Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomsecrets2014-08-17 03:54 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2014-08-17 03:54 pm
[ SECRET POST #2784 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2784 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 057 secrets from Secret Submission Post #398.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
no subject
I never made a habit out of criticising people for being into pairings that are bound to end in tragedy for everyone involved, but I DO side-eye those who take those pairings and portray them as though they were really just tragically misunderstood by society or whatever. I have Opinions about those who seriously think that Subaru/Seishirou from Tokyo Babylon/X in any way, shape or form can be described as a tragic romance and yes, that includes Clamp.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-08-17 09:16 pm (UTC)(link)I mean, I think you could call that a tragic romance? In that it has a twisted attempt to love each other (based on extremely suspect definitions of 'love', admittedly), and pretty much all the tragedy you could ask for?
no subject
People are free to ship what the want, but I think it takes a lot of squinting to read this pairing as something with a potential for romance in canon. Seishirou is utterly dysfunctional: he killed the most important person in Subaru's life, nearly killed Subaru himself, and in X he cheerfully joins the club to end humanity. Subaru, for his part, fell in love with a person who never existed; the real Seishirou was a far cry from the dorky veterinarian next door. One of my big, big problems with X was that it really seems to suggest that this was somehow a relationship that was doomed by cruel fate, not by one of the parts being screwed up beyond all and any repair. Tragically, I know not to expect anything better from Clamp.
Anyway, sorry for blathering on about this. I really do see the point about the attempt to love each other, but I'll never be able to use the word love about what Seishirou was doing with Subaru.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-08-17 10:36 pm (UTC)(link)Of course, in the end he apparently realised that he didn't feel love, or not enough to actually spare anyone, but if the original idea for the experiment was genuine, that adds a layer of tragedy in that his attempt at love failed because there was something too broken/missing inside him to allow it, which could be construed as fate turning against him/them.
All of that hinges on whether or not he was actually trying to feel it or just doubly fucking with Subaru, of course. I think there actually was something, a curiosity if nothing else, though. I think he genuinely was trying to see if something of Subaru's nature could be reflected inside himself, and whether it would be strong enough to change his own hollow nature. It wasn't, because Seishirou is genuinely fucked up beyond all repair, but I think he was sort of half-wondering if it might be.
It's not a basis for love, even still, and in the end it only fucked poor Subaru up even worse by making him partly break himself trying to find something in Seishirou that wasn't there and probably never had a hope to be, but it might explain where the 'tragic romance doomed by fate' comes from, if we interpret the attempt to feel as genuine and 'fate' as being what rendered Seishirou genuinely incapable of love by his very nature, even despite his own wishes.
no subject
Seishirou is a psychopath and except for the "bet" to see if he could learn to love Subaru (which honestly seemed to be more about curiosity than anything else), he never makes any attempts at being a functional member of society. I think a lot of my wariness towards the pairing and people who romanticise it, is that Seishirou is broken by things that cannot be fixed. Psychopathy cannot be cured, and I really do not like the fantasy about how love can heal a person whose psyche is defective on the most fundamental levels. Even if Seishirou's fate was to be incapable of feeling for others, it wasn't fate that made him do what he did to the Sumeragi twins - it was his own choices, which he freely recognises as morally reprehensible.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-08-17 11:54 pm (UTC)(link)Even if Seishirou's fate was to be incapable of feeling for others, it wasn't fate that made him do what he did to the Sumeragi twins - it was his own choices, which he freely recognises as morally reprehensible.
This depends on which philosophy of fate we're using, I suppose. There is an argument that fate, the shape of things that we can't change no matter what our choices, informs free will, the part of us that sees the shapes around us and chooses how to act on them. It's possible and really rather likely that Seishirou made the choices he did because he couldn't feel for others, so it's eminently arguable that fate did indeed shape the course of his life/his relationships. If fate is the things we can't change, and Seishirou couldn't change his nature, then it can be said that his struggle and attempt to love Subaru, which quite possibly was genuine, was doomed by fate to fail.
I think the idea of the star-crossed lovers, the tragic romance, is that implacable forces outside or inside them render their love impossible despite all their wishes to the contrary. It's perhaps not always necessary that the characters themselves understand that, and in a lot of tragic romances often they actually don't, for reasons of everything from a miscommunication that meant they never fully knew they loved each other in the first place, to amnesia, to dying before it could be realised, etc. It's the audience who's made to hope for them, to understand the breadth of what's been denied to them, who understands how tragic it is that she will never know who really wrote those letters to her, or that he will never remember the friend of his youth who died to save his life, or that this man will never be able to understand what he lost because it's beyond his nature to feel it.
In that sense, there's almost an extra tragedy to the fact that Seishirou doesn't even understand what he wanted and then couldn't have, that he probably never will. The tragedy for the audience is that, as you say, his psychopathy can't be cured, that love cannot save the day, that some wounds and some absences are simply too fundamental to be altered. The tragedy isn't for him, it's for us, who hoped for a healing that will never happen, and for Subaru, who believed in something that never really existed and was broken by it.
... And wow, I get philosophical in the A.M. My apologies?
SA
(Anonymous) 2014-08-17 11:58 pm (UTC)(link)---
Well, no, I suppose it's not really tragic for Seishirou, and it's hard for things to get any more tragic for Subaru, but that he wanted to love and found himself incapable is sort of tragic for the audience? In that there was hope created for the possibility of love, and it was destroyed by a flaw that the characters were helpless to alter. Seishirou can't see it as a tragedy, because he literally doesn't have the components inside himself to, but the audience (and Subaru) can understand the potential of what was lost and be moved(/broken) by it.
Even if Seishirou's fate was to be incapable of feeling for others, it wasn't fate that made him do what he did to the Sumeragi twins - it was his own choices, which he freely recognises as morally reprehensible.
This depends on which philosophy of fate we're using, I suppose. There is an argument that fate, the shape of things that we can't change no matter what our choices, informs free will, the part of us that sees the shapes around us and chooses how to act on them. It's possible and really rather likely that Seishirou made the choices he did because he couldn't feel for others, so it's eminently arguable that fate did indeed shape the course of his life/his relationships. If fate is the things we can't change, and Seishirou couldn't change his nature, then it can be said that his struggle and attempt to love Subaru, which quite possibly was genuine, was doomed by fate to fail.
I think the idea of the star-crossed lovers, the tragic romance, is that implacable forces outside or inside them render their love impossible despite all their wishes to the contrary. It's perhaps not always necessary that the characters themselves understand that, and in a lot of tragic romances often they actually don't, for reasons of everything from a miscommunication that meant they never fully knew they loved each other in the first place, to amnesia, to dying before it could be realised, etc. It's the audience who's made to hope for them, to understand the breadth of what's been denied to them, who understands how tragic it is that she will never know who really wrote those letters to her, or that he will never remember the friend of his youth who died to save his life, or that this man will never be able to understand what he lost because it's beyond his nature to feel it.
In that sense, there's almost an extra tragedy to the fact that Seishirou doesn't even understand what he wanted and then couldn't have, that he probably never will. The tragedy for the audience is that, as you say, his psychopathy can't be cured, that love cannot save the day, that some wounds and some absences are simply too fundamental to be altered. The tragedy isn't for him, it's for us, who hoped for a healing that will never happen, and for Subaru, who believed in something that never really existed and was broken by it.
... And wow, I get philosophical in the A.M. My apologies?
Re: SA
tomorrowlater.Re: SA
(Anonymous) 2014-08-18 01:04 am (UTC)(link)Thank you for the conversation!
Re: SA
I've spent the last few weeks trying to get my thoughts in order about a certain anime in which the question of fate and defying/accepting it is a central theme (if you know the girl in my icon, you'll know what I'm talking about), and my mental definition of "fate" has been firmly stuck as "the things in your life that you cannot change", and the vital question that story then asks is: "so what are you going to do about that?"
So I'm going to presume that some degree of free will exists, and I'll maintain that although it was Seishirou's fate never to be capable of love, he had the choice of not doing things that are evil. To get into more detail than one ever would need to because it's not like Seishirou was ever meant to be an accurate depiction of a mental dysfunction: A lot of people on the psychopathy spectrum are fairly well-functioning members of society, because they were raised under benevolent circumstances and are taught to recognise right and wrong, even though they might not understand that difference like others do. The lacking empathy and understanding of morals make it easier for psychopaths to engage in anti-social behaviour, but the fact remains that most of them don't become cold-blooded killers. Seishirou obviously recognices normalcy enough to emulate it, and I'll argue that he could have made the choice to not transgress against society's notions of right and wrong, even though circumstance (being born to the Sakurazukamori clan) might've worked against him.
The tragedy for the audience is that, as you say, his psychopathy can't be cured, that love cannot save the day, that some wounds and some absences are simply too fundamental to be altered. The tragedy isn't for him, it's for us, who hoped for a healing that will never happen, and for Subaru, who believed in something that never really existed and was broken by it.
That paragraph is beautifully put, and to be honest, it opened my eyes to why I'm probably more negative towards the Seishirou-and-Subaru thing than a lot of others. I have read most of what Clamp have published, and I've always disliked their tendency to portray couples that defy the definition of normal in weird and often outright uncomfortable ways - ranging from a third-grader getting engaged to her teacher to people finding their "soulmates" in sexbot computers. Seishirou and Subaru went straight there, what with it being a shady man in his mid-twenties seemingly pursuing a romance with a sixteen-year old who is the purest thing since the virgin mother. (particularly when it was initiated when said boy was eight years old or something, yeeesh) I was put off by the possibility of a romance between them already from the beginning; I was a reader who never wanted them to be together in the first place.
Given Clamp's later track record, it's quite possible that the intended reading of the story is the one you're describing, but it's also one that I find to be, uh, narratively contradictive. I always thought that the central relationship of Tokyo Babylon wasn't Subaru and Seishirou, but Subaru and Hokuto. Seishirou is very clearly constructed as the antithesis of everything they represent. In my eyes, the great tragedy of Tokyo Babylon was never that Seishirou wasn't saved, but that Subaru and Hokuto, those dual forces of good, made themselves vulnerable to Seishirou's cruelty because of their goodness, were powerless to fix it (be it by saving Seishirou, or by destroying him), and in turn were broken because of that.
And there you have it, I guess.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-08-18 10:42 pm (UTC)(link)Ah. Hmm. Possibly this is sideways to the point, forgive me, it just made me wonder about the definition of love. To preface this, I have sometimes a lot of trouble figuring out what people mean by emotions, how they're supposed to be measured, presented, registered. I think it was part of what fascinated me about Seishirou's experiment in the first place, maybe. But. Love is often described as a measure of value. How much value you place on someone/thing relative to how much you value yourself/others. Even if love the sensation was difficult/impossible for Seishirou to understand, it was still possible for him to have/express it in the form of values? He had decided that Subaru was worth something to him, enough to even try the experiment in the first place. Even if the sensation of love had never been possible, he still might have decided that Subaru had enough value to him for Subaru's values to become his own, to abide by if not to feel, and perhaps that might have been as close to love as he could come?
And your point is that he didn't do that. He didn't give even the extent of love he might actually have been capable of, he didn't fight fate even in the ways that were actually possible, so you put the blame back more squarely on him, although fate and circumstances do still provide some mitigation?
Which is a fair point, although I'll put in an addenda, maybe? If Seishirou had problems with understanding emotions/ideals because of his nature, he may not have fully understood the extent to which the values of love could be present in the absence of what he thought the sensation would be. When people describe things like love, when they explain the concept, they usually don't describe it as partly a conscious choice, they describe it as a whole, innate thing. While he may have understood enough to emulate surface behaviours, Seishirou may not have actually understood the deeper structure, because very few people describe it that way. So he may not have understood that love as in the conscious placing of value could exist/matter in the absence of love-the-innate-sensation as it was described to him? He reacted in an all-or-nothing manner, presuming that if one part of love did not exist then none could, because he didn't understand the internal structure of the concept?
Or, alternately, he simply didn't value Subaru enough, in any sense, to attempt to change himself around it. Heh. It could have been that either.
Seishirou is very clearly constructed as the antithesis of everything they represent. In my eyes, the great tragedy of Tokyo Babylon was never that Seishirou wasn't saved, but that Subaru and Hokuto, those dual forces of good, made themselves vulnerable to Seishirou's cruelty because of their goodness, were powerless to fix it (be it by saving Seishirou, or by destroying him), and in turn were broken because of that.
Yes, exactly. However, that is arguably why the Subaru/Seishirou relationship is considered important? They were destroyed because of him, because he thought he might love Subaru. If Seishirou had never thought he could love because of Subaru, if Subaru had never tried to love him back and to save him, if Hokuto had never sacrificed herself out of love and desire to save them both, it would never have ended as tragically as it did. It was because they loved, all three of them, because two of them loved genuinely and with everything and the third one wanted to but could not, that tragedy was brought down. A tainted, tragic love was so pervasive and so powerful that it destroyed a pure and genuine one alongside itself.
The two relationships build from each other, a compare and a contrast that highlights the failures and strengths of each. Subaru lost them both because he loved them both, because Seishirou took too much and Hokuto gave too much, because they both loved or at least wanted him to the extent they were capable and that bound them together until an ending came one way or the other. Seishirou was their antithesis, and love lead them to break themselves upon him.
And ... in an odd way, it was Hokuto who triumphed most? Her love was the most selfless, she gave herself gladly and completely for those she loved, and I think for all she died she found more peace and more joy in that action than the other two ever managed. She died to save Subaru, and he couldn't return the favour, nor could he save Seishirou in turn. They took and they gave what they wanted to/from him, and he couldn't match either of them. Hokuto forgave him for that, loved him endlessly despite it. I wonder ...
Now I'm wondering how it ended between Subaru and Seishirou. Because it would fit ... for it to go full circle, for the tragedy to circle all three of them, it would fit for Seishirou to do the same? It would fit for Subaru to be the one who survives, for him to lose them both, and something like the same way. For one to give in cruelty as the other had given in kindness, for Seishirou to die to take from Subaru as Hokuto had died to give to him. Flipsides of each other, a giving love and a taking love, and Subaru caught between them.
I think ... maybe he was never intended as Subaru's antithesis? Maybe he was always intended as Hokuto's, and Subaru was instead the balance between them?
no subject
ANYWAY, yeah, Seishirou and the thing with emotions. I went back and re-read the sequence where he reveals himself to Subaru, and his claim is essentially that he would make Subaru try to love him, to see if Subaru's goodness/purity would be capable of making him feel something, anything, for another human being. He acknowledges that there is something lacking in himself and that he thinks Subaru might be able to fix, though he doesn't specify about "love" - "love" was the feeling that Seishirou-san-the-dorky-veterinarian used. Seishirou the Sakurazukamori just wants some emotion, any emotion at all. Moreover, the bet was that if he COULD come to care about Subaru, he would use his powers to protect him, which has implications that I don't think Subaru would appreciate at all. If Seishirou truly wanted Subaru's affection, the path should be obvious: stop killing people, and use his powers for the same goals as Subaru does. There's nothing that suggests that he kills people out of a compulsive need for murder.
I think that to whatever extent Seishirou actually wanted Subaru, what he wanted was the emotional insight that he believes only Subaru could give him. When he suggests that he would destroy everyone who threatened Subaru (the complete opposite of Subaru with his willingness to suffer for people who hurt him), it would suggest that he comprehends love only in terms of possession, not in identifying and admiring traits in your partner. What he wants isn't love, but he thinks that love is the only expression of it. And - yeah, when Subaru fails to give him what he wants, Seishirou decides to get rid off him like the professional obstacle that he is.
I don't know. In the end, I'm still not convinced that Seishirou was capable of love, and he obviously didn't want it enough to be willing to try to mold himself into the closest imitation of it that he would be capable of. Respect, if nothing else, should be something that he could comprehend, for Subaru's modus operandi is to love everyone and thereby saving them. I just can't get myself to use the word "love" about Seishirou's entire ordeal with Subaru, because Seishirou de-humanises himself so thoroughly when he describes his absence of empathy. Seishirou wants to be human and he seems to think that "love" is the only quality capable of making him so, but he's either unwilling to accept the basic human tenets that love would require of him, or he honestly does not see the connection.
To return to my first paragraph, it makes sense that Seishirou never truly was Subaru's nemesis, but Hokuto's. The entire time, Hokuto was a lot more perceptive about him than Subaru was, anyway - and although the obvious conflict seems to be between Subaru who heals selflessly and Seishirou who destroys selfishly, the real contrast is between Seishirou who kills without emotion, and Hokuto who dies out of love. In a way, Seishirou wants to become Hokuto: her entire reason for living is to take of Subaru, which is what Seishirou claimed he would do if Subaru won the bet.
Haha, you might want to look up how it ends in X if you're curious. I can't remember the exact details in the anime, but the way it was explained in the manga was just Clamp being their ridiculous selves, I thought. Suffice it to say that I prefer to think of Tokyo Babylon as an independent story that's untainted by dystopian vision of Tokyo blowing up and lanky boys being tossed into walls *g*