This is an anime that is merely a romance in disguise. You might come into this show thinking, ok, so this is going to be a harem for Yukito where he is sort of romancing or getting close to Misuzu, Kano, and Minagi, but of course we know he will ultimately choose our female lead, Misuzu, by the end. Simple as that, right?

For this anime, that is simply not the case.

What it is does not entail a romance, not by any means I don't believe. What builds this story and drives it home (the infamous "finish line" if you will) is all these twisted, complicated familial bonds that which begins the very cause for the events to follow.

It all begins with Kanna, a winged woman and a priestess who wants to reunite with the mother she has been separated from. This quest to find her mother, which is inherently a fragmented relationship because of the defilement of the mother's body. This decision for Kanna to essentially walk away from her responsibilities as a priestess leads to the curse that will poison generations upon generations of girls who will reincarnate with Kanna's soul and be destined for loneliness; trapped within an endless cycle of bad dreams and loneliness, never able to grow close to any living soul without ultimately dying as it happened to Kanna... She had forsaken the solitude and isolation of being a priestess of no close connection to any person alive for the chance of a normal life with her mother, and for that "selfishness" of abandoning her duties of instilling prosperity on all the land and keeping the people safe, those who were once her subjects had laid that curse upon her and shot her down with arrows, never to fly again...

Flash forward and we are introduced to three girls: Misuzu, Kano, and Minagi. What do they share in common?

They all yearn to fly through the sky.

Yukito's role in their stories here is to save these girls just as his ancestor Ryuuya devoted his life to protecting and saving Kanna. However, it isn't Yukito's relationship to these girls that is vital to the story, but the relationships these girls share with their sisters and mothers; motherhood, after all, is the driving theme here.

First, we start off with Kano and her story. I'm not certain if it is a coincidence or not that her name resembles Kanna's so closely, but we will just put that observation aside for here. As what happens to Misuzu and the rest of the winged girls, Kano befalls a mysterious illness that no one can explain.

At a young age, Kano is traumatized by the death of her mother and is left in the care of her older sister to raise her, in which she becomes a motherly figure to her. The death of her mother is something that affects Kano very, very deeply, especially with guilt; even though she was just a baby when she passed away, she wishes so badly more than anything to have gotten the chance to meet her mother and to apologize that her birth had been the incident that had taken her life away. She yearned to fly so she could find her mother out there in the universe somewhere and tell her she is sorry.

Said illness Kano contracts is actually the possession of a spirit, a mother's soul who cannot rest because the townsfolk tried to force her into executing her baby, in which she in turn gives up her own life for. Before Kano is finally set free and can return to her normal life afterwards, she is able to meet her mother's spirit and is comforted by her, because her daughters were her greatest blessing. Kano's mother and the mother who possessed Kano's body are quite the same, because both of these women died in the place of their child.

Moving onto Minagi, she too has a story that is centric around her mother and her sister. Minagi's mother had essentially lost her mind and fell into a state of hysteria after miscarrying Minagi's little sister Michiru. Minagi wanted a little sister so badly, and in the process she ultimately lost both her mother and sister: her mother could not even acknowledge her anymore, so much to a point that Minagi's mother firmly began to believe that Minagi was actually Michiru, and her eldest daughter Minagi having not existed at all.

So here we have both Minagi and her mother, one completely delusional while the other is forced to play the part of somebody who she's not. What first heals Minagi is the imaginary conjuration of a young girl named Michiru that Minagi befriends, a girl who becomes just like a little sister to Minagi. Once that bond heals her own soul, Minagi is able to heal her mother's as well; Minagi's mother suddenly wakes up one day feeling like this huge part of her is missing, and suddenly remembers her eldest daughter and all of that love she's always had for her in the past despite her grief. Though Michiru is forced to disappear now that she had healed the broken mother-daughter relationship, her spirit lives on in the new little sister her father shares with his new wife, which turns into yet another happy ending between mother and daughter, sister and sister.

Then, of course, there's the most important girl of all: Misuzu.

Misuzu never had a sister, nor any sibling at all for that matter. Yukito, however, becomes an older brother figure to her, because I genuinely cannot view them as anything less or more than that. They form a very special connection, one that Misuzu lacks not only from all of the peers around her, but who else you may ask?

Her mother. Or, well, her aunt Haruko, the mother figure in her life just as Hijiri serves for Kano.

This story between Misuzu and Haruko becomes far more important than I think anyone could have expected. Sure, we could see throughout the series in bits and pieces that the two have a very "I do my thing you do your thing," out of each other's business kind of relationship, but when we finally go back and revisit the sequence of events from the beginning onward through the perspective of Ryuuya, there's so much more going on for Haruko beneath the surface that none of us could even begin to imagine.

On the outside, Haruko is just a drunk and a workaholic who doesn't care one bit for Misuzu, but this is merely all a front solely due to the fact that she's afraid of getting attached and being forced to give her back to her father, because what turned into a 10 year "babysitting" job was only meant to be temporary for the sake of Misuzu's health.

Sure, I kind of assumed that Haruko did care about her to a certain extent; after all, she is her niece and they have been living together just the two of them for this long. But to discover that Haruko was genuinely yearning for her and to be her mother so badly that it was killing her every single day was just absolutely astounding. All she wanted more than anything was to go back and do everything differently, everything possible to make Misuzu feel warm and loved the way she's always wanted to. But despite these feelings of hers, Misuzu's fate of withering away from loneliness had been set in stone long before the beginning because of Kanna's curse.

However, even though Misuzu's health deteriorates quick and leads to her young death, she still had managed to be saved from one aspect: the loneliness, and the separation from her mother.

Kanna, more than anything else, wanted to be with her mother and to form a close and loving relationship with her; that was her desire. As Misuzu is dying, Haruko legally becomes her adoptive mother and they get to play house for a while. Misuzu starts calling her mom, and they spend so much time together in what few days Misuzu actually has left. Haruko goes out of her way to make all of Misuzu's dreams come true, like attending the festival and seeing the ocean. And though Misuzu loses all of her memories after the last dream, she regresses into a child and ultimately grants Haruko the chance to be the mother to her that she's always wanted to be up until Misuzu's dying breath wrapped up in her arms.

Air is not by any means a romance in my books, but a sad and gut-wrenching and beautiful story about motherhood: mothers who isolate themselves from their child to protect them from their tainted soul, mothers who sacrifice themselves in the most gruesomest ways to preserve their baby's life, mothers who hold and protect their child even beyond the grave, mothers who can only be saved by the love of their child. And there are those who are sisters and aunts who have no choice but to step up and take that motherly role, and they too do just as much a phenomenal job.

This anime certainly isn't without its flaws and comprised of many confusing elements that even I still can't quite understand, but at the end of the day it is still a beautiful and heartbreaking story that deserves a lot more love <3