Nick Creamer’s view on Kiznaiver here is something I think that’s shared by many of its viewers, myself included:
Learning the reason for Sonozaki and Katsuhira’s emotional issues was definitely a bit of a letdown; instead of their issues being reflective of their characters in some meaningful way, it was simply “the science stuff made bad times for everybody.”
[…]
“Why is Sonozaki so distant but emotionally curious?” “Because science did it.”
But science didn’t do it. Science didn’t take, operate on and torture children in service of some dubious programme to link emotions: scientists did. What’s missing in Kiznaiver and what makes the premisse too light to bear the emotional weight of the characters is the moral dimension. Apart from the two teachers, who were only low level caretakers in the original project and Sonozaki, we never get to see any of the people involved; even the thugs involved in the current iteration are faceless, hiding behind the costume of the city mascot. There’s no sense in episode nine or ten that the project was immoral, not tragic, that what was done to Sonozaki, Katsuhira and the seventeen other children involved twelve years ago wasn’t an unfortunate accident but a deliberate crime. These were people who were given unnecessary, unconsented to medical treatment and who were tortured as a result; worse, these were at best five year old children who could never hope to comprehend what was done to them.
But the show isn’t really interested in exploring this moral dimension; key to this is its treatment of Sonozaki. A victim of the first Kizuna Project, she’s the instigator of its second incarnation, its driving force, with the tenth episode being her crisis point as the experiment is over and the powers behind it want to withdraw funding, which leads to a suicide attempt on her part. It’s clear that we’re supposed to be at least somewhat sympathetic to her, to see her as a tragic figure rather than as a villain. That she pushes her fellow victim Katsuhira down the stairs to test the Kizuna system on their first meeting, after having kidnapped and operated on six new Kiznaivers without consent, then follows it up with both physical and mental torture through the expedient of repeatedly shocking Katsuhira every time somebody answers a question “wrong” –all in the first two episodes– is largely swept under the rug. She doesn’t have to atone for her actions, instead the conflict is the struggle to re-establish the emotional connection between her and Katsuhira, with the worst consequence she’s had to suffer so far being Katsuhira’s disappointment in episode six.
This seeming refusal to even start considering the moral consequences of the Kizuna project is what makes it into little more than a macguffin, a plot device without weight or merit. To me it’s a flaw, something that unbalances the show as it attempts to explain the history behind the project without acknowledging the responsibility of the people behind the project. There cannot be an emotional payoff with this backstory if the show can only answer that “science did it”.
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