Since this falls under spoilers...dragoongfa wrote:It's a little off-topic so I don't mind if you want to split it into an other thread:
The two plot holes:
SpoilerShowFirst the ending one, it's how they killed the Queerat Messiah, in essence the child thought that it was a queerat and when it realized that it killed a queerat it triggered the genetic kill switch that all humans have in them.
The plot hole is that the child already knowingly attacked and helped destroy a Queerat army made of tenths of thousands of Queerats, how come the kill switch wasn't triggered then? It could be that the child only destroyed the weapons of the army (something that is not made clear while the description of the dead queerats and their mutilations is parallel to PK attacks), however even a hostile action against a queerat should trigger an adverse reaction from the kill switch, how much an action that lead to the brutal murder and mutilation of tens of thousands of unarmed queerats. Hell the protagonist's own kill switch nearly got her after the child's death because she knew that the action she took would lead to said child's death.
Second plot hole and the one that nearly broke my suspension of disbelief:
There aren't enough children in the village for a sustainable population even before counting the culling. To have a sustainable population each woman needs to give birth 2.1 times before hitting menopause. The problem is that almost every family depicted is a lone child family, hell the protagonist is a lone child because her older sister was culled.
Then there is the culling itself which worsens everything in regards to a rapidly declining population. I think that the director didn't think about that as he tried to make the families look like the ones from contemporary Japan. Considering the setting and story they should be more like medieval Japan's where each woman had on average more than 5 births but due to child mortality the number fell to 2 or 3 surviving children per family which offered a stable population with a predictably stable growth.
This could be seen as nitpicking but I think that the story itself would be better served if there were far more children and their number visibly decreased as time went by (a plot hint for the viewer to notice), with the main cast not noticing it until they were hit by their own loses and confusion due to their tampered memories.
As the story stands now the humans are committing their own societal suicide and their society should have collapsed long before the time the story took place.
Saki is a bit of a different case. Because she has a developed sense of morality, she feels directly responsible for the child's death, which does trigger her death feedback until she can snap herself out of it. Extreme conditioning is a big part of the series, so I think it's plausible that the Fiend wasn't conditioned to accept responsibility for being an accessory.
The second plot hole is more implied than explained by the show. In Asahina's backstory where a Fiend crops up in her generation about 100 years prior to the series, you can see that they actually do have a modern standard of living, large classes and the like, at least as implied by the very modern looking school which contrasts the one the main cast went to. It's only after the fiend hits them that they pull the standards of culling way up and their population starts dropping precipitously.
The vibe I got from the series as a whole was that the only real danger posed to those with Cantus were their own children. The Fiend incident in Asahina's time cranked up the paranoia to 11 and their whole society is going through a massive eugenic effort to eliminate the prospect of Fiends from their population. The best way to do this is to have fewer children, reduce the population, and then only allow the members least likely to produce Fiends to breed. Smaller populations are easier to manage when it comes to weeding out undesirable traits, so I feel that it makes sense. The societal suicide and one-child families is a parallel to modern Japan though, where the population is currently declining.
Speaking more generally, I recently finished watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes for the first time. Best. Series. Ever.