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Nausicaa and Battle Angel Alita are among the manga I'd rank as the very top of my favorites, with Nausicaa being #1. I try to reread the story and reabsorb all of it at least once a year. The art is vivid and expressive, and has that incredible, mythic, yet lived-in quality that most Ghibli films do, art that draws you in for a while and makes you part of that world. The multiple interleaving themes -- death, rebirth, the power of religion and spirituality, politics, and the environment -- make it possible to read and reread the story again and again and absorb a little more each time.
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Jan 15, 2015 05:20
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 05:50 |
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lil baby anime posted:Thanks again drsunshine Haha! I'd totally forgotten about that until now. I don't even remember which thread I posted it in!! But yes -- Kushana is quite an extraordinary character, primarily in two opposite, yet somehow complimentary ways. First, it's that she changes so much during the course of the story. Second, it's that parts of her don't change at all. Allow me to explain. At the beginning, she is essentially a villain, a hardened and unempathic person cruelly and single-mindedly pursues her goals. She formed this shell just in order to survive the harsh "viper's nest" that was the Torumekian court. Essentially, at the start of the manga we see her as having become her shell, this hardened person has become her true self. However, as the story progresses, thanks to her interactions with Nausicaa, that shell of hers starts to crack open, revealing a more mature and thoughtful person inside. Despite this, she still remains a very brutal person -- as can be seen in the sequence that a kitten posted. Kushana says as much at some point in the story, that she would "never be able to forgive people the way [Nausicaa] can", but she can at least find closure. The most telling scene is when she begins singing in midst of the chaos of a bug attack, after seeing her villainous older brother perish. I think that this scene is a bit more than just her finally seeing a hated figure in her life die -- it's that she witnessed it at the hands of the insects. Seeing him wiped out by the careless whim of essentially a massive natural force, I think, brought it all into perspective for Kushana. Essentially, Kushana realized that the struggles and hatreds that had characterized her life up till then were insignificant, that things could be whisked away by a random twist of fate. It was in realizing the transience and meaninglessness of concerns like politics or family feuds that Kushana gained some measure of closure and peace, that she was able to let go some of the karma from her past trauma as a child. In a sense, the story of Kushana is a very Buddhist-like story: one finds relief from pain and suffering (dukkha) from being able to let go and pass over things in peace. Yet Buddhism counsels not to abandon the world to asceticism, but rather to find peace in the earthly world through balance. We can see this in how Kushana still maintains the strength and some of the ruthlessness that characterized her throughout the story even by the end, even though she has chosen not to walk down the path of endless cycles of revenge (the "path of Ashura" as Master Yupa puts it in the fifth or sixth volume). By gaining a measure of peace through letting go of her past hatreds, while simultaneously staying rooted to the struggles of reality and worldly affairs, Kushana develops and matures as a character on an archetypical Buddhist journey. The epilogue supports this by saying how she chose to remain as regent, ruling over her people in peace to the end of her days.
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Jan 17, 2015 04:04
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