You just have to be very, very passionate about something.
Summary:
- Onmyoji anime has been released on Netflix.
- It mixes historical setting with folklore and uses it to highlight the specifics of the human psyche.
- Mainly it focuses on how passion turns into obsession.
- We touched upon this while talking about Vagabond.
- The folklore inclusion makes the story easier to follow.
Anime Onmyoji, based on the light novel series of the same name, has finally been released on Netflix. It's focused on the portrayal of the adventures of Abe Seimei, a famous historical figure, a wizard who worked for the Emperor, and Minamoto Hiromasa, a court official who brings him supernatural cases to solve. The story mixes the historical events and period-accurate visuals with the folklore, and does it in a very unobtrusive way.
Too much love can kill you
While the general plotline is pretty easy to follow, there's one topic that goes through all of the stories, and it can be summed up as every human can become a demon with a sufficient stimulus. The flow of the show is pretty linear, the first half of it mainly having an episodic nature, and all the cases that Seimei and Hiromasa encounter are based on human obsessions. There's a demoness who's obsessed with love; a demon obsessed with attention; a demon obsessed with poetry. All of them were once human, but ended up being consumed by their passions which turned into obsessions.
This can be a valuable lesson: that sometimes things that we hold most dear are the ones that may hurt us the most. The things that bring us the most joy are the ones that will bring us demise.
We can see it unravel
In a way, this notion can be tied to our recent article about Takehiko Inoue and his relationship with his award-winning manga Vagabond. We tried to understand how this passion project that he started out of love for the story became more and more challenging and more morally taxing, turning into an obsession. Surely Inoue won't turn into a demon, but there's a pattern among creatives who pour their souls into their craft and end up being consumed by their own expectations.
The story of this anime is more about human nature than about the supernatural, although the portrayal of folkloric creatures is quite interesting. But mostly, it explores the depths of human souls, giving the troubles and fears they hold inside the shape of various demonic creatures.
It's a nice metaphor, one that makes the story itself more digestible, despite it already being pretty straightforward. But the attention to these aspects of the human psyche makes the show entertaining.