>>281731301
Also note that while Ichise does die, his ending is not necessarily a sad one as he achieved amor fati (love of fate, being made flesh through Ran). In a Nietzschean or existential reading, he's the only character who's an actual hero, which is why the penultimate episode starts as a movie mythologizing him and he carries out an inverted hero's journey by going to the "Hades" of the surface world where the soulless living exist.

People sometime postulate Yoshii as a Nietzschean hero but in reality he explicitly tells Ran not to tell him or anybody else what his fate is. Ichise on the other hand doesn't desist when Ran tells him his fate is as bad as it could possibly get. This is also why there are allusions to cycles by the Gabe people.

To quote The Gay Science:
>What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."

This is what the flower in the ending (Ran) represents. Ichise having that thing that made life worth it.

Like other Chiaki Konaka heroes his main quest is about self-knowledge and therefore knowledge about his world.