Captain HOOK love's lock.

An older series again. It took me a while to track this one down, but I finally found it. Written by Ninomiya Ai (IM Label) this is once again a very twisted story. However except for the title and a few names it has little to do with the story of peter pan.


The series has two entries: Get off track and Genetic Aberration, as well as a third image song album called Stay a Fake. It tells the story of several characters that reside inside the city "GIALOCK". Mostly the story tells about Shibako and Ichi, who are both searching for a girl called Wendy.

Captain HOOK love's lock is by no means an easy story. To begin with it is advised to read the story introduction to get an idea of the setting on the official website, otherwise chances are you'll be majorly confused throughout the story. But rest assured, even with said knowledge you're guaranteed to get confused.

The story takes place inside GIALOCK, which is basically a prison for a certain kind of prisoners that have been sentenced to death. The concept is that they can live freely, but execute each other. At some point though, someone discovered that a person can be (re)born from the strong memories and will of another...

Get of track begins with a recording of an interview with Wendy, who has just killed her parents. Or her younger brothers (she changes what she says every few sentences). She says that she did it to protect her younger brothers from the abuse of her parents, or that said abuse was the only gesture of love that they had. At the end of the fragment however, it turns out that while Wendy constantly talks about her 'brothers' she only had one younger brother.

As is often the case with Ninomiya Ai her works the story is told fragmented, in this case through recordings of interviews with the prisoners on the one hand and the current actions of Shibako and Ichi on the other hand. In between there is a story about Ichi raising a dog with puppies which is partly metaphorical for the rest of the story. Because not everything is told you have to put together the various fragments to understand what is going on, which is puzzling at best.
  
Genetic Aberration continues in the same fragmented style. And in my opinion adds more questions that that it solves. While it does explain Ichi his backstory, it also adds more questions on other points, especially on whether Wendy is still alive or not. On the whole I liked the story, even though it is very vague and left me with a whole bunch of questions. I suppose it was simply the atmosphere that was so great.


The voice acting was good, although Wendy (CV: Mitsuishi Kotono) her performance in particular got stuck in my head. Wendy sounds incredibly innocent, and either doesn't feel that she did something wrong, or is so insane by now that she no longer understands the implications of killing someone. Either way, how she talks about things is chilling.

The only real flaw for me is that the story is so fragmented that it is really hard to understand. What is going on in specific scenes isn't to hard to understand, but how everything is connected or the bigger picture is bloody different to figure out. This is definitely a story that you might want to listen and re-listen, just in order to make a little more sense out of it.