Karakuri Babble is a daily column by the editors of i360.com, usually on topics tangentially related to anime and cosplay.

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Okay, last post about Dennou Coil. For now.

As I might have obliquely hinted, it's a pretty dark series.

It's a description I hate to use. The word "dark", as a metaphor, has been so completely debased and devalued that I'm surprised people can still use it without laughing. It's a synonym for cheap emotional gimmicks, for spring-loaded cats and ominous music. It's hard to do right, and it's rare as a result. Narutaru does it. Evangelion does it. Saikano does it, mostly with the supporting cast.

Higurashi doesn't quite seem to pull it off, for all the blood and tragedy along the way. Utena, although it is fantastic and tragic, is never dark in the way that, say, Pet Semetary is. Zetsubou Sensei, bleak and bitter certainly, but not dark in the way that I mean it when I use the term. If you're looking for it, there's no substitute.

My definition comes from Glenn McDonald's excoriation of Harry Potter, book six, in which he writes:

No matter how many ten-year-old readers turn obligingly teary for their local news, and no matter how many press-kit arts reporters bark "dark", you have not touched us. Ten minutes later, Dumbledore is napping peacefully in a painting. That isn't dark. Dark is something very bad and very irreversible happening to a person whose happiness we've come to count on, not just whose invulnerability we've been allowed to take for granted.

Dennou Coil is dark. I can assure you of that. All the old certainties vanish and their arsenal of symbols begins to turn on them. Even their occasional victories are colored by doubt and sometimes tragedy, even if it is a light and funny series most of the time.

If you were willing to borrow the quintessential darkness from Tolkien, Harry could have discovered that magic is soul-destroying and Evil by its inherent nature, and been left with the elegantly paired dilemmas that his best weapons would inexorably corrupt him, and that winning his unavoidable fight would undo his world just as thoroughly as losing it.

words from chris, 2009-09-26 04:35:49, los angeles