Texhnolyze is an anime that was created in 2003 through the collaboration of Yasuyuki UEDA, Yoshitoshi ABe, Hiroshi Hamasaki, and most importantly Chiaki J. Konaka. I think it is safe to say most of Texhnolyze is the realization of Konaka’s and Hamasaki’s vision.
I warn, the anime was designed to reveal its meaning only upon several rewatches. In order to understand earlier events in the story, it is necessary to know how exactly the story unfolds. To anyone who has watched it only once, I do not recommend reading this review.
1 — Rebirth
The scene opens with Ichise having sexual intercourse with his promoter’s wife. The perverted woman tries to stick her fingernail in his eyes, and then Ichise gets angry and pushes her off himself onto the floor.
With his rejection, she is furious and she hunts him down with Organo's support. Altercations lead to two of Ichise’s limbs getting amputated with a katana.
Onishii arrives right before Ichise is killed and asks his subordinates to spare him, after which he calls Doc and informs her about about what happened.
Doc finds Ichise in a nearly dead state and takes him to her lab.
Doctor applies Texhnolyzation procedure on Ichise, and then the first step in Ichise’s rebirth begins. He now is a subject in Doctor’s Texhnolyze project and by extension a resource valued by Organo.
As savage he is, he rejects the help and runs away. When he is found by the same Organo members who amputated his limbs, he is thrown into a sewer with the assumption that he wouldn’t be able to find his way out and just die in there.
Ran guides his way out of there by sending him a flower and Ichise's arc comes to an end. Ichise, being saved and given a purpose of gratitude by Ran, is now born again.
“Whenever I was lost, I found flowers that haven’t been there before”
Stranger
As Ichise gets Texhnolyzed in the city, A Stranger also comes down from above. It’s Yoshii.
In the first episode, he prevents Ran’s prediction from coming true - the old man getting shot and dying - foreshadowing his capability to change fate and society.
"You saw my future, didn’t you? I don’t want you tell anyone about my future. Including me."
Yoshii questions society and refuses the apathic state of the people in the surface world. Leaving behind the comfortable life that he had, he volunteers to descend into Lux.
He assassinates Organo members in disguise of a Union member, blows up the base camp of Racan with explosives, and kills Onishi’s wife. All to drive the city into a chaos.
Yoshii’s motives are primarily driven by his wish to satisfy his own anarcho-primitivist desires, the life he had in the surface world not one that satisfied him.
What he wants is chaos, more accurately, order from chaos to emerge. He knows that if he shakes things up, destroys everything, a new order can be created under his lead. Bringing chaos to order, bringing order to chaos.
In the first confrontation between Ichise and Yoshii, Ichise - being the instinctual animal he is - senses how dangerous Yoshii is as a person and starts trying to punch him blindly.
Conclusion: Rejection of Salvation
In order to get Class to directly start a war with the factions of the city and set everyone off against each other, Yoshii creates a plan to assassinate a person from Class.
When Shinji finally figures out that Yoshii was behind the entire commotion, he points a gun at his head and threatens to kill him. Yoshii slips away from Shinji, but then Oonishi crosses roads with him.
Yoshii almost manages to kill him but Ichise appears at the last moment and prevents him from doing so.
In the final confrontation between Ichise and Yoshii, Ichise tells him to ‘get lost’. A big improvement over the last time, Ichise started controlling his instincts and took Yoshii’s advice from the last time they have met.
Ichise ends up pushing him off and then Yoshi falls to his death where Sakimura finishes him off with a coup de grâce.
With Yoshii’s death, the thread of the prophecy is torn apart, and the weave of fate has now started flowing towards destruction. Ichise kills Yoshii, causing Ran’s prediction about Ichise destroying the world come true.
Ignorant masses have not understood Yoshi and refused his ideals, killing the biggest hope for their salvation.
Ran ends the episode, lamenting “Nothing changes.”
2 — Eclipse of the Sun in the Open Sky
Episode 19, my favorite episode of anything, is named ‘Heavenward’. When our characters arrive in the surface world, they discover that Heaven is not quite what they had in mind.
Theonormals have achieved perfection in a more 'perfect' way than Shapes. They did not need to sacrifice anything.
Having abandoned Texhnolyze technology, they scientifically modified their genetic sequences and took out the ‘bad’ genes from their gene pool.
With the same technique, they also made themselves resilient to any physical damage by taking pain, sicknesses and mental illnesses out of the equation.
In result, they became the perfect humans with no bad feelings, crime, loss and disease, and have turned society into a place where bad is no longer existent:
into Heaven.
Heaven is not the infinite paradise some have imagined it to be, because while it is a place of happiness and perfection, it is also a place completely devoid of sadness, which is, from whatever perspective you look at, a very essential part of everything human.
Heaven is perfection, and perfection is indifference. Happiness cannot exist without sadness, and feeling bad is ultimately better than feeling nothing at all.
Hell is a more interesting place than heaven, for what we require is not a comfortable state in which to receive endless pleasure, but problems to give us meaning and nourish our souls.
Humans are designed to seek meaning, and suffering is truly the only way we can find beauty and meaning in life.
It was the attainment of heaven for Theonormals that stripped every bit of meaning out of their life and brought their fall.
Heaven is symbolized by the surface world, Hell is symbolized by Lux in Texhnolyze. The concept of Theonormals is influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of The Last Man, but nevertheless departs significantly from it.
Theo- means God in Greek, meaning they reduced Godlikeness to a point of normality, and played God in their pursuit of perfection.
“Routine remains routine, because it’s carried out as routine.” — Chair
When Ichise and Doctor want to report the situation in Lux to the authorities in the surface world, they are met with a strange sight: an empty chair perched atop a stack of rocks.
This is an analysis on the nature of modern cities and the institutions that govern them:
The chair is empty because we don’t know who the authorities are personally, yet we still ask for their help whenever we have a problem.
The chair is in an elevated position, because the government is above the individual.
As we civilized, we started to regulate our natural instincts by organizing them through centralized institutions of collective action.
All of our governmental institutions in modern life are intended to be more organized and thus more efficient counterparts of our tribal functions.
We no longer have to personally kick people of out of our society or kill them when they engage in criminal activity; we have police do it for us.
We no longer have to go hunting to get food; we have livestocks do it for us.
We basically have compartmentalized our instinctual and impulsive roles in the society into clearer defined, regimented bureaucratical roles which in return for productivity reward with a useful social construct called money.
The chair represents mankind’s transition from tribalism to civilization. The institutions built at place and the medium of exchange being turned into money helped society take advantage from a wider range of skills.
A man could pursue scientific knowledge and teach it to others, a man could be a farmer and feed the society, and both would be paid with money. The scientist would invent technology, which the farmer would make use of and pay for with money, the farmer would bring food, which the scientist would eat and pay for with money.
Compartmentalization of our societal roles on an institutional level increased the amount of cooperation, made room for higher efficiency and allowed us to draw the best out of each person in society, achieving exponential growth and bringing on an outburst of knowledge.
This is the utilitarian model of society — civilization. Everyone for everyone, and the focus of society being shifted from survival to development of science. Society has started to select more and more for intellectual capability over time, and diversification of workforce paved the way for acquirement of complexity.
The chair really is a symbol of the enigmatic nature of power and authority in modern society. The chair’s obsession with following routine seems like it symbolizes how you should always follow a formal procedure in order to enforce your legal rights.
At the end of the episode 19 “Heavenward”, we get more insight into what happened in the past that events unfolded in a way Lux was created underground.
Even with the progress of mankind, even with the modern cities, even with the police, humans still couldn’t eliminate crime.
They jailed the criminals, society kept creating new ones. Fed up with the issue, the government asked for scientists to solve the problem once and for all.
Scientists came together, looked for solutions, and then decided that the only adequate solution would be a mass murder of every individual with inferior genes and bad intentions. The complete removal of these people would be justified, because after all it would be all for the good of mankind.
Then the businessmen stepped in and said, “Why murder them when you can use them?"
After long discussions, a bargain was struck; these people would not be murdered, but they would still be removed from society. They would be sent to a distant location, but they would also be forced to take part in the workforce.
The decision was to excavate a deep and broad chasm, and in its depths, to create an experimental city called Lux. Within the city’s enclosed sky would be installed an artificial sun, while at its center would stand a towering monument called Obelisk. For this, their inspiration was the famous Ancient Egyptian artifacts, “Luxor Obelisks,” and the Latin word ‘lux,’ meaning light.
The monument would make people feel small in its presence but its true significance would lie not in its size or beauty, but in the message it aspired to convey. The first thing people would feel when they looked at the monument would be the gaze of their overlords, and it would remind them under whose power and at whose mercy they are able to keep on living. Another purpose of this monument, though less important, would be to act as a control center for Texhnolyzed limbs and provide them with energy.
The exiled savages of the city would never not be at each other’s throats, murders would never cease and they would go on forever. The disgusting animals wouldn't even think of sitting down and talking their problems out. The corpses of those slain in the massacres would transform into Raffia, and the peaceful folk of the city would be made to mine it and export it to the surface world above in exchange for food. And thus, within a few short years, the project would not only pay for itself, but it would start making profits.
At the end of the episode 20 — “Hades”, the person pulling the strings of the orb girl behind the scenes finally reveals himself.
He’s an old man named Saginuma. He holds an umbrella to protect himself from the sun, and there is an apparatus on his legs similar to Texhnolyze.
He is probably the one in charge of the entire thing.
When Ichise speaks with Saginuma for the last time, Saginuma mentions that the generation before him did not only want to drive the criminals away so they could eliminate the bad elements of the society and live peacefully, but it was precisely also because no miracle happened that would evolve them into the next species.
An obvious implication of Social Darwinism is that a being only evolves further when it faces an obstacle — a hardship. Where there is suffering and destruction, there is construction and improvement. Things can be improved upon only when they are broken apart.
Nature has only ever been capable of constructive action whenever a great amount of bloodshed has occurred and a species has faced an overwhelming amount of hardship.
The comfort of civilization has at last resulted in mankind stagnating in its growth as a species, brought on by complete homeostasis, a perfect maintenance of stability and happiness.
By specifically selecting the bad people of the world and forcing them to live together, people of the surface world thought they could artificially create a situation where people of Lux would evolve into the next species.
This section is roughly also about having a balanced approach towards utilitarianism, basically keeping civilization within boundaries of nature.
Therefore, any society that makes it its ultimate goal to maximize happiness and minimize suffering will lose, which is what Theonormals did, how they achieved homoeostasis, and why they couldn’t evolve anymore.
Some may claim that happiness needs no defense, but look at what its opposite gave us: art, aesthetics, intelligence, as well as intimate and complex social relationships— all of which lower species like single cell organisms lack. If we were free from grief, we would never know them.
What if consciousness is merely the tip of the iceberg? Technology and civilization are not the solution, nature is.
While civilization provides us with the choice to prevent pain, taking it would be a definitive compromise on our evolutionary potential. Redistribution of wealth and welfare cheques are real life examples.
Only because we’ve suffered the most we could have made this piece of rock ours.
Suffering is what pushed us beyond our limits, and what made us explore the farthest reaches of our imagination. It is at the root of all artistic creation, and it is the inspiration for our voyages into space and for all of our other magnificent achievements.
The suspension of pain and suffering can only bring on stagnation, and will eventually only lead to a greater amount of pain. No atom would have been split by now if there was no such thing as sadness.
“An ‘ideal society’ would be the graveyard of human greatness.” — Nicolas Gomez Davila
No one notices the stars above unless there is something heart-crushing in front of their eyes. Without suffering, nothing would have exalted the souls of all the artists, philosophers, writers, warriors, scientists, great men that you admire.
I think the most poignant and conspicuous thing about Theonormals is despite having invested everything they had in science and technology — which still gave them the ability to do very transformative things such as genetic modification — there really is no one uploading his consciousness to the cloud and indulging himself in endless hedonism. In the end, technology proved to be quite limited and ineffective in solving human problems.
Class members are most likely ex-members of Theonormals who rejected the genetic therapy that was taking place in the surface world and decided to instead watch over Lux.
As he is the last person with the “bad” genes in the surface world, Saginuma asks Ichise to stay there, even blowing up the staircase in the airshaft to make him, but he chooses to go back down to save Ran.
Ichise is most likely humanity’s last hope, so this is the second time he screws it up for all of humanity, making Ran’s prediction come true once agan.
Saginuma represents himself as a little girl the first time we see him as the person in charge of the surface world — face of the government.
Saginuma protects himself from the sun with an umbrella, but the little girl is exposed to it.
This is about how governments represent themselves to the citizens in order to avoid responsibility:
There are always things happening behind the scenes, what you’re seeing is merely how those people choose to represent themselves. Playing the dumb, innocent victim is a way to be freed from responsibility and an intelligently directed political move for long-term goals.
This is an identical copy of “Winged Victory of Samothrace” from real life, symbolizing victory in battle. Possibly representing Theonormal victory over the people who later came to be known as citizens of Lux.
The statue is also pretty well-placed. It has wings — but no arms, no legs, and it has no eyes. It can't hold anything between its arms, it cannot walk, it cannot see, it cannot speak.
Shapes
Shapes are Kano’s vision for the future of human evolution. His opinion is that being a human is biologically restrictive, and therefore inherently flawed. If we want to improve life, then we should rid ourselves of our humanity. The idea is born from Kano’s - the twisted artist’s- desire to reshape the world.
It’s arguable how all of this would play out in effect, but what’s more arguable is would life be a genuine experience then?
They’re aptly named — “Shapes” — they’re mere shapes and nothing else. They will live almost eternally, but they’re not alive in the first place. Stuck between a human and a robot, not distinct enough to be a member of the either.
If you try to be everything, and then you’ll observe yourself becoming nothing. There is no radicalism without compromise, which is a compromise on life itself.
When Shapes arrive in the city, people of Lux abandon any sense of identity and revert back to a primitive state of mind for survival.
After that, every association in the city start to dismantle, allowing only tactical alliances suited for the situation to survive in the aftermath.
When ideals cease to deliver in practice, they get replaced by pragmatism.
Degeneration of Class
“The bloodline of my family has been continued by its men mating with their sisters and mothers, it was all to bring me into the world.” — Kano
Episode 21’s title — “Encephalopathy” is most likely referring to Kano, it means damage or disease that affects the brain. Well that’s true, his brain is pretty fucked up.
Class has been engaging in incestuous relationships almost ever since it existed. This probably have led to a fertility crisis, as evidenced by the use of cloning technology. They've all become sterile. There will be nobody left to run the place if they can't breed, so they clone themselves.
The reason why they engage in incest is clear to me — it is in order to keep the royal bloodline pure.
Incest is a strictly prohibited taboo that is highly looked down upon in our society, yet Class has the power to break the rules.
The higher you are in the hierarchy, the more rules you get to make for others and break for yourself.
Your high position in the hierarchy, by giving you a disproportionate amount of access to power and control, will allow you to break out of conventional ways of life and form your own social rules — either for pleasure, for practice of royal incest for preservation of the bloodline, or for any other desired effect.
A real life example here would be millionaires and billionaires engaging in pedophilia.
Although your access to higher technology can help you overcome some of the biological consequences of breaking out of traditional ways of life, it cannot save you.
The traditional ways of life restrain you within a strict framework only because they actually want to protect you. It’s strict and oppressive, but also welcoming and warm.
Incest in their case was a mere consequence of having incredibly high pride, which was the consequence of having too much control and power. They devolved right back into primitive behavior when they maxed out all of their stats. At the end of their civilizational journey, they pushed further and found themselves right back at the beginning.
Overcivilisation eventually cause the problems of the old to take novel forms. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
It's only a matter of time before an adaptive system begins to choke on its own systems. Full satisfaction of each reward system within a larger system is by design impossible, marking the eventual collapse of it. In the long term, this cycle of birth, death and rebirth is not wasteful, but it is more efficient and leads the system into refinery of more resiliency and complexity.
The end is incorporated into the beginning, and the beginning is incorporated into the end.
Konaka is addressing civilizational cycles — social cycle theory here.
What Class represents is a liberal society at its highest stage, where technology is developed, no social rules enforced, and nothing is considered to be 'bad.'Personal freedom is valued above all else, and everyone is free to do whatever they want, because no matter how bad the damage, technology can always fix it.
Technological and civilizational capabilities of such society have advanced to the point where it makes people believe they have conquered nature, but in truth it would not be conquer but committing crimes against it. It's a society that forgot how it got where it did. The corresponding ideology in real life would be a liberal brand of accelerationism.
Another aspect of the conflict we observe with the surface world is represented by Class. It is a minor scale representation of a society whose gene pool has become too limited due to eugenics, and the prevalance of genetic disorders is increasingly rising.
“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.“ — William Gibson
“What has been is what will be, what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9
“Civilizations fall; it’s one of the most predictable things about them. The questions that matter are when and how, not if.” — John Michael Greer
The Prophetess
Ran is a girl from the village of Gabe. She is chosen to be the Prophetess of her generation. She can predict the future, and she can also relay her messages to Oonishi through the Obelisk, making her the voice of the city.
Faction of Gabe is an extremely religious sentimental allegiance, members have no free will and only devotion. They live their lives based on instructions from Ran.
City of Gabe is a town located in the hills far away from Lux in an isolated position. They are the only ones who aren’t affected by the Shapes invasion.
But the damage spreads to Gabe shortly after the city, showing that by running away they have only delayed the inevitable end.
The Greek word theoria means “watching.” and can be used to mean “to consult an oracle.”
As well as Gabe, Ran guides also others. She gives Ichise a purpose, helps Oonishi rule the city, and brings people together after Kano invades the city.
She often appears and helps the characters at times they are alone, and also correctly predicts that Ichise would be the bringer of the end.
Foreseer
Raffia is the substance that suppresses transplant rejection response caused by the immune system in the process of Texhnolyzation.
It‘s essential for Texhnolyze technology. Most of Lux’s economy is based on the Raffia that is being exported to the surface world.
Dead bodies turn into Raffia.
Obelisk acts as a control center for all Texhnolyzed limbs.
Ran is connected to Obelisk.
The obelisk provides Texhnolyze limbs with energy, but also includes an interface that provides assistance on using Texhnolyze limbs by displaying a hologram in the user’s vision.
Raffia can suppress the transplant rejection response only because it tricks the body into perceiving the artificial limb as an organic human limb; because it is originally of man; because it contains DNA, of the corpses who have become it.
Another function of Obelisk is to extract this DNA from within the Raffia, access the ancestral memory genetically contained within it, and then use a pattern recognition system to turn the memories of the dead people into a predictive capability.
A prediction of future is created as a result of this process, and served again within the range of vision to the user through the use of his neural system.
It is essentially the same thing as feeding history books to a neural network, and then making it cross-index each historical event to create a mathematical model of, based on that input, how a possible future would play out. It’s literally weaponised collective unconscious.
Basically, whoever controls the Obelisk has the ability to create a prediction of future. Ran is probably Kano’s sister, they even have the same exact eye color, and Kano is most likely able to observe the city through the eyes of Texhnolyzed people just like his sister, which probably contributed to his insanity.
There is no future sight.
History repeats itself, religions can successfully predict the future through their teachings only because they’re created within accordance to an understanding of past history.
They’re simplified condensations of complex inner workings, wrapped and served within a metaphysical container to encourage the maximum amount of compliance.
3 — Arrival
Everything in Texhnolyze eventually dies in the finale, because as depicted by the intensive train imagery right from the start, it was all unstoppably headed for one direction.
Everyone failed others, everyone was failed by others:
Organo — The power, the money and the classy lifestyle that the organization offered to its highly ranked members created a highly competitive hierarchy within the organization and took control of them by short circuiting their instinctual drives and reward systems. They were too constitutional and organizational. There was no trust; only strict rules, competition and infighting. At times of war, they stuck together and overwhelmed the enemy, but at times of peace, they struck and killed each other.
Racan — Racan was the opposite of Organo. They never cared about anything, they never had rules about anything. They were comfortable with each other at times of peace, but at times of war, they all scattered like sheep.
Gabe —They had no free will. They isolated themselves in the hills far from the city and fled their problems. In the end they only delayed the inevitable. They put their religion at the center of their lives, ignored everything else, and essentially lived like cattle.
Class — People of Class were the elites of the society. They had access to every convenience that technology and power could provide, but because they did not use it within a moral framework, the power they possessed worked not ‘for’; but ‘against’ them. When they freed themselves of traditions and social restraints, they also freed themselves of the protection they had against Nature’s ruthless and destructive laws. Traditions are heuristic techniques and culture actually is downstream of biology. They were the opposite of Gabe, they didn’t learn from past and live by any form of accumulated knowledge, which brought them to their doom.
Union — They abstained from the comfort and the convenience technology could offer them.
Theonormals — They were the opposite of Union, they used technology in order to turn the society into a better place, but what they did broke the natural order and caused an important part within the system to be made undone while the rest stayed the same, after which the system fell into incompatibility. They overused technology — in a wrong way.
They all were failures.
Human beings are nothing without a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose could get a human to put up with anything.
But by strictly using a particular center to communal life, you let your life be controlled by a pathology — which, if misused, may cause you to ignore the other aspects of life.
Your life is yours to live in a balanced way, enjoying every bit of it, not to be sacrificed for the convenience of other people.
There are good and bad ideologies in life, to be able to seamlessly incorporate them into your life and live in a balanced way require a significant degree of nuance and mastery.
Chiaki J. Konaka does not only want to show us what path we should take in our lives as individuals, but also how to walk that path through the main characters:
Ichise
Ichise is the 2nd protagonist of the show.
He is the character that has the most character progression in the series.
He starts at the bottom of the hierarchy and as such he is initially anti-social, aggressive and highly emotional, and he transforms into a civilized and relatively well mannered person as he rises.
As the series unfold, he starts to love Ran and respect Oonishi, both of which are pro-social emotions. Him having a haircut, wearing a tie, and strategizing against the gunmen of Class in Episode 14 indicate him moving vertically higher in the social hierarchy.
The whole point of his character arc is reflected in how he refuses to live in the sterile surface world with Doctor and goes back down to Lux to embrace life and suffering and its problems so that he can protect something that he loves.
His character arc also draws parallels with the story of Orpheus. Orpheus is a poet who travels to underground to save his wife from Hades (the name of the 20th episode) and fails to do so.
However, his character progression is subverted by the narrative, because while he goes through an enormous character progression and rises in the social hierarchy, he fails, and he fails strictly because he fails others.
Having killed Yoshii and refused to stay in the surface world, Ichise is self-centered and ignorant beyond any measure. Both of those actions could possibly save the world.
His selfishness, and his inability to think, strategize and sacrifice are what destroys humanity.
Stray Dog
“Eternal return is a concept that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.” (Wikipedia)
“What attracted me to Ichise was his eyes. His eyes are the eyes of our parents’ parents. What the first immigrants to Lux all had, that’s why they were driven underground.” — Doctor
Ichise came back as the reincarnation of the criminals who had committed crimes and been sent underground, and failed the world once again.
His fault was the same as criminals: being self-centered, ignorant and instinctual, as those are the things that drive a person to commit a crime.
Since he doesn't do anything that is blatantly wrong most people view him as the main protagonist. This is why I believe that he himself is not at fault, because at no point of the story he acts any different than an ordinary person would.
You could replace him with any average person from the streets and things would have ended up the same. He is the exact opposite of a ‘character,’ because he has no characteristic traits. He goes about living his own life, and in doing so somehow acts as the missing piece that makes the whole puzzle finally fit.
I believe Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Return is a central concept deployed in the show to convey that everything always moves in cycles.
There are 2 readings of this.
Each generation is fundamentally the same from a biological viewpoint, you can reduce or increase crime, but you cannot eliminate it.
There will never cease to be criminal activity in a society, because it is just a byproduct of rearrangement of the social hierarchy, because it is what is evolutionarily advantageous.
Societies are hierarchical, and as some individuals rise to the top, others are inevitably driven to the bottom. Such a system naturally produces deviant and anti-social behavior, leading some individuals to commit crimes, who will then be removed.
This promotes evolutionarily advantageous genes and allows for higher adaptive capability by ‘filtering’ the ‘unsuccessful’ people ‘out of society’ and pointing at the vulnerable parts of the system.
The overarching theme here is that criminal, violent and antisocial behavior in society isn’t a bug, but rather a feature that was put there on purpose. It is simply the most efficient thing for us in the grand scheme of things.
This is essentially what is called a ‘complex adaptive system’ + Eternal Return. Masterful infusion of concepts.
The glass of water that he breaks while he is getting used to his Texhnolyzed arm symbolizes his character - unable to control himself, he tears apart all.
At the end of episode 20, Ichise apologizes to his father when he sees his silhouette. This is most likely Saginuma’s doing; using the same technology that he used to project the image of the orb girl, he shows Ichise his father in order to keep him on the surface world.
There's probably some kind of holographic field covering up the entire city in the surface world, and Saginuma controls it. He can probably visually create anything he wants in it - it is his personal playground. He can probably hear and see everything that happens in it, most likely through a brain implant.
Saginuma uses the same trick at the end of episode 19 to lead Ichise and Eriko Kamata into a theater where they learn the history of Lux. This is how we understand it is not merely Ichise’s hallucination, because Doc also sees him. The surface world generally has a theme of ‘things not being what they seem to be.’ They go there to ask for assistance, but they’re the ones who are actually fucked.
Saginuma fails and Ichise still descends down into Lux to save Ran. As seen by his affection for Ran and his apology to his father, he has grown as a person. He stops being a lapdog, and even that action ends up driving humanity towards the end.
Pay attention to how he never decides anything on his own. Like a pinball, he bounces from one situation to another, governed by external forces he doesn’t have any control over. What happens to him is always a matter of luck. As such, I will say that he probably represents the average person as an individual in human society.
The fact that Heaven's will is carried out by the last person everyone would expect such thing from is both ironic and beautiful at the same time. There is some kind of desperation, a state of powerlessness that the author wants to depict through him. You’re told that you are eventually going to destroy everything around you, how are you even supposed to react to that? He is the least important character; and he is the most important character. Poetic justice, for his destiny to overwhelm Yoshii’s, and for him to be the one who ends this cycle of life and death. These imply some sort of ‘divine punishment’ being handed down to humanity by a higher being, and it shows that divine justice goes beyond human understanding.
“As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” — Proverbs 26:11
Kazuho Yoshii
He is the main protagonist of the show. He is originally from the surface world.
His posture is oblique, but the gun stands straight. The man may be insane, but his ideas are right.
Salvation is not obtained on any terms that we can think of, or negotiate for.
The only cure for reason that has made man miserable is unreason. When your reasoning has failed, go beyond it — into divine madness. It is a state of inspiration, a precondition for doing the new, for creating what has not yet been created.
Only the inconceivable—a conviction arising from madness, of equal intensity and violence to that of apostles—can bring redemption. When we have reached the end of our understanding, we must begin to believe; sometimes, a leap of faith into the abyss is all that you need.
Much like Christ, he descends from 'Heaven' to redeem the world and starts to carry out his plan, but he is rejected and murdered. He does not fail anyone, but he is failed by the ignorance of others. Whether they are aware of it or not, people need what they need.
His character is often said to be a representative of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, but I prefer the Knight of Faith in my interpretation for several reasons.
“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.” - Kierkegaard
The Man of the Prophecy
Yoshii comes from the surface world where the Obelisk doesn't exist, and where some type of genetic therapy is successfully used on the population to eliminate bad elements of society.
Yet his arm and body are Texhnolyzed, and it looks like he can act aggressively as he wishes without any difficulty.
My theory is that Yoshii’s body rejected the genetic treatment in the womb and reacted adversely to it, causing him to be born with a deformed body.
Theonormals replaced his limbs with mechanical ones as medical treatment. These were most likely old Texhnolyze prototypes, leftovers from old experiments done before moving on to genetic therapy.
In the absence of Obelisk, they used portable batteries to provide these limbs with energy in the same way that Doctor had with Ichise before going up to the surface world.
His bag gets stolen when he first enters Lux in Episode 3. He goes out of his way to chase it, and even offers up the guns in exchange. This is probably because the bag contains these portable batteries that he needs. When he is asked if his arm is Texhnolyzed during the commotion, he says “That would have been nice.”
The leader of the surface world also has a mechanical limb. That is probably why he tries to talk Ichise into staying on the surface and blows the staircase up. Both have ‘the mark of a leader’, but Yoshii’s is far more stronger, a visionary. Even the device that scans them upon entering the surface world - I think it would simply cut your body with a laser into pieces if you aren't approved. They can't hurt anyone, so they let autonomous systems kill intruders for them.
Yoshii is an extremist. If he cannot have everything he would rather have nothing at all. Compromise and moderation are states of misery and self-betrayal, and spirit is born out of suffering.
“If we look on idly, heaven and earth will never be joined. To join heaven and earth, some decisive deed of purity is necessary.” - Yukio Mishima
Yoshii was the chosen one. I believe that he would have relocated people from Lux back to the surface world and restored the natural environment to how it was before after much bloodshed, if he had succeeded.
This is the reason he is the main protagonist even though he dies early into story. He is a prophet figure and Lux is a society that killed its prophet, leaving the prophecy unfulfilled.
He embodies both extremes of being at once: that of creation and destruction, order and chaos, hope and despair, reason and unreason, birth and death, potential and futility, redemption and irredeemability. But none of these mean anything in the face of retribution.
One another thing I like about his character is how deceptive his appearance is. At first glance, he does look like an ordinary middle aged man, but then a careful look reveals how unique he is. His age misleads the viewer, also.
I called him the man of the prophecy, but that was not entirely correct. He wasn’t a designated messenger — nobody asked him to do anything nor was he sent by anyone. His strength was purely his own, a willpower born of the depths of his own soul. With his consciousness and determination, he exists almost outside destiny. Rather than Christ, I think a better comparison is Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander the Great, etc. To recontextualize things, he’s a human prophet. He’s a Lucifer figure who actually moves for the sake of humanity. He is one of the most compelling characters I've come across in fiction, if not the most.
"In an hour of crisis, a systematically governed organization is overwhelmingly stronger than one that's not. If you went head to head with Organo, the result would be obvious, wouldn't you say?"
"To come out as the winner from a three sided war, you cannot afford to see things the same way as your opponents."
The intellectual savage, a paradoxical entity of both cultured elegance and primal instinct, controlling the monster within yet setting free what is noble in man.
I see Yoshii’s murder at the hands of Ichise as basically even the best and most exceptional member of humanity not being able to change anything. This is practically rubbed on your face. I think that the man with the strongest soul is laid to waste by the man who could not be more ordinary is incredibly absurd and very tragic.
The fire of his cooking equipment represents his character perfectly. A fire that suddenly goes out, leaving everywhere else in darkness. After he dies, it is all nothing but a slow unfold towards death.
Kano
Long ago I had decided to cover Kano in Yoshii’s section and I didn’t write out a separate section for him. There wasn’t much depth to his character, and he simply stood for pure chaos. Now I deleted those lines from Yoshii’s part, and here they are:
In the same way as Yoshii, Kano was also born disfigured. He is not gifted, but instead severely crippled. Both are accelerationists who seek to ‘accelerate through’, but while Yoshii uses human suffering as a means, Kano instead relies for such purpose on technology.
“No scientific instrument has ever transformed society. It was always the soul of the society that transformed the scientific instrument.” - G.K Chesterton
The message of his character is that you cannot continue to engage in practices that are plainly destructive and degenerate and then still expect everything to go smooth and as it always did. You may be able to get away with it once or twice, but you’re dealing with chaos and disorder, you’re doing something stupid, and it will eventually blow up in your face.
Like Ichise, I don't believe Kano should be hold accountable, as his character was less a human of free will, and more a thematical representation of a certain law of nature. He is also partly Nietzschean as he thinks harmonious order is an illusion that keeps us away from our potential, though his methods are flawed.
Kano is shown and said to have three mothers. Probably that they took parts of eggs from all three mothers and fused them into a single embryo, and then fertilized it. This explains his far more severe genetic anomalies in comparison to the rest of Class and his distinctive blue hair.
The reason why I wasn’t interested in Kano’s character was because he didn’t make much sense. He was a pure element of destruction as a product of incest — the evilness of the self hatred of a man who was meant to be an artist—, but now I also realize that he exists exactly to draw a parallel to Yoshii.
I also like how elegant, noble and prideful he is despite his disfigured and self-loathing nature. He’s never going to become a Shape. He’s never going to reduce himself to ugliness. It’s all just a play thing for him. It’s all for his art. He represents a very fragile beauty, similar to that of Japan. It becomes the most vile thing upon touch.
He was a person who was meant to suffer and who was meant to be twisted from birth. Yes, he is the biggest part of the “retribution.” It was decided.
Keigo Oonishi
Oonishi is the leader of Organo. He can hear the voice of the city thanks to his Texhnolyzed limbs. If anyone is in charge of this experimental city, it is Organo.
He is given directions by the voice of the city in the same way Ran gets her predictions from Obelisk. Thanks to his Texhnolyze limbs being connected to his neural system, images that guide him in his rule often pop up within his range of vision. Those images are selected by Ran.
The voice of the city is Ran, and Ran was chosen by Class as The Seer. Konaka wants to depict Organo as the government, Class as the shadow government, and Ran/Gabe as the religion in a society. Gabe making weapons for Class shows how religion is used as a tool by ruling class.
Organo itself was most likely named after “organization”.
Organo is a principled allegiance, there is a certain constitution, hierarchical order and there are a few subgroups within the organization itself with each of the subgroups being led by one of the council members.
They are principled, but not sentimental, which in function devolves into something similar to a tactical model of operation. Practical, albeit profit seeking. Efficient, but not productive.
What I mean by that is this: Organo members have no trouble killing their friends if they are to gain money and power from it. They lack morals.
Oonishi’s Organo represents human systems that are unto themselves — systems whose inherent models are incredibly efficient, but require human morals to be imposed onto themselves to function in accordance with nature.
Such systems imitate nature’s models by being driven by competition and so incorporate revolutionary ideas into themselves, but the only thing they achieve is efficiency, not happiness.
They are as close to perfect as it gets but humans who take part in them are not. Free systems serve themselves, not humanity, which is the only way they can serve nature and be efficient. It is humans themselves who should aim to serve other humans. They require every human who take part in themselves to be moral, otherwise demoralized acts such as murder become merely a commodity to be capitalized on.
These systems promote and reward people who engage in immorality, selfishness and dishonesty, basically people who sell their souls, as seen in Tooyama offering his body to his father for information. They don’t select for morality, anything’s fair game, winner takes all. Sexual relations between Tooyama and Kohakura are also heavily hinted at.
With the right inputs, these systems can be used for good and function in an utilitarian fashion, but when society stops thinking for itself, such systems prove to be a bastion of degeneracy.
In function, Organo is nothing different than a machine. Without an applied morality to hold it all together, the only people who actually gain from the system are people who take the most advantage of it. A few people at the top.
The most important logical consequence of Social Darwinism is “Only the fittest survive.” Imitating the competitive models of nature to achieve efficiency within a system which you do not keep under check with morals, causes that system to become the model. Only the fittest survive, and others die. The system that was created to be utilitarian and help every member of the society prosper, sets natural selection into motion and starts doing the opposite of it.
Free systems are wild beasts that roam without direction. Mankind has the duty to build the bridge with these creatures by instilling ethical values into them and ensuring they remain virtuous. Only then they can flourish in harmony with nature and serve the greater good. When they stand by and unto themselves, they devolve into demoralization. Although they retain their efficiency in that case, they become unproductive.
A real life example of this would be Capitalism — independent, free markets. Corporations seize delusion and use it as clay to sculpt consummate consumers. Illness is capitalized on by hospitals and pharmacy companies. People are made to believe that being fat is a good thing through elaborate psychological operations so they’ll visit the hospitals and fast food restaurants more often, etc etc. Social engineering as a product. Insanity as a commodity. In Organo’s case, the commodity is bloodshed.
They are principled, but not sentimental. If they had a higher order sentimental moral framework to operate within, which non-invasively would overwrite the rules of these free systems, Organo would have been the ideal organization. If its members have adopted Gabe’s religion, then killing a friend would be considered a sin, and they would stay away from it. In that sense, religions are vehicles of moralization.
This entire section ties into the ‘suspension of pain’ section in earlier in the review. Just because we need to live within competitive free systems, doesn’t mean we should sacrifice our humanity. Exceptions and morals exist. When we see something that conflicts with our sense of morality while living within these systems, it is time for us to break the rules and bring forth what is just.
Oonishi represents the quintessential workaholic husband as a reflection of Organo itself. Because of this, his wife goes crazy and his family falls apart. They start sleeping in separate beds. A broken family. To double down on this tragedy, he cheats on her with his secretary. For his work, Oonishi neglects his family, who he is actually most responsible for. It is not surprising that the prophet of Lux ends up killing his wife. It was divine punishment.
As honorable Oonishi was, he was able to save neither his wife nor his secretary, both of whom he was involved with and responsible for. What is honor good for in that case?
However, there is a reason why I called it divine punishment. It is a punishment for Oonishi and Oonishi only. His wife was likely only that way as a result of his neglect, and she was not at fault. By killing her, in effect Yoshii liberates her from the despair of watching humanity's downfall, a more sorrowful fate than any. The same applies to the prostitute at the beginning of the story who has been exploited and abused by her husband. And before death, she was accepted for what she is, so I would suggest she died happy. In their cases, death actually frees them. As I've said before: divine justice goes beyond human understanding.
In context of what Organo represents and in contrast to other Organo council members, Oonishi is the good guy here. He subdues chaotic forces in a way that removes their vices. But within the larger context of the story, his desire for order turns into a desire for safety and ultimately results in the removal of Yoshii. I think there’s some subversion with his character, he spares Ichise when Ichise is in a condition that, if Oonishi was in the same condition, he wouldn’t want to be spared. There’s some kind of deep hypocrisy caused by a lack of nuance.
Oonishi himself eventually gets killed by the city of Lux that he loved so much, and for which he neglected his wife and family. He was killed by those he loved the most, and for whom he worked the hardest. A fitting end. Divine justice.
??????
There’s a certain contrast between Oonishi and Kano. Oonishi is basically a machine of order, whereas Kano is a machine of chaos.
Initially I believed Oonishi giving up his legs to Kano was meant to represent Oonishi's self sacrificial personality and enable him to hear the voice of the city, but I've recently realized that the story implies a deep connection between our bodies and minds.
It's a story where it is deliberately implied that any physical change — from diet to sitting position to getting a tattoo — can have very transformative effects on our thoughts.
It's possible there is a program created by The Class that monitors the inhabitants of Lux by using the eyes of Texhnolyzed people as cameras, and, with that information, form a model of the personalities of every individual in the city.
Upon watching Kano grow up in his deformed state, some high ranking member of The Class probably used this data, and wanted to transplant Oonishi's legs onto Kano's body so that Oonishi’s legs would influence Kano’s thought patterns.
The Class aren’t elites for nothing - at least a few of them have to be people with genuine insight. However, the operation does not actually happen for some reason, so this unknown Class member probably dies at some point of this process.
“Kano changed. He became a bigger fool. Because of your legs. But we promptly dumped those legs of yours. Kano had no need of them from the beginning.” - Three Mothers
Then, other Class members reject Oonishi’s legs because he’s a commoner and they give Kano high level and experimental Texhnolyzed limbs which have administrative power over the Obelisk, the symbol of their sovereignty.
He was probably murdered by Three Mothers, Kano’s mothers and grandmothers. They’re still ridiculously blaming Oonishi, for legs that were removed from his body and then quickly put into the trash.
If he was alive, this Mr. Metra probably would have supported Yoshii from within Class and never let Kano rise to influence. This way, he draws quite the parallel with Theonormals who gave Yoshii mechanic limbs. I claim that he is the second most competent person in the narrative. He has insight that surpasses Yoshii’s.
Shinji
Shinji is the de-facto leader of Racan. They’re an unprincipled allegiance. In Japanese, 'Shin' means 'trust/faith/belief,' 'Ji' suffix means 'child/young,' Shinjiru means 'to believe.'
They do not have any values, the only value they have is “being free,” which is so vague as to be essentially meaningless.
They have no rules. They do not feel ownership, attachment and love. They don’t have any attachments like family or religion, because they think those things are liabilities that keep people back from individual expression.
They don’t have any family, because family means to look after others and to be looked after by others. To love is to want something all to yourself, it restrains you and the thing that you love, which is why they don’t love.
Racan's ideals are stupid but feel virtuous, because they tell you that to avoid pain and responsibilities is self-righteous. In theory, it is one of the best ideas ever conceived; but in practice, it is completely worthless.
They stood against nothing and everything at the same time. They were a contradiction and time always straightens those out. Yoshii, another revolutionary, had at least a clear mission and a vision.
This is why the love triangle between Shinji, Hal and Yoko remains unsolved.
They are free to do whatever they want, but when Shinji brings Oonishi’s secretary into Racan headquarters, Yoko succumbs to her jealousy and kisses Hal to provoke a reaction out of Shinji. In result, Shinji remains indifferent, and Hal leaves Racan.
At the end, Hal comes to Racan as one of the Shapes, looking to have a physical fight with Shinji to settle the conflict. They fight, and Shinji kills Hal by thrusting his Texhnolyzed finger into his eyesocket.
Shinji might not have known what he was doing, but he lived by the sword, and died by the sword. His response to Yoko kissing Hal demonstrates how powerful he is; he genuinely believes she is free, so he doesn't get involved. He is a man of conviction.
I interpret Shinji's opposition to Hal turning into a Shape as him starting to realize the error of his previously hold beliefs. Sometimes people will do ridiculous things for ridiculous purposes, and so when you deny them the right to perform these actions you are actually protecting them from a low-quality freedom.
Racan teaches us 6 things:
Just as responsibility without freedom is slavery, freedom without responsibility results in apathy. One cannot be sustained without the other. Without boundaries and commitments, freedom eventually destroys itself.
A life without rules or identity is like the life of an animal. Without rules and identity, we are slaves to our lower order tribal instincts. Freedom should not be exercised without a moral framework; or we would be reverting back to tribalism.
You should be accumulating energy and not releasing it. If you do not learn from yesterday's mistakes by following religion and tradition, then tomorrow you will be finding out firsthand why such things exist. You should not ignore the rules of a game before learning how to play it well, and only then you can break them with skill and grace and make your own rules. If you’re part of the rising class, you should use it to teach yourself discipline.
Idealism requires competence. Liberalism is sustainable only when it is practiced by someone capable and self-aware enough to break out of instincts and control his emotions, which is something only the very few exceptional outliers in a society can do. It is not sustainable at all on the societal level.
Every successful organization functions systematically — with clear, well-defined principles and a hierarchy. They are governed centrally, from the top, at least by some form of oligarchy. A successful organization is one that draws the best out of its every member and filters everything else out. Liberal, egalitarian organizations, by not having principles and quality-control systems, do the opposite and draw out the worst of everyone instead. They are neither principled, nor tactical, nor serve any actual purpose, which is why they always fall apart in times of crisis. The more diluted power is, the less efficient your organization will be.
There’s no middle ground at all—either everything is forbidden, or nothing is. Very few people in society are capable of nuance: understanding why something is wrong and under what conditions it is not. Satan is like a worm; the bastard always gets in through the smallest of cracks. Over time that crack widens, it turns into holes, then the wall itself appears to be no longer there. This is why our social rules are incredibly restrictive, and rightfully so.
To join them means essentially to leave everything else. Notice how no one in Racan has a surname. They are people who are lost and don’t belong anywhere.
“There is a boy who longs for the world on the Hill, and I want to show him. I want him to know the truth.” - Yoshii
I think it is likely Shinji would have been one of the new leaders of mankind had Yoshii succeeded. He is strong, but also young. Oonishi’s secretary constantly praises Oonishi in front of Shinji, but from what I am seeing Shinji’s already surpassed him.
“I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the bowels of his heart, but his heart drives him to his downfall.” - Nietzsche
What Rakan think freedom is, is simply Disneyland. True freedom isn’t being free of constraints, it’s to abide by nature’s laws, so it’s MORE constrains. Racan suffered from being chained by liberation — those who are weak cannot handle freedom.
Real life example of Racan is marxism and liberalism. Racan (maybe) have the heart, but not the brains. Class represents a liberal society at its best, one that is sophisticated, and Racan represents one at its worst.
“If we are uneducated, we shall not know how very old are all new ideas.” — Chesterton
The Third Man
Racan’s story can be read also through a psychoanalytical lens. The series tells us that Shinji, Hal and Yoko had another friend, and he was Yoko’s older brother and the original leader of the gang. We learn that this person steps down somehow, and Shinji ends up taking over in result.
For this reading, we assume that Hal wanted to be the leader during these events, but he repressed this desire because he didn’t want to cause any conflict in the group. Then one other thing, that Yoko fell in love with Shinji and preferred him to Hal only because he was the leader, because he held power, because in doing so he reminded her of her brother. Whenever she saw Shinji giving orders, she found herself thinking of her brother, and she projected onto him her own ideal of masculinity.
When Yoko's insincere kiss reach Hal's lips, his repressed emotions finally explode forth, and he does everything he does to equalize the power dynamics between him and Shinji. He can no longer contain his feelings — at that point, everything becomes too overbearing that he simply has no choice but to act out. If anything, he put up with being treated like a piece of trash for far too long. But every person has their limits. For long he had suffered in silence, but now the time for tolerance had passed.
This reading makes Hal suddenly sympathetic and righteous. What a tragedy his life has been, he was thoughtful and he suffered for it, he was made to feel inferior because of it. Hal is literally Jesus —betrayed with a kiss of Judas, he ends up suffering for others.
This reading constructs an atheistic reality devoid of God, in which sin and retribution are mere social constructs. They are these concepts some ignorant people have thought thousands of years ago, and everyone ever since has been blindly following them without any capacity at all of individual thought.
However, thanks to this generation's stock of brilliant individuals and the power of science, thanks to which we also now know everyone is born as a blank slate and shaped entirely by the environment, the moment has come to move past these absurd ideas.
In this scenario, they suffer not because they violate the laws of nature, but because of psychological problems caused by lack of communication.
Their salvation is to go to group therapy — if such institution even exists in Lux— and to sit down and talk about their problems. And I think it would be nothing but common sense to steer clear of the therapist that Oonishi’s wife goes to.
In this reading, there is no one to blame. There never is. They hurt each other only because they don’t know any better—because hurt people hurt people. No one ever holds any responsibility or accountability for their actions — it was society that forced them to act that way. Those gender norms that assess a man’s value by how successful he is with women and that posit masculinity is attractive in a man, those evil sexual norms that plant the seeds of doubt in a woman’s mind by saying that cheating occurs only when there is no longer love between two people when sex is in reality just some harmless fun, causing psychological issues in men and women and genderless and non-binary persons alike. All such values should be abolished immediately — they are even making people who otherwise would have such a kindness that its scope would be limitless, do things like steal, kill, rape, randomly smack people in the head in the streets.
In the darkness of the therapy room, Hal's mind was illuminated by a revelation that he had long denied: he is, in fact, a homosexual, and he was jealous not of Yoko, but instead it was Shinji he desired; that his insecurities were coming from suppressing his homosexuality, which was in turn causing him to engage in toxic masculinity. After coming to this realization, they all cry, hug each other, Hal confesses his love to Shinji. They start to hold massive orgies with all Racan members, and finally become happy.
This reading is a false reading utterly out of touch with reality, based on nothing but assumptions and empathy, making a hero out of the demon. Hal is literally a homosexual Christ figure in this reading. The narrative quickly falls apart when you start asking some questions. Would Racan survive under Hal as long as it did under Shinji? This question barely touches the narrative and the entire narrative falls apart just like that.
Eriko Kamata
Eriko Kamata is my favorite character in the series. She is a scientist specializing in Texhnolyze technology.
She is a born member of the Class and is sterile due to Class' internal biological degeneration resulting from incestuous relationships.
Her life was dedicated to Texhnolyze before she met Ichise. Afterwards she is portrayed as a second mother to Ichise, in that she gives him his life back by Texhnolyzing him. The third episode contains a lot of womb symbolism.
Doctor’s approach towards technology consists of 2 principles:
Nature: Integrate mankind further into nature with the use of technology. Make everything as nature intended, and improve when there is room.
Culture: Technology can be used to achieve the next step in human evolution, but organically and culturally rather than physiologically. It should be used to support evolution, not replace it.
Example #1: Ichise’s Texhnolyzed arm having improved strength.
Example #2: Doctor’s desire to make a cultured man out of Ichise by showing him how elites of The Class live.
Nature as the main principle, and high culture as the aim — embellishment of arts, intellectual sophistication, further civilization of mankind.
One part of the reason why her character is there is to show how much maintenance technology requires. It may be convenient, but this shit rusts, it’s not nearly as robust as biological systems, and it lacks the cohesion that evolution has. It’s extremely flawed.
The fact that Shinji’s mechanic finger overpowered Hal’s cyborg body shows that technology is very often a matter of who uses it and how it is used, which Doctor also seems to believe. The series generally adopts an elitist perspective towards accessibility of technology.
Doc herself has a narcissistic side and enjoys dominating others, as seen in her sexual abuse of Ichise at her clinic, and she does so through Organo’s support.
When she enters a store in the city to inquire about raffia, the store owner is the one to abuse her this time by stealing her money and licking her hand. This demonstrates that bureaucratic power is useless in the absence of an entire system built around it to enforce it, and society once used to select for muscle strength, even if it today selects for intellectual capability and influence.
Her infertility is likely the root of her obsession with Texhnolyze and her desire for dominance. It is because she feels worthless and powerless she seeks those externally. Her happiness does not come from within herself, but from her accomplishments and things she has control over, which leads to an abusive personality that is obsessed with dominating others. Kamata means 'hold,' 'grasp,' 'seize,' 'take by force' in Japanese.
I think she was written as a female mindfully. If she was instead a male who devoted his life to science because of some other insecurity, it would not have sent out the message intended.
“When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually. Sterility itself disposes one toward a certain masculinity of taste; for man is, if I may say so, ‘the sterile animal.’ “— Nietzsche
She lies to Ichise and instead of his mother’s she puts her own cells into his Texhnolyze limbs. Despite being infertile, she still has a desire to create life and pass on her genes. She wants to nurture ‘something’ just like other women, and Texhnolyze is her baby. The portion about the shop owner licking her hand also seems to be written with this in mind. There’s also this notion being emphasized on in the series, that her lying to Ichise was supposedly for his own good. She’s a manipulative and twisted person but with good intentions.
In the episode 14, she drives to the hill with Ichise so that they can begin living together within Class, but instead her project for improvement is rejected and Kano attempts have them both murdered.
During the commotion, the disk that contains the work of her life gets destroyed.
After these events the only thing she has left in life is her love for Ichise. After he too abandons her, she commits suicide in the surface world.
The car she drives in the first half of the series represents her character very well. At the edge, one last push and it all would end. I think her character represents a very inexorable reality, that not all of us get to make the decisions to be happy.
She fails, because like Kano, she was failed by the degeneration of her own people. And Ichise deals the last blow by betraying and abandoning her, by pushing her off.
Three Drops in the Ocean
Haruhiko Tooyama
"And I resented the fact that I was his son. That's why I changed my name. And that is why I did this…" (pulling up his pants and revealing his Texhnolyzed leg) “…they say that acts such as injuring one's body on purpose and getting tattoos signify attempts to deny one's blood ties." (Episode 11)
"I bear no hatred towards you. I rather like you. This is why I want to kill you."
For a story such as Texhnolyze, I believe that Tooyama is the only real nihilist in the story.
Brought up in a household where his father abused him in several ways, Tooyama changes his name and joins Organo, where he gets his leg Texhnolyzed and rises through the ranks by selling his soul and body. By the end, he’s achieved the highest form of self-harm. He has finally given up as much of his body and soul as possible. He loves Ichise, and that's why he wants to kill him.
Keiichi Saginuma
In contrast, Saginuma is the passive nihilist. He doesn’t want to destroy the world or cause harm on anyone. If anything, he hopes to restore it back, but he simply doesn’t have any life left within him.
Destroying the airshaft, he pins his hopes on Ichise, but he is eventually rejected and from there on he does not pursue the matter any further.
Tatsuya Sakimura
At first, I thought Sakimura was in the story so that Ichise and Doctor would have a guide in the surface world and there would be a character connecting both of the worlds throughout. He was a redundant character who was there only for storytelling purposes and didn’t make much of a difference at all in the story.
But I was wrong.
From the minute Yoshii steps foot in the underworld, Sakimura puts all of his faith in him and desires for his success. To Sakimura, Yoshii represents the possibility of a better tomorrow, a bright and happy future for all humanity. He is the embodiment of his dreams and hopes, the symbol of mankind’s power to arrive at a future where humanity has overcome one another tragedy.
Yet, fate takes a turn, and he ends up being the one delivering Yoshii the fatal blow that puts him out of his suffering. With his own hands, he kills his own dreams.
Then he painfully guides the person who caused Yoshii’s death through the surface world as he represents a new hope, but by then he has already completely resigned.
By the end, as Ichise takes his last breath, Sakimura is still alive and working at his job. He sees the death of worlds, he ends them with his own hands, yet life goes on for him as usual.
He’s the last person alive on earth, and he is the last person who is going to die. His existence amounted down to practically nothing. He was given hope, only to have it violently shattered in such a miserable way. A prolonged torture.
What makes it even more miserable and lonely is that along with Saginuma and Yoshii, his body also appears to have rejected the genetic treatment to an extent, so he's fully aware of what's going on. All of this is revealed in how he holds a gun to Shinji’s head when he threatens to shoot Yoshii. With Sakimura, the suffering takes on a new form. Thus, I believe he had it worst of any character in the series.
Two More
I've already pointed out Oonishi's hypocrisies in this text. He goes out of his way to spare Ichise when he is in a pathetic condition. He makes every effort to get rid of Yoshii. He neglects his wife, and he shamelessly cheats on her with his secretary.
Why is he such a hypocrite? Why does he sell his legs to Class? And why is he so obsessed with maintaining order?
One way to explain it all is that he grew in up in a fatherless household, where his family struggled to make the ends meet, and he sold his legs to Class to provide for his family. Growing up in such a house, he forced himself to assume the role of the father figure, and as a result he developed this rigid sense of order and authority.
But then there’s the other part of the puzzle. Why does he neglect his wife? If he’s so into being the father figure, wouldn’t he care about his wife and family more than anything? And from here, we assume that his mother had serious mental issues, which caused him to have an unhealthy relationship with his mother, and this caused him to hate women, and so he keeps his wife at arm’s length and focuses on being a father in different ways that don't remind him of his mother. When his wife goes crazy, she starts to remind him of his mother even more, so he continues to cheat and puts even more of a distance.
This causes him to hate an aspect of femininity— chaos. He just treats everyone he comes across as his son so that he can keep being a father, and he solves issues and eliminates femininity in order to cope with his trauma over and over again.
Oonishi is a very competent person, but he's suffering from psychological issues, and that’s why he acts so contradictory. That’s right. His problem is hypermasculinity. Here, he draws a contrast with his subordinate Tooyama, who gives up his legs out of his hatred for his father.
On the other hand, Shinji is a liberal who seeks freedom and rejects any and every authority in life. This is most likely caused by him having issues with his family as well, and in his case he probably had serious issues with both his father and mother. He’s also quite sensitive, seen in his talk to Hal’s dead cyborg body over some alcohol. He is the most idealistic character - a very strong heart who is strongly disappointed, in both his family and the imposing society. He doesn’t like participating in the social game, the financial game, the social norms and people who participate in these things. He’d be good at playing the game, but he rejects it out of sensitivity.
He gathers people who are rejected by society under the roof of Rakan, believing that treating them nice and giving them freedom will make them happy, in the same way his freedom gave him happiness, but he is actually making the situation worse for others. His strength lets him keep his sense of self together, but this is not true of other Rakan members. They are there not because they don’t like the game, but because they lost at the game, and he’s enabling them by saying that the fault was society’s and not theirs, projecting his strength onto his natural inferiors.
I think even when people talk about how much more admirable Oonishi is in comparison to Shinji, it just shows that most people are mere aesthetes. They judge based on pictures.
Motoharu Kimata
Kimata is the leader of Union. Union think humans should not meddle in nature’s affairs, and so technology should not be used to change man’s body. Kimata means ‘wood,’ and ‘tree’ in Japanese.
Union
They are a religious allegiance, but rather than having made into their mission what they believe in, it is their mission of which they are devout believers. Their principles are the foundation of their faith. Unlike Gabe, they are not blind believers.
They are strictly against the divorce of body and soul. They believe that body and soul are both instrinstically linked and intertwined with each other, and that Texhnolyzation contaminates the soul by changing the body.
They are anti-technology, anti-materialism, anti-progression, pro-nature. And as they want Texhnolyze technology to be abandoned, they are reactionaries. They wish to return to an older state of affairs.
Kimata
Later in the series, we see that Kimata himself is Texhnolyzed, from which some kind of taint seems to have spread over his body, that most likely acted as the trigger for the formation of his worldviews.
Most likely it was a botched implementation, the doctor in charge of the operation probably screwed up and his body was consequentially damaged. Another possibility is it was simply incompatible with his physiology, and he was so an exception.
His opposition is irrational, it is only caused by a biased perspective which stems from a personal experience that is uncommon for others. We do not see in Lux anyone else whose body has been damaged by it.
His body being tainted is probably just Chiaki J. Konaka leaving room for various interpretations, or more accurately, bait.
There are 3 possible ways to interpret this, starting from the most superficial:
People who believe in the same things as Union, do in secret what they preach against in public.
Exceptions don’t change the rule. (regarding technology)
Your feelings and biases can help you identify problems.
None of these, in my opinion, align with what the author is trying to tell in this section and address his intentions.
Union, Part II
Union was an allegiance that was both devoted and practical because they were both religious and principled. By mixing both practicality and sentimentality, they achieved the highest form of free association.
Remember, very few of them are actually Texhnolyzed. Not all of them can be emotionally prejudiced like Kimata himself.
However, the story does not give us any reason as to why people participate in Union. So I am forced to draw parallels between our current society and that of Lux.
People in our society who tend to believe in the same exact things as Union are traditional and religious people who usually follow simple lines of logic like this:
"This is what my great grandfathers believed in. It’s what we always did. It's how I was brought up, and it's how I'll bring up my children. No need for technology. We're created by God and we're already perfect the way we are."
"It's easy to destroy things, but incredibly hard to build them. It has worked before, and it will again in the future."
“Using technology to mess with nature and natural environment sounds dangerous."
Union represents average people in human society who think simple and are devoted to the values they have seen from their fathers. They are people who don't ask too many questions, and who thus arrive at simple truths.
And as such, Union were not exactly blind believers. What they believed in made sense to them; and they believed in what made sense to them. Though their ways of thinking may not have been complex, they came to their views through their own reasoning and not through the influence of their emotions.
They were basically conservatives who believed in ways proven to be failproof by time and history. It was what worked for humanity for a long time, and they haven’t made any mistakes besides having a bias towards technology.
Now, here is where it gets complicated: disliking technology is not a fatal mistake. And while all associations in the city have serious inner conflicts, Union and Gabe are two exceptions that do not.
In case of Union, Konaka wants to say that conservative values have an incredibly high chance of success, because that you are here is proof they work.
In case of Gabe, even though being extremely religious might prevent you from living your life freely and making your own decisions, it doesn’t necessarily produce undesirable behavior. Gabe members are in fact very content people, however out of touch with reality they may be.
If you’re dealing with unprecedented things that are potentially dangerous, it is best to adopt a very cautious approach - and conservatism and religion always give results.
Tradition is essentially a process of learning and passing down practices that help humans operate in harmony with nature. They are truths born out of mistakes, torches that you pass down to your sons and daughters.
Union and Gabe are both either simple-minded or driven by emotion, but neither is essentially incorrect. While not perfect, what they do is irrefutably, ultimately not wrong.
Closing act
But you alone can not survive in a declining society. They did nothing necessarily wrong, but they lost the fight and let ignorant people take over their city.
In a time of peril and moral decay, it is not enough to be on the right side of history. As the world descends into chaos and madness, holding fast to the truth is not enough; you must also ensure that everything you hold dear will not crumble down to ruin and ashes.
In order to do that, you need to win the fight and eliminate all of the bad actors wreaking havoc on your society, whether they act in ill will or not.
Kimata’s death is symbolic of this, as he dies in combat, losing the fight. Most characters in the series have deaths symbolic of the failure modes of their worldviews.
It’s easy to dismiss them as dumb people, but in my case, Union were the hardest faction to understand. Their simplicity was the simplification of a complex reality.
By portraying Kimata as a Texhnolyzed individual, the author likely intended to mislead viewers into thinking that these individuals were hypocrites who did in secret what they opposed in public and that they operated on feelings rather than reason.
This is the same way we look at these people in real life, when in truth, they are the ones who are in the right.
Finally, I want to bring attention to how almost all of the important characters in the series deviate from the norm in some way, leading to negative consequences in most cases. Ichise is brought up in a fatherless household, Oonishi sells his legs; Saginuma, Yoshii and Kano are all insane and born crippled, Doctor is infertile, Tooyama was most likely abused in childhood by his father, Ran is a child prophet, Kimata’s body is tainted. I think Konaka is trying to say, “Ordinariness makes for happiness but it is not what produces character,” suggesting that an ordinary way of life is the happiest way to live.
deep within earth and in heaven of earth
The withering flowers of Eden and the dust of nations.
“What is essential “in heaven and on earth” seems to be, to say it once more, that there should be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction.” - Nietzsche
The complete experience is what makes life meaningful. Suffering gives us purpose and meaning. What makes us bad is what makes us human.
Problems and rewards both come from nature. Only by passing through one of them you can get to the other.
Nature is the ethereal plane of all possibility from which everything is born. Those who treat it like an obstacle are bound to suffer meaninglessly.
We are limited by the fluid boundaries that biology sets on all of our possible behavior. We’re still instinctual animals, intelligence is not what people think it is.
Technology as a means of achieving heaven on earth is to marry hell to earth. There is no progress, only trade-offs.
Good cannot exist without bad. Antagonistically to a progressive worldview, 'bad’ is not a bug, but an integrated feature. Only through most extreme solutions that crippled life could crime ever be eliminated.
All moving parts within a system constantly interact with each other through feedback loops. You can not break one and expect the others to keep working smoothly.
Existence of bad elements promote and strengthen good elements. Thus, our capacity for progress is already selected for by nature. Realization of our potential passes through connecting with nature.
To end suffering is to end purpose, meaning and potential.
“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.” — C.S Lewis
If your society makes a wrong decision and disrupts the balance between man and nature, then your society will be doomed; and if what is broken is not repaired with utmost importance and the balance restored, your society will get wiped out.
And the only thing to stay will be the dust of nations that once stood above all else.
Fates of the servant and the traitor
People who bring about change do so because they feel compelled by the need within their souls to change the world according to their vision of the good. They move because, in their hearts, they believe that the world needs to be changed.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. True evil is never deliberately evil, and so it lives by its own words. If you take the side of evil purposely for your own benefit, then don’t think you will be safe or you’ll be spared.
They will come for you, your loved ones will be taken from you, you will be made to experience what you’ve done to others, no one beside you will share your suffering and there will be no one to comfort you in your dying moments. You will die alone and if there is anyone left to remember you they will not do so fondly but instead with a passionate bright hatred. In no sane world they will not spit on your grave. Evil is its own worst enemy. As evil harms others, it harms itself. As it destroys others, it destroys itself.
“In fighting those who serve devils, one always has this on one's side; their Masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own Masters finish the work for us. They break their tools.” - C.S Lewis
the last flower
The fragile small sapling, just beginning to blossom, waiting quietly for the passage of time to tend to it. Even as we die, we can do so with a smile, knowing there is still beauty in this world.
After all, we've had one hell of a ride, didn’t we? What is the end for us is a beginning for an other.
Notes
Here is a list of inspirations that I found here and there:
The scientific experiment ‘Behavioral sink’ by John B. Calhoun
Chiaki J. Konaka’s answer to a question on Twitter about who thought about using Edward Hopper’s paintings as reference to define the general aesthetic of the surface world: “Terrestrial sequence was an attempt to depict the twilight of humanity. Hopper was the artist that I felt that for. Except for Hopper, all the aesthetic design was directed by Hamasaki.”
Hiroshi Hamasaki’s response to a question on Twitter asking who his inspirations for TEXHNOLYZE besides Piet Mondrian, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Edward Hopper were: “Eugène Atget, René Magritte, Hans Bellmer, Ito Jakuchu, Komura Settai, Paul Delvaux… and many more.”
2 years after I wrote this review, here are some more thoughts:
I think of TEXHNOLYZE as Chiaki Konaka's modern take on Divine Comedy — however divine it is, it is essentially a comedy. It is a comedy not in the original sense of the word, but in the modern, contemporary sense. It is ridiculous.
Most likely only a religious man who views death as a bridge can fully appreciate this story. There is a graceful and modest acceptance of death. It doesn't worship death like Nietzscheans do, and it doesn't fear it like liberals do; it simply accepts it. I think the more you accept death, the more you appreciate this narrative overall. Death is the main theme.
I see 5 ways to read this story: Nihilist -> Existentialist -> Communist (Cyberpunk) -> Atheist -> Myth. Thanks to the labyrinthine structure of the work, I didn’t need to concern myself with the first 3 routes before I could find a way out, but I recommend considering other perspectives.
That one interpretation, “mankind has achieved everything it set out to do, and there’s nothing left, so they’ve all withered into ghosts” is one idea that has been applied to the surface sequence, but I believe this is a shallow perspective. Some people believe that just being good at their jobs will ultimately solve all of their problems and that having a career is the purpose of life. What you witness in the show is a complex adaptive system being pushed out of balance. It’s more a statement about how “all this” works, that happiness and sadness are intertwined emotions, like how hope is a form of fear, how desire is a form of suffering. Yoshii notes that people in Lux are starting to lose their regenerative capabilities. This is because even an engineering miracle of an artificial sun isn’t enough to replicate the skills of the original creator.
The work’s contrast with “serial experiments lain” is quite striking: lain is a girl who exists without a body, and in contrast, TEXHNOLYZE is extremely grounded and earthly in its portrayal of the physicality of these things. It illuminates the unchanging nature and eventuality — the reality of the situation. Death is very central to Texh as it is to life. I could never guess they were written by the same person.
Thinking about it, Ichise is certainly the finest protagonist this story could have. Texhnolyze is a story of civilization, of how we have come to these days, of what we have sacrificed, and of what we should cherish. It’s about the birth and death of humanity. Ichise is the personification of this progress, as he goes from a primitive state to a civilized one. Ichise represents humanity, and that draws quite the contrast with how he kills Yoshii. Since he fits so perfectly with him finding beauty amidst desolation and embodying the core of the anime, it’s actually hard to see Yoshii’s purpose in the narrative, which reveals how subtly the story is told. There may be some human romanticism to his character with how he refuses Texhnolyzation. Following the same line of thought, Yoshii would represent the chaos that human beings require. It’s humanity entirely removing chaos that leads to these things. His refusal to submit to moderation, and to settle for safety, are things that Lux required right from the beginning. Ichise not having a father is worthy of note—humanity had to become its own father too.
Just like Kimata’s, Shinji’s death represents something important as well. He dies while he’s shooting at the bodies of cloned Class members, not even seeing what killed him. The machine can create as many bodies as it wants. He thinks he’s dealing important damage, but then he is shot from a blind spot. And the guy who shoots him can’t use his own eyes. The technological device on his head probably works with a similar algorithm to how the flying Orb at the door of Class meant to keep guard identifies targets. Most likely, the software just sends him instructions and doesn't bother with unimportant information. The perfect servant.
There is a scene in the show that refutes this interpretation. The fourth minute of the twentieth episode features a flashback of Yoshii. We see that his hand is a human limb —we see that he doesn’t use cosmetic covering when he descends into Lux—, and from there we can presume that he got his limbs mechanized on his way down to Lux for the purpose of combat. There’s also an interview where Ueda says “The reason for making this title is not about exploring violence, and it’s most definitely not about stirring up the kettle of discrimination. I did it to show what I think a truly heroic man is.” The scene where Union attacks Gabe at the end of the first episode also doesn’t make much sense with this interpretation. There are multiple explanations for all of these —I have no idea why Ueda says that in particular though. — but it’s good to know these things. Possibly, what you see on the screen is Ueda’s vision — the hero who keeps on living, lives to the fullest and and dies with a smile — and what I explored in this text — the calm and death interpretation— is Konaka’s vision. These are all just my own views, however. I can’t attribute anything to anyone. Though I still tried to stick to the truth of the story, so there are views I personally disagree with in this text as well. It surprised me to see some bits where I subtly show mental derangement as well. Seriously speaking, the nature of evil as described here is in my opinion outright misleading. I would broadly recommend Yusuke Kishi’s work for a more accurate model; for example, the two movies Ao no hono-o (2003) and Lesson of the Evil (2012).
The stupidity of mankind is the ultimate lesson of TEXHNOLYZE for me. “They corrupted God’s masterpiece and incurred His wrath.” Such a simple conclusion, yet I wasted countless words to reach it. We are arrogant, we complicate the simple, and we make ourselves the center of existence. This, I think, is the gravest sin. Nothing is complicated. The eye to see this is not a prize, but a gift given to everyone, only so long as they can accept things for what they are. To accept, to accept, to accept. Don’t you know that every action has a reaction? This text just explores a centrist position. It's all just common sense. No serious discussion should be held where these moral presuppositions are not acknowledged as baseline principles.
I think the story draws a meaningful parallel with our current times. The guy comes down, tells them that they shouldn't have to put up with this, that they should take up arms, and then they kill him.
Some recommendations of other visual works I find to be as good: Shin sekai yori (read the novel first if you have good visual imagination), WHITE ALBUM2 (VN, you can watch the anime first if you’re a romance fan, otherwise head straight for the VN), Mawaru Penguindrum, Twin Peaks (specifically the 3rd season, “The Return”), Neon Genesis Evangelion (the movie specifically), Shoujo Kakumei Utena, Mushishi, Space Dandy, Cowboy Bebop, Saya no Uta, remember11: the age of infinity. TEXHNOLYZE, Mawaru Penguindrum and Shin sekai yori pretty much form a thematical anime trilogy between themselves representing (Heaven, Hell, Earth).
Also if you seek the same religious / divine vibe, I recommend The Leftovers (American TV show) and Monster (anime/manga). And maybe SWAN SONG (VN, also would recommend MUSICUS by the same author for fiction that is “alive,” do all routes and finish before judging). Also Mahoutsukai no Yoru (visual novel), while not similar aesthetically or in terms of storytelling, does something remotely similar.
The coverarts made by ABe for Tsuki no Uta’s official release: (I - II) | (I - II - III)
(?)
The shapes that have taken root in the ground will probably fail to evolve into the next species, but we are a species whose existence is a miracle by itself.
No one knows when and where a beautiful flower may bloom. And who is to say it never has?