Night Head Genesis
2007-12-11 17:11:51

Night Head Genesis is an anime series that premiered on Animax Network in 2006, based on an original 1992 live-action series. I wish I could have seen some of it. It might well have been a sort of cross between Dark Shadows and Doctor Who... well, it could have been anyway, except that Tom Baker would have had to have been Japanese and about 26 years old.

I'm assuming that you're going to watch the series, so I won't offer any spoilers. Do let me tell you that the ending is not tragic, though, and that might have been a mistake for the sake of the story's impact. Nope, it has a happy ending. I don't have anything against happy endings, mind you, but I was all braced for one and felt a bit non plussed by it. Not angry or disappointed, really, just surprised given the danger both in the storyline and in the Japanese penchant for tragedy.

As in so many stories, there were these two brothers. Each had a special power. The elder brother, Kimihara Naoto, was psychokinetic and powerfully so. The younger, Naoya, was psychometric and almost uncontrollably so. Don't touch him. He doesn't like it. So his elder brother protects him from both the world and, to the best of his ability, from his own power of perception as well. Surely this is something that anyone with a little brother can identify with. That part of the story, where any story begins to call us to identify our own situation with its, succeeds.

It also succeeds on the level of being a story of good guys versus bad. The two Kimihara brothers are definitely good guys, pure and without guile. The people they oppose are up to some real wickedness. It's just that they don't always perceive it as such. Sometimes they are insane, sometimes too young to make a real moral judgment. It is only at the end, when they begin to become confident of their maturing abilities and judgment that they can and do address the real bad guys.

Comparing it to other hero-twin or hero-brother stories is an easy thing to do, but perhaps unfair. We just don't know without asking how much of a study the writers have made of folklore and mythology. It's a pretty convincing story of how two brothers would address such a situation. It might also be good to bear in mind that the rivalry for their parents' attention and the struggle for individuation is obviated by the removal of their parents and their institutional upbringing. As such it is never addressed in the story.

As for the ending, well, sometimes the heroes get to come home and just lead normal lives. That's what we all wish for them isn't it? I've had the honor and pleasure of knowing some who did. And at the end of their heroic adventures they came home to face the same sort of problems as everyone else. That they faced them in the same way as the rest of us, mostly well, perhaps says something encouraging about the rest of us. Maybe there's the potential for heroism, if not psychokenesis, in us all.

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Busou Renkin - 2007-05-31 11:37:39

Demonbuster - 2007-05-12 08:39:30

Re: Elemental Gelade
2007-12-19 09:53:17

Hi, Applesauce.
Elemental Gelade sounds rather like "Castle in the Sky," by Miyazaki. Is it? It has sky-pirates (yay!) and a girl with a crystal, after all. What do you think?

Re: Busou Renkin - 2007-12-11 22:46:37