We’re back to standard form this week with a jolly beating of hard realities into Kakeru’s thick head, which oddly enough has things looking up for the show, at least in a small way.
We start off with a minor irrelevant fight that shows that Kakeru’s picking up the slack in the combat capability department, largely due to copious application of fighting game moves. Honestly the “good at video games transfers to good at superpowers” trope is so worn that I’ll just sort of accept it.
The meat of the episode, though, involves meeting Oka’s big sister. She’s the leader of “Black Team”, the elite corps of whatever overarching group is behind the power suit demon fighters, and while she seems kind of an exuberant nut when dealing with her little sister, she does have a reason for her visit: a special kind of oni called a Shinja has emerged, and she wants the help of “White Team” (our main characters) in order to flush it out and defeat it.
We learn as the hunt begins through a ninja theme park that a Shinja is the result of an oni fully consuming their vessel and crossing the point of no return, where the Oni is in control and free to act even in the mortal world while evolving to another, smarter level, devouring humans (presumably in the more mundane sense) as they please. The former vessel has lost their soul and can no longer be saved, or so we’re told, but hero-obsessed Kakeru has some trouble accepting this.
Kakeru’s ethical issues come to a head when he actually encounters the Shinja, which initially takes the form of a man desperate to find his son as a lure. As Kakeru and Ibara fight the thing (which actually has a unique oni form, a slimmed down blade-handed model that is at least different from the normal chompy things we see), it gets into a discussion of being Oni with Ibara, deriding him as one who failed to become a Shinja (which he rejects, seeing himself as a better form) and recounting that, as oni see it, it’s the most basic wish of humans to give authority over their lives to another, which is ultimately the wish that Oni grant.
This is the kind of thing that could be interesting if it were better explored; a number of psychological studies indicate that humans have an interesting issue with power dynamics and often surrender their own convictions when presented with a powerful authority… but suffice to say that Shikizakura’s treatment isn’t nuanced or detailed enough to really invoke any of that.
The Shinja also proves a really rough fight for White Team, so it’s a good thing that Black Team shows up to show off their much more formidable powers and take it down. At the end it seems to turn back to human form and even talk like the vessel, which of course Kakeru buys despite being faked out by that several times before, only for Oka’s sister to go ahead and run it through with her sword, leaving the twisted half-oni corpse to show its true nature.
She also goes ahead and takes out Kakeru with a gut punch, carrying him away and taking charge of Ibara at the same time, which is suggested to have possibly been her true goal. White team, especially Oka, doesn’t seem very happy with this turn of events.
Now, to really talk about this episode, let’s talk about heroes and the interplay of more grim and more bright material.
There’s something of a pendulum of perception when it comes to lighter versus darker treatments of heroic action. There’s an expectation for material that’s made for little kids that there’s always going to be a pleasing way to save everyone without major sacrifices. It might take major work, but if everybody tries and believes then there’s no need to kill and no need to die.
To a lot of people a lot of the time, this doesn’t come off as realistic. The ideal of the perfect hero with a 100% success rate and 0% losses is just that, an ideal. Sometimes it’s sold by making that the hero’s deep need and something that possible only because the hero possesses great power, making it their responsibility to use that power for the greatest good even if easier routes are available. Other times, it just seems childish: In the lives that most people experience there are, if in a more minor sense, tradeoffs and sacrifices so that not everyone can have everything their way. It breaches our suspension of disbelief, after a point, if a protagonist can always win and win cleanly at that. All the same, we do tend to long for happy endings and good resolutions in our entertainment. It’s not engaging to watch the story where everything always works out and there’s no real chance of even costs being incurred along the way, but it’s not fun to watch where the story is totally miserable and no one has a chance of actually getting through things. Pure happiness is rejected, but pure darkness is fatiguing and loses interest just as totally.
Somewhere between the harmless peace of Rainbow Brite and the grim darkness of Warhammer 40,000 there’s a balance point, and frankly one of the cycles in media, the year-by-year pendulum swings of deconstruction and reconstruction, is the location of that balance point. We can say it starts pointed more towards the light, where generally a clean success will be possible as long as there’s a good struggle to get there. Then later works, reacting to that body of work, will reject it as infantile and present increasingly dark takes as more ‘real’ or ‘honest’. At some point, the pendulum swings back and we start to see more idealistic and hopeful works standing out and regarding their predecessors as overly cynical or miserable. To an extent, the Toaru Series is an encapsulation of different points on the scale. A Certain Magical Index is lighter and brighter; Toma is never forced to fight a truly irredeemable villain who he’d have to kill rather than simply beating them into submission with fists and friendship speeches alike, and nobody he steps up to protect has to die anyway. A Certain Scientific Accelerator is much darker; not only does Accelerator go ahead and kill off his foes when there’s not a good reason to spare them, he’s faced with situations where we can’t get a “good” resolution and save everybody. What’s lost is lost and even if our main character is mostly invincible the people around him are allowed to be mortal to a greater degree. We kind of get both elements under one title when the lead characters start to collide and the scenes around each one reflect their own tones.
With that as an example, how does this topic relate to the current episode of Shikizakura, you might wonder. The fact is that a lot of the meat of this episode is predicated not even on the position of that pendulum between light and darkness, but on its proper motion. It’s an arc that’s seen fairly frequently, but not always, because it’s an arc that’s always seen when things are turning around.
Basically, the core arc is that Kakeru is told that things can’t work out like the idealist hero wants while, as an idealist hero himself, he wants to reject that lesson and prove that everyone can be saved. He and his setting are at different expected stops on the spectrum of noble to grim, bright to dark. If the pendulum is shifting dark, than the purpose of this arc is to “break in” Kakeru, and force him to endure the trauma of accepting pain and loss. If it’s shifting the other way, the purpose is to inspire those who have too easily accepted losses to try to fight for better outcomes.
In neither case does this necessarily end with everything one way. When lighter is shifting to darker, it can go all the way dark (and become unfun in the process, since it’s all about breaking people down) but more likely, especially with this being deployed so late rather than as part of simply initiating the main character, it will hit a balance point where the belief in the possibility of redemption and earnest struggle for it is a precious thing, even if sometimes the hero won’t be successful, forcing them to carry the scars of their failures and causing them to feel for every sacrifice that’s made along the way. In the case where dark is shifting towards light, there will normally still be losses early that the hero is primed to reject, and that the hero and those they inspire will gradually fight harder and harder to prevent the repetition of those tragedies.
Typically, you can tell the two apart in that, when we’re shifting darker and getting the hero used to harsh reality, there will generally be situations that are fully within the hero’s power, where they (or those they look up to who are teaching them these lessons) have a legitimate choice as to what to lose or how. In the case where we’re shifting lighter, the pain is usually more out of the hands of characters with agency, at least at first, and gaining control over those painful events by growing stronger and more resolute is the key to preventing them. One way you have painful choices and sacrifices, the other you have the struggle to protect and defend.
Overall, Shikizakura seems set up for the “light in the darkness makes things better” version of the pattern… which probably means that Kakeru is really going to annoy some people, both in this episode and going forward. Because while media seems to swing back and forth like a pendulum in terms of what’s popular, people have their own favored or natural points on the spectrum. And an unreasonably brighter hero than the viewer, who refuses to buckle up and try to do the best with the situation they’re handed, instead whining about how things should be rather than dealing with how things are? That kind of character can be, from a personal perspective, torturous.
To once again draw a comparison with the much better show I’m going through this season, 86, there are going to be some people who won’t be able to stand Kakeru because he doesn’t have Shin’s capacity for doing what’s necessary rather than what’s, in some senses, right – probably more than would have trouble watching Shin, though that’s down to the better writing making you feel the weight he experiences for what he does.
But, that aside, I do think this episode represented a slight improvement for the show. We had an actual boss monster with a different (if still kind of lackluster) model, we had a good fight, we actually talked to an Oni other than Ibara and got what could have been some emotional investment in these outcomes, and we introduced (in the form of Black Team and an old guy they report to in the post-credits stinger) some potential human antagonists with whom we can have good interplay, generating conflict that’s based on understandable and human elements rather than just punching chompy monsters because, hey, they’re chompy monsters and that’s obviously bad.
It’s clear that the creators of Shikizakura, as green as they might be, know what they are trying to do and roughly how to accomplish that. They might not always be able to successfully execute that vision, but at least they have the right idea about these things, and that’s an encouraging thought.