Answers! And the hook for the main conflict! That’s what this week is all about, and thus it gets into some of the most fascinating stuff out of In/Spectre and… kinda glosses over it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s kind of
already troublesome that the show is put on hold for the vast
majority of the episode (the present-tense events are a kind of slow
fight between Kuro and Steel Lady Nanase and Iwanaga presenting her
findings), but the explanations and ideas were what made In/Spectre
interesting as a manga, weaving stories within stories. It’s
something I was somewhat afraid wouldn’t translate well to visual
media, and… it does kind of have trouble. Not fatal trouble, at
least not yet, and there’s still plenty of fun to be had in the anime
adaptation with the comedic deliveries and timing of Kuro and Iwanaga
playing off her somewhat disturbed-seeming romance, but it’s a little
bit rocky and I’m not sure there was a good answer.
Because most of the episode is spent in
two explanations. One is how Kuro became… what he is, and what
that implies. You might remember from earlier episodes that he
consumed the flesh of two kinds of Yokai, absorbing their powers, and
that one of them was mermaid flesh that made him immortal. Today, we
learn about the other Yokai, and why Kuro is the way he is.
That Yokai is the Kudan – a creature
with the head of the human and the body of a cow that utters a
prophecy (which is never wrong) and then promptly dies. An ancient
head of Kuro’s household, desiring to gain the power of prophecy, had
many of those close to him consume the creature’s meat in the hopes
of gaining its power. However, even the ones that didn’t die from
eating Yokai flesh died thanks to the Kudan’s power, though some gave
accurate prophecies when they did. The head of house eventually
devised the plan to have Mermaid mixed into the meal, granting the
subject an immortal body as well as the lethal power of prophecy. In
the old days, it never worked – the number of just plain rejections
skyrocketed. In the current generation, though, Kuro’s grandmother
resurrected the scheme… and Kuro was the one who lived, not having
a lethal bad reaction to the Yokai flesh and gaining both immortality
and prophecy… though he has to die to see the future. He was them
tortured/killed repeatedly for information so he can’t really feel
pain or fear death anymore.
It’s implied but not really explained
in this episode that “seeing the future” is not entirely
accurate. What happens when Kuro dies is that he gets to see the
strangs of fate, and force time down a particular course. Compared
to a proper Kudan, his reach isn’t far: an event must be decently
probable and fairly at hand for him to ensure that it happens.
However, once he locks something in, that’s what occurs.
This is actually a very interesting way
to handle the issue of future sight and prophetic power, having both
sensible limitations and annoying conditions that mean Kuro can’t
easily run roughshod over any plot that presents itself. I suspect
we will get more of these details as they continue to be relevant, so
the fact that it’s not all 100% in the open now isn’t what I’m
talking about.
What I mean is that I think the
presentation is something that could have been altered for a dramatic
format. This is one of the thorny issues of adapted media – what
do you change? Personally, I think that a good adaptation does have
to make changes. Being faithful is a good thing, but being 1:1
faithful isn’t necessarily, because it misses the point of moving the
work into a different medium in the first place.
So, I question you this: What would it
be like if instead of a fraction of an episode with a flashback to
Kuro’s family history largely told by Iwanaga’s narration, we got a
full episode (or mostly full episode) that was essentially entirely
in-character, with very few cuts to Iwanaga’s thoughts on the matter?
If we were more in the moment, we would better understand the
emotions going on, that lead to one of our main characters having the
identity we’re familiar with. The one scene that most strongly does
this, where kid Kuro eats the flesh and watches all his other young
relations/fellow experiment subjects cough up blood and die in
horrible pain, is fairly effective. We could have had more of that.
What we do have is still effective, and
it’s faithful to the manga. I’m just contending it’s not as
effective as it could be.
The other big note is Iwanaga’s
identification of Steel Lady Nanase as a “Monster of the
imagination”. Essentially, Steel Lady Nanase is a type of spook
(using this word to cover all the types we’re introduced to) that,
rather than having an independent existence, is formed by the action
of human thought. We’re given another example, the slit-mouthed
woman, about how a rumor became a monster however temporarily. We’re
also told that Steel Lady Nanase is different from that: it’s hard
for Monsters of the Imagination to form and easy for them to fade,
and they don’t often have much power in their brief existences.
Steel Lady Nanase, however, has a very solid and powerful
manifestation, and has come into being with great rapidity. The
spread and the codification of her rumor is being driven by
something, and Iwanaga knows what: the website all about her, with a
vivid, evocative picture of the Steel Lady on top of the home page.
Essentially, rather than the website having been made to record the
monster, the monster was spawned from collective mania in the
internet, given form and direction by the website. The site, then,
is Steel Lady Nanase’s true form; the ghost swinging steel beams at
people is just a projection of it.
Again, this is a pretty dynamite idea.
When I first read the manga, it reminded me very much of the AD&D
setting “Planescape”, which takes place in a realm very much
formed by and subject to belief and ideas and something can be caused
to exist (or not exist) because it’s believed in or believed against.
Consensus reality is something that has a lot of play and can lead
to some good payoffs, which in In/Spectre (at least in a conceptual
sense) it does.
After all, how do you kill an internet
rumor? The ghost isn’t the problem, the story of the ghost is, and
until that can be somehow undone there’s not much point in, say,
snapping the Steel Lady’s neck (Kuro tries this episode).
The answer to that will have to wait
for later!