Aquarion is a franchise that is very near and dear to my heart, I have watched and rewatched every previous entry and I love them all greatly. Genesis makes up any for any flaws with its extremely charming mix of fantasy and scifi and silly directing, Evol feels like a much more realized version of Genesis, and Logos although suffering from being too "normal" in comparison still keeps the Aquarion spirit of "seeing a weird, probably stupid idea to the very end and making the absolute most of out of" perfectly. So of course, you can only imagine my excitement when MoE got announced back in march of 2023

I had my doubts when we got more info. I had this looming fear that in grand 2025 weird anime were no longer possible, I has placed all my hopes on Shuumatsu Train being the savior of the industry a few months back and that turned out to be pure ass so that killed any hope I had for anything interesting ever coming out again. But then it came out that the show's artstyle would be half kids' anime half PS3 era JRPG cutscenes and my doubts slowly subsided

Myth of Emotions is everything I could hope a shorter, modern Aquarion could be and much, much more. It's a show that can be very weird and obtuse but in an EXTREMELY intentional way. Its presentation is fantastic and the multiple ways it tries to confuse and misdirect the audience are nothing short of genius, so let's start with that

MoE uses a lot of big technobabble pseudoscience terms to describe its world. The mandella effect, string theory, quantum physics; a good portion of this show is dedicated to trying to puzzle out a logical, mathematical explanation to how this universe works and how to fix it, so what do you do when you require mathematical precision? You leave the job to computers of course! In this case DEAVA, the super powerful AI which has the answers to everything, why make hard choices when you can just input numbers and get the best number out of the number machine right? Don't try to question why or how, that's like quantum mechanics or some shit you don't get it... Doesn't that sound familiar? Like it's some sort of blind belief, or even worship? This is where one of MoE's genius moments comes up

Perhaps more than any season prior, MoE draws huge parallels between the story happening today and the story that happened 12000 years ago. The errors the characters committed then haunt them now, their overcompensation (ripping out their wings) made them unwhole human beings today (As a side note, I really like how every character in this show feels kinda off and disconnected from everyone else, because it just makes sense right? How do you expect to act "normal" when you're missing some of the bare essentials of a human being?), but perhaps the most important and also least likely parallel that MoE draws is the one between the worship of the goddess and the reliance on DEAVA. Sure, maybe if you sacrifice enough people to Mulua Satene she will finally make the soma bloom again; and sure, DEAVA will always give you the best possible course of action to victory (allegedly, because fun fact Aquarion ended up with a miserable 40% win rate); but following the goddess/priests teachings WILL lead to lives being lost, and if DEAVA determines that you must kill 1% of people to save the other 99% she will tell you to follow that course to the end. A very strange but interesting parallel is drawn between religion's attempts to explain a complicated, merciless world with mystical blind-belief terms and AI's overoptimization and a whole internet's worth of knowledge.
Do I think MoE is all about the dangers of AI and/or anti-religion? Partially, they're definitely amazing examples to illustrate the show's main thesis however

MoE is, in short, anti-easy-answers. Some things are just really fucking complicated and sometimes attempting to extract and clear, concise, mathematical definition out of things somehow removes them of any meaning, emotions and the human mind are obviously the main example presented here. Paradoxically MoE also seems to dislike complicated answers, I mean sure you can probably explain all the out-of-time phenomenons with whatever flavor of theoretical physics you like, but isn't that too an easy answer in a way? Maybe getting there is hard but once you have the God formula you can just predict everything right?

What an "easy answer" then entails is something that can always be explained and always makes sense. Humans don't make sense, emotions don't make sense, we act in impulsive and unpredictable ways and that freedom to not act according to an efficiency algorithm is what makes us us. This is where MoE's other main talking point comes up: The show doesn't seem interested in answering "what makes us human" but rather why rejecting that which makes is human is wrong. Sure, we don't like being scared, sometimes our empathy ends up hurting us or we end up being manipulated, and love can be a very scary things when you think about it; but can we be whole beings without those feelings? Without fear we just end up getting bored of everything, without a bit of self-esteem we end up indistinguishable from suicidal, without empathy we can barely connect with anybody. When we try to remove that one or all of those variables from a human we end up with either barely sociable sociopaths or cold, calculating and unfeeling artificial intelligences. Maybe incomplete human beings can live normal lives, and maybe a computer can give you every result you want, but the former will always live somewhat disconnected from the world around them, and the latter cannot consider emotional distress into its equations

So, if easy answers can boil down to using utilitarianism to solve complicated moral questions, what's a complicated answer. Simple really: They either don't exist or don't have a definition. Why would we risk so much to save Momohime AND the world AND the mythical space when just letting Momohime die saves us all? Because we love Momohime's of course, why do we love Momohime? Great question, good luck explaining it, you probably can't. Some things can't be explained, they can be only felt, and just because the answer your heart comes up with is less logical or less optimized than whatever result a calculator can give you doesn't make that answer any less valid. Following your heart to the very end, even if you're in the "wrong", is still justice

And perhaps there's even MORE I can talk about with MoE, but I've probably gone for long enough. Myth of Emotions, for any flaws it may have, more than makes up for it with how ambitious and how uncompromised it is. It tells exactly the story it wants to tell and it has no intention of holding the viewer's hand. It's very quickly becoming my favorite Aquarion season and I'm beyond glad that somehow, 20 years into its history and 4 shows in, Aquarion manages to still be Aquarion