Narrative Warfare: Tragedy, Hope, & What You're Supposed To Do With It

Today is Primary Election Day in Minnesota. I threw sand in the gears. Pic related, including other recent events.

The Shiba of Color would approve.

I will point you to Brian Niemeier's blog for more about those events; I'll reserve my thoughts for the coming weekend when more information comes out.

Note that Brian wrote about this in the framework of Tragedy, using that word properly in its sense in Drama and thus in narrative. Last night saw him do a Twitter thread about that, followed up with yesterday's post, and seeing that more of you know Evangelion than Othello--shame be upon you--I'll embed the start of that thread below.

Some Gen Y folks not quite processing this. That's fine. Our conditioning runs deep.

It's like this: Not every story should leave you feeling uplifted. If you identified w/ Shinji & felt disturbed by EoE ...

1) You are morally healthy
2) NGE is a good story. https://t.co/HDohVAjUc3

— Brian Niemeier (@BrianNiemeier) August 8, 2022

It's fine for the protagonist to fail. You just have to set it up properly, and in a tragedy that means foreshadowing the protagonist's flaws and howthose flaws could lead to poor decisions that lead to failure, which Shakespeare is famous for doing (and thus is why he's required reading) and why tragedy in anime only works when structured so.

In Legend of the Galactic Heroes, most of the characters that don't make it to the end alive are characters that meet tragic ends. Yang Wen-Li's end comes as a direct result of his flaws and vices, as do the ends of many of his allies and subordinates. The same is true--and lampshaded harder--with Reinhard von Lohengram's side of the story. This includes their respective secondary antagonists; Littenheim and Braunshweig both failed against Reinhard due to their vices overcoming them, and the would-be Karma Houndini Truhint smarms and smugs as only a high-functioning Gamma can until he meets someone with nothing left to lose and a willingness to do violence that others did not.

The catharsis experienced by the audience at the last moment, when Reinhard's infant son repeats his father's grasp for the stars, is ironic and bittersweet in its hope for and concern over the future as Reinhard is no longer there to raise him, leaving Hildagarde--now Kaisarin Regent, with the power to deny the boy succession--in a very dangerous position of her own.

The audience, expected to be familiar with the many historical parallels--many of them European--that Tanaka draws from, appreciates this juxtaposition of Tragedy in the Drama with the reality of this further destabilizing an already precarious galactic polity, as all empires are. As the story ends there, we know not what follows. There is hope that all present will reflect on events that just passed, learn from them, and have the wisdom and the ability to pass those on to the children that come after them. Three is the concern that this fails, and the cycle of history--a theme in LOGH--repeats anew. (Tanaka is no Whig.)

That is what makes an effective tragedy, because those concerns of the survivors are meant to be refleceted in the minds of the audience after the story ends.

To address those concerns, the tales must be considered at length and with attention to detail so that the audience can identify what went wrong and why. They are meant to see in the tragic character something to avoid, not embrace, and thus find cause to correct such character flaws in themselves lest they too meet such an end.

Yes, that happens.

No, you're not supposed to like Shinji. You're supposed to see why Shinji is a bitch and don't do that. Ditto all the other dysfunctional characters in EVA. (A lot of them could use the help of someone like Adam Lane Smith and his Attachment Therapy.) I don't like him either, and I don't like EVA, but it has staying power and Tragedy is that power. Refresh your familiarity with the form; Brian is correct that too many have muddled senses due to the enemy willfully confusing it with Deconstruction and its inherent nihilism.