Coffee Spoons » anime

TTGL – a reason for fighting

itsubun — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 01:51:54 +0000

So I finally got around to watching TTGL after a fun week of Hige standing over me with his whip ever since I mentioned that I’ve kinda, sorta [totally] been ignoring all of the internet hype about it when it first premiered and therefore, have been living under a rock. So the existence of this entry is due in large part to his aggressive pimping enthusiastic encouragement to give TTGL a try.

All fun poking at Hige aside, I’m glad I didn’t miss out on this series. Funny, fantastical, all the right proportions of giddy excitement for epic adventures and deep empathy for the depiction of private and universal human struggles, TTGL is a Win.

One of the things I love about TTGL is that it doesn’t bother trying to be subtle with its phallic symbols and sexual innuendos. It’s not afraid to bypass pretentious attempts at intelligence and Enlightenment while poking fun at itself. There’s this easy confidence to TTGL in the way indulges in simple humor while at the same time maneuvering a number of twisting philosophies about the ageless struggles of its people.

The storyline of TTGL is simple in its presentation, stripped of excessive colloquialism and frivolous plot holes. It is because of this simplicity that its other merits are brought to light in how TTGL can narrate with such clarity and artistic brilliance the relentless human desire to reach towards the heavens and the crippling anxiety of ever reaching that ultimate destination.

Kamina, as the self-deprecating ideal of super masculinity, was a surprisingly easy character to like and grow attached to. The determination to prove himself does not originate from his own insecurities, but from the need to protect and support those around him. So his lack of humility and common sense in battle do not come off as conceit or foolishness, but as an example of steadfast courage and perseverance in the face of great odds.

In one of the first battles against the Ganmen, Kamina finds himself in a dire situation while under assault and looks in front of him to see a skeleton on the ground, the very image of death itself. It is in this moment that he comes to learn what it means to look death in the face, to understand the gravity of war and survival and the weight and uncertainty of his own existence. TTGL’s ability to illustrate these moments of painful immediacy and confrontation and then to pull that all back, all the fear and severity threatening to spill over from the screen, and wrap it up in supernova explosions and rapturous victories is what makes the series so multifaceted as an epic viewing experience.

I have a lot of admiration for the producer of TTGL as it was easy to see that he put a lot of his own genuine emotions and ideals into Kamina as a character and cared about him a great deal to be able to effectively memorialize and maintain his presence throughout the rest of the series even after his death.

The relationship between Simon and Kamina is one of the most emotionally affective and gratifying portrayal of brotherhood and camaraderie that I’ve seen in any given anime. At the beginning of the series, Simon struggles to stand his ground during the early battles. He consistently butts heads with Kamina, who reprimands him for running away and asserts that a true man cannot do so in the heat of battle. For all of Kamina’s posturing and flamboyant speeches about manhood, fear and weakness isn’t something to be overcome and discarded, they’re things a person has to continuously grapple with in their personal struggle to evaluate and attain their dreams and ambitions. When Simon finally does battle, he fights for his brother. Not because of an ideal or an image that he idolizes, but because there’s a real person, flesh and bones, who needs him.

And that’s what you have to understand in all of this.

It’s not about idealism and it’s not about proving yourself, it’s about death and dying and what it means to be scared. And in the face of all of these paralyzing fears and worries, you come to understand what it means to truly fight for others, not yourself, but for another tangible human being who has put so many intangible hopes in you.

What it comes down to is this: You’re scared of dying, but you’re even more afraid of letting him die.

This is where Simon’s strength comes from. He puts more value into other people than in himself, but he doesn’t come off worse for his martyrdom because they in return reciprocate his trust and dedication and they come running when he needs them. This profound and faithfully blind act of give-and-take is a necessity, otherwise none of them will survive this war. And they’ve already lost so much in coming to the surface. The ability to stand at the edge of it all and put aside your own grievances and selfishness, to stand to lose a bit of yourself, in order to work together is what makes the drill that can break through the walls between humans.

there is nothing on the surface, no walls and no ceilings… it’s a good place for men

Thank you for reading. Hope your summer is going well.

pale cocoon – archive of our losses

itsubun — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:00:23 +0000

Pale Cocoon is a one-shot OVA by Yasuhiro Yoshiura. In a futuristic dystopia of rusted cubicles, disintegrating archives, and weary bodies filing along the darkened corridor of a factory warehouse, we are presented with the silhouette of a bleak reality that isn’t too hard to imagine for ourselves as a real possible future. Ura, our protagonist, is a diligent archaeologist of sorts within the “Archive Excavation Department”.

Wiki summary:

It has been many years since a group of humans retreated to an artificial colony above the planet surface. The colorful world that used to exist was ruined by human foolishness, making it uninhabitable. Much of recorded history before the move has been forgotten, despite the numerous advances in technology. The last remaining information lies in a vast archive of data, much of it in corrupted formats. Determined to recover this precious information, the “Archive Excavation Department” works specifically to restore as much of it as possible.

Ura is a zealous worker, driven by his own curiosity and fascination with the “green world” as depicted in the fragments of his discoveries. However, he is alone in his undertakings, save for Riko and another faceless coworker speaking through a communicative book [voiced by the director himself]. From bits of conversations between the three of them, it can be inferred that the department had once been quite lively and flourishing with many people eager to learn more about the past. However, the years have worn down the collective endeavor, whittling down the project until it’s just Ura sitting in front of glowing screens trying to salvage something of the old world from binary codes. And the lonely form of him bent over his computer, surrounded by the inherent wrongness of things, the distortion of a compressed reality, of dark claustrophobia and crumbling time, makes me ache in a painfully self-conscious way.

There is tension between Ura and his coworkers. They often reprimand him for doing extra analysis, telling him that it’s unnecessary, why bother? At the climax of the OVA, Riko blows up at Ura and tells him the hard truths that he probably already knew all along:

don’t you get it?

no one wants to see more of human stupidity

none of it exists anymore

She asserts that it’s better to not understand that world, to never know of the past, so that it wouldn’t hurt so much to miss it, to yearn for something that they never had. So that they could curb their regrets and cut their losses.

That is the explanation for why the department has gone to ruins. The more people found out, the more they learned about the past, they began to resent it. Because that past, with its vibrant colors and brilliant lifeforms, is so radically different from the dim reality that they live in now. And they cannot reconcile that disparity inside of themselves. So they suffer for it, for their yearning of things lost and unredeemable. And they wish that they had never known so that they could be content in their ignorance and never realize the poverty of their reality.

So what then, is the point of Ura’s work? With the department on the verge of being completely shut down, he’s faced with the desolating prospect of toil without reward. As the excavator of things happier off forgotten, he embodies the duality of the historian and martyr. And he might be onto something there. In his lonely and rewardless search for a pathway to the past, he is also looking for traces of the old world in his current reality. There is the hope that some traces of that beauty and magic might still remain, that there is something that transcends devastation and evolution, and will not be lost to the relentless flow of time.

While restoring some corrupted files, he happens upon a music video recorded by an unknown woman. In the video, she states that people leave behind records of themselves because there are things that they want to stay the same. That is why people take pictures of their loved ones, why they leave behind memoirs, and why Ura tirelessly digs through the archives for the memories of others. Because there are things that are worth preserving in the face of pain and regrets. Things that extend beyond the fallout and the aftermath, and trickle into the future to serve as memories that warrant nostalgia and quiet sighs and soft smiles.

Pale Cocoon is in itself a piece of that expansive archive. It serves to remind its audiences that they can’t forget. You can’t forget. Otherwise, what will you have left for yourself? If there is nothing worth preserving, then what will all of our efforts and strifes amount to? You can’t forget how things used to be, even as painful as it is to remember your losses. Things were different once. This current reality, as bleak and empty and lonely as it seems, can change. There are no absolutes. And there is no inevitability because the future is open-ended, full of the vastness of blue skies. Do you understand what this means for us?

You can’t forget your possibilities. Otherwise you’d fall back into the tumble and fold of things without ever knowing any better. Otherwise you’d make the same mistakes and get caught up in your own failures. You can’t forget because you have to maintain a perspective beyond the immediacy of your circumstances. So that you can still have the capacity to hope, to know that things can get better, they will get better, you can make that happen for yourself.

All the best things in life are still possible.

school days: nothing like human

itsubun — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:00:28 +0000

This especially tl;dr entry is dedicated to Ashley and Marmot.

During a conversation with Iknight about notoriously hated characters in various anime where I was trying to justify my undying love for Naruto and Shinji, he taunted me and said, “[What about] Makoto? Go on, defend Makoto Itou.” Oh, IK… Don’t think I won’t take you up on that, you hater!

All jokes aside though, I do think that a lot of the hatred is unevenly directed at Makoto, while the girls are more or less excused because they are perceived as victims of his irresponsible manwhoring. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending Makoto or justifying his actions in any way. But I think people might be missing the point if they were to simply cast all of their disgust and hatred onto Makoto as the ultimate failure of a man, when the anime itself facilitates blame in a complicated system of karmic balance and [un]poetic justice.

School Days sets itself up to be a typical shoujo anime with a love triangle in a school setting fueled by poetic adolescent angst. It was so seemingly typical in fact that nothing could have prepared me for the ensuing 6-hour mind-fuck that I sat through. School Days shattered all expectations and preconceived notions of shoujo plot lines and cliches. In short, it was a religious experience for me.

The cast of School Days are more or less caricatures of people, epitomes of adolescent vices and virtues.

Kotonoha Katsura is the formulaic truluv of anime protagonists: beautiful, naïve, shy, soft-spoken, chaste, co-dependent, forgiving, loyal, victim of bullying
Sekai Saionji, the martyr of truluv: self-sacrificing, an empathy-manipulating conception of melodramatic antics and passive-aggressive angst, indirect when it matters, outspoken when it doesn’t, tries to compensate for her jilted feelings by being a cheerleader for her luvah’s truluv
And then we have the infamous Makoto Itou himself: emasculated, awkward, cowardly, indecisive, over-sexed, self-indulgent, incapable of protecting his loved ones, worthless

So then, why do all of the girls wanna hit that?

This is where the mechanics of the logic, “It’s not you, it’s me,” come into play.

Because Makoto is so unremarkable as a character and an epic failure as a representation of masculinity that he is able to serve as everyone’s sounding board for them to work out their own issues. Think about it, what else do you know about Makoto from the anime besides the fact that he is indecisive and cowardly? He has no redeeming qualities that would give him agency. He has no actual human partiality that you can recall like “Makoto hates mint chocolate” or “Makoto loves green tea ice cream” that would endear you to him. Makoto likes sex. Period. He is a sex machine, in the most literal sense. He is the collective letdown of every girlish fantasy, the gaping black hole into which they put so much of themselves without the hope of compensation for their sacrifices. He is only acknowledged for his promiscuity because girls throw themselves at him. However, when Sekai reveals her pregnancy to the school, he encounters an existential crisis because he no longer has that reputation to sustain him. The girls reject him one by one because he is no longer just a body for them to fuck with; he is now forced into the role of fatherhood and that is repulsive to them. The pure blankness of the old ideal is now painted over with domestic responsibilities and obligations, ruining its mystique and allure. New standards subverting the old.

So what is it about Makoto that brings all the girls to the yard? Well, quite simply, the answer is NOTHING. There is NOTHING about him that is attractive or worth investing in. That’s not how relationship dynamics work in the School Days universe. The reason why Katsura is so desperate to hold onto her relationship with him is because she wants to preserve for herself the role of the “girlfriend”. Her classmates spurn her because they feel threatened by her physical assets [boobs], her position in the committee stresses her out and wears her down, she has no one else that she can turn to in her time of need. And after having fought so hard to persevere, suffering through the cruel jabs and relentless bullying from the other girls, she progressively puts more and more weight into her role as Makoto’s girlfriend as her grievances add up. She hangs onto it like a lifeline because if she loses that, then what else does she got left for herself? If she loses Makoto, then all of her pain and suffering for the sake of their relationship would amount to nothing, and she couldn’t bear the prospect of that, can’t standing having her martyric sacrifices be in vain. In being able to stay by his side as his “girlfriend”, she has a purpose, a role, a function to fulfill that she believes will complete her and counteract the criticism and cruelty that others inflict upon her. For her, he is her buffer against the painful reality of her social life at school and the emptiness and depression that she harbors from being repeatedly rejected by her peers.

karma: usually loli shaped for dramatic effects, also likes to cosplay

So therefore, it is not a question of what he has to offer to these girls, but rather how they utilize him to their own ends. Means and ends. He himself has no inherent worth. He only exists and matters in so far as the meanings and values that the girls put into him. Sekai wants Makoto because she had originally stolen him from Setsuna. She speaks about him as a flower that she was supposed to give away, but instead decided to keep for herself. In objectifying him through a metaphor, he is reduced to a thing, a commodity, the value by which she measures her own self-worth. Because she obtained him through unethical means, she grows paranoid and delusional in her possessiveness over him. She is painfully aware that in the same way she was able to snatch him away from Katsura, another girl can just as easily steal him away from her because of his wayward nature. The foundation of their relationship was built upon stolen happiness; therefore, she’s forever worrying over his intentions, questioning his fidelity, agonizing over the prospect of losing him. She does not want to lose him because that would mean that she has lost to her own transgression, has become a victim of herself. She doesn’t want to be caught in her own trap, doesn’t want be proven wrong. And she can’t, she can’t, she CAN’T afford to be wrong. She would rather KILL off the boy in an attempt to eradicate her own sins than admit that she is wrong, because that would mean succumbing to all of her comeuppances and facing the darkest part of herself, stripped of martyrdom and white lies.

Note the use of cellphones throughout the series: They mediate emotions by providing a hyperreality in which the character are able to exploit and maintain their ideals, communicating their thoughts and feelings through a substitution for real human interaction.

For both of these girls, chasing after Makoto is like digging a hole so deep, it goes right through the other side and they free fall endlessly, crashing and burning into eternity along with all of their hopes and expectations. It’s not because of TRULUV that they gave him everything. LUV has got nothing to do with this. What it comes down to is these girls being unable to cope with their own fallibility and personal circumstances. Because they can’t reconcile the reality that they live in with their own ideals, they sought to use him to simultaneously forget and reaffirm their existence. It’s NOT you, it’s ME. I’m willing to bet that they don’t know anything about him beyond the superficial, and ultimately that doesn’t matter to them. They can just fill in the missing gaps with their own fantasies of what he SHOULD be for them. And that’s as much as he will ever amount up to for these girls. He is a placeholder for their jilted desires and stifled dreams.

The one girl who was able to come back from the black hole after falling into it is Katou. Initially pursuing Makoto because of her memories of him from junior high, Katou finally acknowledges his flaws when she confronts him about Sekai’s pregnancy. Because he refuses to take responsibility for his actions, Katou’s idealisms of the caring boy she once knew are destroyed. And in their place is something so ugly and harrowing that it is able to subvert her memories of him and replace them with the harsh truths of the [non]person that Makoto is. Unlike Sekai or Katsura, Katou manages to escape the trap of self-delusion and destruction that the other girls set for themselves. As a result, she was the only one who was able to move on with her sanity intact and all the hard-earned life lessons that he inadvertently taught her.

This is the first time that I can remember ever seeing the wide-angle lens in an anime. The wide-angle, aptly named, is used to capture a wider view of the reality being presented to the viewer, as an alternative to the normal view, which mimics what the human eye sees. Note the convex curve of the school building. This distortion of reality instills a pressing sense of paranoia and anxiety in the viewer due to its hallucinogenic mimicry. It lets you, the viewer, know that the shit’s about to hit the fan.

working within frames: all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream

I’ve only seen the wide-angle used in non-animated films and photography. For Keitaro Motonaga to utilize this in an ero-adaptation strikes me as ambitious and admirable in his own rights. He is intentionally distorting and challenging the reality within the anime, which is in itself already a manipulated representation of our “reality”. By working within multiple frames in the anime, he unhinges the normative notion of “reality” as being singular and absolute. In doing so, and depicting extreme situations in which idealisms clashes with reality to produce monstrosities, he is encouraging the audience to reevaluate their own preconceived notions of interpersonal relations [love, friendship, loyalty, sacrifice]. By presenting popular stereotypes and idealisms and then inverting them, twisting them into something so ugly that they are no longer recognizable as human desires to the viewer, he is purposely alienating the person from the ideal. Conscious separation of the human from the fantasy. However, this separation is complicated by the multiple frames of reality that the anime operates in.

In the moment when Katsura tells Makoto that she will do everything she can to BE that ideal for him, to be The Perfect Girlfriend, she transcends herself as an product of idealism because she is able to vocalize her consciousness that she is NOT that ideal YET. But she will try to be, just for him. And he breaks down because finally, finally, someone is willing to strive to be HIS ideal, even knowing all of the things that he has done, the ruthlessness that he is capable of. Katsura misleadingly offers him the unconditional and he misinterprets that to mean that she accepts him for the flawed, incomplete being that he is. When in actuality, she is offering him her last bid in order to secure the role of being his “girlfriend” to save herself from being completely consumed by her own loneliness and hysteria. It isn’t love. It’s self-preservation and desperation mixing together into something so dark and warped that it should never be mistaken for love. Throughout the anime, Katsura never says, “You can’t have him because I love him.” What she keeps asserting over and over again is that “I am Makoto’s girlfriend.” And the difference between those two statements are profound and irreconcilable.

So what happens when these idealisms are conscious of being idealized, when they know where they stand and what they have come to represent? It’s almost as if they have somehow managed to break through their own limited dimensions and are now suddenly so close to human. Their circumstances being too close to the “real”, their flaws too easy to recognize and point out from personal experiences and knowledge, their emotions so immediate and volatile that the audience can’t help but recoil from a Frankenstein brought to life by their viewership.

In the last episode when Katsura slices Sekai open and looks inside, she calmly states, “Just as I thought… there’s no one inside,” confirming that Sekai was lying about the pregnancy. But it’s a strange statement, given the pronoun “no one”. Because even if there were no growing fetus inside of Sekai, the declaration of a newfound emptiness inside of another person negates the actual being herself, confirms the absence of “the person” whom Katsura asserts was never there to begin with.

The way the shot is angled, you, the viewer, are inside of Sekai’s womb, staring up at Katsura after she has sliced through the fourth wall. And then she is directly speaking to you because Sekai, the fantasy, has dissipated, and there is no longer a buffer between you and the anime. And she is telling you that there is no one there, do you get it?

Sekai is intrinsically empty because she is a dream, she is thick fog and smoky nights, a product of the collective fantasies of fanboys. And Katsura, another version of that dream, is telling YOU that these dreams are just empty placeholders. There is no one inside. You can’t hold onto these idealisms because you would just be grabbing at ghosts, falling into the self-destructive traps of disappointment and bitterness that endlessly reset themselves. The creator is speaking through Katsura and telling you that you’ve been watching a series about a bunch of [non]humans fucking, hurting, dying and dreaming right along with them. And the wakeup call leaves you feeling so strange, cold, and painfully self-conscious because the turbulent emotions that you have projected onto the anime get redirected right back at you, smacking you in the face at full force. And it hurt. That was the moment that cemented this anime as a 10/10 for me on MAL.

~ * ~

5 cm per second: gather up our hearts and go

itsubun — Sun, 25 May 2008 10:26:25 +0000

Where do I even start with this entry? I’ve been meaning to write about “5 cm Per Second” for the longest time, but I kept putting it off because just the task of it was so daunting. For me, watching 5 cm is such a personal experience that I can’t write about it without empathizing to the point of being vulnerable. People see the act of showing emotions as a vulnerability and they reprimand me for being so stupidly open with myself. On certain days, I agree with them. But when it comes down to it, I can’t write in any other way because my emotions are what move me to write and put these words down onto the screen; otherwise I wouldn’t have started blogging at all if I couldn’t write about the things that have touched me in some way, left their impressions on me, made me laugh or cry or think really hard until my head hurt.

This is the wiki summary of 5 cm Per Second: “a chain of short stories about their distance”

Upon graduating from elementary school, Takaki Tōno and his close friend Akari Shinohara drifted apart. Akari moved to Tochigi Prefecture due to her parents’ jobs, while Takaki attended a junior high in Tokyo. The two kept in contact by writing letters, but despite the special feelings that existed between them, the only thing that persisted was time.

5 cm per second made me cry so hard that I could barely catch my breath. And then afterwards, I ached for days every time I closed my eyes and recalled the aesthetics of it. Makoto Shinkai has been criticized for reusing the same fundamental plot [distance = QQ] in all of his works. While I do agree that he needs to experiment with new storylines for future productions, I think he rightly played to all of his strengths in 5 cm. I’m mesmerized and seduced by the concept of distance in 5 cm and how you can go so far but still not move at all from the point where life let you down and broke your heart. Shinkai is a prodigy of aesthetic grief. Everything, everything from the breathlessly beautiful settings, to the attention to tiny details that instilled nostalgia into the mundane, to the bare-bones dialogues delivered in all of their quiet wonder… all of these things consumed me whole, pulled me into Shinkai’s world of inevitability, made me hold my breath, sucking in as much air as I could contain and holding it all inside, feeling so full and empty all at once.

Kanae Sumita, in Cosmonaut [part II], said, “It must be so lonely, being in the dark, never knowing if you’ll ever bump into anything or find anyone. It’s too lonely like that, lifting your hands so earnestly towards the vast night sky.” In between the moments when I’ve fucked up and before I can pick myself back up, I wondered if life will always be like that, the endless search in the pitch blackness and the disappointments at every turn. Things don’t work out between Kanae and Takaki because he can’t see anything for himself beyond Akari. So then, what happens to those feelings that Kanae can’t convey? What becomes of them and where will they go now that it’s impossible to make them known to the person who matters most?

Melodrama theory would suggest that they go into the artwork itself. One such theory is that melodrama is an art medium that strives to express the inexpressible. The boundless regrets, the private suffering, the dreams that can’t be realized, all of these things that cannot be voiced appear within the anime in nonverbal, stylistic features that speak for the characters when they themselves cannot. When there is silence in the face of great suffering, there will be emotional excess. These excesses then get translated into the scenery, into the techni-colored skies, the vivid hues of sunlight reflecting off of chrome surfaces, and all the meticulous details that the artist painstakingly took the time to include in every frame. This is why just perceiving Shinkai’s artwork is emotionally taxing in and of itself, because it serves to be the interpreter of all the things that are too shameful or embarrassing or too heavy to be said out loud.

The sky caps from Cosmonaut are visual orgasms for my eyes. These skies with so many stars and crowded galaxies and the purple and blue astral gases, they stretch out into the darkness, wide-open spaces full of hollow minutes and empty years. For the characters, being under them, always gazing up at them, always wondering, feeling so small and strange, I can imagine their painful anxiety when they think about the future. And in the next part, it creeps up on them so suddenly that the momentum, the unwanted realization and unwilling acceptance of it, breaks them.

In the last part of 5 cm, Takaki has grown into a man, working and living on his own. He throws himself into his job and comes home to an empty apartment, floor littered with empty beer cans. His days are all the same. He lives like he’s not really living, always staring off into the distance, always looking jilted and so, so tired.

“Just by living one’s life, sadness accumulates here and there, be it in the sheets hung out in the sun to dry, the toothbrushes in the bathroom, and the history logs of mobile phones.”

The image of him sitting in his dark room, the soft glow of the TV, the rumpled bed sheets, all of that stayed with me long after I finished the movie. When I look to the future I can see those things for myself. And I felt devastated and relieved, all at once.

At the end of 5 cm per second, Takaki and Akari walk past each other and just as he was about to turn and look at her, a speeding train blocks his view, and he loses out again. So he stands and stares with all of his regrets and sorrows and resentments. He knows that it is her [how could he not] and he probably knows too that she has moved on and is now living a life that he is not [cannot be] apart of. And yet he’s still able to walk away from that scene with the softest smile on his face. Somehow, I think he must be so relieved. It’s like encountering a ghost and finding out that that girl from your memory isn’t the same anymore. She’s no longer a static figure. She’s grown and changed and fallen in love with someone else who isn’t you. And devastation and relief mixes together inside of you, propelling you forward, so that you can take it step and step and someday when you look back [it'll still hurt, it'll never stop hurting] you can see how far you’ve come and all the distance that you’ve put between then and now and how that has changed you.

Kaiba 04 – all the unfinished business that you left behind

itsubun — Sun, 11 May 2008 05:40:55 +0000

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.