Maybe I should have had titled this post as such : "How death grows old pretty fast in Another" but the pun was really bad and I didn't really want you to have a bad impression of me from the start. (Though now you do but that's beside the point.)
The real point is, people die in anime, that much is obvious and each and every one of them has its own way of dealing with death. Take Death Note or any kind of post-apocalyptic anime or manga, death is just there, it doesn't get any special treatment, it's just there as a tool to make the plot advance. Now take a Gundam, or Code Geass, people die and their death is treated as an example a tool of emulation to created heroism, in short, propaganda. Unless they're villains. Obviously. Because villains only get what they deserve.
Only rarely do we see anime (or manga) dealing with everything that surrounds death, be it ante-mortem (like in Ikigami or Bokurano) or post-mortem (like in Ghost Hound, or even Tiger&Bunny). I like this kind of anime because it makes its characters more human.
Now, what's the matter with Another you ask? First, let's go over my reaction to the four deaths we've seen so far and I'll explain what really bothers me.
Remember, episode 3, the first person dies.
My reaction : FUCKING AWESOME. So much blood and so ridiculous yet so dramatic I'm totally in love.
Now, the next one.
My reaction : Damn they're imaginative, I am definitely going to pay more attention to elevators now but damn was it awesome and all the details and *insert random fangirlish noises here*
Here comes the less impressive.
My reaction : Well, a heart stroke, it was needed to keep up the realism.
And the last.
My reaction : The first one was to complain he didn't commit proper seppuku.
And then I started to think and it started to bother me.
Putting the curse aside and the fear of dying that happens to pretty much everyone when someone close to them dies, why do they care so little?
They don't seem sad, they barely seem to keep thinking about it once the initial shock has passed. Damn it, the people who died were all people they knew. Classmates, parents, friends.
For convenience I'll say that it's the survival instinct kicking in, and I guess that in the end the thing that really bothers me is that I really, really liked Another as an horror anime.
And now I'm disappointed.
I'm disappointed because dying in Another isn't dealt with as something that really matters. All that matters is survival of the greatest number. The ones who died are just unlucky cursed people. Why bother with those you can't save anymore?
In the end, it doesn't scare me at all anymore because I'm not made to care about the dead people, because I'm not attached to the alive characters.
Dying doesn't matter I just want to solve the mystery.
