Ill-fated Beginnings

[flemmings]

The latest Saiyuki ep arrived Monday (and is on its way in the usual fashion, those who know.) Lovely interaction with Hakkai and Gokuu, leaving me shaking my head yet again at the insistence, by those that way inclined, on Hakkai's scary semi-psychotic dangerousness. Even being sensible as a doorknob, as here, and empathic and tactful and down-to-earth, can't save him from people who want to harrow up their souls and indulge a little horripilation over the grinning psychopath. "Hakkai is a dark and twisted man! He killed a thousand youkai!" Yes: and the slaughter was clearly just a passing whim of his that had no repercussions worth mentioning, and that certainly left him with no special feelings about it at all. So one may reasonably expect him to wander out some afternoon and murder another thousand youkai. Because people work like that. If I bang my fist into the wall in a fit of rage and break my fingers, next time I get mad I'll certainly hit that wall again. Unh-hunh. Is the idea that actions have consequences, and that those consequences change you profoundly, so foreign these days? Or is some perverse Calvinism at work: your character is decided forever by 18 and you are predestined always to act as you acted before?

Which is partly why I'm not reading the comments over at radiofreebanri. And partly to avoid the 'forget Hakkai and Gojou how come us Sanzou lovers didn't get any Sanzou love?' wails. I think the Sanzou lovers got a lot of Sanzou love. Seems to me the man has a pretty good idea what he's doing and quite possibly he couldn't do it with the other three along. They can pick him up later, as per Rikudo. Yes this breaks the New Saiyuki Rule of one for all and all for one and we don't go off on our own. But Sanzou made the rule so Sanzou can break it.

Otherwise I started Tooth and Claw. I don't think I'll get far in that one. Unpleasant people doing unpleasant things are unpleasant people etc even if they're dragons. (What do I expect dragons to do? I expect them to defy the Jade Emperor in order to bring rain to the parched common people and get imprisoned under mountains for it. (Man, if I could embroider I'd so have these all over my shirts. My shirts always get bleach stains and grease stains and so on, and I've always wanted to be able to embroider little flowers or something to cover them up.)

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Mhh yeah. Freud's bastard grandchildren come back to haunt us. Everything has its root cause in some trauma and the trauma doesn't go away, it marks you for life. Thus Hakkai is a potential murderer because he was once an actual murderer: the trauma of losing his sister under violent circumstances made him a mass murderer and since trauma doesn't heal, he still is a mass murderer.

Never mind that one part of Minekura's ethos is Get over it. You did it, it's in the past, get on with your life now. Never mind also that the experience of having conducted a massacre is a fact that changed Hakkai's conception of himself. He knows what he did under extreme circumstances and as far as I can see he takes care that those circumstances don't arise again. If he has to do it by keeping people at emotional arm's distance, he does. The idea of Hakkai being unaware of his own reality and unwilling or unable to control himself just doesn't mesh with the fact that his weapon of choice requires discipline, focus and self-knowledge to attain and use. Hakkai the ticking time bomb just doesn't work for me.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

But the corollary of Freud's position- which has been embraced fervently by North American culture- is that you can't recover from trauma without the psychoanalytical/ psychiatric process. Hakkai is doomed to be a violent murderer unless he gets professional help to deal with his anger management issues and the innate narcissism that prevents him from being emotionally involved with other human beings. As I see it, he's dealt with the former himself and is learning to deal with the latter. Being cooped up day after day with three other people in a small space will do it to you- though it'd make *me* a psychotic mass murderer.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

One can see the interaction in terms of patient and psychiatrist if one wants to, and I'm sure Freud did- your reading of him is more extensive than mine. But surely that's Freud aggrandizing his own role as psychiatrist. "The strong influence of a person you care for would be the best if it wasn't too awkward to apply" seems to downplay what *is* the best and most natural way of modifying behaviour- the kind of interaction that the Saiyuuki guys use with each other, and the effects of experience.

I'd prefer to see the psychiatrist role as mimicking the role of friends and intimates, or parents and relatives, when for whatever reason these actual people don't exist or don't function for the individual. It's the family and friends that are the natural mode, and the patient/ psychiatrist one that's a kind of... well, artificial replacement for it. The fact is that Hakkai has changed from the person he was both before and after the massacre, and that this was accomplished naturally over time; it just irks me that fangirls still say we all know how dangerous Hakkai is- he *did* kill a thousand youkai after all.