Casshern Sins 8: embracing your purpose

Killing never looked so right.

There is a magical moment in Casshern Sins 8. Not one of those feel-good moments in Natsume Yuujinchou, but one that is both surreal and sublime.

Here, toward the end, both heaven and hell converge at one place, but, at the same time, both are definitively separated by the concert dome’s walls that echo the sound of destruction on one side, the sound of hope the other. Yet, not unless the pressures of these two opposing sounds have worked together would the walls hold up.

Had Casshern not been there, the raiders would have cut short the songstress’s song and all of her gatherers’ lives. At the same time, had the songstress Janice not been there, it would’ve just been another bloodlust episode by the destroyer of the world.

Yet life works on such mysterious level, as Lyuze has observed: how ironic it is to see both the deliverer of death and the songstress who helps others to forget that death, both walking together side-by-side. Two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, incomplete on their own and incompatible to each other, can come together to complete each other’s purpose and to create a moment that would not have been possible each on their own.

On his own, Casshern can only destroy—a sin that eats him alive from the inside. On her own, Janice can only sing—a skill that, as lofty as its ideal of hope is, is utterly useless in such an age of cut-throat savages and rampant chaos. Yet, she recognizes a particular purpose of that part of her and embraces it even at the point of death as evident at the beginning of the episode when she could do nothing other than sing even as the raiders were about to deliver her a deathblow. Furthermore in what I thought was an outlandish idea, she even encourages Casshern to embrace his destructive nature, merely stating that everything has meanings.

By the end of the episode, it would seem like Casshern has changed not and done nothing other than what he has always been doing: destruction. But did you see it in his eyes (even behind all the blood)? This man has seen purpose, not sin. Casshern’s sin has for that one moment became his purpose. And for that purpose, he performs to his fullest his version of the orchestra in harmony to Janice’s melody that is on the other side of that wall.

So, my dear readers, if you are ever troubled by your “flaw,” be brave and embrace it. Then seek out a place where your flaw becomes your purpose, a place where a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that looks ugly up-close completes a larger picture of grandeur.

Does it really matter what she is singing so as long as she is still willing to sing amid hopelessness?