Tsubasa 28

CLAMP – Del Rey – 2009 – 28 volumes

UGH. Wow, so things got way more convoluted than I could have possibly imagined. Time travel was really scrutinized and explained in a very explicit, complicated way, and I… just didn’t enjoy it very much. I felt like I should be able to write a thesis after I finished, or something. It was all very technical. And unfortunately, the characters were lost in the explanation. They were the best part.

Was it worth it? I hated the later volumes, because the explanation for the simple things that I enjoyed early on was near-incomprehensible. But I do love the characters, and I loved all the cute stories and dimension hopping, and I loved Fai. The first half was worth it, at least, and if you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound I guess. And it’s hard not to grow attached to something you’ve followed for years.

For non-fans of CLAMP, it’s probably not worth it in the end, and the experience in the early volumes is definitely enhanced if you have at least Cardcaptor Sakura under your belt. There’s a lot of cute shoujo moments pulled from CLAMP’s earlier series, mixed with a lot of swooshy abstract shounen action. It’s pretty gender-neutral, and for everybody, but it’s hard for me to believe that the crowd this was probably originally intended for could wrap their heads around the explanations.

Now, I’m going to cut and talk myself through this finale. If you don’t want to be spoiled silly, don’t read below the cutoff.

Spoilers…

Spoilers…

Spoilers…

Okay. So the wish Fei Wang wanted was indeed for Yuko to live. But it wasn’t really his wish. Fei Wang wasn’t a real person, merely the manifestation of how badly Clow Reed didn’t want Yuko to die. And because Clow was so powerful, she wound up stuck in her shop and outside space and time, very much alive. She says she stayed there in order to help Sakura and Syaoran, who would eventually help her out of her predicament and restore the order of normal space and time. And she eventually dies. Yuko’s real series, XxXholic, doesn’t explain any of this. Nor does it really go into the specifics of why Watanuki decides to fill her role, but admittedly I prefer the emotional fallout of Yuko’s death as a reason, rather than… whatever was going on here.

So. Syaoran’s parents are also Syaoran and Sakura. When the “Syaoran” and “Sakura” copies are recovered by Yuko, Yuko gives Syaoran and Sakura a choice. Be together and suffer, or be apart. They decide to be together, no matter what the cost. They eventually give birth to… Syaoran. And he meets Sakura in an alternate dimension. And they realize that time is repeating itself, and they are stuck and forced to forever loop over and over again. Somehow, “Syaoran” and “Sakura” are part of this loop, possibly because they were doing the journeying and Sakura and Syaoran were the parents, but apparently they periodically switch positions in an extremely cosmic and messed-up chain of events where one gives birth to onesself over and over again if you are Syaoran (or conceived, I guess, since he’s not a girl).

I’m not sure how the tube figures into this, or whether there was a third pair of Sakura and Syaorans stuck in the tube, or what. It seemed like there was a third pair, but that the third pair was Syaoran’s parents, but maybe they were “Sakura” and “Syaoran,” killed and brought back by Yuko since they were merely images and not alive, but who gave birth to Syaoran? Anyway, there was a tube, and both copies and originals got stuck and broke out. Then they got stuck in an alternate dimension when they decided to break the cycle and stop Fei Wang’s magic. Then “Syaoran” and “Sakura” were absorbed into the originals, since they had already been killed and weren’t real.

Because Syaoran can’t really give birth to himself, and “Syaoran” and “Sakura” no longer exist, Syaoran’s existence in the normal flow of time is an anomaly since nobody could have given birth to him. So is Watanuki’s, since he was created to fill Syaoran’s place in the real world (at the moment, I have no idea why this is, but I’m sure it was explained earlier and I’m just too lazy to look it up). To minimalize the anomaly, Syaoran decides to travel dimensions, never staying too long in one place, and Watanuki decides to stay in Yuko’s shop, in one place, forever, possibly outside the flow of space and time.

So Syaoran, Sakura, Fai, and Kurogane wake up in Clow, and they all remember. Then Syaoran decides to go on an adventure, and Sakura stays behind. They love each other. Fai and Kurogane have very little to do with the resolution.

The end.

I mean… Syaoran keeps conceiving himself. That’s… really, really weird.

And come to think of it, why Reservoir Chronicle? Was that tube the reservoir? Or the underground lake/cave that time was stopped in and Sakura was stolen from?