(Why?) Darker than Black

This is the obligatory Darker than Black post that should have been written during the infantile stages of this site. I won’t make any extravagant claims so you should watch for the ones I do make. Here’s one: Yin is the most AWESOME, WONDERFUL character in anime EVER. Like I said it is pretty much common sense. I probably don’t even have to explain it or provide evidence.

On a serious note though I did name my blog YinNoPiano and despite what you may think it’s not just because I spent hours learning to play the song. Darker than Black was one of the first animes I watched when I seriously started watching anime. I’d seen Trigun and Bebop, but I hadn’t gone out of my way to go look for things. Perhaps it was for exactly this reason I let myself be convinced over time that the series wasn’t anything special. I might have just been prescribing it the wonders inherent in all anime after all. I recently re-watched the series and I realized I was very wrong. There is a lot going on in Darker than Black that isn’t going on in other animes. I’ll probably try to write a few of my thoughts here, but this won’t cover even a fraction of the thought provoking sentiments inherent in the series. I for one hope they make something else related, but I’ll miss the old cast.

Before I really start I encourage you to watch the series before reading this in its entirety because I make no plans to censor what I write. On the other hand you might need convincing. I will tell you what I see in this show and hopefully you’ll then deem it worth your time to plow your way through the jargon fest that is the first few episodes. I believe it was worth it and I wouldn’t purposefully mislead you.

I’ve heard it said that you can attribute meaning to anything. That’s probably correct. I can find meaning in the garbage that sometimes piles up in my room to songs like “Hey Ya” by Outkast. Meaning to me is that ambiguity in the plot: The things they don’t explain, or at least not through exposition. One of my main complaints about some animes and network tv is they often exposit on everything. Instead of trusting their actors to portray a scene in which two people are uncomfortable they put a line in the dialogue saying “I was so uncomfortable there”. The writer shouldn’t have to explain everything to us. Most of the fun is figuring it out for ourselves. Darker than Black is a master of the subtle. They often use very little to say a lot and when they do bother to state something it’s never directly like Gui Kurasawa’s famous line

What the heck, this might as well be the first theme I talk about. For me this is a very important concept that comes to fruition in Episode’s 13 and 14 lovingly named Yin’s Arc. Let’s face it we treat lots of people like objects in our society. We often don’t care what a model thinks, only what she looks like. Do you want a subordinate to have an opinion? In Yin’s arc and the Yakuza arc we see a clear line drawn in this fictitious setting. These “Dolls”, as they are called, are not humans. They lack emotion and the ability to think for themselves. The real kicker though is that the series slowly shows us this isn’t necessarily true. Just about every Doll they introduce ends up having some kind of feeling towards the people it ends up with. This is treated as somewhat of a character revelation as we see Yin crying in the moonlight or remarking that “She feels sad that she can’t feel sad”. Although the process of Dolls becoming Dolls is never made evident I suspect the actual process is just erasing all of their memories (which they can do). The statement is then that our memories define who we are. When Yin starts to recover her memories she can finally start to see her soul move. She also is creating memories with the people around her all the time. Realistically all of our relationships are based in memory. As I sit here writing this post alone in my room I can confidentially say that I have friends, have had girlfriends (oh so long ago), and a family. What makes those things true and what made those relationships to begin with? It’s no secret to a musical cast or a sports team that shared suffering brings people closer together. Many of my favorite moments came about when I was wining about some homework assignment I would rather not do. However, all of these experiences are based in memory. Is a friend still a friend if you take away all of the moments when they went jogging with you at one in the morning or listened to your problems when you had no one else to talk too. Quite frankly I would say no. If both parties have lost the memories of the other then no relationship exists. If a person has lost all of their memories then they are nothing. It isn’t until the dolls start creating new memories that they can redevelop into human beings, but that doesn’t mean they are not human before that happens.

If you’ve seen Darker than Black you already know that the real sky has disappeared and has been replaced by a fake one. The fake stars each represent a different Contractor (the super power people in the series) and the moon is forever hidden. By the way those two pictured are in my opinion some of the best bad guys of all time, if you can even call them that. Darker than Black often deals in the morally grey. The bad guys aren’t really evil and if they didn’t happen to be against the protagonists we probably would sympathize with them even more. I’ll probably talk about them again later, but for now I would just like to concentrate on these lines as they bring up my next point. All of the characters in the series have a past they can’t quite escape from. The idea of atonement runs deeply in our culture and I wonder if that’s due to the church or just morals in general. What causes someone to willingly hurt themselves in order to allay the guilt of a past grievance a little? Yin became a doll assumedly because she felt responsible for her mother’s death. The loss of the moonlight (her favorite light [so sad]) is also a strong example of the things she’s lost. Mao, the awesome talking cat, has lost his real body paying off his contract.
{A contract is something that all contractors in Darker than Black seem to have. After using their powers they have to enter into a remuneration in which they do a specific task. They can be as excruciating as dislocating your fingers to the simplicities of writing poetry}
Huang has joined the organization to keep the memories of getting his best friend killed. Memories have a strong ground in our psyche and are often revealed as torturous to the characters we follow. There are countless examples of repentance but the interesting question is “Why?” Why do we as humans repent for the things we have done wrong and is that the very thing that makes us human. Contractors are portrayed as cold rationale beings who kill without any moral objections. It’s interesting then that they have an obeisance as part of their contract. It’s like being sad without having the feelings of being sad. They’re performing the steps of the dance without listening to the music. However, if this is a uniquely human idea Darker than Black does a good job of explicating on the characters who we brand as monsters and alien are capable of the same things we are. The wall that separates us from those we label as different is constantly being torn down as they show us these Contractors and Dolls are just a blurry reflection of us in a mirror. The best part is they don’t say any of it. There’s a lot more too this, but I’m going to leave this point at that for now.

Storytelling devices are important in any text. Whether this is a narrator controlling our intake of information from his writing workshop in the sky or being put directly in the action. I’m particularly fond of the way Darker than Black tells the story as I’ve stated before. Instead of wasting a lot of time telling us what contractors are they show us a bunch of different contractors over the course of the anime and let us decide for ourselves. We first have Mai, the child who becomes a moratorium burning all in her path. The arc itself is important as the girl herself is sweet and struggling with her father who is never home. Being early in the anime it’s like we’re watching her turn into a monster. She burns her best friend and her best friend’s dad to death in a fit of being unable to control her powers. The girl blossoms into a murderer before our eyes and we can’t help but feel moved by her terror and sadness as she loses control. However, the question is always present, is it her powers that made her a monster or her situation. All I saw was a lonely girl who was bad at getting close to people. The powers turned into an outlet for this frustration, but ultimately losing her emotions allowed her to finally escape from the sadness of being all alone. Do monsters just appear, or do we make them? Then there’s an influx of three new contractors with November 11, Havoc, and April. We’re suddenly privy to the horrors Havoc has committed in the South America conflict. She’s murdered many and does not want to return to being a contractor. It’s no coincidence that we never see a contractor that isn’t working for some organization. Thus the question becomes is it the contractor’s fault for committing atrocities under the orders of others. The people giving the contractors orders are humans. The same humans call the contractors abominable killing machines. There’s a hypocrisy inherent here and a fallacy that is readily made available. Are the humans any less the monsters because they do not commit the actual murders themselves? Was Hitler not a monster because he wasn’t actually flipping the switch at the gas chambers? I hope you answer that they are still monsters. The contractors are willing to do these things as purely rationale beings but the humans who order the attacks are also apparently willing. Does feeling bad afterwards make the humans less to blame? I don’t believe so. It’s true that “those who need mercy the most deserve it the least”, but in this case I don’t think wanting to be forgiven excuses them from the crime. Most of the contractors on the other hand would probably rather not kill at all as it’s dangerous. Thus once again are they monsters because they are, or does society create them as monsters?

Then comes Mao’s arc which emphasizes scent and the human body. This is a strong arc that seems to harp on the nature vs. nurture argument just below the surface. You can’t help the way you smell, yet body odor can be extremely important. There’s an interesting play here as your body is a very personal thing that we feel a strong connection to. In modern culture we’re almost taught to hate our bodies: To hate the way we look, the way we smell, even the way we sound. Where did all this hate for our containers come from? The body is who we are and there is nothing wrong or embarrassing about it. The female body isn’t a mysterious object that we should worship, nor is it something disgusting that we should hate. Our bodies are really the only thing that are personally ours and have a large link to how we “view” ourselves (Haha get it view… it’s getting late). We’re also stuck for the most part in the body we have, which is the universal proof that the world is not fair. I don’t look like Brad Pitt and that’s why I demand a redo!! In this case they use scent to front an interesting question.

We have an emerging view of the contractor as something that is not quite human, but very close. It’s like watching Sylar on heroes and wondering just which buttons would push me over the edge. Then we’re introduced to the killing machine Wang in Misaki’s arc. Of course this arc is about a lot of things, but what it really concentrates on is dependence: Our dependence upon others, upon dreams, and even upon love. The contractor in this arc points out Alice’s dependence upon others in her final moments but if we think back a little we can remember that the contractors also depend upon organizations for their orders. The goal is to break free from these bonds holding us down, but ultimately this proves impossible for everyone involved. Just like we cannot change our nature we cannot change the large society we have created and help perpetuate. The climax of the entire series is the final step Hei takes from not being a subordinate to any organization. He cuts his ties and makes a decision purely based on his own intuition. This arc does a great job leading into the final revelation.

As sorry as I may be, I don’t think I’m going to be able to fit my entire analysis into one post. This is already 2,500 words and I’m thinking most of you are pretty bored. I’ve been doing a lot of plot summary in the last couple of paragraphs. Instead I’m going to throw you some pictures of Yin to close out the post and then I’m going to go to sleep. I’ll write the second part of the Why Darker than Black post tomorrow.

I hope you enjoyed the post and I hope you watch this series. I think it’s one of the shows truly worth watching. There are of course others, maybe I’ll talk about them later.

More proof on why Yin is the most AWESOME, WONDERFUL character in anime EVER coming soon. For now here’s some pictoral proof. By the way she is also blind and a piano player. She loves the moonlight. She can use a surveillance specter (like a detached soul that she can move around and look for things) by touching the water and she can see with this specter anywhere there is water. Now you know!