“Yeah, but that girl would have been killed if I hadn't done that!”
Hikaru Shidou Quotes
2 quotes from Magic Knight Rayearth, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“One day, I will want to return to Cephiro again. Not out of regret, but because I'll want to see what the new Cephiro is like.”
Additional recorded source links
- ANN · Editorial article: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/magic-knight-rayearth/blu-ray-memorial-collection/.112585
A fair complaint about this closing line is that it is too tidy. Eagle Vision dies on the way to this finale, Alcyone is swallowed by shadow in this one while calling for Lord Zagato, and a heroine announcing that she has no regrets can sound like the show waving its losses away. The answer is in what "not out of regret" is replying to. Anime News Network's Blu-ray review says the first season sends the girls home "feeling more depressed than satisfied" by their victory, and ANN's synopsis of the second season opens with Hikaru wishing they could go back and do something good for the land Emeraude protected. That return was a debt. This line cancels it. Shortly before, Hikaru told her friends that Nova was a monster created from her own heart, so she has earned the right to tell wanting apart from owing. The objection holds only if regret was the better motive, and the second season spent twenty-nine episodes arguing that it was not.
The three of them are hanging in a net because Hikaru kicked a monster, and Umi is scolding her for it. Hikaru does not apologize. She gives the reason, flat and unarguable, and Fuu settles it by observing that the monster was angry to begin with, the politest available way of telling Umi she is wrong. Episode 14 explains the reflex. Hikaru's family runs a kendo school; she takes lessons with the students and cleans up alongside them, she has three brothers, and she has never played a video game. She is the one member of the trio who arrived in Cephiro already drilled to act first with her body, so the line is less bravery than habit. That habit is also why her friends keep paying for her decisions. The net is the first of those bills.