the island appearing in storms may act as a temporal wormhole. And, wouldn’t you know it, it’s a stormy night and Rinne was aware enough to overhear the scifi nut’s story, causing her to run off to the shore and commandeer a small boat to go back to the magic island, looking for redemption.
Setsuna follows after, rescues Rinne from sinking, and then goes ahead and lets the two of them sail into the time warp. They arrive on the island with a slightly damaged boat and a mission to look for Setsuna Prime. Unfortunately it seems the wormhole (if there is such a thing) works only one way, and the Setsuna found in the mysterious tech lair under the island (it’s a thing) is looking a little spookier than Rinne might remember.
Rinne naturally takes this a little hard, but luckily the first Setsuna’s diary helps her cheer up, at least enough to have a great montage playing at Gilligan’s Island until she works out her feelings. Finally, they’re ready to go, fix up their boat, and depart, only to have us jump cut to Setsuna waking up back in his room on Urashima just in time for Rinne’s funeral. Oops. Upon being slapped by Rinne’s mom he remembers that she decided to go and sacrifice herself when their return trip was caught in a storm.
We then get a whirlwind genre hop as we get an unknown time skip and Rinne’s mother recruits the drifter formerly known as Setsuna go get involved in her carrying on of the research Karen’s mother did, not into normal ocean stuff as we were told before but rather into OoPArts (Out-of-Place Artifacts) found the world over and associated with Urashima’s weird little three family fairy tales suggesting either more time abnormalities or a scientifically advanced source of phenomenal antiquity, the former (future people meddling with the past) being what they believe. Specifically, she has the pod in which Setsuna Prime sent Rinne back from the island, which stops time for anything inside it when turned on, allowing it to work as a cold sleep casket. Thus they decide to box up Setsuna for as long as it takes for a future time-traveller who can interfere with the past to pick him up and provide a conduit to save Rinne.
And if you think I pushed that out fast, the show does it in less than half an episode. So, fitting. It swerves so fast that if this weren’t set explicitly in 1999 for some reason I’d say you could pinpoint the exact moment where, elsewhere in the world, Haruhi got her powers and started rewriting things. Instead I guess it’s just the point where Haruhi starts watching the show over Kyon’s shoulder and utters “wouldn’t it be cool if…”
To be totally honest though, the show tried – it really did. It used Sara and her nonsense to attempt to maintain a time travel theme for seven and a half episodes of mostly puttering around with totally mundane (if too dramatic to really be “slice of life”) problems. I honestly don’t know how much more they could really have done, but even if the answer is truly “nothing” that just makes this an inevitable pain point, rather than not a pain point. In that way, it could be similar to the “lost in the deep end” opening of Kemurikusa. It being a forced issue doesn’t make it not an issue, but it does make it hurt a little less.
Still, okay, we’re now on Setsuna’s Wild Ride. Where does it end up?
We cut to the great underground empire of the unspecified future, full of suspiciously reused character designs and social regress that would make Warhammer 40k say “yup, that checks out” as a mega-church headed by Big Boobs Sara (identified as Sarah) hands out measly cans of rations to massive lines of petitioners, which include both Setsuna (our same one? In his past? After the time on ice? Eventually it’s revealed to be the latter) and a potentially extra-little, flirty, impish wrench wench version of Rinne (styled Rinné).
Underground rebels seemingly led by kid Karen (Karin) show up, smoke bomb the plaza, and start swiping food, which provokes the guards to begin shooting indiscriminately since killing starving lower class citizens is more important than there being a massive crowd of slightly less low-class citizens in the way, even over Sarah’s objections. She gets bludgeoned and knocked out by careless soldiers and ends up in Setsuna’s care. As she comes to inside the church where Setsuna brought her, Karin appears and decides to not listen to anything and attempt to knife fight Setsuna, running off only after kicking him in the balls.
This is five minutes folks. Welcome to new Island. It’s nothing like old Island. It even gets a new intro and a title card changed to “Never Island”.
And in Never Island we quickly get roped into this apocalyptic cloak and dagger nonsense. Sarah wants to help the undocumented children in the depths, and recruits Setsuna and Rinné to help since they’re sympathetic saps. They do a food delivery, but Karin has Setsuna kidnapped and tries to seduce him to get an in on the church. It turns out to be a bit late for that as church troopers show up to kill absolutely everybody in the depths. Karin, Sarah, Setsuna, and Rinné escape, but the others learn from Sarah that it’s Snowball Earth outside and there’s no hope, causing the seemingly mind-messed-up-again Setsuna to declare since he’s here to save something or other, he’ll save the City-of-even-worse-off-than-Ember.
That doesn’t go so well. Karin’s little rebel kids are slaughtered, Sarah is made a scapegoat and outlaw and then dies, and finally Karin herself dies. However, Rinné finishes her time machine just in time for Setsuna to get his memories back and explain everything. He also confesses his love to Rinné, which is weird and awkward. Rinné at least seems to recognize that the Never Island is a dead end, but before sending Setsuna back to the distant past to hopefully butterfly effect herself a different time period, she gives him a consummated marriage to remember her by.
And there are a lot of things I could say about that, like how we got a brief glimpse of this at the start of episode 1 with no context, or how it’s really damn conceptually uncomfortable given how Rinné is drawn and frankly even written, but instead I’m going to lean on the side of… given that idiot’s amnesia problems, maybe it’s for the best.
At least it’s only a couple of seconds, rather than getting really prurient with the cut.
Sure enough, Setsuna wakes up back on the beach, but now thanks to the shabby hand crafted wedding ring plot trinket able to remember the full details of his mission. Thus, he’s able to speedrun the Mr. Perfect route, resolving the issues of Karen and Sara with far less strife than the previous time around. He even gets Rinne through the worst of learning what befell Setsuna Prime, as apparently the magic storm island isn’t that magic and you can just go there with a real boat at normal times. The only problem seems to be that the memory of Rinné stands between Setsuna and Rinne, since he can’t reciprocate this Rinne’s feelings.
However, there has to be one last round of crazy when it turns out that Rinne’s mother is not the real owner of the identity she uses: she’s actually Rinné, who apparently sent herself back in time after Setsuna and missed the landing a little. She was apparently also pregnant (despite looking way older when she arrives in the past) with Setsuna’s child, who becomes known as Rinne when the real mistress of the house dies unexpectedly without a proper heir and Rinné is induced to take up the role. This kind of breaks Rinne’s heart.
Before we actually talk to Rinné, though, we learn that apparently the time machine isn’t a time machine, just another stasis capsule. Time is a flat circle, repeating endlessly. Or so they say, frankly the cosmology in this show makes no sense. Point being, Rinné angsts about being a MILF now, Setsuna still wants her, Rinne decides to insist her mom and dad hook up rather than going for the incest plot, and that lets them hook up and allows everyone (on modern-mode Urashima, at least) to live happily ever after.
And that was Island. Um… is the history loop broken now? Or are we just supposed to ignore the Fimbulwinter setting we were trying to set right? What happened in past loops? We saw things like Setsuna kissing Karen in some of his broken memories flashbacks, did he still ultimately get thrown in the stasis pod on her route? Why did Setsuna at least once get in the pod vowing to kill Setsuna?
For that matter, where did Setsuna come from? He seems to be a case of what I’ve best heard described as the Pocketwatch Effect. The idea here is that a time travel story is initiated by a particular trinket (a pocket watch) being discovered abruptly, which ultimately is thrown back through time at the end to land at the point where it’s discovered at the beginning. The existence of the pocket watch is a closed loop; it has neither beginning nor end. It has no origin, no creation, since its observed origin is also its fate. In theory, it should also age each cycle an amount equal to the length of the cycle.
Setsuna is the pocket watch: he enters the Urashima setting via “time machine” with his naked beach wakeup, spends summer there, enters the stasis pod, and awakens in the Never Island setting to ultimately be podded again. All the other characters, even Rinné, have definitive beginnings and ends. Rinné is born in Never Island and takes a pod to Urashima, where she presumably lives out the rest of her natural days. But Setsuna is neither born within the loop nor does he die. It doesn’t matter if it’s a history loop as is briefly spotted at the end or a proper time loop, when everything repeats so absolutely precisely, down to the very second a phone call is made, there should be another version of Setsuna if he was ever germane to either setting. It can’t be Setsuna Prime who dies in Rinne’s past, that’s pretty well established to be a different if kinda similar dude. I feel like that was the show’s out from this paradox, saying that Rinne’s existence, caused by time displacement, also caused the death of the germane Setsuna, but they don’t go there. I guess you can dodge Setsuna’s aging by saying there are a finite number of loops between the inception and the exit loop, so he’s only going through a countable number of summers and winters, but his origin is still an issue.
I guess in a sense it’s a good sign for Island that it’s forcing me to think about this speculative time travel stuff, as it means the show was sufficient enough that I’m mentally engaging with it, but let’s step back for a minute and take stock of the macro for the show.
The characters are… okay. I can’t really think of any of them that stand out as more than mediocre. Karen is a tsundere who doesn’t get a lot of time. Sara is a cloudcookoolander who doesn’t get a lot of time. Rinne plays the mysterious waif too straight. We don’t see a lot out of Urashima-phase Rinné until the very last episode, and all the Never Island characters are thinly and quickly sketched over the backbone of their Urashima selves. Rinné and Sara lead to some awkward scenes, but on the other hand, they’re not strictly bad as characters just… sometimes an author’s fetish bleeds through into non-explicit material in ways that are downright uncomfortable.
The story is pretty okay until Haruhi takes the wheel, but nothing great – it’s the same “work through the personal dramatic issues of these girls” you’ve seen in just about every VN adaptation to not have a stronger claim to fame. Once Haruhi takes over, there’s some real interest and energy to it… but you kind of have to admit that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense all the same. In addition to the pocket watch effect, why is Setsuna not found near the pod that held him? Since pods are variously repaired and reused, should they be suffering wear and tear, or is Rinné building some fresh every time? How did the mess get started without information traveling across the eras? Rinné relies on ancient knowledge in Never Island and ancient artifacts in Urashima to accomplish the time travel events. Why do clothes disappear but rings don’t?
Sorry, I shouldn’t be going down that rabbit hole again but… the show really does invite it. Suffice to say like most things Haruhi comes up with there’s not a lot of sanity to be had in the last act of Island.
I’ve asked in the past whether I prefer a show that’s effective but on autopilot, or one that’s a mess but that’s at least unique and memorable. Island manages to be both those shows, stapled together.
It’s not a good look, but when you get down to it… Island is perfectly watchable. If you find that the first half starts to get kind of boring, the complete insanity of everything after Rinne dies is probably a reward worth waiting for. If you were grooving with the more normal material, it does sort of just exist on its own without the later stuff messing with it. And in my mind, both the slightly dull standard and the madness it becomes are tolerable in their own rights.
From me, Island gets a C. It’s a drastically uneven piece, but that’s part of the charm, and unless you get offended at some very brief moments of rather inappropriate relations, there’s nothing here that’s really bad, just… off kilter.