Lost Kitten

Noir is my long time Favorite Anime.  Of every one off target of the week episode with no bearing on the main plotline the episode I consider the best is the 6th episode titled Lost Kitten.  It’s the one I think about the most intently.

And that’s no small feat since I love all of them. In the many times I’ve rewatched this show the only episode I’ve ever even considered skipping is episode 5 and it’s technically not a one off, it’s the one that names the villain organization.

Maybe you find that weird if you remember how in 2018 I misremembered the name of the episode as Snow.  But that just shows how great and memorable Yuki Kajiura’s music in this show is. Snow is the name of a song from the soundtrack that only plays in this episode since this is the only episode to feature any snow.

I shall spoil what happens in the episode for the rest of this post, you have been warned.

Our assassin protagonists have been hired to kill an old man living in some vaguely Eastern European city devoting his time and energy to helping all the poor and homeless people.  However decades ago he was a participant in an ethnic cleansing.  He has a pet kitten that Kiraka kind of befriends and so they bond some.

But we then learn that way back when he was a child his people were ethnically cleansed by the people he massacred later.  Mirielle talks about how that doesn’t make what he did forgivable and in the end Kirika kills him and he accepts his fate.

One of the themes of the episodes is clearly Violence and Revenge being a cyclical.  It’s a theme I see in Anime a lot but it hasn’t been unheard of western media.

But it’s a theme some online Leftists are uncomfortable with, it reminds them too much of the “Reverse Racism” BS of American Conservatives.  The righteous vengeance taken by the oppressed against their oppressors can never be morally equivalent in their minds.

The YouTube Channel M Laser History has a video on what happened to the Germans of the Sudetenland after WW2 called Germans of Czechoslovakia : What Happened?  The truth is what happened there is inexcusable, no matter how much you view it as payback for what the Nazis did.  I can’t prove that is what inspired this episode of Noir but I definitely think about it.