The Completely Incomplete Storyline of Key the Metal Idol
In the beginning, we meet Tokiko Mima, nicknamed Key. Key is a robot, the only one of her kind. She is like a human in every way except she cannot show emotion, not even a smile. She has been "created" by her grandfather, and attends school like a normal girl. Her body is "upgraded" yearly to keep up with her age. But her life is thrown into chaos with the death of her beloved creator. In his dying words - recorded on a tape to be played on a Walkman - he tells her that she might become human, if only she could find enough friends, such that would cry for her. By his calculations, she will need 30,000 friends. Key is driven to fulfill this goal. She is pushed by the certainty that she will terminally malfunction soon and pulled by her desire to be human. As there are not quite a hundred people in her village, she strikes out for Tokyo.
Of course, this would just be another forgettable anime if it weren't for the fact that Key is more unique than she knows. The company that sponsored her grandfather wanted him to create a fist sized power source for androids. They conduct the field tests of these experiments in Tokyo, letting their robots (code named PPORs, which means Psychologically Powered and Operated Robot) roam the streets. Too bad they have the tendency to go insane and kill people. The PPORs are in search of a miniature power box, a geist powered engine, if you will. Little do they know that Key already has one. The operator/man in charge of the PPOR project, Sergei (D), is hunting something down. But though they don't know it is Key. He is the epitome of evil, he's ruthless and maniacal, at least when compared to typical bad guys in anime. When I get to Ajo, then you'll really see some egotistical megalomania at its best. The PPORs are vastly superior in both strength and numbers to Key, but she has the power to make them malfunction unconsciously, which I'll get into later.
From the get-go, Key has only three things going for her: her friends, Tomoyo Wakagi (her grandfather's mysterious assistant and something of a bodyguard for her), and her own wondrous powers. So when she first arrives in Tokyo, Key is approached on the street by a pornographer. Key doesn't know that's his trade, and she explains that she's in Tokyo to find 30,000 friends. Sakura - her only childhood friend - just happens to deliver a pizza to the pornographer's place of business. When she sees Key, she immediately whisks her away. There is a short pursuit by the pornographers to retrieve Key, but they're stopped by Wakagi-san. Key ends up staying with Sakura. When Sakura goes to her night job as a video store clerk, it is here that Key meets Tataki Shu'ichi, the president of the Miho Utsuse fan club.
Wakagi is extremely mysterious, and sometimes it's best you didn't know how he does half the things he does. Tomoyo is sort of her field technician/bodyguard, as I mentioned before, keeping watch over her vitals by remote and interceding to save her. He completely beats Sergei senseless in one fight. Throughout the series, there are several awesome power struggles between the two. It's something to look out for.
Most important of all is Key's inner power. During brief moments, when people around her are praying or cheering for her, she gains nearly unlimited abilities, such as levitation, super strength, and pulverizing PPORs. When she is around PPORs she disrupts them, while exhibiting odd behavior. A good example is when she throws a rose with sufficient strength to completely impale the PPOR Miho, although she didn't understand how or why she did that.
As with any anime that has a background-driven story, the majority of Key's background is done in flashbacks. At first, I was a little confused by the back story of Key's grandmother and mother, but when I finally re-watched the entire series after I bought the Complete Collection, I figured it out.
Key's grandfather/creator Dr. Mima, met Key's grandmother Tomiko, whilst on a business trip to Mamio Valley to see the local priestess' annual puppet dance. Dr. Mima's life's work was to make a robot come alive, a realistic android in the twentieth century. An old colleague of his who grew up there brought him down. Dr. Mima and his colleague were trying to see if the dance would help them figure out how to move robots realistically. Instead, Dr. Mima fell head over heels for Tomiko. To his colleague's surprise, Mima proposes marriage to Tomiko at supper the next night. At first, she didn't want anything to do with him. Eventually Tomiko accepted, and the new family moved to Tokyo where Mima tried to study her powers. While there, she became weaker and weaker. This all takes place before World War II.
After living in the city for awhile, they have a baby daughter, whom they named Toyoko. While holding her, Tomiko is stronger in her ability to move things. Mima sees that, but has no explanation for it. After his lab and equipment are wiped out in WWII Tokyo, they move back to Mamio Valley. Mima begins experiments on Toyoko to see if he can learn the secret of her powers. What he doesn't realize is that the source of the power is the people's gel around them. Gel is the very essence of how a human lives, survives, functions. That's as about as simple as I can explain it. The Mamio priestesses are able to absorb gel from the people around them and use it for positive purposes. An example of this is when a rock star feeds off the energy of the crowd before him. According to the Key saga, the rock star is gathering the gel from the crowd and therefore his performance is stronger, louder, etc. On another note, Key is the last living descendent of Mamio priestesses.
Around this time, Ajo of Ajo Heavy Industries shows up for the first time. He's a very shady character, and how he found Dr. Mima is currently unknown. What he does know that Mima is on to some sort of advanced robotics. Ajo is very powerful and manipulative, but Mima can only hold him off for so long by giving him his old research. Tomiko has continued to grow weaker, so Toyoko has to do the festival puppet dance that year. During the ceremony, Tomiko passes away. When she returns home, Toyoko vomits up gel, the first time anybody has ever seen a physical manifestation of it. Tomiko tells Mima that it's what he's always been searching for. Gel is the physical medium that people's energy is stored in. The gel she vomited up was the last of her mother's gel. Gel is called geist by Ajo and his bumbling idiots.
Sometime later, Toyoko becomes pregnant. Funny thing is, she isn't and never will get married. She has Tokiko (Key) out of wedlock. In fact, the father is Sakura's father (more on that later). Before Toyoko dies, Mima and Wakagi harvest her gel, enough for 30,000 people. In order to preserve the gel from Ajo and safeguard young Tokiko, Mima and Wakagi infuse all the gel into her. The process has the unfortunate side effect of leaving Tokiko catatonic, very robot-like. Mima encourages the belief that she's a robot in order to trick Ajo into believing that there are no more Mamio priestesses left.
Now on to my favorite character. Sakura Kuriyagawa's life defines tragedy. Her father left when she was very little. Before he left, Kuriyagawa-san was saying that the priestess of the shrine had chosen him to be the father of her child. He pretty much went insane or was already a victim of a mental illness, we, as viewers, are not sure. Her mother died while she was in middle school, so Sakura had to leave Mamio Valley for Tokyo. There she has to work three jobs just to make ends meet: traffic cop, pizza delivery girl, and video store clerk working the night shift.
When Key arrives, Sakura puts everything aside to help Key become human. The man she loves (Shuichi) is completely oblivious to her affection; he thinks of her as a friend and doesn't see the love in her eyes. *weeps* In the final version (aka episode), Ajo kidnaps Sakura to trap Key, and extracts all of her gel. When they finally rescue Sakura-chan, it's too late - Sakura dies by nightfall. I was incredibly upset with this part of the story. It almost seems like Sakura was created just to suffer. Even her death was beyond her control, one last capping injustice to a lifetime of them. When Key finds Sakura's gel at the end, I almost hoped that Key would use it to bring Sakura back to life, but obviously that's not possible. One of the most endearing quotes I've ever heard is during Sakura's death scene. Key tells her, "Don't fall asleep, you'll never wake up." Key has been told all her life that if she were to close her eyes for an extended period of time, she would die. She's lived that philosophy her whole life and to have Sakura close her eyes would defeat her thought behind it. It's assumed that at the end of the series, Key is still in possession of the last of Sakura's gel. So a part of Sakura lives on in Key.
I'm also not real sure about the pasts of Wakagi and Sergei. You may also notice that D doesn't really look Japanese. My friend who got me into the series suspects he's German. I get the feeling that they were at one time mercenaries or soldiers together, either in World War II or even Vietnam, but the brief flashback scenes where they fight make absolutely no sense. All you see is some grass blowing in the breeze, and maybe the sound of helicopters. At one point Ajo referred to Wakagi as Sergei's double. It's possible that Sergei and Wakagi were both once soldiers under Ajo, but there just isn't enough to go on with that train of thought. You may be asking who survives the final battle. Major spoiler.... when Key is murdering Ajo's PPORs in the final concert, whilst she's singin' "Key no Lullaby", D is wriggling on the ground like a dying worm and Wakagi freaks out about this. He says something like "why is he being affected by the destruction of the PPORs?" In the final struggle though, Wakagi puts a block of C4 on D's forehead and it blows up.
I really love this series. The story is so appealing - there's something of Key in all of us, something lonely and misunderstood that could use 30,000 supporters. Everyone should see this, even if just once.