This piece is dedicated to all those I have hurt in the past 23 years of my life. I wish I could go back and take everything I did and said all back. I only hope that the scars I left can heal, and have healed.

How does the military train a human being to become a killer? This question has been asked by many military leadership structures throughout history, and for good reason. While it is quite known that a sufficiently ideologically motivated person will seek out violent resolution themselves, in many of the great wars that are existentially threatening to the reigning orders of history the defense of the nation has ultimately depended on the peasant or the citizen. If you think about it, depending on a population of random individuals from your nation to make what is most often the greatest moral decision one can conceive – to take away the life of another – in your favour is extremely dodgy at best. Even in the best of times, your military men who have been trained in a military culture all their lives may turn tail and run. This much was observed in particular during the 100 Years’ War between England and France; although French chivalric culture sought to instill in their warrior class a sense of honor and duty in battle, flight in battle was so common that English soldiers would often be caught off-guard by the odd French knight who did not flee the battle (Isaac, 2006). Given how comparatively brutal medieval European culture was to contemporary global culture, it is quite likely that soldiers today would be confronted with an even more conflicted emotional state in battle. So, how do you take a few thousand people randomly off the streets, and turn them all into people who will carry out your political will without question? If you’re interested, a pop-history YouTuber named Lindybeige has a 25-minute video on this exact topic. There’s always someone who can probably explain what I want to explain better, but in summary, the ideal soldier is one who is able to kill without mentally processing it in their minds. Militaries therefore seek to drill their soldiers into becoming tools for the purpose of reducing the ability of the enemy to wage war, by killing their soldiers.

Answering this question can be a little bit heated, and difficult. There is no clear way to obtain statistical data to test our hypotheses on combat psychology. As a result, people in the field tend to cite the works of two individuals: Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall, and Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman. B.G. Marshall (ostensibly) conducted multiple mass interviews over the course of the great wars fought by the United States over the course of the 20th Century, and consolidates this data in the book Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in 1947. Marshall is most famous for making the claim in this book that over the course of WW2, in any given battle, only 15-25% of an American infantry troop would have actually fired their weapon at the enemy, with the actual tactical conditions of the battle making no significant impact. According to him, this is not necessarily attributable to the fear of death that would typically grip people in a combat zone – he observes that morale and the feeling of support comes not from an individual acting on the orders of their commander, but rather from the mere sight of one’s comrades beside one another. People are unable to shoot because even if you can compel an infantryman to shoot a target on the range, and they are willing to do so without hesitation, that force does not necessarily translate to a situation in which he must knowingly take someone’s life. Marshall attributes this to American society in particular.

“He is what his home, his religion, his schooling, and the moral code and ideals of his society have made him. The Army cannot unmake him. I t must reckon with the fact that he comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable. The teaching and the ideals of that civilization are against killing, against taking advantage. The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply and pervadingly – practically with his mother’s milk – that it is part of the normal man’s emotional make-up. This is his great handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him. Because it is an emotional and not an intellectual handicap, it is not removable by intellectual reasoning, such as: ‘Kill or be killed.’”

While Marshall’s methodology and legitimacy has come under question over the past decades, his conclusions have been borne out by other similar studies of combat personnel in wartime. In response to his findings, the US Army began replacing range targets from simple target boards to targets that resembled human silhouettes. These silhouette targets, which move across the firing range and go down when hit like what one would expect from shooting a real person, were found to better translate soldiers’ range experiences to the battlefield, and as such Grossman observes in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society that this has led to a rise in accurate fire being placed against enemies in war (55% in the Korean War, 90% in the Vietnam War). However, Grossman also states that the silhouette train-fire programmes implemented in the US military has also led to a rise in trauma after soldiers return home from the battlefield. The core assertion is that these train-fire programmes effectively train soldiers to shoot human targets instinctively, without thinking, and that the confrontation of that moral act can therefore only come for the infantryman after it has already been committed. After the military has gotten you to shoot, it is no longer any of their business what happens to you.

Alternative hypotheses have been proposed over the past decade; in The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson asserts the alternative hypothesis that soldiers in fact find the experience of killing in war pleasurable, and Joanna Burke suggests in An Intimate History of Killing that more men suffer psychological damage in war because they were not put in the position where they had the opportunity to kill, thus denying them an outlet for their aggression. The Marshall-Grossman thesis remains, however, the most widely-accepted thesis, and it is important to understand because the implications of this thesis are stark. The Marshall-Grossman thesis suggests that militaries, in a bid to turn their soldiers into effective fighters, essentially turn them into machines of violence against whoever they are ordered to, and do not care very much about the psychological damage that can occur as a result in the aftermath of combat experience. Men are turned into tools of violence, with no care given to their mental state in the future.

I chose Violet Evergarden to round off this mini-series on how anime deals with trauma because it is quite easily one of the best, if not the best, shows on the market to demonstrate how one can undergo the healing process after trauma. Steins;Gate shows how one can develop trauma and react to it in the short-term, and Banana Fish shows how one behaves having lived in the spectre of trauma for basically all their lives. Violet Evergarden experiences the most extreme interpretation one can have of veteran PTSD – she is literally trained as an emotionless tool for the sole purpose of inflicting death on whomever she is pointed at, and is visibly scarred, with the loss of her arms reflecting the scars of war in her heart. Her prosthetic arms are one of the main avenues of initial conflict whenever she meets someone new, as they stare in a myriad of complex emotions whenever she unveils her metal hands to type a letter. Unlike what the militaries of the world would like to propagate about prosthetic limbs for soldiers being no big deal or, in fact, a demonstration of perseverance, adjusting to living on prosthetic limbs can be one of the most emotionally challenging experiences for individuals. This emotional conflict arises from a phantom pain of sorts – missing the limb that is no longer there, and having to realize again and again that your body is no longer whole. Simple tasks like walking become difficult for those with leg prostheses. Nothing can truly replace what was lost, and it is this fact that makes veteran with prostheses a universal symbol of the human shattered by war and violence.

Violet Evergarden chooses to address one very simple question to encapsulate her entire traumatic experience: what is love? I’m going to take a crack at this question myself on Christmas, primarily because somehow I have as little knowledge as to the answer to this very simple question as Violet does, but it’s important to note that every recuperative experience on Violet’s journey to rediscover her humanity revolves around this single question. We don’t actually know very much about Violet’s background – although we know that she was a child during the in-universe war, we don’t know anything about how she was born, or her circumstances prior to being taken in by the military. When Gilbert Bougainvillea is transferred possession/command of Violet from his older brother Dietfried, she seems almost feral. Violet doesn’t speak, she doesn’t sleep on a bed, and she is completely hostile to any human touch. She operates purely on animalistic instinct, and it is with this animalistic instinct that she kills in the battlefield without hesitation. This is the primary reason she is reviled and feared by soldiers not just on the enemy side, but also in her own army. It’s difficult to speculate on exactly what she experienced during the course of being trained as a child soldier to turn her into a human attack dog, but it’s stark and sufficient enough to note that who she was during the war and who she is after are two almost completely different people.

For many individuals, including myself, there is no one single inciting incident that causes trauma; rather, it is the accumulation of an extended period of traumatic experiences that one stews in, blind to the fact that their self has been fractured until they are lead to this realization. In the psychological community, a new understanding is being created on a new condition called complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), because individuals who experience trauma over a long period of time display markedly different behavior from those who simply suffer from a single inciting incident. Particularly, C-PTSD individuals are observed to typically suffer from 3 additional symptomatic identifiers: (i) emotional processing and affect (dys)regulation; (ii) self-organization, exemplified by persistent negative self-concept, guilt, and dissociation; and (iii) relational security. In other words, if PTSD can be considered to be a simple hairline fracture of the self, C-PTSD is by comparison a complex fracturing of the self, where . In fact, psychologists who study C-PTSD note that if one separates these two forms of PTSD, one sees a higher comorbidity of C-PTSD with other personality disorders, especially borderline personality disorder (BPD), where the impaired decision making, unstable sense of self, and emotional instability really shines. It’s quite easy to see that at the start of the show, Violet has nearly no sense of self. She is a doll through and through.

The term Auto Memories Doll, in fact, is quite confusing to viewers who may not fully realize what Violet’s life experiences entails. I feel like this term was chosen very carefully, as while the occupation of transcribing peoples’ words into letters during a time where enough of the population was illiterate existed, it never carried the level of romanticism which is implied in the show. They still exist, in fact; we call them ghostwriters, hardly the most romantic name for an occupation. While a show about a typist may have been incredibly boring, every single assignment on which Violet was sent amounted to Violet assisting people with regrets and deep melancholy in sorting out their memories and looking at them differently, or sometimes reliving them, thus giving them solace and allowing them to find the words to then put to paper. Invariably, all these people she talks to are dealing with their own sense of loss, one of the most profound and tragic experiences that most people tend to face in their lives. Thus, she is a doll, but this time in the course of helping others come to terms with their memories, she comes to terms with hers: an Auto Memories Doll. The Japanese write it as 自動手記人形, or automatic note-taking doll, and the Germans translate it as Autonome Korrespondenz-Assistin, or autonomous correspondence assistance, but we’ll chalk that up to a lack of imagination on their parts. We know that Violet is not a mere copywriter, because as the show suggests, writing enables a person to put into words feelings that would otherwise be left unsaid, and that is her primary function to the clients we see. A letter for her classmate, who lost her brother to anger, alcohol, guilt, and trauma after the war. A screenplay for a father broken by the loss of his daughter to disease. 50 years’ worth of letters for a mother who would herself be lost to sickness soon and wished for her daughter to continue feeling loved in her absence. Through the process of helping her clients navigate through their broken memories and fractured selves, she slowly learns enough humanity that it begins to hurt.

When Violet is first adopted into the care of Claudia Hodgins, she asks him why he isn’t disposing of her, as a tool of war no longer has use in peace. She calmly demonstrates her prosthetic hand to the matron of the Evergarden family, completely unaware that this is something horrifying and uncomfortable for regular people. Implicitly, we know what this scene means. She speaks about her tales of war completely normally and without candor, without recognition of the fact that it is a significantly stressful event. Hodgins tells her, “You’ve been in the army ever since you were a child. You’ve spent your life fulfilling your duties. You’re going to learn a lot of things. But it might be easier to keep living if you didn’t know them. You don’t realize that your body is on fire and burning up because of the things you did.” The question is, then, how do we know that incidents are in fact traumatic for Violet when she doesn’t appear to recognize them as such? Are we supposed to operate simply off the words of those around her? Is it possible that he’s simply horribly misguided in projecting his own discomfort of her onto her?

In his section on how trauma imprints itself onto the minds of children, van der Kolk speaks about the importance of the messaging we internalize as children. He writes, “As children, we start off at the center of our own universe, where we interpret everything that happens from an egocentric vantage point. If our parents or grandparents keep telling us we’re the cutest, most delicious thing in the world, we don’t question their judgment—we must be exactly that. And deep down, no matter what else we learn about ourselves, we will carry that sense with us: that we are basically adorable. As a result, if we later hook up with somebody who treats us badly, we will be outraged. It won’t feel right: It’s not familiar; it’s not like home. But if we are abused or ignored in childhood, or grow up in a family where sexuality is treated with disgust, our inner map contains a different message. Our sense of our self is marked by contempt and humiliation, and we are more likely to think ‘he (or she) has my number’ and fail to protest if we are mistreated.” Oftentimes, when you encounter individuals who you have radical disagreements with, it is quite likely because of this, and having grown up trained to believe that the proper relationship between a parent and child should be marked by fear and absolute obeisance, it was quite a shock the first time I went to my friend’s house and witnessed him speaking at anything louder than three-quarters of the volume of his mother. When I informed my friends that anything louder than that would have gotten me beaten as a child, or that walking with footsteps louder than a whisper after getting reprimanded would get me drawn back and the situation worsened, or that my mom would force me to smile after I had been beaten because crying was only allowed for when she was dead, they were all completely flabbergasted. For me, it was the most natural thing in the world – watching my friend treat his parent as an equal, on the other hand, induced such intense stress in me that it was apparently visible on my face and in my actions. I was 22 years old when I finally realized that the vast majority of my childhood experiences were abnormal.

This is the true importance of Violet’s occupation, and the humanity-building experiences she undergoes over the course of the show – her quest to fill in the gaps of herself, and to create a person that is whole in spite of her scarred body. It is particularly difficult for Violet, as she has no frame of reference for what it feels like to be an individual of value beyond her instrumental utility – no idea of what it feels like to be loved, let alone to love. Van der Kolk suggests a method of creating some semblance of resolution and filling these gaps – rescripting one’s past into an alternative setting where one has the capability to be human and express their humanity. This allows the individual to tap on the basis of understanding of love and care that is essential to our functioning, and to begin to rewrite the imprint that is made upon them. It is this change that is clearly visible in Violet’s responses to Dietfried and her war guilt. When we first meet Dietfried, he casts disdain on her new life as an Auto Memory Doll; she wordlessly, blankly accepts, and internalizes his disgust towards her for her actions during the war.

It is inevitable that over the course of Violet’s journey she has to confront the damage she has done as a tool of war. The pain of her loss of Gilbert, combined with a growing understanding of the widespread loss suffered everywhere as a result of the war, eventually leads her to begin to comprehend the sheer weight of all the broken ties which she has left behind for innumerable people. When one’s mind and body completely reorganizes itself for the sole sake of survival, especially in a wartime setting, one becomes incredibly hypersensitive to danger, and under these circumstances is compelled to action by irrational, intense, barely controllable urges. What specific actions these urges dictates varies, but for someone trained as a weapon of war, the instinct would invariably be to eliminate whatever threat was detected as quickly as possible. A stranger to herself, Violet is barely cognizant of what she is doing as she slices through the enemy without hesitation. The army has trained her to operate on instinct and kill, without regard for her mental well-being, focusing only on the immediate task of gaining a tactical advantage over the enemy.

When we talk about trauma for war veterans, there tends to be only one brand of trauma that is socially acceptable to speak about. We only talk about the kind of trauma suffered by war veterans if they come under attack by a vicious enemy, or watch their friend die in battle, or engaged in some self-sacrificial act. Rarely is the fact that the soldier in the course of combat experience invariably engages in the act of killing, either in performing or abetting it, mentioned. This is primarily because of how respect for the soldier is predicated on the three pillars of their injury, innocence, and heroism, as a way of distancing us, the public showing them gratitude, for their participation in war. Significantly, this approach was codified in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, because public knowledge of the mass atrocities and brutalities being committed on a daily basis made the civilian population of the US uncomfortable to attribute these things for veterans. It is difficult to pity a man who has probably engaged in completely inhumane acts over the past few years, and as a result difficult to believe that they could have trauma with all the damage they inflicted. While many fondly remember veterans of World War 2 in media as the “Greatest Generation”, and stories about them abound in the amount of humanity they attribute to the soldiers involved (particularly on the Allied side), veterans of the Vietnam War are almost universally reviled, commonly portrayed in the media as bitter and prone to explosive anger. This difference is most starkly shown in the two famous HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, which reverently follows a company of heroes from the 101st Airborne Division and their struggles in WW2, and Generation: Kill, which very irreverently shows the inhumanity and absurdity of modern warfare through the eyes of the 1st Marines Reconnaissance Battalion during the Iraq War. I would like to present one of my favorite clips from Generation: Kill to show just how irreverently they portray these soldiers. I would like to request that you keep in mind the image of the idealized WW2 hero charging through Nazi machine gun fire on the beaches of Normandy while you watch this, to fully effect a powerful contrast.

On 16th September 2007, 5 individuals from the Blackwater Private Military & Security Company (PMSC) killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad. Two explanations would be delivered in court for the Nisour Square Massacre. The first explanation that took popular opinion by storm was that these 5 men were intent on behaving like cowboys, and the massacre was a wanton act of killing to demonstrate to one another their militarised masculinities. Iraqi witnesses discredited the statements provided by the Blackwater private military contractors (PMCs), stating that the team was “bent on destruction”, and that the suggestion that they were threatened under sworn testimony was complete fiction. The second explanation, which was offered by mainstream media in order to soften the image of the PMCs, focused on the central figure of the controversy, Paul Slough. The New York Times notably focused on Slough’s spotless military record, as well as his childhood experience of growing up with an alcoholic father, thus assigning to Slough the persona of the frazzled, brave, sensitive, and reliable military operator: a true hero of the United States. Completely left out of the discussion was how whether or not Slough’s testimony that he had really suspected that the white Kia he first shot was actually a car bomb was immaterial; even if we do believe him, he had been trained by the military to fire without hesitation at threats in a hostile environment. The situation is much more complex than this; I believe that Paul Slough was neither a hero of war nor an outright war criminal, but rather a tool of war that fulfilled his function.

We as a society of onlookers are unprepared to deal with the kind of harm our men and women in uniform deal out as part of their duty to protect us from the enemy. We are unprepared to give any pity to those who are exposed in the line, committing atrocities. We are, therefore, unwilling to recognize that soldiers in a combat zone may also experience the same force of traumatic compellence to perform horrific acts upon the enemy. Dietfried cannot see a victim in Violet because he is all to familiar with the level of death and destruction that she is able to dish out. The Violet we see is different from the Violet Dietfried sees. If the show had been titled Dietfried Bougainvillea instead, with him as the main character, we would be unable to sympathize with Violet. The only reason we are able to do so is because the focus of Violet Evergarden lays much heavier on her suffering, and I do not believe that this is the case. Discussing the morality of a soldier’s acts is always difficult, but I find it difficult to stomach the sort of absolute moral condemnation that is laid on soldiers that clearly performed these acts while under a state of extreme duress. Both our view and Dietfried’s views of Violet are necessarily imperfect and absolutist, and that is why her defense of herself to Dietfried is a clear demonstration that she has rewritten her own memories to make sense of them. She no longer needs Dietfried to condemn her, nor us to pity her; as she is in the process of becoming whole, she can now take responsibility for the acts she commits, no matter how heinous.

This process is invariably painful. The first time Violet has to come to terms with this realization, the pain of remembering and recognizing the horrors she inflicts, combined with her grief at being unable to protect Gilbert, drives her to attempt to atone for her mistakes through death. Unfortunately, for a great many veterans and individuals afflicted with trauma, this is where their story ends. It is only through the acceptance of the evils she has committed as her former self, and recognition of the happiness she can bring to others in her current capacity, that allows her to begin to work through this guilt and grief. When she defends herself to Dietfried atop the train for her actions, she has come to terms with her guilt, and resolved to do better – that conviction is what drives the budding sense of agency we feel in Violet.

Violet Evergarden is probably one of the few stories that I can say truly reframes the world and how I see myself. We all harm other people over the course of living, for that is the fate outlined for us in the Hedgehog’s Dilemma, but most of the time the damage we inflict on other people is at least mendable, if not reparable. I know for a fact that over my 23 years of life, living in the throes of my inability to comprehend even the most basic of human needs and experiences, I have inflicted at least a few deep wounds upon others. I cannot describe in words the amount of intense guilt and regret I feel every day for the mistakes I made, that I never even knew were mistakes until relatively recently in my life. I’m still very shakily trying to figure out exactly how to be a human – how to be a good friend, how to be a good sister, how to be a good partner. Although this process is mostly feeling one’s way through the dark, I have the fortune of only beginning to have the means to try and feel things out for myself nearly a quarter into my life. A third, if the alcoholism brought on by my dark moments of uncontrollable and unidentifiable rage and grief has already done a number on my liver. It’s not much, but I’m trying.

At the time of writing this, the Violet Evergarden movie is currently screening in theaters. I don’t know anything about it other than that Gilbert is actually alive, and the plot presumably revolves around her renewed search for him, the final resolution of her journey to discover what love means, and the beginning of a new journey of trying to love. Maybe back in 2018, when I first watched Violet Evergarden on its release, I would have said that it was a bad decision. I would have said that for Gilbert to be alive and for Violet to rediscover him would be a violation of her whole character journey and render it entirely moot, because then nothing would stop Violet from reverting to her previous identity where her unitary purpose in life was to follow his every command, to seek out his orders. I didn’t believe that a character who had suffered so much deserved that happiness, and I didn’t believe that I deserved that happiness, because it was almost an article of faith that suffering has to happen for a reason, and to remove it makes it all meaningless. I’m sure that Violet would have believed the same thing at the start of her journey.

It’s been about 2.5 years since Violet Evergarden rocked the world of anime, and today I think that I’m ready to see Violet return to Gilbert. I’m sure he’d be proud of the new person he sees. I’m sure that although Violet is still learning, she’s come a long way since the moment she finally realized she was on fire. I think it’s time to see her be happy. I think it’s time to step out and be happy.

References

Adelman, Rebecca A. “Economies of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury.” In Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv75d9qp.8.

Chu, James A. Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Other Dissociative Disorders. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011.

Cohen, Emily. “War Without End: Technology and the Injured Body.” Anthropology Now 2, no. 2 (September 2010): 70–75.

Ford, Julian D, and Christine A Courtois. “Complex PTSD, Affect Dysregulation, and Borderline Personality Disorder.” Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation 1 (July 9, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/2051-6673-1-9.

Grossman, David. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 1996.

Higate, Paul. “Mercenary Killer or Embodied Veteran? The Case of Paul Slough and the Nisour Square Massacre.” Working Paper. Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2013. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/spais/migrated/documents/higate-09-11.pdf.

Isaac, Steven. “Cowardice and Fear Management: The 1173–74 Conflict as a Case Study.” In Journal of Medieval Military History, edited by Clifford T. Rogers, Kelly DeVries, and John France, 4:50–64. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2006. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt81ntp.6.

Jones, Edgar. “The Psychology of Killing: The Combat Experience of British Soldiers during the First World War.” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 2 (2006): 229–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009406062055.

Jowett, Sally, Thanos Karatzias, and Idit Albert. “Multiple and Interpersonal Trauma Are Risk Factors for Both Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder: A Systematic Review on the Traumatic Backgrounds and Clinical Characteristics of Comorbid Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder/Borderline Personality Disorder Groups versus Single-Disorder Groups.” Psychology and Psychotherapy 93, no. 3 (September 2020): 621–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/papt.12248.

Kolk, Bessel van der. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2014.

Marshall, S. L. A. Men Against Fire: The Problems of Battle Command. University of Oklahoma Press 1st. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.

Snukal, Katia, and Emily Gilbert. “War, Law, Jurisdiction, and Juridical Othering: Private Military Security Contractors and the Nisour Square Massacre:” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 4 (August 14, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815598077.

Tell me if you’ve experienced this before: a singular scene where a character is shown at their very worst, and you see it and go “oh damn… that’s me.” I suspect this sentiment is quite common among those who suffer in any way from mental health issues, especially given the prevalence of a lot of mental health tropes as a part of story telling. But for the more serious conditions, it’s quite rare to find a sympathetic and realistic portrayal of what it actually is like to live under those conditions. Characters that come to mind for me, personally, would be Bojack Horseman from, well, Bojack Horseman; Evan Hansen from, uh, Dear Evan Hansen; and Harley Quinn, in particular from her animated series because in almost every other media that strongly features her her borderline personality disorder seems to be fetishized into the “manic pixie dream girl” trope with a dash of “psycho babe <3” thrown in. With particular respect to this whole thing about seeing yourself in a fictional character, and the kind of help it can be to people in terms of self-understanding to see somebody who is like them in fictional media, I find this video by Curio to be the best at explaining that.

The reason I bring this up is because it’s one of the biggest reasons I love Banana Fish. I’ve watched it before, and connected to it before, and written about it before, but I never quite managed to put my finger on the connection I drew to the show. I tried in that previous article, but I don’t think that the ideas really cut as deeply as they do with more information. If you’ve read the previous one, you can kind of think of this as a supplementary deeper dive of that, but if you haven’t this article itself should cut it. I generally just assumed that it was the fact that I like seeing boys kiss or snuggle up to each other, I like literature, and Banana Fish is an incredibly human tale which makes copious references to the list of Great American Novels. But it runs much deeper than that, and most of it can be traced to a single scene. Throughout the show, Ash Lynx suffers through intense ordeals and trauma, and it’s made clear that this is only a short snippet of the horrors he’s had to live with for basically the entirety of his life. He is sexually assaulted by the mercenary Colonel Eduardo Foxx during the process of his capture. His friends manage to save him, but he is so shaken that he is unable to even stand human touch. Cain Blood attempts to look over his wounds, but Ash slaps him away on reflex. Nobody is allowed within the vicinity of the injured Lynx. Nobody, except Okumura Eiji.

On first glance, the sheer amount of tragedy that befalls Ash Lynx in his childhood and adolescence can only be described as “too much”. Repeatedly sexually assaulted by an adult man in the small town he grew up in and forced to defend himself as a small child; being all but abandoned by his family who have no idea how to handle this ordeal; being kidnapped by a mafia when he runs away from home and forced into child sex slavery. It’s not quite hard to see exactly why Ash is so damaged, but harder still to see how Ash has grown into who he is in the show. Ash has Mary Sue-levels of intelligence, is dangerously elegant, and intensely charismatic, if a little bit cold. I want to deal with this because this, to me, is the key to unlocking the ultimate demise of Ash Lynx.

In 2016, three academics at the Dornsife School of Public Health in the Drexel University published a content analysis study on all articles that mention Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the New York Times (NYT) between 1980 and 2015. The purpose of this study was to triangulate the level of public awareness of what trauma entails, as a pillar in the fight against PTSD as a public health issue. The study concluded a few things: firstly, that media coverage of PTSD had broadly increased from 1980 to 2015, with 2 NYT articles in 1980 and 70 in 2014. Secondly, the vast majority (50.6%) of articles on PTSD focused on veterans and other members of the military, with combat-related trauma making up most of that (38% in total). Thirdly, there seems to be overwhelmingly negative or misguided coverage of PTSD-related issues. A third of articles spoke specifically about the common PTSD tropes of nightmares, depressions, and flashbacks. A sixth covered court cases in which the defendant/alleged perpetrator suffered from PTSD. Finally, articles identifying treatment options for PTSD declined in relative frequency over time, from 19.4% between 1980-1995 to a staggeringly low 5.7% between 2005-2015.

In the hit detective game L.A. Noire by Rockstar Studios (more famous for the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises), you play the role of Cole Phelps, a veteran of the Pacific War in the US Marine Corps who returns to Los Angeles and begins his career in policing. The tone and environment of the game is a very strong callback to the noir film genre (it’s right there in the name), and you follow Phelps’ meteoric rise in the LAPD as a detective investigating cases. As the player, you get to solve these cases, interrogate suspects and witnesses, engage in police shootouts, all that fun stuff. But the real concerning meat of the game lies in the overarching narrative that only begins to truly unfold after your partner double-crosses you and you get demoted to the Arson desk. The moral conflict of the game revolves around Phelps’ wartime subordinate Ira Hogeboom, who was a flamethrower operator during the Pacific War. Haunted by the memory of having burned out a cave of wounded civilians and children, Hogeboom is manipulated by a real estate syndicate into burning down peoples’ homes as a threat. The story of Hogeboom is, in essence, the classic PTSD story: a war veteran inadvertently commits horrific war crimes against children, whose screams haunt him in his dreams and who is unable to control his actions as a fractured individual. Phelps eventually shoots Hogeboom, to put him out of his misery.

From this, we can generally construct the public perception of what trauma and its effects are like. The traumatized individual is a potential danger, but not as a fault of their own. They are unable to help themselves from recreating the scenes of destruction and terror that float about in their head. They have absolutely no control over their actions. They suffer from constant nightmares, and are typically found in a depressive state. It is little wonder, then, that a 2010 survey found 46% of employers citing PTSD as a barrier from hiring veterans.

Ash Lynx is decidedly not most of these things. He is always superbly in control, terrifyingly in control even; he knows how to use his sexual appeal to entice other men into making mistakes. He stands strong against everything the show has to throw at him. Throughout the entirety of Banana Fish, his relationship with Eiji is completely asexual in nature. Some have questioned whether Banana Fish is an actual entry into the boys’ love genre because there is no sexual relationship between Ash and Eiji whatsoever. While Ash suffers from occasional bouts of nightmares, he is always generally lucid and sanguine when awake, and is always so task-oriented that it’s difficult to even tell if he really has emotions for the vast majority of the cast and the audience most of the time. If we go by the common perception of what trauma is, we can see that while Ash has suffered from traumatic experiences, who he is as a person and the way he behaves jars greatly with how people tend to understand PTSD.

The key to understanding Ash’s PTSD and its representations lies in his troubled relationship with Eiji. Attachment theory, outlined by John Bowlby in his 3-volume work Attachment and Loss in 1969, is a good tool to analyze this relationship. Bowlby studies the attachment behavior between children and their mothers as catalysts for their relational behaviors well into adulthood. Bowlby outlines 4 standard categories of attachment behavior that surface in adulthood, that can be traced to different childhood circumstances, and applies them along two axes modeling the individual’s model of their self and their model of others. The “normal” behavior is known as secure attachment. Children become securely attached to their parents when they are sure that their parent or caregiver is sensitive and responsive to their needs. Children who grow up securely attached, with caring parents who provide a sense of safety, tend to be more independent, have higher self-esteem, and report fewer instances of mental health issues. These individuals, naturally, have a positive self-image, and are secure in others. If a child has a positive self-image but is insecure in others, they tend towards dismissive-avoidant attachment. A dismissive-avoidant child is caused by a consistent unresponsiveness of the caregiver to their needs. Essentially, the child learns that emotional messaging and attachment behavior is entirely ineffective in fulfilling their needs, and sort of gives up on human attachment. This means that they avoid intimacy into adulthood, and behave generally distantly. If a child has a negative self-image but seeks others out, they exhibit anxious-ambivalent attachment. Anxious-ambivalent children exhibit high levels of insecurity, and are extremely dependent on others for validation and self-worth. Research shows that this style of attachment is common among those who experience emotional abuse in childhood and in relationships that diminish affected individuals’ self worth. They grow up to be defensive, but ultimately reliant upon their close relationships. This would probably apply to the yandere trope in anime quite well.

What happens, however, when a child experiences both low self-esteem and has no confidence in others to be able to fulfil their needs? This is called disorganized attachment, and has been experiencing a growing interest from researchers in terms of how it correlates to other mental health conditions – which is good for this article, because it directly correlates to the kind of childhood trauma which Ash experiences. Comorbidity in psychology is a complex web, and a game of trying to pin down exactly which condition is the first mover in an individual’s system. Being the most problematic attachment style, however, it is fortunate that this is experienced by a minority of individuals. Disorganized attachment is the result of a chaotically abusive primary caregiver, where the parents are themselves the terror which is inflicted upon the child. There is a double bind that occurs when parents fulfil the biological need for attachment yet enact cruel abuse on their child completely at random, and with no predictability for the child. Researchers observe that children who are in this situation tend to be constantly on survival mode, constantly feeling out the emotional availability of their caretaker in a desperate bid to gauge and predict whether the next interaction will result in the fulfilment of needs or yet another stressful situation. This is how trauma tends to pass on from parents to children, in fact; most of the parents of children identified with disorganized attachment are unable to meet their child’s emotional needs because of their own emotional unavailability.

I’ll be quite clear and honest: I personally suffer from disorganized attachment disorder. I grew up in an abusive household. My biological father was the most identifiable abuser, since he would come home drunk almost nightly and violently assault my mother. However, the gift that he bestowed upon me was not disorganized attachment, but rather a deep sense of androphobia and mistrust of men that has only been exacerbated through bad interactions with men that persists to this day. No, the disorganized attachment was a gift to me from my mother. Life was difficult for the both of us; she lived trapped in a household as a result of a bad decision to marry a bad man, with a young child who was entirely dependent on her. She had grown up with her own history of childhood abuse, and now was thrust into motherhood. In a sense, she needed me just as much as I needed her, if not more. This meant that she invested all her energy into my development and ensuring that I grew up to be a successful person. I don’t doubt that she did her best, and many of the stories are far too personal to relate on a public platform like this, but suffice it to say that life at that age was a nightmare for me. I could never be sure whether anything I was going to do would make her happy or lead to me getting caned that night. I was unable to, and still am unable to, relate my emotional life to her because I have no idea whether that will end really well or in a complete flaming dumpster fire disaster.

The exact provenance of Ash’s disorganized attachment should be traced back to his relationship with his estranged father. When his father finds out that his son has been sexually abused, well… I don’t really know how to put profoundly how messed up this scene is into words.

We can try to look at the effect this had on Ash through his response, his primary caregiver’s response, and what happens afterwards. It is noted in this scene that Ash stares, wide-eyed, at the adults who are discussing what happened. This is, unfortunately, quite standard for children who develop disorganized attachment. Researchers note that these children tend to have a “freeze” reaction, along with other reactions to their caregivers that indicate fear, although they continue to seek comfort from them. A lot of gaps exist in the story of Ash’s childhood told by his father that must be filled, but ultimately we see that Ash is unable to find final solace in his father, who in exasperation gives up on trying to help his son, to the extent that a child must take matters into his own hands. Soon after, Ash goes to live with his aunt when his older brother is deployed to Iraq, and runs away from home, eventually ending up in a vicious cycle of sexual abuse as one of Dino Golzine’s captives. I’m no expert, but going off my own bad experiences with men, I would say that having this sort of experiences with men for the entirety of your life ever since you were seven years old would not only deeply affect your own trust in men, but also how you relate to sexuality. This explanation for the extremely asexual nature of Ash’s relationship with Eiji is rather straightforward, and there’s more to dwell on.

A 2006 paper by Barbara Kuerer Gangi explores how disorganized attachment resulting from abusive childhood trauma leads to problematic romantic relationships in adulthood using 3 case studies. In particular, the cases exhibit a fluidity between hostility and helplessness strategies in relating to intimate partners. Naturally, they’re all personal attacks to me and my own behavior in relationships, but I’ll put one of the examples here to illustrate.

“Kate and Samuels’ relationship also demonstrated the hostile or controlling and helpless or submissive strategies of disorganized couple dynamics. In their relationship the hostile and helpless roles fluctuated between them; one or the other would take either role.

I could not figure out the icky, disgusted, ‘I want to be out of here’ feeling I had with a couple that came to talk about their 10-year-old son. They were handsome, with movie star good looks. Yet I did not find them attractive. The best I could decipher of my countertransference was the sense that Kate had a “Stepford wife” feel to her. She rarely moved while she sat and was exceedingly compliant with her husband. After we focused on the presenting problem, Samuel wanted to talk about his wife’s inhibition in oral sex. He demeaned Kate’s interest in intercourse and described with rapture how he enjoyed “going down on her” and how “uptight” she could be. It was his opinion, forcibly expressed, that he knew the correct way to sexually engage and that his wife’s preferences were less than adequate. Kate submissively and sweetly agreed that she was not sufficiently spontaneous in oral sex. Samuel’s dominance and Kate’s submission were dramatically substantiated when later, I learned that at Samuel’s request, Kate had had plastic surgery on what they both described as her ‘unfeminine vulva’. In a still later session, Samuel, in great pain, disclosed that ‘it killed him’ that Kate had had two affairs in the last year. The hostile or controlling and helpless or passive dynamic persisted in this relationship, although now the roles had changed.

Their very difficult childhood experiences helped illuminate their hostile or controlling and helpless or passive pattern. Kates doll-like deadness began early in life with a perfectionist, controlling, and abusive backstage father. Samuel, with numerous scars remaining on his body, had frequent encounters with violent at his brutal father s hands. Now, as adults currently in a family together, struggled against knowing yet enacted the annihilation fears they experienced in their original family.” (Gangi, 2006)

While Banana Fish mainly operates as a chronicle of Ash and his fight against those who abuse him, and so spends a lot of time focusing on him and Eiji apart but struggling to find their way back together, there are small pockets in time where they both are in a state of relative domestic bliss. It’s quite cute to see the both of them together, but at the same time their interactions when living together must be understood through the lens of Ash’s disorganized attachment. There are two main features of their interaction that we, as the audience, find endearing. Firstly, that Eiji is the only individual who has ever truly been allowed into Ash’s personal orbit. The other members of the gang are horrified when Eiji moves over to wake up Ash, and are stunned when their gang boss wakes up in a state of docility. Ash needs Eiji, and this is clear to see in every single interaction between them living in the Manhattan condominium. The second feature occurring underneath all this is that Ash is attempting to push Eiji away, ostensibly for two reasons. Ash wants to protect Eiji from the dark, messy world which he inhabits, and at the same time doesn’t want Eiji to see him as an operative of this underworld. To Ash, Eiji as an enduring source of comfort stems not just from Eiji’s purity, but also his perception of Ash. No matter how much Ash talks to Eiji about his trauma of having had to kill people to rise above his station in the criminal underworld, and no matter how much Eiji sincerely proclaims and exhibits his acceptance of Ash regardless of this fact, Ash cannot but be afraid that Eiji’s mind will change if he sees what Ash gets up to. Thus, he pushes, and he pulls. Ash draws Eiji ever closer by his side with the excuse that Eiji is most safe with him, and pushes him away with the excuse that Eiji is most in danger by his side. Eiji as a character never really wavers at all in how he treats Ash; it is only in Ash’s mind, where he is reliant on Eiji yet at the same time insecure about Eiji’s attitude towards him.

I talked before about comorbidities between mental health conditions being common in individuals who experience trauma. In the aftermath of the 1999 Izmit earthquake in Turkey, it was found that 87.5% of individuals with PTSD experienced comorbidity with other mental health conditions, chief among which was major depressive disorder (MDD) (Yildiz & Göker, 2004). Thus far, we’ve talked about the disorganized attachment disorder which is comorbid with Ash’s PTSD and explored it through Eiji’s relationship with him, but not really explored his PTSD in and of itself yet. The most distinctive feature of Ash’s PTSD is not the loss of agency nor the discontinuity in temporal experience, but instead how he is seemingly permanently locked into a “survival mode”. Julian Ford connects PTSD with the part of our brains that, when triggered, cause us to be hyper-vigilant and be stuck in a fight-or-flight state. Every other function of the brain that is not essential to the immediate survival of the individual is shut down. The slightest suggestion of threat triggers an overblown response to individuals with PTSD, only because their alarms are almost permanently on. When you see Ash use his spider-sense and cat-like agility in almost all situations, you should be aware that this is him in survival mode. In fact, the only time he ever switches it off is whenever Eiji is involved – and because he lives such a wretched life, that’s always whenever bad things happen, and this perpetuates his inability to switch it off.

This is, in fact, one of the greatest reasons I find the ending of Banana Fish to be as tragic as it is. The sort of mentality that it requires to survive in Ash’s position is one that is at the same time extremely unhealthy, and the sort of bond which Ash forges with Eiji is critical to his own recovery and the rediscovery of the existence of a life beyond the violent, wretched one that is all he knows. The death of Ash speaks to the greatest truths of therapy as pertains to trauma: healing cannot begin while you are still entrenched within a lifestyle that caused those experiences to begin with, and that healing cannot erase the damage that you inflict on others as well, even if you inflicted that damage while you were not in control of yourself. The cycles of violence in Banana Fish do not end with the death of Ash, and will never end. Is it enough that Ash found this small moment of solace from the world before it took him? Or, more importantly, what ultimately killed Ash?

Let me try and trace the causal chain of events leading to him being shot. Ash was shot as a result of a desire by Lao to take revenge for Ash’s killing of the boss of the Chinese street gang, and Ash’s best friend, Shorter Wang. In fact, one of the major conflicts of the second half of the show is the Chinese street gang grappling with Ash’s killing of Shorter. The truth is, however, that none of it was Ash’s fault. He shot Shorter in an effort to protect Eiji, since Shorter had been injected with the Banana Fish serum and had gone feral. He refuses to tell anybody why he shot Shorter Wang, even as the new boss, Sing Soo-Ling, constantly attempts to try and get an answer for him in order to placate the gang. Yet, Ash’s silence on this remains unbroken throughout the rest of the show. Shorter is an unspeakable topic around him, and he snaps at anyone who tries to bring Shorter up, and you can tell it isn’t simply because mere knowledge of Banana Fish has been deemed to be dangerous for the individual. It’s conclusive that Ash was killed by his silence, and this is important because research indicates that traumatic experiences affect an individual’s ability to communicate. It’s quite telling that Ash never brings Shorter up – he never brings up any of his past to anyone unless absolutely necessary to complete the task at hand, and even then is unable to personally reckon with it. This is in itself a natural consequence of PTSD, since one cannot explain to others what one cannot themselves process; to (mis)quote the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The very symptom of his trauma, in other words, denied him the chance to recover and live a new life.

I would argue that the fact that Ash was killed by his silence makes him a tragic hero in the Greek fashion, and that is why we feel so much for him. Do not be confused by the name – a Greek tragic hero is not meant to be seen as a role model, or to be emulated. One is not a tragic hero; rather, one becomes a tragic hero through their misguided actions.

“Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.”

The tragic hero is thus ensnared by the greatness which the work places upon them. Just as Oedipus swept into Thebes after unwittingly killing his father and unknowingly beds his mother after saving the city from a crisis, so too is must Ash kill one of his closest friends in order to save everyone. Just as Oedipus sought out the truth of Thebes’ famine because of his strength as a leader and belief in truth, so too is Ash unable to relate to anyone else the circumstances of Shorter’s death. And just as Oedipus eventually blinded and exiled himself upon discovering the truth of his misdeeds, so too does Ash lay bleeding in a library as a result of the distance he must maintain from others.

Banana Fish is a complex work that stands the test of time. After all, it was first serialized in 1985, and the story itself only ended in 1994. A lot of the themes in the story don’t change very much, sometimes by nature of the fact that the US itself doesn’t change very much – there isn’t that big of a change, for example, in changing Griffin’s veteran experiences to have occurred in the Gulf Wars rather than in the Vietnam War. Neither has society become so much less dark that the horrors shown are entirely removed from memory. After all, while the 2019 arrest of Jeffrey Epstein was not the first time he had been convicted of sexual crimes related to minors, what marked it was the extensive connections which he had with the rest of the political and business class, which is probably what led to his demise (unless you believe he did actually kill himself, in which case you can ignore this section). The themes of the inescapable cycle of trauma, while being something I previously touched upon, connect Banana Fish to the work that inspired its name on a far greater level than I initially expected, and sometimes it feels like I take different lessons away from this show depending on the stage of life I watch it at.

Every time I watch this ending, I invariably cry. You’d be a monster if you didn’t at least feel terrible for Ash and his demise. That is, after all, what I believe the creators of the story intended with this particular ending. While happy endings are usually preferable among audiences, once in a while a good creator knows how to create a meaningful, terrible ending to a story. In fact, I’m quite different from most in that I tend to prefer creators who know how to do this instead of simply copping out with happily-ever-after endings when the meaning of the story would be much better served if it was framed as a cautionary tale. Creating believable and empathetic levels of trauma and sadness, however, seems to be almost an art form given how difficult it is for many creators these days to do. This is why tomorrow I’ll mainly be talking about really, really bad representations of trauma in anime, in particular in what I like to call the postmodern magical girl genre. I feel like in order to recognize good portrayals of complex issues like trauma and its effects in anime, it’s important to recognize the bad ones, and this genre has been a pet peeve of mine for a while, so do let me indulge myself.

References

Bowlby, John. Attachment. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Attachment and Loss. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1982.

Gangi, Barbara Kuerer. “Disorganized Attachment Dynamics in Couples.” Group 30, no. 2 (2006): 153–62.

Lahousen, Theresa, Human Friedrich Unterrainer, and Hans-Peter Kapfhammer. “Psychobiology of Attachment and Trauma—Some General Remarks From a Clinical Perspective.” Hypothesis and Theory 10, no. 914 (2019). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00914.

Monson, Candice M., Steffany J. Fredman, Alexandra Macdonald, Nicole D. Pukay-Martin, Patricia A. Resick, and Paula P. Schnurr. “Effect of Cognitive-Behavioral Couple Therapy for PTSD.” JAMA 308, no. 7 (August 15, 2012): 700–709. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.9307.

Purtle, Jonathan, Katherine Lynn, and Mashal Malik. “‘Calculating the Toll of Trauma’ in the Headlines: Portrayals of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the New York Times (1980–2015).” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 86, no. 6 (2016): 632–38. https://doi.org/10.1037/ort0000187.

Rholes, W. Steven, Ramona L. Paetzold, and Jamie L. Kohn. “Disorganized Attachment Mediates the Link from Early Trauma to Externalizing Behavior in Adult Relationships.” Personality and Individual Differences 90 (February 2016): 61–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.10.043.

Yildiz, Mustafa, and Meltem Naz Kuruoğlu Göker. “Psychiatric Comorbidity in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Among People Seeking Treatment After the Marmara Earthquake.” International Journal of Mental Health 33, no. 1 (2004): 59–66.

When he returned for his appointment, I eagerly asked Tom how the medicines had worked. He told me he hadn’t taken any of the pills. Trying to conceal my irritation, I asked him why. “I realized that if I take the pills and the nightmares go away,” he replied, “I will have abandoned my friends, and their deaths will have been in vain. I need to be a living memorial to my friends who died in Vietnam.

I was stunned: Tom’s loyalty to the dead was keeping him from living his own life, just as his father’s devotion to his friends had kept him from living. Both father’s and son’s experiences on the battlefield had rendered the rest of their lives irrelevant. How had that happened, and what could we do about it? That morning I realized I would probably spend the rest of my professional life trying to unravel the mysteries of trauma. How do horrific experiences cause people to become hopelessly stuck in the past? What happens in people’s minds and brains that keeps them frozen, trapped in a place they desperately wish to escape? Why did this man’s war not come to an end in February 1969, when his parents embraced him at Boston’s Logan International Airport after his long flight back from Da Nang?

Tom’s need to live out his life as a memorial to his comrades taught me that he was suffering from a condition much more complex than simply having bad memories or damaged brain chemistry —or altered fear circuits in the brain. Before the ambush in the rice paddy, Tom had been a devoted and loyal friend, someone who enjoyed life, with many interests and pleasures. In one terrifying moment, trauma had transformed everything.”

One of my favorite stories in fiction is The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. It is peculiar in a particular way: the events in the story are almost peripheral to the actual meaning underpinning the story. In The Metamorphosis, the salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into an enormous insect. Yet, his concern and the main story elements do not deal primarily with his transformation into an insect in and of itself, but rather its implications for the world around him. One of Gregor’s first thoughts is to call in sick for work. He ponders how his family will manage without him around as the sole breadwinner supporting them. Not much attention is paid to the fact that Gregor is now a huge insect, least of all by Gregor himself. This is because this is not an Animorphs novel; the metamorphosis we observe here is not to be treated purely as a literal story event, but rather as symbolic. Many have, over the years, attempted to plug at interpretations for The Metamorphosis. One of the more popular modern interpretations is that the crucial metamorphosis occurring is that of Gregor’s sister, Grete, from a girl into a woman, and her assumption of responsibility as the primary male caretaker of the family becomes grotesque, wretched, and without salvation. It is also possible to read the story with the idea that Gregor is still a human, and his physical degeneration into an insect’s body is a function of how he views himself as a professional worker.

In the same way, I don’t believe that calling Steins;Gate “that anime about time travel” is entirely accurate. Time travel plays a significant role in the story, and it is around the theme of time travel and the conspiracy theories regarding it that the core story beats revolve. However, saying that Steins;Gate was about time travel would be the same as saying Neon Genesis Evangelion was, in fact, about giant robots defending Earth against kabbalistically-derived aliens. No, Evangelion is decidedly an anime about loneliness and depression, and so ultimately while the plethora of information available on the NGE wiki about how the various entities and story patterns tie in to Jewish mythology are useful (if you’re a nerd), knowing that the supercomputers in the underground base are named after the three wise men who visited Jesus or that the Central Dogma deals with the flow of genetic information within biological systems does not in any way help one’s understanding of the central conflict within Evangelion. In the same way, I believe, arguing about time travel paradoxes and inconsistencies within the Steins;Gate timelines is ultimately quite pointless in trying to pin down exactly what Steins;Gate is, at least from my point of view.

Ultimately, Steins;Gate is a story about trauma.

In many ways, time travel is the most perfectly ironic story device to use to illustrate trauma. These days, the word “trauma” is bandied about quite often without a true understanding of what it really implies for the individual who is experiencing this trauma. We all know the tropes of trauma – nightmares, flashbacks, triggers, etc. that have been expanded upon to death in the media. We can recognize it in Okabe Rintarou’s eyes every time he witnesses the death of Shiina Mayuri, or is confronted with his decision to let Makise Kurisu die in Steins;Gate 0. But true appreciation of the beauty of Steins;Gate‘s storytelling only comes with a good reckoning of exactly what trauma is. It’s such a perfect fit that this is the reason why I chose Steins;Gate to headline the 4-part series on trauma’s representation in anime, with each segment exploring a different aspect of trauma, and how it deals (or fails to deal) with recovery and reconciliation.

After about three months in country Tom led his squad on a foot patrol through a rice paddy just before sunset. Suddenly a hail of gunfire spurted from the green wall of the surrounding jungle, hitting the men around him one by one. Tom told me how he had looked on in helpless horror as all the members of his platoon were killed or wounded in a matter of seconds. He would never get one image out of his mind: the back of Alex’s head as he lay facedown in the rice paddy, his feet in the air. Tom wept as he recalled, “He was the only real friend I ever had.” Afterward, at night, Tom continued to hear the screams of his men and to see their bodies falling into the water. Any sounds, smells, or images that reminded him of the ambush (like the popping of firecrackers on the Fourth of July) made him feel just as paralyzed, terrified, and enraged as he had the day the helicopter evacuated him from the rice paddy.

Maybe even worse for Tom than the recurrent flashbacks of the ambush was the memory of what happened afterward. I could easily imagine how Tom’s rage about his friend’s death had led to the calamity that followed. It took him months of dealing with his paralyzing shame before he could tell me about it. Since time immemorial veterans, like Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, have responded to the death of their comrades with unspeakable acts of revenge. The day after the ambush Tom went into a frenzy to a neighboring village, killing children, shooting an innocent farmer, and raping a Vietnamese woman. After that it became truly impossible for him to go home again in any meaningful way. How can you face your sweetheart and tell her that you brutally raped a woman just like her, or watch your son take his first step when you are reminded of the child you murdered? Tom experienced the death of Alex as if part of himself had been forever destroyed—the part that was good and honorable and trustworthy. Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again? Or, conversely, how can you surrender to an intimate relationship after you have been brutally violated?

The key aspect of trauma which Steins;Gate explores is how trauma locks one in time. In order to be able to make sense of one’s life, one must be able to assemble the events of one’s life into a coherent narrative structure. This is the normal method of weaving experience into memory for human beings, and it helps us to create the psychological foundation for our daily functioning by establishing a firm sense of identity and place. However, it is quite easily disrupted; what happens when an experience is not amenable to assimilation whatsoever? We most frequently encounter this situation in the most wretched depths of the human experience. War is an intensely stimulating and terrifying experience, with so much in the way of sensation but not much in the way of coherence. So is experiencing sexual assault. The defiling of human life and individual dignity strikes at the heart of an individual’s psyche, and is near-impossible to weave into one’s coherent autobiographical narrative. “The self of the traumatised victim cannot remember itself to itself, and cannot imagine itself whole… yet trauma is a difficult condition to understand because it involves both an inability to forget, with an uncontrollable past making terrifying intrusions into the present, and an inability to assimilate the past within a broad duration across time because what cannot be realised as such, acts as it were in utter scorn of the victim’s present and future needs. Trauma embraces both radical cross-temporal discontinuity, and radical temporal continuity heedless of the biographical continuousness of change.” (Keightley & Pickering, 2012) Time travel, then, can be construed as a very literal representation of time breaking down for traumatized individuals.

Broadly speaking, we can construct the whole Steins;Gate canon as one great exercise of the Hero’s Journey, as with anything else. I feel it is necessary to back up this connection with the understanding that it’s really not that uncommon to infuse a reading of the Hero’s Journey together with trauma in conducting character or story analysis. In fact, there’s an entire YouTube channel dedicated to doing just that, and he does a stellar job at it (I appropriated his most commonly-used reference for analyzing representations of trauma in media for this piece, so there’s that). Additionally, the Hero’s Journey is in itself a descriptive narrative structure which we use to analyze character development in fiction, and seems quite apt for analyzing the (auto)biographical narrative of Okabe Rintarou. I believe that Steins;Gate 0 is also crucial in completing one’s understanding of Okabe’s journey, since the crucial link of the Hero’s Journey, the Abyss, occurs within Steins;Gate 0, although regrettably the anime is greatly lacking in many of the aspects present in the game. The Hero’s Journey, also known as the Monomyth, was originally developed by Joseph Campbell as a way to deconstruct and explain the similarities between the great world myths in many pre-modern mythological narratives involving great figures. He summarizes it in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), as such: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” I reference the stages of the Monomyth quite a bit, so here’s a quick guide on what each stage entails.

Okabe begins his journey as an extremely carefree individual, who spends his days in the lead-up to attending university tinkering with things and hanging out with his two closest friends, Hashida Itaru and Shiina Mayuri. He is called to adventure by Professor Nakabachi’s conference on time travel. Through a miracle of coincidence, he manages to spark the time-traveling function on the Phone Microwave, thus saving the life of Makise Kurisu and turning her into his mentor, upon which he crosses the threshold. The first half of Steins;Gate, while boring and seemingly draggy to most people, really is not to me upon reflection. Okabe’s carelessness with his words and behavior once he has crossed the threshold into the unknown world of time travel cements his group of allies and his group of enemies. It is a masterful bait and switch; where Okabe has only just entered into the world of the unknown, the audience is brought to believe that he has already come back a conquering hero, with the amount of happiness he doles out to those close to him. In reality, Okabe is travelling even further into the Belly of the Whale, ignorant of his pending symbolic death and rebirth until the moment Mayuri lays dead at his feet. The imagery of the clock having stopped working is particularly haunting as a reflection having been reborn into this unending cycle. This traumatic event disrupts Okabe’s narrative of his self, and he is reborn as the eternal time traveller that is locked in time. From the moment after he sees Mayuri’s first death, every single decision is framed in a purely utilitarian calculus – how will this help to save Mayuri?

Now firmly ensconced in the terrifying world of the unknown, Okabe must defeat a number of trials. Being that this is a story of time, he must fight against time itself. He must figure out how time travel works, and how to undo his meddling with time. This is one of the core emotional struggles of Steins;Gate would not exist, that of; having to make the decision to take away from each and every single one of your friends the happiness which you have managed to, through the force of miracle, grant them. It is knowing that you could have given your friends a better life, and that you have seen that better life and their happiness, but you must reverse that decision. While he is aware, conscious, cognizant of the way in which his acts are returning his friends to their previous, less happy states, at this moment in time he is unable to care, because he is on a crusade to save Mayuri, in which everything else is secondary. He coldly logs how much time each reversal manages to save Mayuri. He waits for her to actually die before his eyes to confirm his hypothesis. Above all, while he enlists Kurisu’s help, he is unable at this moment in time to connect with her or think about the consequences and implications of his actions. Succumbing to the temptation of giving up, or enjoying another friend’s happiness with them as you are able to in the visual novel, marks the ignominious end of Okabe’s journey, and his inability to ever be able to return to his original state, or to continue weaving his experience into memory. A premature end to the journey means Okabe is now entirely lost, stranded within his broken sense of time.

Maybe the worst of Tom’s symptoms was that he felt emotionally numb. He desperately wanted to love his family, but he just couldn’t evoke any deep feelings for them. He felt emotionally distant from everybody, as though his heart were frozen and he were living behind a glass wall. That numbness extended to himself, as well. He could not really feel anything except for his momentary rages and his shame. He described how he hardly recognized himself when he looked in the mirror to shave. When he heard himself arguing a case in court, he would observe himself from a distance and wonder how this guy, who happened to look and talk like him, was able to make such cogent arguments. When he won a case he pretended to be gratified, and when he lost it was as though he had seen it coming and was resigned to the defeat even before it happened. Despite the fact that he was a very effective lawyer, he always felt as though he were floating in space, lacking any sense of purpose or direction.

The only thing that occasionally relieved this feeling of aimlessness was intense involvement in a particular case. During the course of our treatment Tom had to defend a mobster on a murder charge. For the duration of that trial he was totally absorbed in devising a strategy for winning the case, and there were many occasions on which he stayed up all night to immerse himself in something that actually excited him. It was like being in combat, he said—he felt fully alive, and nothing else mattered. The moment Tom won that case, however, he lost his energy and sense of purpose. The nightmares returned, as did his rage attacks—so intensely that he had to move into a motel to ensure that he would not harm his wife or children. But being alone, too, was terrifying, because the demons of the war returned in full force. Tom tried to stay busy, working, drinking, and drugging—doing anything to avoid confronting his demons.

Steins;Gate 0 is, in many ways, the core of our analysis of Okabe’s trauma. After all, Steins;Gate 0 happens in the small (big?) space in time at the end of the mainline series, one where Okabe is unable to bring himself to go back and save Kurisu one last time. His trauma is shifted from the moment at which Mayuri is killed by the Rounders, to the moment where he accidentally stabs Kurisu in his attempt to save her, and with Mayuri defending him at his mental breaking point, he abandons his quest, and is imprisoned within this choice. It is for this reason that the entirety of Steins;Gate 0 situates itself as Okabe’s experience in the Abyss, and his Apotheosis.

Throughout the introduction of Steins;Gate 0, he is largely numb, neutered, and lacks any of his old boisterous personality – Mayuri notes with surprise at his attending a mixer, to which he responds that he was simply dragged along. Hououin Kyouma has died, and in its wake only a muted, introverted individual stands. Even with this general sense of listlessness about him, Okabe is driven by a singular goal – to attend Victor Chondria University, Kurisu’s old institution, and continue the work that she had done. The very first reigniting spark we see in him is when he attends the conference by Professor Alexis Leskinen and Hijayo Maho, in which he presents the same research on neurological pathways which underpinned the Time Leap Machine Kurisu had invented. Similar to war veterans who throw themselves into experiences reminiscent of their deployments in order to feel alive again, Okabe cannot help but to assist in the development of Amadeus as a tester, to communicate with the very individual who pins him in place to this timeline.

One of the most notable aspects of Steins;Gate 0 is that unlike the main series, Okabe is often incapable of bringing happiness to any of his friends, if he is even able of identifying what would make them happy at all. Where in the main series Okabe had to give them happiness before wresting it back from them, for much of the anime (and game) the world seemingly moves on around him. Despite the spectre of World War III hanging overhead, most of the events around him do not involve him – the development of Daru’s relationship with his daughter and future wife and the search for Mayuri’s daughter, Kagari, being the core of the excitement and action in the series. The revival of his agency, the power to influence the events going on in the world around him, seemingly comes only when Mayuri breaks the hinge upon which he is chained to this timeline – his decision to forgo saving Kurisu. This process begins when Mayuri expresses her regret at not encouraging Okabe to continue, and in fact shielding him from his own actions. From this point on, all the characters’ efforts mobilize around sending Mayuri to the past, in order to tell her past self to slap some sense into Okabe.

I suppose that the most common reading of this would merely be Mayuri telling Okabe to grow a pair, in a similar way that many Evangelion fans cry out “Shinji, get in the fucking robot!” in a gross misunderstanding of why, exactly, Shinji won’t get in the fucking robot and how that’s the entire crux of the story. I don’t think that this is the actual function of this process. The choice that kicks off the entire arc of Steins;Gate 0 in the original timeline is Mayuri’s choice to allow Okabe to rest, immobilized and inert, within the pool of his trauma. On the face of it, Mayuri is angry at Suzuha for placing the weight of the world upon Okabe. However, the weight of the world never really was what mattered to Okabe – it was the loss of agency he once again experienced when he realized that it was his hands that had, in fact, killed Kurisu. This encounter, and the realization of this truth, prevented Okabe from reaching out and attaining the greater resolve he needs in order to complete his journey. In effect, this is the purpose the Attractor Field Theory serves in the show, a device by which Okabe is deprived of agency and the ability to create meaningful change in the world. The false recognition that he could not meaningfully alter the world to prevent Kurisu’s death anymore is what, fundamentally, creates such a neutered character in Steins;Gate 0. So, Mayuri must break the hinge, by having him confront his trauma rather than seeking to escape it. The Apotheosis brings Okabe the resolution to face down the greater challenges ahead of him. I mean, the dude literally time leaps back from 2036 all the way to 2011 in order to get Mayuri to tell the other Mayuri to slap him in the face.

The fact that the Okabe of Steins;Gate and the Okabe of Steins;Gate 0 (Okabe Zero, for simplicity) are portrayed to be two entirely different people, unlike in the original series, is an interesting decision. At the end of Steins;Gate 0, Okabe Zero has mastered time travel to the point where he can travel back into the primordial space and rescue Mayuri and Suzuha. The resolve and understanding built up by Okabe Zero is transferred to Okabe the same way it all began: through a D-Mail. In this way, Okabe Zero rescues Okabe, and allows the latter to escape the world of the unknown. In effect, Okabe inherits the experiences of Okabe Zero. To quote Keightley & Pickering again, “In reflecting on [his] narrative, Hoffman calls it a project of translating backwards to retell [his] story in the language of the present. It is only in reimagining the past through this language that [he] is able to reconcile [his] successive selves to each other. It is not… a return to an origin, but a creative act of bringing into view the disparate strands of [his] own experience, enabling a movement ‘between them without being split by the difference’.” The memories and experiences of Okabe Zero are necessary as the final key element to weave all of Okabe’s experiences together, and give him the resolve to break the chains of time that bind him. Where in the main show Okabe’s moving across timelines was confined by his inability to break away from the memory of Mayuri’s death pinning him in time, in Steins;Gate 0 Okabe Zero reimagines his ability to move across time as a way to escape that which chains him, and it is this power which Okabe Zero finally bestows upon Okabe.

Activists in the early campaign for AIDS awareness created a powerful slogan: “Silence = Death.” Silence about trauma also leads to death—the death of the soul. Silence reinforces the godforsaken isolation of trauma. Being able to say aloud to another human being, “I was raped” or “I was battered by my husband” or “My parents called it discipline, but it was abuse” or “I’m not making it since I got back from Iraq,” is a sign that healing can begin.

We may think we can control our grief, our terror, or our shame by remaining silent, but naming offers the possibility of a different kind of control. When Adam was put in charge of the animal kingdom in the Book of Genesis, his first act was to give a name to every living creature.

If you’ve been hurt, you need to acknowledge and name what happened to you. I know that from personal experience: As long as I had no place where I could let myself know what it was like when my father locked me in the cellar of our house for various three-year-old offenses, I was chronically preoccupied with being exiled and abandoned. Only when I could talk about how that little boy felt, only when I could forgive him for having been as scared and submissive as he was, did I start to enjoy the pleasure of my own company. Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology; being able to articulate a complex feeling, and having our feelings recognized, lights up our limbic brain and creates an “aha moment.” In contrast, being met by silence and incomprehension kills the spirit. Or, as John Bowlby so memorably put it: “What can not be spoken to the [m]other cannot be told to the self.”

I think Steins;Gate is a perfect analysis of the cross between time travel and trauma. In media, whenever we discuss time travel, it’s almost always discussing travelling to the past. We ask questions like: would you travel back in time to kill baby Hitler? If you could travel back in time to fix one of your mistakes, what would it be? We never really ask questions about traveling to the future. On some level, there is no frame of reference for what the future could look like, and so generally speaking there isn’t very much to talk about; however, time travel is mostly attractive to people because all humans inevitably live with regret. Abstracting a few levels, trauma really is just the natural conclusion of a life lived in regret, where one is so unable to move past an event or a period of time in their pasts that they become that neutered version of Okabe: numb, and unable to create effective change in their lives or on the world around them. Ultimately, every party who is interested in time travel in Steins;Gate is only interested in it to their own ends. In the visual novel of Steins;Gate 0, Vladimir Putin at some point uses a time machine to reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is hilariously chilling given the knowledge that Putin sees the USSR’s collapse as the single biggest humiliation in Russia’s long history.

This, to me, is the reason why all time machine usage in Steins;Gate past the first few episodes of creating happiness for the other characters has the objective of returning to the original point in time. It’s not so much a case of wiping the slate clean here. Steins;Gate, and its alternate timeline, presents us with the thesis that regret is ultimately pointless without action by demonstrating its ultimate form, trauma, and its impact on the main (player) character. One might think that the final usage of the time machine to save Makise Kurisu would disprove this thesis, yet this final usage exactly captures how Okabe has now been freed from his trauma. Instead of being locked into a single space in time by his trauma, and doing everything he can to reverse that fateful decision, Okabe’s efforts to reach the ultimate timeline of Steins;Gate is, in fact, his rejection of the past and grasping of a new future. It is a radical new reassertion of his personal agency over his life and the universe around him, one that had been forsaken throughout the entirety of the series. Okabe flips the script, and instead of time mastering him, he has mastered time. As he finally forsakes time travel for good with his shining future secured, time begins to flow again.

Just like any other psychological issue, there really is functionally not a lot that can be “done” for sufferers of trauma in the conventional sense. Sure, you can attempt to medicate yourself, but the thing is that for a severe fracturing of the self – which is what trauma effects – any damage done is entirely internal, and therefore any remedy that you can apply must come from, and be applied to, the self. I’m not entirely sure if this knowledge is at all useful to you. Maybe you don’t suffer from significantly disempowering trauma, or perhaps this just sounds like another useless platitude. After all, if trauma is a temporally-disconnecting experience which disempowers you and robs you of your agency, whence cometh the means to draw our strength anew?

References

Keightley, Emily, and Michael Pickering. “Creative Memory and Painful Pasts.” In The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice, 1st ed., 165–93. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Kolk, Bessel van der. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2014.