rushthatspeaks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks) wrote2022-07-27 08:32 pm
rushthatspeaks) wrote2022-07-27 08:32 pm
Made in Abyss, again
So back in 2018 when I watched the first season of the anime Made in Abyss (2017), I wrote it up (bottom review in the post) as a work which I thought had a great deal of value, but which is also inherently from a narrative viewpoint that is so disturbing that I completely understood why a person might not want to watch it.
TL;DR:
-- stunning art that ranges from Ghibli to Giger within seconds
-- some of the best fantasy worldbuilding I have ever encountered (in anime I have seen to date, it is beaten only by One Piece)
-- the best score and incidental music of its year and several years surrounding it, by Kevin Penkin
-- great character writing, with a real sense of stakes and difficulty and kid protagonists who behave like real kids
-- a narrative gaze that is, although no character in S1 has these tendencies in any way, fetishistically pedophilic to the point of being intensely, uncomfortably obvious
-- a narrative delight and revelry in the injury and pain of its protagonists
And I said I'd watch season two when it came out.
In between 2018 and now, three feature-length Made in Abyss movies were released, and for various reasons I did not watch any of them at the time. Season two, Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, is airing now. The week before the first episode came out, I watched all three films in order to make sure I was caught up.
The thing is, most feature films associated with television anime traditionally do not advance the plots of the shows. Either they're stand-alone, non-canon adventures not meant to have any effect on the television status quo, or they're artistically re-cut versions of the actual TV anime. These are intended to showcase the prettiest shots and give the casual viewer enough information to step into the show at the next airing season, with a couple of short new scenes added to satisfy the existing fanbase. In other words, inessential, and not necessarily much resembling what many people think of as a feature film.
In recent years, this has started to change. The Shounen Jump darling Demon Slayer found itself with a very awkward amount of manga left to adapt given the timing of when the anime seasons aired versus when the manga came out, and somebody also realized that there were some fight scenes that could really use a larger screen and the budget that gets devoted to a theatrical release. All right, they thought, maybe we can make our existing audience go to a theatre or risk missing plot. It was one of the hottest manga franchises in Japan at the time, so they decided to take the risk-- and Demon Slayer: Infinity Train was beyond a smash hit. It racked up box office numbers legitimately comparable to things like the Japanese release of Titanic. Audiences loved the quickened pacing and ludicrously pretty animation. And other anime series have begun to follow suit; earlier this year, for example, I watched Jujutsu Kaisen 0, another Shounen Jump movie which neatly solved the problem of adapting a prequel/side story that would have completely derailed the pacing of the anime of that particular property, but which the series' fans really wanted to see adapted.
The first two Made in Abyss features are standard old-school re-cuts of the first anime season. I watched them because I had not rewatched the show since originally seeing it, and I kind of get the point of doing this? It certainly freshened my memory. I would not have wanted to pay theatre prices, and of course a lot of the finer details got glossed over, but I remembered those finer details better for having seen the major points go by again.
The third Made in Abyss feature film, Dawn of the Deep Soul (2019), is plot, and must be watched between S1 and S2 in order for S2 to make any sense.
Okay. So. Dawn of the Deep Soul.
Whoof.
This is hard.
One of the reasons I resorted, above, to recap and industry explanation and general contextual nattering is that it is very, very difficult to write about art that fundamentally hurts me. I mean, my first draft of that sentence had 'hurts you', generalizing the effect, taking it away from my personal feelings and into the overall audience.
After finishing the movie, I sat and stared into space for several hours, trying desperately to figure out whether Dawn of the Deep Soul, a masterpiece on every level, is a work of art that I consider it moral for someone to have made. Trying to decide whether its existence is evil. This is not a question I generally find myself having to ponder about art. I come down on the side of making art, even if the intentions behind making it are evil (and these, I really believe, are not). But this one, I had to think over.
Amazingly, the pedophilia isn't the problem. I mean, it's there. It's no worse and no better than in S1.
I came to the conclusion that it is good that the film was made, because the movie taught me something new about the nature of evil, which does not happen often, and which is one of the things I would, ideally, like art to do.
I also came to the conclusion that I deeply, deeply pity the mangaka for having the misfortune to be himself and having to live in his own mind, a state of being which he is navigating with as much grace as possible under the circumstances, and quite possibly in the only manner that would not cause him to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Without going into plot spoilers, the best way I can describe the thematic argument of the film is to say that the mangaka is not just into pedophilia. He is into pain. He is into fear. He is into coercion and degradation. He is into dirt and disease and decay. He is almost certainly into taboo things partly because of the lure of the forbidden, but he is also into filth for the sake of filth, and I mean literal filth as well as metaphorical. The fetishes that society in general finds most disgusting and horrific, the worst porn you can imagine lurking out there on the internet in the depths of the worst humanity has ever had to offer? That's what this guy is into. The worst of it. No, worse than that. And he seems to be hard-wired for it.
So he puts all that into his art.
And then he argues, look, it's bad that I'm into this, although nothing I can do will change it. But I am putting it into my art because I know the difference between right and wrong; indulging this in art means that I will not indulge it in real life. And because I behave morally about my urges, and because this art is a consensual experience, I'm going to argue that, though I may be unfortunate, I am not an evil person, and I have every right to make art about this, no matter how unpleasant or repulsive anyone else finds it, and no matter how emotionally troubling or even traumatizing.
You want evil? He'll show you what real evil can look like, as opposed to the sum of his own kinks, and let the contrast make the point for him.
Enter the villain of the movie.
I have an odd psychological hangup surrounding the villain of the movie. I cannot remember his name.
He is so horrific and so triggering that I have blocked it out. Whenever I see it written down, I recognize it as being that guy and being that guy's correct name, and then I promptly forget it again. I think of him as 'that motherfucker', a term I wish I could revise, because it gives him far too much respect.
Said villain, by the way, is not at all sexually violent-- has nothing at all to do with sexuality, and his horrific physical violence is within rational control at all times and is not driven by any of the urges from the id that I have described in relation to the mangaka. That's kind of the point.
So I've seen many portrayals, in various forms of art and media over the years, of villains who are supposed to be beyond the concept of good and evil. People talk about Hannibal Lecter this way. Various other villains. What's generally meant by that is that these villains have completely rejected the codes of morality held by the societies in which they live.
This is the first time I have ever seen a villain who, when someone brings up to him the immorality and cruelty of his actions, takes a moment to stare in confusion, because that never crossed his mind, because it would never occur to him that that was relevant. And who then decides that it isn't relevant, and never thinks about it again. It isn't that he's rejecting societal codes. He'd have to care enough about them to make a decision on the matter in order to do that. It is that the entire concept that causing other people pain is bad is one that has been so ignored by his own version of morality that he not only doesn't care about it, but can't understand why other people do care in the .5 seconds he thinks about the concept before returning to his plans.
His own morality is simple. Anything that causes him to be able to progress farther down the Abyss and return with more information about the depths is good. Anything that hinders his progress downward must be made to serve him, and hence be made good, by any means necessary. Period. It is a monomaniacal religious and intellectual obsession which consumed his whole being long before he is ever introduced into the narrative. He uses himself exactly as ruthlessly as he does other people, not that that helps anything.
Since he is a genius and has brilliant organizational skills, he is able to function competently at a depth of the Abyss which most people die before they come close to reaching. He has gone down until he hit a barrier beyond which he cannot go without being unable to come up again, and has been trying to find a way around that barrier for a very long time. (Time goes... strangely in the far reaches of the Abyss.) Unlike anyone before him, he is able not only to continue living at the point at which he has stopped, but to communicate with the surface readily, and even to go back and forth between the surface and the place he is stuck. Yes, this is a violation of one of the major existential rules of the Abyss. I said he used himself ruthlessly, and the thing he did to himself to make himself able to go up and down as far as he does at will is, in fact, complicated and nasty. Not that that helps either.
Anyway, he's in continual communication with the city on the rim of the Abyss, although I have no idea how much he tells them about what he's actually doing, and is, for them, an inexhaustible source of new information, new artifacts, and new ideas about how to progress further. What this means is that they have essentially turned the area he is stuck in over to him. He can do anything he wants there, not that anyone up top could have stopped him anyway, and he has, essentially, an unlimited budget and fund of materials from above. I mean, the man installed a fucking elevator. His own private kingdom. His own private army. All focused entirely on the sole purpose of getting him further down, and then getting him, and/or the information he finds lower down, back up again.
There's a bit in Terry Pratchett where I believe it is Granny Weatherwax who says that sin starts with treating people as things. This man sees people, including himself, so thoroughly as things, as tools, that he is incapable of seeing them in any other way or for any other purpose.
Sure, I've seen other villains who will do anything to achieve their ambitions, or so their narratives tell us. But it isn't usually literally anything. And they usually have to consider whether or not some horrific nastiness is a thing they're willing to do. And they usually have some amount of id invested, in some direction, in the concept of cruelty, either enjoying causing it or disliking what they see as the necessity for it. This guy does not have the id to spare for that. The only emotions he has point straight down. He has never doubted himself in his life, and is not capable of doing so.
I'm not going to go into the things this means he actually does, or that we find out he has done, over the course of the movie, except to say that at one point I shouted HOW MANY WAR CRIMES CAN YOU FIT INTO TWO HOURS?! at the screen, and then thought, I guess this isn't in the context of a war, and then thought, no, my original exclamation stands.
And it's not just body horror, the physical use of people as tools, that he works with. That would be bad enough. No, everyone in his city, all of his subordinates, absolutely, genuinely love him. Because he wouldn't allow their minds to work any other way, or they might not be as useful to him! And what he'll do to get them to that-- and he doesn't have access to magical Abyss-y mind control or anything of that sort, he uses entirely methods that are plausible in day-to-day life as we know it--
He takes no pleasure in this sort of manipulation at all, except insofar as it furthers his goals. The thing is, that makes it worse, because on an intellectual level, most of the other characters find themselves respecting him. His goal is so purely itself that, because it is the goal shared by every other person who has made it down to that level of the Abyss, he is able to get otherwise decent people to do incredibly horrific things, simply because they are awed by his level of dedication and astounded by the amount of real knowledge he has discovered.
(Gee, I wonder what sorts of causes and ambitions that could be analogous to in real life.)
So going up against this guy are three battered and extremely traumatized twelve-year-olds armed with what they can carry.
This is a bit of a spoiler, but... they don't win.
They only sort of win.
They sort of win because they manage to arrange it such that he will get more information back to the surface by letting them go further down than from anything else he can think of doing with them. They are not able to save anyone else from him. They are not able to stop him, or to slow him down. They are not even able to preserve their own bodies and minds from his manipulations.
All they can do is get past him, and they can only get past him by being in collusion. But they share his monomania enough that, to them, it is worth it. At least, worth it enough. None of them can think of themselves as good people anymore, afterwards. He destroys a fundamental part of their innocence, and possibly of their selves. It dies, right there on screen.
Dawn of the Deep Soul is one of the darkest pieces of fiction of any sort that I have ever encountered.
The thing is, I saw instantaneously that people can be like this, and that a person from earlier in my own life in fact was, except that the monomania he was focused on was providing satisfaction to the kind of id-driven horrors that the mangaka is into, thereby uniting the two types of problem. It explained so much about that person, who, luckily, had no budget, though he was also, unfortunately, pretty clever. I find myself thinking of the movie villain as a kind of saint in the hierarchy of hell. There are people like this. There really, really are.
Anyway, S2 picks up directly after that, and has an actual pedophilic rapist appear briefly in episode one just so we can all be clear on what a total petty little piss-ant he, and that kind of person in general, is when compared to the sorts of depths humans can actually sink to, because said rapist is only a physical problem.
S2 is now proceeding to do something thematically else entirely, but since it's still running, I have no idea what that actually is yet.
Every week I watch the episode and think to myself huh, that wasn't so bad, very little traumatic actually happened in that at all, and every week I then see an episode summary just listing events which occurred on screen and realize that my standards have been completely reset for this series and it continues to be fucking horrific. With, of course, incredible moments of luminous and numinous beauty, grace, and redemption, and the best soundtrack of the year.
Sigh. I am invested now, of course, and won't stop watching. I was completely unprepared for the intensity. But, after the movie and S2 so far, I now believe something about the mangaka that I never thought could happen when I first heard the concept or through the entire first season of the series: I believe that he will finish the story, and they will reach the bottom of the Abyss.
And I believe that it will live up to the journey.
Do I recommend this show?
Fuck if I know.
TL;DR:
-- stunning art that ranges from Ghibli to Giger within seconds
-- some of the best fantasy worldbuilding I have ever encountered (in anime I have seen to date, it is beaten only by One Piece)
-- the best score and incidental music of its year and several years surrounding it, by Kevin Penkin
-- great character writing, with a real sense of stakes and difficulty and kid protagonists who behave like real kids
-- a narrative gaze that is, although no character in S1 has these tendencies in any way, fetishistically pedophilic to the point of being intensely, uncomfortably obvious
-- a narrative delight and revelry in the injury and pain of its protagonists
And I said I'd watch season two when it came out.
In between 2018 and now, three feature-length Made in Abyss movies were released, and for various reasons I did not watch any of them at the time. Season two, Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, is airing now. The week before the first episode came out, I watched all three films in order to make sure I was caught up.
The thing is, most feature films associated with television anime traditionally do not advance the plots of the shows. Either they're stand-alone, non-canon adventures not meant to have any effect on the television status quo, or they're artistically re-cut versions of the actual TV anime. These are intended to showcase the prettiest shots and give the casual viewer enough information to step into the show at the next airing season, with a couple of short new scenes added to satisfy the existing fanbase. In other words, inessential, and not necessarily much resembling what many people think of as a feature film.
In recent years, this has started to change. The Shounen Jump darling Demon Slayer found itself with a very awkward amount of manga left to adapt given the timing of when the anime seasons aired versus when the manga came out, and somebody also realized that there were some fight scenes that could really use a larger screen and the budget that gets devoted to a theatrical release. All right, they thought, maybe we can make our existing audience go to a theatre or risk missing plot. It was one of the hottest manga franchises in Japan at the time, so they decided to take the risk-- and Demon Slayer: Infinity Train was beyond a smash hit. It racked up box office numbers legitimately comparable to things like the Japanese release of Titanic. Audiences loved the quickened pacing and ludicrously pretty animation. And other anime series have begun to follow suit; earlier this year, for example, I watched Jujutsu Kaisen 0, another Shounen Jump movie which neatly solved the problem of adapting a prequel/side story that would have completely derailed the pacing of the anime of that particular property, but which the series' fans really wanted to see adapted.
The first two Made in Abyss features are standard old-school re-cuts of the first anime season. I watched them because I had not rewatched the show since originally seeing it, and I kind of get the point of doing this? It certainly freshened my memory. I would not have wanted to pay theatre prices, and of course a lot of the finer details got glossed over, but I remembered those finer details better for having seen the major points go by again.
The third Made in Abyss feature film, Dawn of the Deep Soul (2019), is plot, and must be watched between S1 and S2 in order for S2 to make any sense.
Okay. So. Dawn of the Deep Soul.
Whoof.
This is hard.
One of the reasons I resorted, above, to recap and industry explanation and general contextual nattering is that it is very, very difficult to write about art that fundamentally hurts me. I mean, my first draft of that sentence had 'hurts you', generalizing the effect, taking it away from my personal feelings and into the overall audience.
After finishing the movie, I sat and stared into space for several hours, trying desperately to figure out whether Dawn of the Deep Soul, a masterpiece on every level, is a work of art that I consider it moral for someone to have made. Trying to decide whether its existence is evil. This is not a question I generally find myself having to ponder about art. I come down on the side of making art, even if the intentions behind making it are evil (and these, I really believe, are not). But this one, I had to think over.
Amazingly, the pedophilia isn't the problem. I mean, it's there. It's no worse and no better than in S1.
I came to the conclusion that it is good that the film was made, because the movie taught me something new about the nature of evil, which does not happen often, and which is one of the things I would, ideally, like art to do.
I also came to the conclusion that I deeply, deeply pity the mangaka for having the misfortune to be himself and having to live in his own mind, a state of being which he is navigating with as much grace as possible under the circumstances, and quite possibly in the only manner that would not cause him to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Without going into plot spoilers, the best way I can describe the thematic argument of the film is to say that the mangaka is not just into pedophilia. He is into pain. He is into fear. He is into coercion and degradation. He is into dirt and disease and decay. He is almost certainly into taboo things partly because of the lure of the forbidden, but he is also into filth for the sake of filth, and I mean literal filth as well as metaphorical. The fetishes that society in general finds most disgusting and horrific, the worst porn you can imagine lurking out there on the internet in the depths of the worst humanity has ever had to offer? That's what this guy is into. The worst of it. No, worse than that. And he seems to be hard-wired for it.
So he puts all that into his art.
And then he argues, look, it's bad that I'm into this, although nothing I can do will change it. But I am putting it into my art because I know the difference between right and wrong; indulging this in art means that I will not indulge it in real life. And because I behave morally about my urges, and because this art is a consensual experience, I'm going to argue that, though I may be unfortunate, I am not an evil person, and I have every right to make art about this, no matter how unpleasant or repulsive anyone else finds it, and no matter how emotionally troubling or even traumatizing.
You want evil? He'll show you what real evil can look like, as opposed to the sum of his own kinks, and let the contrast make the point for him.
Enter the villain of the movie.
I have an odd psychological hangup surrounding the villain of the movie. I cannot remember his name.
He is so horrific and so triggering that I have blocked it out. Whenever I see it written down, I recognize it as being that guy and being that guy's correct name, and then I promptly forget it again. I think of him as 'that motherfucker', a term I wish I could revise, because it gives him far too much respect.
Said villain, by the way, is not at all sexually violent-- has nothing at all to do with sexuality, and his horrific physical violence is within rational control at all times and is not driven by any of the urges from the id that I have described in relation to the mangaka. That's kind of the point.
So I've seen many portrayals, in various forms of art and media over the years, of villains who are supposed to be beyond the concept of good and evil. People talk about Hannibal Lecter this way. Various other villains. What's generally meant by that is that these villains have completely rejected the codes of morality held by the societies in which they live.
This is the first time I have ever seen a villain who, when someone brings up to him the immorality and cruelty of his actions, takes a moment to stare in confusion, because that never crossed his mind, because it would never occur to him that that was relevant. And who then decides that it isn't relevant, and never thinks about it again. It isn't that he's rejecting societal codes. He'd have to care enough about them to make a decision on the matter in order to do that. It is that the entire concept that causing other people pain is bad is one that has been so ignored by his own version of morality that he not only doesn't care about it, but can't understand why other people do care in the .5 seconds he thinks about the concept before returning to his plans.
His own morality is simple. Anything that causes him to be able to progress farther down the Abyss and return with more information about the depths is good. Anything that hinders his progress downward must be made to serve him, and hence be made good, by any means necessary. Period. It is a monomaniacal religious and intellectual obsession which consumed his whole being long before he is ever introduced into the narrative. He uses himself exactly as ruthlessly as he does other people, not that that helps anything.
Since he is a genius and has brilliant organizational skills, he is able to function competently at a depth of the Abyss which most people die before they come close to reaching. He has gone down until he hit a barrier beyond which he cannot go without being unable to come up again, and has been trying to find a way around that barrier for a very long time. (Time goes... strangely in the far reaches of the Abyss.) Unlike anyone before him, he is able not only to continue living at the point at which he has stopped, but to communicate with the surface readily, and even to go back and forth between the surface and the place he is stuck. Yes, this is a violation of one of the major existential rules of the Abyss. I said he used himself ruthlessly, and the thing he did to himself to make himself able to go up and down as far as he does at will is, in fact, complicated and nasty. Not that that helps either.
Anyway, he's in continual communication with the city on the rim of the Abyss, although I have no idea how much he tells them about what he's actually doing, and is, for them, an inexhaustible source of new information, new artifacts, and new ideas about how to progress further. What this means is that they have essentially turned the area he is stuck in over to him. He can do anything he wants there, not that anyone up top could have stopped him anyway, and he has, essentially, an unlimited budget and fund of materials from above. I mean, the man installed a fucking elevator. His own private kingdom. His own private army. All focused entirely on the sole purpose of getting him further down, and then getting him, and/or the information he finds lower down, back up again.
There's a bit in Terry Pratchett where I believe it is Granny Weatherwax who says that sin starts with treating people as things. This man sees people, including himself, so thoroughly as things, as tools, that he is incapable of seeing them in any other way or for any other purpose.
Sure, I've seen other villains who will do anything to achieve their ambitions, or so their narratives tell us. But it isn't usually literally anything. And they usually have to consider whether or not some horrific nastiness is a thing they're willing to do. And they usually have some amount of id invested, in some direction, in the concept of cruelty, either enjoying causing it or disliking what they see as the necessity for it. This guy does not have the id to spare for that. The only emotions he has point straight down. He has never doubted himself in his life, and is not capable of doing so.
I'm not going to go into the things this means he actually does, or that we find out he has done, over the course of the movie, except to say that at one point I shouted HOW MANY WAR CRIMES CAN YOU FIT INTO TWO HOURS?! at the screen, and then thought, I guess this isn't in the context of a war, and then thought, no, my original exclamation stands.
And it's not just body horror, the physical use of people as tools, that he works with. That would be bad enough. No, everyone in his city, all of his subordinates, absolutely, genuinely love him. Because he wouldn't allow their minds to work any other way, or they might not be as useful to him! And what he'll do to get them to that-- and he doesn't have access to magical Abyss-y mind control or anything of that sort, he uses entirely methods that are plausible in day-to-day life as we know it--
He takes no pleasure in this sort of manipulation at all, except insofar as it furthers his goals. The thing is, that makes it worse, because on an intellectual level, most of the other characters find themselves respecting him. His goal is so purely itself that, because it is the goal shared by every other person who has made it down to that level of the Abyss, he is able to get otherwise decent people to do incredibly horrific things, simply because they are awed by his level of dedication and astounded by the amount of real knowledge he has discovered.
(Gee, I wonder what sorts of causes and ambitions that could be analogous to in real life.)
So going up against this guy are three battered and extremely traumatized twelve-year-olds armed with what they can carry.
This is a bit of a spoiler, but... they don't win.
They only sort of win.
They sort of win because they manage to arrange it such that he will get more information back to the surface by letting them go further down than from anything else he can think of doing with them. They are not able to save anyone else from him. They are not able to stop him, or to slow him down. They are not even able to preserve their own bodies and minds from his manipulations.
All they can do is get past him, and they can only get past him by being in collusion. But they share his monomania enough that, to them, it is worth it. At least, worth it enough. None of them can think of themselves as good people anymore, afterwards. He destroys a fundamental part of their innocence, and possibly of their selves. It dies, right there on screen.
Dawn of the Deep Soul is one of the darkest pieces of fiction of any sort that I have ever encountered.
The thing is, I saw instantaneously that people can be like this, and that a person from earlier in my own life in fact was, except that the monomania he was focused on was providing satisfaction to the kind of id-driven horrors that the mangaka is into, thereby uniting the two types of problem. It explained so much about that person, who, luckily, had no budget, though he was also, unfortunately, pretty clever. I find myself thinking of the movie villain as a kind of saint in the hierarchy of hell. There are people like this. There really, really are.
Anyway, S2 picks up directly after that, and has an actual pedophilic rapist appear briefly in episode one just so we can all be clear on what a total petty little piss-ant he, and that kind of person in general, is when compared to the sorts of depths humans can actually sink to, because said rapist is only a physical problem.
S2 is now proceeding to do something thematically else entirely, but since it's still running, I have no idea what that actually is yet.
Every week I watch the episode and think to myself huh, that wasn't so bad, very little traumatic actually happened in that at all, and every week I then see an episode summary just listing events which occurred on screen and realize that my standards have been completely reset for this series and it continues to be fucking horrific. With, of course, incredible moments of luminous and numinous beauty, grace, and redemption, and the best soundtrack of the year.
Sigh. I am invested now, of course, and won't stop watching. I was completely unprepared for the intensity. But, after the movie and S2 so far, I now believe something about the mangaka that I never thought could happen when I first heard the concept or through the entire first season of the series: I believe that he will finish the story, and they will reach the bottom of the Abyss.
And I believe that it will live up to the journey.
Do I recommend this show?
Fuck if I know.
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... I mean, that's probably fair.
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Oh, God, we can have the conversation about whether it's worse for profit or for free!
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I still genuinely don't know if I will ever watch this show, but your reviews of it have been incredibly thoughtful, enlightening, and I feel you have absolutely given me (and any other readers) the information needed to decide if this piece of art is something I will find sufficient value in interacting with to counter-balance the inherent costs of interacting with it. Which is everything a review should do, of course, but feels especially precious when dealing with such difficult, complicated art.
So, thank you for writing these. And thank you for such deeply thoughtful contemplation of art and its purposes, especially difficult, ugly art that sparks genuine questions about whether it should ever have been made.
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<3
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<3
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<3
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“Enjoying” definitely seems like the wrong word but I don’t regret reading it (yet). It manages to be still darker than I’d expected, and the characters are heartbreaking. The world is incredible. The pedophilic viewpoint is inescapable, and it’s really hard to know what to do with that - I’ve seen a number of people online trying and failing.
(also, the art - I don’t know how they do Ozen in the anime, but in the manga when she’s menacing the kids she becomes either a black shape with a single bone white smile, or, close-up, the white of the page with just three dark smudges for features, and it’s terrifying)
I guess I continue onwards and downwards.
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Ozen also becomes less human in the anime when she's being menacing, and the thing the anime does really well with her physicality is that you can never quite figure out what her anatomy is actually like. You can never see all of her edges, if she's being inhuman. She also does the white-smudge with dark-smudges thing, and it is upsetting. (I love Ozen. She may be the outright nicest person in the series, which is distressing, but there it is.)
I do recommend, if you're not up for the actual anime, listening to and finding the translations of the lyrics of both the opening and ending sequences of season two when you get to that part of the series (layer six). Season one's music was really good. Season two's music was instrumental in helping me cope with the series emotionally, and both the opening and ending are just ludicrously brilliant.