Coffee Spoons

It’s been a long, long time since an anime has gotten me this emotionally attached to it.

It was unquestionably the grandmother character that got to me. Poor little, old grandma who waits in that little, old lighthouse for grandpa to come back. Except he’s dead. And whenever anyone mentions this fact, she falls into a deep, deep sleep.

Her mind is a library of memories, with books lining the shelves, books that are probably full of so much happiness and pain and wisdom and loss. There is one book held close with a clamp and it trembles every time grandpa is mentioned. Besides the books, there is the incomplete ship model and a broken blue door. These are all the unfinished business that grandpa left behind when he died, that she still keeps locked away in her mind, still holds close to her while she waits for him to come back. And fuck, THIS:

Broke me. Made my throat go dry, my breath catch, my chest hurt. Because I can’t… I can’t even dare to imagine what that must be like. That kind of loss and loneliness. All that time spent waiting inside of her memories for someone who [didn’t die didn’t die] will never come back. She sleeps so deep because she doesn’t want to remember that stupid little fact that messed up everything, she sleeps because she wants to remember life as it was before THE FACT. See that, the act of remembering and not remembering, of sleeping and dreaming, see how it works and how it doesn’t. Really? Because I don’t. Shit, what a fucking mess it’s made out of my head.

And maybe it would be all well and good for her if her greedy grandsons hadn’t come looking for the treasure inside of her pain. Here, we are presented with the question of value and worth. Which memory constitutes as a treasure, and to whom? The ungrateful bastards want info, they want a map to a treasure chest, anything else is disregarded because they have not attached any meaning to the past. They are simply looking for a one-way ticket out of what they perceive as a shithole. If there is no monetary appeal to a memory, then it is worthless. So apparently this makes it okay for them to exploit Grandma’s memories, to dig up her grief and turn her loss inside out to see if they could scavenge anything from it.

Grandma isn’t very happy about this. Big surprise. She more or less tells them to fuck off by directing them to an old shoe box filled with mementos from the past. For her, that IS the true treasure. Because all she has are her memories, and they are so much more than just fuel for bitterness or resentment. To her, they are everything:

Even on that shitty planet with the weak ass gravity, she was able to find wonder and magic and love, and she was happy. So maybe the bigger tragedy here are her grandsons, both of whom resent their literal and figurative place in life. They dream instead of leaving and traveling the world because they can’t find any kind of meaning where they are now. They don’t see the little worlds that they have created or any of the great things that are possible for them still. And maybe there’s a big message being conveyed here. A big message that I’m too fucking lazy to elaborate on so I will it sum up as: Life sucked and then they died. To avoid said fate, have a little care.

While all of this is going on, Kaiba is once again the onlooker. So far, he has merely been the spectator, the one that takes us all over the universe and shows us what it means to exist and to be human in that specific time and place. But with each passing episode, his character gets more and more twisted up in the actual plot, so that he can no longer just watch things unfold from a detached distance. For Kaiba, someone without any memories of his own, it must be painful to see other people exploit each other’s and their own memories. He’s getting entangled within the discourse of memories and if the flashbacks in this episode are anything to go by, soon the plot demons will eat him alive. Something that I am quite looking forward to because I’ve been “WTF, where’s Neiro? Go find Neiro!” for the longest time.

So while on the topic of assigning meanings and emotions… Maybe I am stupid for getting so attached to something that isn’t real, for crying over something so inconsequential as moving pictures and words spoken by 2-D characters. But I think it’s because anime is… well, animated that I am able to put so much of my emotions into it. Because it’s so far removed from the reality that I live in and I know that these characters have no intrinsic values to them, that they’re just polished elements of some guy’s dreams, trapped forever in their plight. But because they are art, and art is the work of conveying human truths, they are like open vessels where I can store all of my little feelings that would otherwise have no outlet for expression in society, in the different social spheres that I move through as I go about my life trying not to fuck up or embarrass myself. Because these characters aren’t real and they can’t hurt you so you don’t have the same reserves that you otherwise would towards other human beings. Ergo, you’re free to put as much stock into them as you want because they won’t complain or bite you in the ass for it later on.

So I guess in this way, anime is cathartic for me, wherein the characters go through hell and back and I’m just trying really hard to pick up on the lessons that they’re teaching me and hoping that I won’t fail. Or maybe I’m taking this too seriously. Maybe I do need a new hobby.

Anyway, thank you for reading and do catch Kaiba if you get the chance.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 10:40 pm and is filed under anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.