Wednesday | 04 DEC 2024
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Shinsekai Yori

Title:
Date: 2023-06-04
Tags:  anime

Table of Contents

  1. Recap
  2. Characters

After wating Heavenly Delusion and catching up I realized that there was another show that sounded similar that I had skipped ages ago. It was Shinsekai Yori, From the New World. I'm not sure why I skipped it as I'm watching it now and I'm loving it. It has some really cool themes and ideas that I've thought of. I imagine that this could have been something that really pushed my mind in one direction.

The show is about a world after people develop psychic abilities. They call it PK and it ultimately led to the end of our civilization. There was a warring period and then in the era of peace it was only achieavble by having everyone be domesticated. They had to breed people to have a fear of killing each other and they had to make sure the gene pool was docile. This is actualyl an amazing idea because the ability to kill with your mind would break the way the world works. Your psychic abilities would dictate strength and you are a one man army. The group of kids we follow are slowly learning the way things work and how the world around them is hindering and helping them.

The idea of fiends and karma demons is pretty cool. Fiends are people that choose to be evil, they are those with psychic abilities and only cause harm. These outbreaks happen randomly and so society tries to premptively remove them. A single fiend can cause huge amounts of deaths.

Karma demons on the other hand are those with psychic abilities that leaks out. This modifies the world around them and mutates and changes things. This one isn't as violent as the fiend but more dangerous because it causes an environmental change. Karma demons are also a sadder case because they have no choice. Their subconsious will is leaking out from them and they cannot control it.

The false minishiro is a mutated sea slug that contains knowledge of the world from the before times. This is a cool idea. These things just exist to give knowledge and that's it. We meet one very early on and get an idea of what the world is about. Then in episode 12 we get more of knowledge dump from the head of the ethics board.

It's also pretty progressive in showing relationships, I wasn't expecting a main gay couple so quickly. It didn't go anywhere but still. The author of this book that got turned into an anime is definitely creative and took some wild ideas about humanity and ran with them.

I really wish I had watched this with /a/ because I think the message boards would have been fun.

Goddamn does the series go crazy at the end. I was expecting a queer rat arc but it is quite the arc now. I'm on episode 22 and this might be the best build up to a specific arc in awhile. The entire show was definitely a build up to this final arc.

Finished up the series and it was great. What an ending. The next post will have all the spoilers and thoughts. I do like the mirroring of the first part where a single satoru was enough for the robber fly colony to win the war. That is where squeler probably learned that having a human on your side is the best way to do things.

When they found Mamoru and Maria it was like a winning ticket. I'm surprised that the comment about the queens being lobotomized and used to have kids didn't come into play. I thought it was hinting at such a fate for Maria.

A reddit comment really highlights why I like this so much, the start of it the show makes it seem like its about mysteries and that the world is dark and strange. The adults are hiding things and then the story shows us what is really going on and the child like fear of things is gone and you realize the world works this way for a very specific reason and it is depressing. The children are getting disappeared not because of some random reason but because that is the only way to be safe in a world with psychic powers.

Recap

The first part of the show is about a camping trip and it starts with the characters trying to find a false minoshiro to learn from it. This is Shun's desire. He seems to have an idea that there is more to their world than it seems. They find the false minoshiro and they question it about their ancestors and they learn that killing humans was a thing. They learn that this was bred out of them. Shun also asks what happened to the other humans that were around as now it was just those with cantus.

The next arc in the story is with Satoru and Saki who join Squealer and the Robber Fly colony in their war. They are at war with a colony that is external to the system and so there are no watchers. They win because Satoru was with them and this where Squealer probably figures out that having such a human on their side is key to winning.

The next arc involves a 2 year jump to where the group is now 14 and have become more distant with each other. Satoru and Shun become an item and Saki and Maria do as well. Shun becomes a karma demon in this arc and dies and gets erased from everyone's memory. He gets replaced by Ryou who is mostly ignored by the gang.

The next arc is with Mamoru and his weakness. This really highlights that the world exists to protect the weak and so Saki learns that she needs to take care to stop Mamoru from learning too much. He gets targeted by the cats and runs away and Maria joins him. They have left the village and live outside of it.

This arc feeds into the arc that is 10 years later. Saki and Satoru are the last ones of group 1. This is the climactic arc. The child of Mamoru and Maria believes that she is a queer rat and so she can kill humans. This fiendish power is the driver of everything and culimination of the entire series saying that humans cannot kill other humans.

The girl never learns she is human and she never gets saved. She isn't crazy, she is simply another queer rat and it looks like Squealer simply raised her that way and got a weapon. I'm curious what she was saying the entire time now that we know she isn't crazy.

Characters

Saki - Our main heroine and the inheritor of the culture she is in. She has the ability to regenerate her telomeres like the leader of the village and she also is someone who is calm even in crisis. She is able to go through strong emotions but not let herself get dragged down in them and so this makes her the ideal canidate to lead the village in the future. A key part of the village as that they need docile sheep but they also need lions to protect them. They never go so far as really creating a lion, all they do is create slightly better sheep in my eyes. Saki is our eyes into the world and we see her grasping with all sorts of things. At the end she ends up continuing the way of life that she knew because she learned why it exists. She does some good to keep the giant hornet colony alive but I don't think she lets her self see the queer rats as human.

Kaburagi Shisei - The OP psychic of the series and he is the one that protects the village. It was cool to see someone so strong get so destroyed by the fiend. The fact that they bred people so well that they can't even think about attacking their own kind is amazing. He is extremely powerful but he can't overcome his own upbringing and brainwashing. I'm very curious about the 4 pupils, maybe he was part of a set of twins that joined together and that is why he is overpowered.

Squealer - The antagonist of the series. He is very much the hero in his own story. He is vicious and ruthless and a liar but he does it all for his people. He may even be selfish and doing it for his own power but ultimately that isn't a bad thing when the humans are treating them as cattle and as slaves. You can do anything once that is the side you are fighting. I think there is no room to see Squealer as a bad guy because of how bad the humans are in this. It only gets worse when we learn that queer rats are genetically modified humans. The very fact that Saki and Satoru can keep the shame of death away is by thinking of the queer rats as other was great. I also love that Squealer rejected the name he was bestowed and that he went back to his old name. Squealer sounds much worse but that is what he knew and what he grew up as.

I love the final scene with him next to the dead child. He knew that his story was over as soon as that child was dead. There was no winning. He immediately gave up which highlights how overpowered the humans were. He could do nothing, theycould blink and end his existance. I love it.

I also love his trial, they parade him naked and talk down to him. He had hurt them and shown them that they were only human. He could fight them and he almost won. It must be so terrifying for the people to be shown that these creatures they treated as dirt were about to do the same thing to them.

One that thing I don't get is why Squealer didn't wait longer. Why didn't he let Maria and Mamoru have more kids. I thought the lobotomized queen was going to come into play such that a lobotomized Maria would be used to breed fiends. It might be that there is no way capture a psychic person and Squealer didn't want to risk it all for that. He had one child and one child was enough. He already saw what Satoru could do.