this episode reveals a lot about mizisua's dynamic, the truth about mizi's character and how it has developed over the events of alien stage. i feel like the development of mizi's character has been so brilliant...the reveal that she knew the truth the whole time. how she has constantly been putting up this facade of a naive and happy girl to appease others. how even the audience has fallen for this facade. the guilt she feels from faking happiness and from being the last one surviving, manifesting into this narrative that she manipulated everyone she knew in order to make it to the top. out of guilt and trauma, she convinces herself that the boy from anakt garden is right, that she IS using her good looks and niceness to use other people for her benefit. to put other people down in order to keep herself alive. this leading to her believing that she doesn't deserve to be saved and that her love for sua wasn't strong enough, when clearly, sua's death has brought her so much pain and grief.

the killing blow for me was the scene of sua saving mizi from the cliff. people have pointed out how it's reminiscent of a scene from revolutionary girl utena. and as an avid mizisua and rgu fan, this of course has completely altered my brain chemistry .

if this reference is intended (which is quite likely due to how similar the scenes look, how influential utena is in wlw media and personally, i think it was such a Choice to make sua's hair long in this scene specifically. and the crazy thing is that this is the scene in rgu where utena and anthy confess that they haven't been honest with each other and they feel like they've just been using each other the whole time. and this is. Quite relevant to mizisua !!!), then it is basically confirmed that mizi had tried to end her own life before sua had caught her. and since mizi directly saw how much ending her life would cause sua pain, she never wanted her to be in such pain again. as such, she allowed sua to sacrifice herself for her. mizi feels guilty for this, she feels like she is exploiting sua, but what prevents her from stopping sua is not only the desire to keep up the facade of their happy relationship, but also the desire to prevent sua from living a painful life alone.

of course, she couldn't just stand aside the entire time while sua sacrifices herself. despite the fact that mizi says she just allowed sua to do what she wants, there is a scene of them arguing right before round 1. she confronted sua about her plans and tried to stop her. not only that, but at the end of the video, we see that she actually ran to sua and hugged her while she was watching those tapes of alien stage. but whether mizi knew the truth or not, sua would still choose to sacrifice herself for her.

additionally, i noticed how the scores between mizi and sua in round 1 were really close, having a difference of only 1 point.

i found it strange that their scores would be so close, considering that we were made to believe that sua was trying to lose in this round without mizi knowing. at first, i thought this might just be a small oversight, since this was the very first episode. however, the reveal that mizi knew the truth the entire time leads me to believe that perhaps she also underperformed intentionally, in order to let sua win. thus, they were both underperforming and their performances were similar in quality. but, of course, mizi had won in the end. perhaps sua had been so practiced to the point of being able to control the score even in this situation. perhaps she knew exactly how many lines she needed to give mizi in order to let her win. perhaps her plan worked out just by chance. regardless, this is such an interesting little detail when put in the context of recent events.

turning back to the karma mv, a common theme in the video is contradiction. as i've mentioned before, mizi paints herself as this passive actor in sua's sacrifice, but she has obviously interfered in the past. as she becomes overwhelmed by grief and rage, she believes that she is inherently a bad person, that everyone is, and that other people are only the cause of suffering. i think that at her breaking point, she had lost faith in humanity entirely. despite this, when she hears till's heartbeat, she is immediately desperate to ask other people to help him. the minute she realizes till could survive, she dares to have hope again. additionally, despite how mizi had ruined the rebels' plans for escape, her actions resulted in the happiness of the children from anakt garden. the explosion of the missile turns into imagery of the children of anakt garden floating happily down. the missile ends up killing many aliens in the audience, while the children cheer on.

considering vivinos' previous works, a bleak ending was very likely, but i trusted her to do it well. and while i would say that the ending of alien stage overall is more hopeful than most of her other works, mizi's ending in particular is a rather bleak one. after 7 years, she is still missing and we have no idea where she could be now. when we last see her, she is still in despair and grief, guilting herself over not being able to save sua.

despite this, i am quite happy with this ending. mizi's character was written so beautifully and given so much complexity in this mv. i think it makes sense that we would not be able to see her heal and process everything properly after all that has happened to her. but although mizi had become so cynical about humanity, there was a glimpse of her faltering in the end, and i still have hope that maybe she can one day accept that none of this was her fault and that her love for sua was never exploitation, but the greatest gift she ever received.

if you've made it to the end somehow, thank you so much for reading my silly rambling....now that im finally done yapping, please take a moment to enjoy the insanely beautiful stills from the mv. religious imagery in wlw media my beloved ❤️

(p.s. i'm just noticing that this one looks similar to a crying mary statue, which i used as a reference for one of my drawings of mizi....that's so crazy....)