In recent years, my daughter has introduced us to anime. We've grown to love some of the shows and it's funny how references from them crop up in our lives now, as family jokes.
Before we even had children, my husband used to watch things like Dragonball Z. If I wasn't working, I'd catch the occasional episode myself and they were fun enough to watch, but nothing that caught my attention particularly. So when my daughter talked us into watching some shows with her, I was expecting something similar. Yet over time, I've been quite impressed by not only how enjoyable they've been, but how many of them seem to be teaching the audience something on morals and ethics.
We enjoy animes that make us laugh the most, as an escape from the stresses of life, but there are plenty of serious ones which can make you think about situations in life that aren't always as black and white as we might like them to be. If you've ever seen Attack on Titan, you'll probably know what I mean. I don't want to give the plot away because the revelations as you move through the story are what makes it such an eye opener. What I will say is that you may never look at war in the same way again and be sure who the good guys and the bad guys are.
Attack on Titan image courtesy of Wallpapercave
We see animes that like to tip our usual beliefs and concepts upside-down by looking from a different perspective. Mairimashita! Iruma-kun (Welcome to demon school! Iruma kun) is a fun one that does this. When Iruma's irresponsible parents sell him to a demon, he expects he will end up being killed, but instead, he becomes the happiest he's ever been and makes friends for the first time in his life.
These kinds of stories remind me how we often judge people by what others tell us before getting to know them ourselves. A common tactic used in war time is to dehumanise another group of people in order to rally their own people against them. If they are demons or monsters, then you aren't killing other people, you are merely saving you and yours from inhuman creatures. We've seen propaganda used in that way multiple times in history.
My daughter and I recently watched 86. You could see parallels in this anime with how the Nazi regime declared the Aryan race as the superior people. In the story, they (the white haired Albos) did this in order to dehumanise the people (coloureds) that they were sending out into the 86th precinct to fight and die to protect them in the inner precincts from AI fighting machines that had gone rogue. They even called the fighters drones so that they could disassociate themselves with them as they directed them in battle, often to their deaths.
An anime that really got me thinking recently was Overlord. It was fun to watch and certainly made us laugh, but you felt torn on some of the ethics in it. The concept was a player, Momonga/Ains, who was in an online game that was being shut down. He had made some good friends in this game and decided to stay logged in until the end when it was taken off-line, for old times' sake. However, instead of getting booted from it when it goes off-line, he finds himself trapped there or transported to a world with the non-human NPCs his guild created. The NPCs have become sentient and revere him as their overlord and guild master. He is stuck in his gaming form, which is that of an undead skeleton, and finds he's formed more of a connection with this guild of monsters than the humans in the world they're in. While he initially saves a village from being slaughtered by some bad people, he does so more because he knows that was what one of his previous gaming friends would have done, rather than because he felt any empathy towards them himself. This village comes under his protection from then on, but he seems to view them more as his pets than as people. His guild sees humans as inferior and the more he disassociates with humans, the less concern he has for them and is ultimately encouraged by his guild to slaughter innocents in order to gain complete obedience as he becomes the ruler of this world.
Overlord image courtesy of wallpapertag
On one hand you are cheering him on when he wipes out some terrible people like they are nothing more than ants, but on the other hand you are pleading with him that the innocents in the city that he has just destroyed didn't deserve to be punished along with them just to set an example. You long for him to regain some empathy towards these people that you, watching from both sides, have gotten to know as individual.
As a gamer, we know that things are virtual, so we happily go around killing things in a game that we wouldn't if they were real. We might choose to be an evil character in the game and part of what we do to advance and gain reward would be doing bad things; things we would never do in reality. I feel like the Overlord story plays on this, exploring what it might be like if this gaming scenario became a reality. I'm curious to see how future seasons will play out. Will he regain his empathy for humans or has he completely become inhuman himself now?
