I watched Synduality: Noir in a previous season, enjoyed it, and was looking forward to the second season. The second half of the series does do a good job of changing up the dynamic, exploring a few more of the world’s mysteries, and bringing the series to something of a satisfactory conclusion.
There will be spoilers below the cut.
Synduality: Noir’s second season shifts the threat of the series from the various monsters, called Enders that roam the wasteland between settlements, to a much more human threat. In this case it comes in the form of Ideal, the organization that the series not-Char, Black Mask, works for – one which considers itself the salvation of humanity, while its leader, Weisheit considers the Magus who are allies of humanity, and potentially the humans who are not directly part of Ideal as obstacles to his goal – with Weisheit wishing to wipe out the Magus along with the Enders, and really not giving a damn if the humans on the surface are killed in the process as well.
With this, Kanata and Noir are also joined by a second personality inside Noir – Mystere – who is almost the Asuka to Noir’s Rei, in terms of being a loud and boisterous Tsundere, though without Asuka’s self-sabotage issues (or the reasons for that self-sabotage). Additionally, we get more developments around Ciel, and with it Black Mask and Schnee. The general thrust of this season, in particular, is Kanata, Noir, and Mystere using the knowledge that Mystere possesses from their previous master to finally figure out how to get to Histoire, and hopefully use the knowledge from that location to improve the lot of humanity – while Ideal in general and Weisheit, in particular, trying to use Histoire for their own ends.
I do appreciate having a different, human threat in the series to change things up. That said, while Weisheit gets some solid development, Ideal as an organization does not. We don’t get a sense of what Ideal was up to before Weisheit took over in an ostensibly bloody coup. We don’t get the scope of the coup, nor do we get a sense of if anyone escaped being purged. It feels overly restrained, all things considered, both in terms of this series and other, earlier anime I’ve seen.
This is also somewhat aggravated by the fact that I think Ciel is done dirty by this season. Towards the end of the series, and her character arc, it’s established that the relationship between Ciel and Weisheit is in reality incredibly abusive, born out of Weisheit’s hatred for Magus as a whole, and his desire to exterminate all of them. While Ciel does manage to get one over on Weisheit, it’s ultimately a very temporary setback, and comes at the cost of her life. While I’m not in opposition of the use of the heroic sacrifice as a concept in fiction, it does feel like a bit of an odd twist on the whole Women in Refrigerators concept, with a female character sacrificing herself out of love for a male character (even if she’s also doing it to save another female character) – and getting killed by an abusive, bigoted male character. Again, I’m not saying you can’t write this into a story, it’s that if you’re going to do this it shouldn’t feel like the character who sacrificed themselves was done dirty by the sacrifice. They should get something over on the abusive antagonist equivalent to the level of the heroic sacrifice, as an immediate direct result of the sacrifice, as opposed to casting a light into the future for the abuser’s eventual theoretical overthrow (which is how it turns out here) – especially if it’s at the hands of a male character.
I still enjoyed the series, and should it get a physical release, I’m definitely going to pick it up, but that particular issue does end up making it a little less enjoyable than it could have been.
Synduality: Noir is available for streaming on Hulu/Disney+.
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