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

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

Snapping once and carving up a thousand people is one thing. a) It seems unlikely that _anyone_ would do that over and over, much less Hakkai. b) Even extreme nastiness loses a lot of impact if it's revisited multiple times. (What, mass murdering again? Dude, find a better hobby.)

Gokuu is really Seiten Taisei so our Gokuu is just a manufactured personality.

This comes off as a novel thought. I mean, I've always just accepted that as obvious, but it's now occurring to me that I've likely been sitting in an unpopulated corner here. Huh.

('Course, no one believes Gokuu *is* Seiten Taisei *really*, except Gokuu who, bless the boy, automatically took full responsibility for what happened. 'Did I go wild again?' he asks. I. Not ano bakemono or any variations on same.)

One of my most long-standing fanfic pet peeves.

I used to get into the most irritating arguments on usenet over whether a character in a certain TV show ought to be held responsible for his actions.
Me: Yes. He killed people. Ergo.
Everyone: Yes, he killed people, but Outside Forces Made Him Do It. So no.

When the show itself settled the argument by embracing the Flip Wilson defense (y'know, "the devil made me do it!"), I stopped watching. Why are we supposed to have more sympathy for those who evade blame than for those who don the hair shirts? Foisting it off on your inner werewolf / aliens / demon possession / alcoholic intake / whatever is nothing more than the fictional equivalent of shirking. I'm still baffled by this.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Gokuu is really Seiten Taisei so our Gokuu is just a manufactured personality.

This comes off as a novel thought. I mean, I've always just accepted that as obvious, but it's now occurring to me that I've likely been sitting in an unpopulated corner here. Huh.

Well, it goes against both what incandescens calls the comfort space and the tradition of these things east and west. The western tradition- well, you summarized it yourself. If there's a beast within, You Are Not Responsible for what it does.

(I have a long digression on the anomalies of NAmerican culture. Things like, the society that most encourages individualism least encourages personal responsibility for the individual's actions; and the country that was the leader in women's rights a century ago will be the last one to have a woman head of state. Fricking **Pakistan** had a female leader but not the U.S. I'll save it for another time- but point to Papa Freud below for some of the whys of the first anomaly.)

I know manga/anime/RPG does a lot of beast within: multiple personalities, actual shape-shifting monsters- but I'm not up on the shounen and games that give you the best examples. I seem to recall that you just come to some kind of accommodation with them. Subject always to the dictates of the shounen audience- Kenshin can reverse his blade as much as he likes but you *know* he's going to become Battousai so you get a good fight in the end.

Still I was overstating when I said that our Gokuu is a manufactured personality. We actually don't know what he is, though I'd guess he started as a blank slate when STTS's nature was first suppressed, and eventually grew into himself. A separate but parallel personality. Our Gokuu has a long history of personal development, and there seems to be a link between how psychologically mature Gokuu gets and how physically powerful STTS gets. They're sides of the same coin. I shouldn't say Gokuu is *really* Seiten Taisei because that implies that our Gokuu is a sham, and he's not: but he *is* Seiten Taisei just as much as he's himself, and Gokuu at least doesn't distinguish between the two. It's not even the Beast Within: it's "me when I haven't taken my meds."

I think my original point was that, if the existence of STTS doesn't make our Gokuu a lie, so the fact of youkaiHakkai or even mass-murderer Hakkai doesn't make present Hakkai a lie. I get a little tired of 'the face beneath the smile' thing being taken to mean that the Hakkai we see is a clever ruse to disguise the violent person he really is.

I know Hakkai can be violent when needed and I'll even agree that he enjoys the experience, rather than just accepting it as a necessary evil. He isn't Vash the Stampede. But he's no more violent than any of the others, including Yay a fight!! Gokuu. If Gokuu's happy mayhem doesn't give people frissons of Seiten Taisei's mad rampages, then I don't see why Hakkai's efficient blood-letting should give them frissons of Gonou's massacre.

And that, m'lud, is the case for the defence.