A critique on the movie that made me cry, because I'm too emotional. Contains major spoilers for all the media in this franchise.

This might appear as a dunk on the creators, but it's really not. The media was deeply emotional, but when the emotions fade and logic comes back, you get to understand why the movie is a logistics nightmare for schoolkids.

"5 Centimeters Per Second" doesn't make sense

Let's break down why. First off, the events in the media themselves.

According to the second novel by Arata Kanoh, they had a healthy communication through their letters across the last two years of their middle school, which simply means that they were still in a good state of being and in a healthy relationship, so to speak.

The problems and the pain started after they started high school. For being the weirdly emotionally intelligent kids that they were, they fell into a pit of despair thanks to their distance. Which makes absolutely zero sense because if they paid attention, three years after their high school would have been college, and the most colleges are in Tokyo which means they could have happily reunited. More on this later.

So yeah, they were two emotionally mature for their age kids in a long distance relationship so to speak. And then somehow, within a few months of them starting high school, all their letters go south and they are in emotional anguish (the basis being that they wanted to preserve the purity of the night at Iwafune). You'd come to think that kids who had way more emotional maturity and sense in them as compared to their peers would do better than that. They don't.

Instead, their aggression to preserve their relationship without acknowledging their feelings for each other leads them to, you guessed it, stop writing and communicating. Guess what, they also had email all this while. Like, the entirety of high school. Faster communication. More communication. It was basically an instantaneous messenger for them for the time, for all practical purposes. And both of them just let it be instead.

For zero particular reason, Shinkai decided that Akari moving on would be the best course of action, even though she's the one who fell in love first as a child. That just made a lot of people actually really hate her. It was a weird move, she loved him enough for enough period of time that she'd want to have a proper emotional closure to it (she's emotionally mature, remember?) and despite that, she just pretends he never existed? Despite the fact that she kept visiting Iwafune station for reliving the memories of that night? Now THAT'S low.

This is emotional absurdity from two people who are supposed to be really mature. To top it all off, in the final arc, at the train station crossing, Akari just doesn't wait for the trains to pass and just leaves. Really? The accepted belief is that she didn't want her old feelings to resurface, which is yet another contradiction to her supposed maturity. And the same goes for Takaki too. He suddenly heals from this and moves on? My man, she and you stopped communicating in high school. It has been 13 years since. Get a grip in life. Again, supposed maturity, missing.

Not to mention that during the 13 years, social media became a thing and if Takaki was so insistent on not forgetting her, he could have just looked her up. Pretty sure the media mentions that Takaki is a very smart "programmer". He should've been able to find her, if anything.

The lore behind the lore

Most people don't know this, but Akari's family name, Shinohara, is also the name of a former voice actor and ex-girlfriend of Shinkai, Mika Shinohara. Personal emotions and motives behind the movie? God knows. And Shinkai knows. Unless he forgot all about it like Akari did.

No, but seriously, this is too much of a coincidence.

The practicality of it all

This shows kids who are emotionally really mature. I have a singular problem with that. Kids are fucking stupid. Even high school children. If they really were as mature as the media portrays them to be, then my points above hold.

No middle school kid would really be aware of what love really entails. The feelings, sure, they'd have, but I find it hard to believe that they had the emotional maturity to comprehend the full grasp and then for one of them to travel through a long distance to meet up.

So, what now?

Nothing much, rant pretty much over. I also want to do a self plug and talk about my own fan-fiction on AO3. Here. It's an ending I think they deserve. Having said that, a lot of my critique would probably seem too logical for a movie meant to be emotional. More importantly, if it was supposed to teach us the art of letting go, it did a very bad job at that. I mostly think they just wanted to create an emotionally driven story and really succeeded at that. But yeah, I'll continue to have my gripes, since I'm such a sucker for happy endings and romance.