The Patreon Letter - 20th October, 2018

Hi everyone, Em here again after several weeks off due to ... well, a whole mess of stuff. I'll be taking over the Patreon letters for the next 3 weeks I think, so please look forward to all the stuff I've had lying around half finishing in the dustbin of my brain for the last month or so as life got in the way.

Today? Today we're talking some anime.

SEROUS SPOILERS AHEAD FOR BOTH DEVILMAN CRYBABY AND THE DEVILMAN MANGA

Me and Jackson will probably never do a Your Uncle's Beach House on Devilman Crybaby, but if we did it would be the rare instance of me really loving a show Jackson does not. I watched Crybaby entirely because Masaaki Yuasa directed it, having recently come off of Ping Pong and Tatami Galaxy and loving both. 

I remember when the show first aired it generating a lot of discourse about queer representation, something I'm always wary about when it comes to anime. Not that anime can't be queer, or support queer reads and fandoms, but I have an estranged relationship with that stuff at the best of times and I really do find anime pretty bad at providing things I can identify with on these fronts. So at the time I mostly just ignored it, especially when Jackson reported back that the show wasn't really to their taste. I barely have time for anime I'm interested in, so why would I bother with trying stuff I've been dissuaded from? 

Anyway, I already covered what happened next, only a few weeks ago. Yuasa. I'm gonna watch all his work, I swear. I love it all. 

Going into Devilman Crybaby pretty blind was a great way to experience it. My memory of the discourse was so dim I didn't even realize that Akira and Ryo were the two people everyone shipped (look, I can be slow about this stuff sometimes), because my read of the show is so dramatically different than most of the culture's. Whereas, as far as I can gather, the usual read of Crybaby is about this estranged relationship between Akira/Ryo (Devilman/Satan, whichever suits you), the ideas of sexual release and freedom tied into demonic possession/transformation. The usual stuff you get with body horror/monster transformation media. 

All well and good, except I watched the show and most of it never occurred to me. So instead let me suggest an alternate read of Crybaby (and to a lesser extent the manga). Devilman Crybaby is about the war of good and evil, not between God and Satan, but within the hearts of mankind. And it's not a traditional push and pull of two dichotomies at war within the battlefield of free will. No, Devilman Crybaby is about embracing an inevitability that what is good and what is evil is innate, immutable, and damning everyone to their fates under the inevitable hammer of God.

Ryo picks Akira to be Devilman because he's the most kind-hearted person he knows. The show opens early on Akira as a child trying to save a fatally injured cat, caring for it despite all evidence that it would die. Child Ryo mocked him for investing when all hope was lost, but Akira did it anyway. Not because it might work, but because he could do nothing else. That's who Akira is. He is simple humanist compassion, embodied in an average boy. 

Ryo isn't that. Ryo is a character defined by his meticulous objectivity and desire for understand. Ryo wouldn't just stop at pulling the wings off flies, he would try to dissect the whole fly, as much to genuinely learn as to indulge in a sort of detached cruelty defined as 'let's see what happens?' It's the kind of behavior that is labeled in pop culture sociopathy. We're introduced to present day Ryo pulling a machine gun on the group of kids who loiter around rapping, an injection of intensely casual violence in what has been up until now a show about teens being teens. His disregard for the lives of others is innate from the start.

The only person he actually seems to care about is Akira, but that regard isn't out of concern or any on-screen affection. Ryo is interested in Akira because he is what Ryo is not, and nothing Ryo has ever been able to do has been able to change that. Ryo loves Akira because Akira is an 'other', and he literally unmakes the world in an effort to see how far he can push his friend to prove his incorruptibility. The only emotion I ever got from Ryo was delighted fascination that Akira never breaks, even when he suffers every possible tragedy. 

But Akira isn't special, really. Akira is taken in by the Makimura family and his real best friend is the eldest daughter Miki, a half Japanese half French American girl who is Akira's equal in goodness and compassion. They were raised in a household that is the epitome of Japanese consideration but molded around a Western, Christian upbringing. The show, in my memory, isn't particularly explicit about this, but my impression was that Miki's father was some variety of missionary or pastor. At the very least, devout enough to raise Miki and Akira to be good Christians. And boy did that take.

The entire show revolves around this innate goodness. Akira is able to take on the mantle of the Devilman and use it to rally other Devilmen living in hiding to his cause. He's made powerful and indulgent and vice-ridden, but he is able to exert a control over his demonic nature none of the other Devilmen seem to even consider. Both versions of the story are very clear, Akira's heart remains human, and furthermore remains empathetic and (not to put too fine a point on it) Christ-like. Miki is right there with him, in terms of intentions and beliefs, but never gets empowered in the same way. She is simply a girl, not much more going on in her life other than being good at track and being pursued by a creepy photographer she's ducking. 

Her relative disempowerment only highlights how much her goodness (and Akira's by association) is in itself considered a power. Her goodness attracts people to her, regardless of their demeanor, because it is so unique in a world where most people struggle with their personal battles of good and evil daily. By the time human civilization is collapsing, those few people with consideration left to them have rallied in her house in a sort of last stand of humanity, people who still care for others barricading their doors against the fear of the mob.

Devilman in both of its incarnations is known, in no small part, because of its apocalyptic ending, where the reveal of demons creates a panic scenario orchestrated by Ryo that wipes out all of humanity when demons rise up and take over the world. Ryo, transformed into a reawakened Satan, tries to paint this as a final victory. He has succeeded in erasing God's creations for his own kingdom. Evil has won. It's all very dire but also I think it's all very hollow, despite all the apocalyptic battling and devastation we're presented on screen or in the panels. 

The thing Crybaby realizes, a thing I don't think the manga accomplishes nearly as well, is by the time Satan destroys humanity the battle is irrelevant. It doesn't matter who lives or who dies in the struggle. Life and death are paltry considerations for God. What mattered was the innate nature, good or evil, of the souls that lived on earth before they were killed. All that Ryo's war does is trigger the divine accounting of what was already present. And the show isn't subtle about these considerations: 

Miki's seemingly disastrous empathy for the photographer who's trying to get nude photos of her is played with great menace early on, but Miki's choices are seen as unwaveringly beatific. She's the closest you can get to a nun in anime without putting on a habit. 

The other Miki, and the group of rapping kids hanging around, are characters living in the moral grey where they struggle with temptations and an earnest desire to do good. They sometimes succeed, they sometimes fail. They're us, the audience surrogate, and their envy and love of characters like Miki and Akira humanizes them by showing how different they are from us. 

Miki's younger brother, by contrast, is lost to the corruption of the world well before he begins to transform into a demon. He's breaking into Akira's computer, watching porn or the scenes of violence happening in the world and even partaking in the classic Devilman anime, a corrupting influence if there ever was one. The show paints him as an innocent, yes, but an innocent beset by the temptations of the world unequipped to handle them and his danger unnoticed by everyone else. No wonder he's devoured by the darkness.

The world in general follows a similar fate. As demons emerge into the public consciousness, fear and religious fervor consume the country. Japan suddenly has a lot more guns and Bible thumpers than you would ever imagine, in scenes that I'll generously describe as 'pointedly American' in their critiques. The people, going about their business not considering the state of their souls, are totally blindsided by the demons and fall into the worst aspects of fear-driven zealotry. Miki and Akira, and Miki's parents to a lesser extent, are mostly immune to this because they live in a state of consideration of the metaphysical and moral every day. Hard to be swept up in a Revelations fad when you're already living the lifestyle.

So Ryo/Satan destroys the world, and everyone in it, leaving Akira and him on a rock in an endless sea evoking the earliest state of the Earth, when all there was was water with no life in it. Akira is already dead, unable to hear Ryo's self satisfaction at having won. Not that it would matter, Akira has already been proven to be better than Ryo's narrow self-interest. In dying, he's shown that his desire to oppose Ryo's world view was earnest and unbreakable. Ryo would have to kill him or submit, and in killing him Ryo loses the one thing he wanted: a world where Akira would understand him. 

There's an idea in Calvinism called double predestination, that God already knows who will be saved and who will be damned, and that all of our lives are just a grand stage play operating seemingly for nobody's benefit but ours. We might think we have free will, that we will decide our lives and our afterlives should we believe in them, but in actuality it's all just  mass delusion of animals too dumb to realize the game was over eons before any of our births. All that's left is to wait for the whole thing to play out, and God to show up to sweep all the spent pieced back into the box. 

Ryo, the last living being on a devastated earth, clings to the idea that Satan's rebellion was his idea and his purpose, to defy God and create a world outside of God's image, where beings live and die free of the moral compass God had delivered to mortals. As the show ends, however, God's army is seen showing up all around the earth, not as a new rally in the war against evil, but as a parent home after a day at work sweeping up after a messy child. Our last vision of Crybaby is of a world reborn, made again by God who can keep doing this literally forever, all of Ryo's tantrum erased as quickly as it arose in the first place.

Satan can never be saved. He can never win. His existence is as fated to end in his despair as Miki's existence was fated to end in well-meaning, empathetic tragedy. None of the big picture war for Earth mattered, all that ever mattered were the little things in the day to day. Akira and Miki, going through life trying to help people? That was the spiritual struggle that mattered. 

All the demons and all the devilmen and all the angels fallen or otherwise never held a candle to a kid beatboxing his affection to a girl, or teammates trying to support each other through a difficult race, or people trying to just live through high school well. The saved are saved, the doomed are doomed, and a boy crying over a dying cat is worth everything not because it'll do anything but because the things that are right are right innately, not when they produce results.

That's what I got out of Devilman Crybaby: an admonition to compassion and understanding in a world that could end any day, with violences unimaginable, and cruelties thoughtless and stupid. In that way, it's quintessentially Yuasa, concerned with the small humanity of little moments as the reason for literally everything. And that's why I really loved Devilman Crybaby, even when I don't really see the things other people love in it. I hope that makes up for not getting a beach house out of it.

Also the music? Fantastic. One of the best modern OPs I've heard, honestly.

Until next week,

Em