Can if be that the crow doesn’t represent someone Rakka knew, but rather is carrying over the feelings of someone she knew who is still alive out there? That one would fit in with the belief that crows carry over things left behind on the other side of the wall.

It was not a coincidence that the crow followed Rakka to Glie. The conventional explanation is, it’s an entity who cared for Rakka. As we see, her problem was that she developed a psychosis of loneliness (and most likely jumped off a building); dealing with that is the nature of her second chance in Glie. Therefore, the crow is her teacher, parent, sibling, or a dog — someone who was unable to reach her while she was alive and heal her. The nature of the exception that allowed the crow to enter Glie is a curious thing. In particular if that someone dided too (now you see it’s easier to assume a dog).

I’ve been thinking about this part of Michael’s comment off and on today. Why did the crows intervene? Is it because of the crow in the well? If so, doesn’t this make it a happy coincidence that there was a crow following Rakka to Glie (seen in her dream, for however once wants to interpret it) and therefore crows led her to the well? And that this event happened to cure her of the sinbound status?

I like Michael’s explanation, but I’m coming up with more questions than answers the more I think about it. This is not a bad thing, and I don’t promise to come up with anything better once I get a post written up compiling my collected views.

I’ll be putting together a post detailing my own views of why Rakka became sinbound (as part of a series of after-episode 13 posts), and it’ll be quite different from what you’ve presented.

No, no. Becoming sin-bound is something one does to oneself. We saw how it works with Rakka, back in ep. 7 and 8: her grief at Kuu’s flight led her to withdraw from the others, brooding over the loss led her to despair (at which point the dark spots appeared on her wings) and then her despair fed on itself (and the dark spots spread) until she was nearly suicidal — and then the crows intervened. One needs help from outside to escape the condition, but no outside influence is required to enter it.

This does raise the question of how Reki could be sin-bound from the moment her wings emerged. It might have been pre-natal, something Reki did as a human; but I prefer the idea that it was hatching alone, in a room full of junk (and sopping wet!) and then suffering a mysterious fever and the pain of crowning wings, that made Reki despair for her lot. Hence the importance in her mind that Rakka not be alone when she hatched, and that she understand what was about to happen; and hence her pleasure that Rakka’s wings, when they first emerged, had no black on them, but were an unspotted grey.