30-Day Anime Challenge
Day 12: Saddest Anime Scene
Saddest Anime Scene? I can’t guarantee the scene I’m about to talk about is the Saddest Moment in Anime History, but it always makes me get teary-eyed.
SPOILERS FOR YUKI YUNA WA YUSHA DE ARU UP AHEAD
Every so often, I watch one particular scene. It happens in Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru, (episode 11) when Karin finally accepts her friendship with her clubmates to be more important than her obsession and sense of duty.
It’s the lowest point of the series. Togo has lost her mind and does something really stupid, Fu and Itsuki are desperately trying to defend against the swarm of enemy grunts, and Yuna has trouble maintaining her hero form. Valiantly stepping up to face the horde of bosses, Karin declares that she’ll stop fighting as a Taisha hero and start fighting as a member of the Hero Club.
In Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru, magical girls can temporarily increase their abilities at the cost of giving up function of their body parts. During this time of great peril, Karin becomes a one-woman army all while proudly screaming out the five tenets of the Hero Club. Remember that she scoffed at how wishy-washy all the sayings sounded in an earlier episode.
To do so, however, she had to go into overdrive four times, which costs her her right arm, her right leg, her eyes, and her ears. At this point of the story, all of the magical girls are aware of the consequences of activating their power-ups, but Karin willingly sacrifices her body in order to make things easier for the rest of the Hero Club. She’s obviously scared of what’s happening to her since she freezes up whenever she feels one of her senses leaving her, but she swallows her fear and continues her rampage until she’s no longer able to fight.
It breaks my heart to see a middle school girl go so far out of love for her friends. The scene always gets me.
Which scenes do you consider to be the most sad? I’d love to hear about it in the comment section!
The Lily Garden 