But being able to let go is important too. Alice held on for a thousand years out of love, which is a positive thing. To continue the heaven metaphor, in Dant’s Paradiso the third sphere of heaven was Venus, named for the Roman goddess of love, and housed those lovers with a deficiency in the virtue of temperance. It’s as if Nasu is arguing that what she needed was catharsis, and that’s not the same thing as happiness.

And for what? She finds her happy ending, but cannot keep it. For a thousand years, she hangs on, devouring her own dream to survive. Alice turning back the pages every time means she never gets to the resolution.

But like all stories, happy or otherwise they end. Instead, fairy tales were allegories for children, cautionary in nature. Indeed, fairy tales are only associated with happy endings thanks to the works of Disney - they even gave The Hunchback of Notre Dame a happy ending, for crying out loud. But Alice’s obsession with sticking around to see Hakuno again - the happy ending - drives her to extremes. The promise that he’d win the war and come back down for Alice is well intentioned, but not one he could reasonably keep. In the Last Encore continuity, Past!Hakuno did not have to fight Alice, but that doesn’t exactly end well for anyone. It’s all very sad, and she symbolised the innocent you had to trample to survive in this barbaric battle royale. She was no less an unfortunate little thing, but there was no alternative to fighting her in the game. In the iteration of the Moon Cell Holy Grail War that was the original Fate/EXTRA, Alice was yet another opponent you had to defeat on your way to the top. But evidently he also wished to make a point about the obsession with happy endings, such is the nature of Nursery Rhyme. For one, this is Nasu, who saves his richest sadism to unleash on innocent children. Give them their happy ending, and let them be.īut this arc about Alice and Nursery Rhyme is not exactly a lighthearted story with a happy ending. Or perhaps it’s simply a supply and demand thing with an abundance of miserable little girls, the market for cheerful little girls boomed. But perhaps anime became over-reliant on the tears of little girls to fuel their drama engines and cause some sort of subconscious backlash. What choice did they have? As I talked about last week, their only role in the story is to suffer. Being a little girl in anime is suffering. For generations, anime built a tradition of abusing its little girls. I’ve come to understand why the Cute Girls Doing Cute Things ‘genre’ of anime is a thing, now.

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