I’m 37 years old; much too old, some would say, to be watching anime (“cartoons” as some call them). This is an opinion that I’ve heard quite often, but I’m as inclined to agree with it as I would be to the idea that someone who reads fiction novels or loves watching movies has to be young.
Anyone who has taken the time to watch an anime series (especially one like “Ergo Proxy” or “Eden of the East“) knows that the writers and artists spend a great deal of time developing multi-faceted characters and complex plots. Add to this the Japanese tendency to develop protagonists that aren’t wholly good and antagonists that aren’t wholly evil. The wicked have the potential for redemption, and the hero’s are almost always precariously balanced on the precipice, within a hair’s breadth of falling into the Abyss. How is this different from “acceptable” literature?
Ichigo as the Arcetype of the Conflicted Hero
Is the only difference between a masterpiece of literature, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings, and an anime, like “Bleach,” the fact that one is written and one is animated?
Both, either knowingly or unwittingly, utilize archetypes (symbols that are, according to psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, universally recognized by the subconscious mind) to tell the story of the hero, …and not just any hero — the Hero common across cultures. They follow a very consistent pattern, which you can see represented in the world’s greatest myths, legends and stories, known as the Hero’s Journey, recognized by sociologist Joseph Campbell as the “monomyth.”
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. – Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The Archetypes of Ichigo’s Journey
The story of Ichigo Kurosaki in the series “Bleach” is a rich tapestry of characters and plotlines that literally spans centuries. It is a fantastical story involving death gods (shinigami), lost souls seeking to devour other souls’ energy (reiatsu), and a complex twist on heaven (Soul Society), hell (Hueco Mundo) and reincarnation. And yet Ichigo represents the Everyman that people can relate to, and his story is one that appeals to millions of people around the world because it utilizes the archetypes of the monomyth, the Hero’s journey toward immortality.
All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. — Carl Jung, Collected Works, Volume 8, p. 342
The Reluctant Hero
An essential requirement of the monomyth is that the main character isn’t a spectacular or otherwise outstanding person. The point of the monomyth is that you don’t have to be a superhero or a god in order to make a difference. The hero is an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances and thereby becomes extraordinary himself. A consistent element of anime and manga is that the main character is “an average high school student.” Look through the encyclopedia at Anime News Network and see how often you see the phrase “So-and-so was an average high school student until…” in their descriptions of the various anime and manga in their archive.
The Call to Adventure - Ichigo meets Rukia
This occurs more often than not, I would suggest, because in high school people are already a confused mess. The desire to be accepted and fit in is at odds with a combination of raging hormones and societal pressure to find your path. It’s a tough enough time, and there’s hardly a worse time in someone’s life for something extraordinary to happen. Both young and old can relate to this archetype because the young are there and the old have been there.
Ichigo is essentially the same. While he is exceptional in that he can see the spirits of the deceased and he is one of the best fighters in Karakura Town, he doesn’t really want to be exceptional. He just wants to hang out with his friends, look after his family, and be normal.
Being exceptional, Ichigo realizes, infers the assumption of risk, mainly the risk to the safety of his beloved sisters and his friends. And that’s not a risk he is willing to take … until Fate lands a shinigami in his bedroom and puts him in circumstances that require him to embrace and perfect that which makes him special in order to protect the ones he loves.
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To be continued…
In the next blog post, I’ll use The Substitute Shinigami and the Soul Society arcs to illustrate the 17 stages of Campbell’s Monomyth.