How Anime Portrays Collective Anxiety

the year is 1996 a young high schooler will call darius is practicing american football he goes to tackle another player their helmets collide sweat flies and things go white for a moment darius is shaken up disoriented but the sensation passes as quickly as it comes i'm fine he tells himself and returns to practice as he is driving home from the field that evening he begins to notice that he cannot see in his left eye he treacherously veers panics stops and calls his father the next day at the doctor he is assured his vision will return in two to three days it does not doctors run tests mris find nothing his primary care physician can find nothing wrong and according to his ophthalmologist it was impossible for darius not to see in the bad eye another roundup test at another eye specialist out of town finds nothing abnormal even this second opinion yields no answers and yet darius has made no improvements this young man is now half blind and doctors cannot ascertain why okay fair warning today i am going to do something on this channel that i never do which is talk about psychology that is based not so much in replicated empirical research but in the ideas of a few psychologists in the early 20th century ideas that have very little if any current day research backing them by talking about these ideas i am not saying that they are true or false or even really taking a stance either way i'll simply be presenting them because they are important for the subject matter at hand will it be interesting wildly will it be entertaining i certainly hope so will it be something to better understand yourself or be taken as advice no well that's entirely up to you use your own judgment we will of course also be talking about a few actual scientific studies as well including the one i opened up with and we'll swing back to that was in fact a true story covered in this research paper oh and here are your trigger warnings and there will be minor no context spoilers for a few shows throughout i'll tag them with this as they come up but for the first time ever on psychoplay we'll be talking about psychology from a historical and cultural perspective but then again this isn't a psych of play is it [Music] i have watched a lot of anime in my day i have read a lot of manga i have played my fair share of anime games i am what you would call a closet weeb because i don't really talk about this much unless we are close friends and you also enjoy this little slice of media i've never really been able to put my finger on it but anime and manga have always done a spectacular job of doing one of two things making me squee like a little girl when something aggressively wholesome happens and giving me a chance to interact with something extremely heavy or uncomfortable in a way that no other medium really does i'll give you an example my wife and i recently finished the first season of a show called true detective it's one part buddy buddy cop show one part twisted crime mystery drama and about five parts character exploration over the course of several years our two main characters detectives cole and hart work together to hunt down a man who has been brutally murdering women while also dealing with their own off-the-clock anxieties heart's marriage and relationship with his daughters is in shambles as he turns to alcohol and women to cope with the abhorrent sight he comes across as a detective and conversely cole is obsessing over his investigative work to distract himself from a past trauma the first season at least illustrates their struggles directly through their actions and dialogue and metaphorically through their endeavor to hunt down this mysterious putridly heinous killer we understand what coal has gone through because it has manifested itself in his repeated nihilistic mutterings i think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when in fact everybody's nobody that sounds god [ __ ] awful rush and we understand what heart is going through because we watch him repeatedly strongly regret his decisions and through the pursuit of a common enemy we see them grow and overcome their demons at least to some degree this is how a lot of stories in the western world are written internal struggles are manifested through actions and dialogue evil is represented by another character or group and overcoming sin evil is a metaphor for the good guys overcoming the darkness they have within themselves however in my experience a ton of anime is written just a little bit differently i realize this is a gaming channel so to ease us into this why don't i start with an anime game persona imagine for a moment that in true detective both men had to face their inner demons directly not in a physical sense through their decisions but in a metaphysical sense by literally facing their darker selves imagine that the killer was not a person to arrest but instead an aspect of a person to defeat imagine that the villain was not just a man serving as a metaphor but instead a literal polymerization of coal and hearts anxieties and dark thoughts this is how many manga anime and anime games like persona illustrate evil we don't just see real world consequences of internal anxieties and fears we see actual metaphysical manifestations of them that are to be dealt with directly in persona the gang doesn't deal with this teacher's sexual harassment by catching him in the act getting evidence and reporting him we go meet his subconscious self and physically beat it into submission until it will listen to reason and understand the air of its ways in a really fantastic anime called rascal does not dream of bunny girl senpai yes that is the real name of the show we see a handful of characters who aren't just facing anxieties in the way you or i might we see those anxieties come to life in physical symptoms my sakurajima is slowly realizing that people in the real world can no longer see her not emotionally as if she doesn't truly feel seen but physically she is fading from the awareness of the people around her even going so far as wearing this in a public library just to see if anyone will finally notice her this is happening to her as we find out because she feels isolated due to her complicated relationship with her mother work and school life later in the show her younger sister nadoka's jealousy of mai causes them to swap bodies until they can work through their issues in jujutsu kaisen yuda okatsu is haunted by the death of his childhood friend rika which again doesn't result in a nihilistic worldview and obsession with the cold case it manifests in a wildly powerful and jealous cursed spirit that represents the trauma of losing his first love and we see this everywhere in anime and manga hitagi shinjigahara's weightlessness in bakemanokotari as a symptom of repressed trauma that would otherwise weigh her down if you've seen naruto you'll know that the sharingan eye manifests when a uchiha reaches a certain level of hate and only grows more powerful as that hatred intensifies and i can't tell you how many times in shows like gurren lagann it seemed like they made these physical giant robots and drills grow from sheer ambition alone spiral power cursed energy key japanese media seems to have a fascination with physical or metaphysical manifestations of emotions we don't just see emotion and body motivations and dialogue we often see it embody the real world itself as an actual hurdle to be overcome a real tangible location an enemy a weapon an appearance a symptom it's almost like a surreal fantastical version of what our friend darius is going through you see what i didn't tell you is that darius is suffering not just from blindness but also an immense amount of pressure from his father our boy is a 6'5 290 pound dog and he's still only in high school his coaches his community and especially his father are all expecting great things out of him being in his shoes when he's going to a big division 1 college on scholarship and could mean stardom one day in the nfl and because of this pressure darius is experiencing an uncharted level of stress that is manifesting in a wildly unconventional way blindness this is an extremely rare condition called conversion disorder when an anxiety and emotional trauma of fear manifests symptoms that cannot otherwise be explained medically and it's not just blindness another study highlights a young boy that is losing mobility in his arm and experiences constant pain throughout as a response to his father's unemployment and his mother's scare with cancer there is another case of a woman dealing with speech impairment and tremors in response to memories of sexual abuse if you remember the girls of leroy in the old lavender town video we did same business physical symptoms for mental wounds many would call it faking but these symptoms are experienced as very real to those afflicted you see convergent disorder is one of the body's ways of intervening when a stressor becomes far too much darius felt like he couldn't quit football because of his dad but after the psychiatrist in this study stepped in and made it clear to darius's father that this might be the issue darius and his father talked it out it was made clear that he could drop football if he really wanted to and that his father would love him all the same once they had this talk the eyesight returned within a few days shinjukuhara's weightlessness can be interpreted as a safety mechanism to keep her from carrying the heavy burden of her home life falling apart after her mother's abuse it's only after she accepts the burden as her own that her weight returns and she can begin to move forward relations between mai and nadoko were strained by a mutual jealousy those feelings took form and a body swap to give each other a chance to literally walk in each other's shoes it's only by understanding and accepting each other and themselves that they can return to normal and i think this is one of the many things that fascinates me about anime the surreal nature with which internal struggles are illustrated it's artfully placed in the open as a player rather than just a motivator now at this part of the script usually i am asking why why do people play games the way they do why does this game make people feel this way and so here i was asking why so much conversion disorder was there some mass psychogenic event in japan at some point where is this coming from what is the connection between this illness and this trope and the answers i found were what well they they weren't they weren't that simple because this trope isn't that simple i'd like to make a proclamation i really like chainsaw man it's an absolute roller coaster of a manga the anime is going to be a banger i like makima i like power more i like dingy best i feel sorry for kabini and sometimes i wish i could teleport her to that planet in teen titans where the little aliens give you massages and feed you grapes and one thing that i find interesting about chainsaw man is that the characters known as devils in it all derive their power from public perception the more the general public fears said devil the more ferocious it becomes for example sharks are scary right i think most people would agree here is the shark devil he's pretty strong bats yep same thing here is your bat devil anyone afraid of chickens yes it's safe here yeah not many so here is your chicken devil guns yes especially nowadays especially after certain events have taken place and chainsaw man does not stray away from this the public's collective anxieties manifest here much in the same way that they do on an individual basis in our little slice of life anime and as i was reading chainsaw man back in august of last year it really resonated with me but it also occurred to me that i think i've seen this before jujutsu kaisen another show that i really quite like actually quantifies and makes a currency out of negative human emotion cursed energy all humans have it and as it leaks out in times of strife if enough is built up a cursed spirit is born populated locations like hospitals parks and schools are typically breeding grounds for these baddies because of all the dark emotions associated with them and in certain cases like our boy judah from earlier it only takes one heavy trauma to create an extremely powerful curse and historically i think a lot of this general public anxiety feeding into the power of the bad guys trope comes from the old shintoism belief in yokai mischievous spirits that inhabit the world around us in the show natsume's book of friends a yokai's power is determined by the number of people that believe in them which i think is an interesting parallel to this idea because some sources say that one origin of yokai is that they were superstitious explanations of misfortune in japan take for instance the kappa yokai they spend time in lakes and marshes love to wrestle with children and will you know occasionally drag a child downstream with them they're superstitions and folk tales that only gain steam the more credence they are given they are only as real as the public makes them the more these things are talked about the more they take form in the collective unconscious [Music] and this is where things gets unsettling [Music] ah i'm just kidding we aren't talking about ava carl young was a swiss psychiatrist he studied under freud take that for what it's worth until he eventually went his separate ways from freud because he disagreed with a lot of freud's ideas take that for what it's worth mainly he thought that freud's conceptualization of the unconscious was too limited and overly negative he also disagreed that sexuality was a key motivating behavioral force meaning young clearly never watched interspecies reviewers he laid the foundation for the study of introversion and extroversion and there is a crowd of psychiatrists still working today that consider themselves a young yin in their practice like i said at the beginning i'm not here to take sides and use your own judgment but most of his ideas borrowing intro and extroversion have very little backing from current day empirical research one such idea is his concept of the collective unconscious that lying in the depths of each and every one of our psyches is a genetically past set of ideas that we share with every other human on the planet have you ever watched a movie and felt like you could place each character into a stereotypical category the shady guy with ulterior motives the wise mother-like figure the innocently naive hero who is inevitably betrayed or taken advantage of according to young these are archetypes that we all inherently understand from birth and we recognize these traits in ourselves and each other because we come with a built-in blueprint of each there are four main archetypes that you may recognize 12 sub-archetypes and young admittedly proposed that deeper than that there may be no limit to the number that exists you might be afraid of the dark or clowns because they are archetypes passed down through previous generations in a nutshell your unconscious mind is the collective culmination of ancient wisdom that came before it and you'd better believe that this has influenced a ton of media you could argue that the objects of power and control gain said power because they are archetypes developed from being symbolic of something in the public eye for years a ringing telephone a rubber duck a horse from a merry-go-round ordinary things that come alive due to repeated perception and associations katsura hashino the director of the persona series said in an interview with killscreen that persona addresses problems people hold deep in their hearts and that his games are meditations on the true self which you may have noticed from a moment ago the persona is one of the four main archetypes proposed by young too young the persona represents all the different social masks that we wear in everyday life it's there to help us behave in a way that society expects to follow social norms and to mask all of the primitive urges impulses and emotions that aren't socially acceptable persona the games seem to directly comment on this by having characters again often face their own shadows and the shadows of others that much like young's archetype of the shadow are completely instinctual the shadow is the unfiltered desire in the unconscious that is composed of repressed ideas weaknesses and instincts the persona series is actually extremely jungian and one of the most interesting places in the game for the purposes of this video is mementos in persona 5 which sort of illustrates the pop culture version of young's collective unconscious it is literally a living breathing connected network of the general public's cognition when it rains moods drop so monsters become stronger when it's flu season enemies often start the battle with despair if it's a heat wave they might start the battle burned and this illustration of the collective unconscious while a bit unfaithful to the source material i think also really embodies the collectivist nature of the general public in japan compared to the individualistic nature of the west and you can obviously see the parallels to this and chainsaw man and jiu jitsu kaisen the public's collective fears are a huge player in both series hell even in a manga called dandadan the collective unconscious is mentioned by name when explaining why these guys attacked the game by the way you need to be reading dantodan it is genuinely fantastic mark my words this will get an anime adaptation one day and take the world by storm if you thought marin and lady demontrescu were bad just wait until the internet catches wind of ayase's grandma anyways we've well established that the collective unconscious regardless of how accurately it is portrayed is a huge influence on a lot of japanese media but at this point during my research of this video i still couldn't find a connection why was jungian psychology so big in japan well honestly it it kind of wasn't at least not any bigger than it was anywhere else in the world so what's going on what am i missing why was young such a big influence on the east what i had it backwards it wasn't young that had an influence on the east it was the east that had an influence on young as fate would have it a few years after young broke up with freud his interests turned east and he actually drew a ton of inspiration from eastern culture and religion according to this 2019 article from the pacifica graduate institute young's investigation of eastern culture and religion supplied him with an abundance of cross-cultural materials to compare with his hypotheses of archetypes the collective unconscious and other manifestations of psychic reality in other words it's entirely possible that a lot of aspects of young's collective unconscious were influenced by the collectivist culture of the east as well as religions like buddhism what we've been talking about this entire time may not just be a jungian influence but also a buddhist one when shinjuku hara is being questioned before she faces the source of her weightlessness she is asked who her favorite novelist is and she reports yumeno kusaku who was in fact an author and buddhist monk in the early 20th century best known for his surrealistic narratives not unlike the ones we've talked about today one arc in jiu jitsu's first season features cursed objects known as the cursed womb death paintings these are nine special grade objects created with mixed genetic material of both a cursed spirit and a human these give rise to new villains and one of the most badass fight scenes i've laid my eyes upon in a long time but the name death paintings is actually a reference to the buddhist art of kusozu a series of nine paintings portraying the nine stages a decaying corpse goes through before it eventually turns to dusk they are as you can imagine repulsive and the point was apparently to be a resource for monks if a monk felt he was being attempted by bodily desires he could view the art and remember the temporary nature of the flesh really cheery stuff and in an interview between gege akutami the creator of jiu jitsu kaisen and tita kubo the creator of bleach these death paintings came up kubo noticed them and pointed out that he too likes to incorporate buddhism in his writing these rings that appear when tosin uses his bankai actually have the names of the nine stages of death paintings written on them both admitted to finding inspiration in buddhism and even agreed that it is essentially japanese mythology which i think is really the root of this whole collective unconscious idea we've been trying to get at this entire time there was a concept in buddhism known as non-self to wildly oversimplify it by extinguishing one's selfish desires and replacing them with an undying loving kindness you can find true happiness that by practicing compassion instead of pride you can empty yourself out achieve the non-self state and understand the fundamental meaning of being alive in this non-self concept as well as other buddhist ideas were a large influence in the work of one japanese psychologist named hayao kawai who actually introduced jungian ideas to japan in 1955. young and kawhi both agreed that the major difference between the western and eastern conceptualizations of the self was where the self lies within our own consciousness what i mean is that the western self is very contained in the conscious mind however presumably because of the collectivist nature of the east as well as buddhist influence the eastern self is not contained here it leaks into the unconscious according to kauai these self and westerners is put in the center of consciousness meaning that the self is thought of as strong central and independent the eastern self however lives in the unconsciousness which means that the self is rather fluid young echoed this in 1954 he wrote to the west consciousness is inconceivable without an ego if there is no ego there is nobody to be conscious of anything the ego is therefore indispensable to the conscious process the eastern mind however has no difficulty conceiving of a consciousness without an ego consciousness is deemed capable of transcending its ego condition indeed in its higher forms the ego disappears altogether wait leaks fluid empty disappear it it all why does it always come back to ava obviously a lot could be said of evangelion in this context right especially that scene oh right spoilers for the 20 year old show everyone's obsessed with you can see threads of kawaii's illustration of the eastern model of consciousness here you can interpret the orange liquid everyone gushes into as unconsciousness you could interpret the at fields which by the way stand for absolute terror fields i just learned as the boundaries of the ego keeping the self separate from the unconscious and presumably the unconscious of others once it goes away we all become one large nucleus of unconscious goop but ultimately anno takes these jungian buddhist concepts much like every other show we've talked about today and brings a literal interpretation to them to achieve the true meaning of life the human instrumentality project not only does the idea of a self need to be abandoned to achieve happiness but the physical self must be relinquished as well obviously this particular ending of ava is well a feverish nightmare and we could spend hours picking apart what it all means and why i'm completely missing the point but it's just another example that i think would be the most complete and the most striking of everything we've talked about today you know writing this script started with me trying to understand the origin of a trope i've seen in anime naturally this being the show that it is i went to psychology i wanted answers and i still can't decide if i really found them but i think i did find something else along the way i think i understand why anime moves me the way that it does i am an american for what it's worth and whether or not me living here my entire life has caused this or not i am a very prideful person i'm competitive i'm insecure i like to show off i think a lot of myself and admittedly i'm not as empathetic or as good to other people as i wish i was i am very individualistic my at field is strong as hell dog and i i guess i guess anime takes these subtleties of a lot of american media and makes them not so subtle that burning feeling i get when i see injustice in the world that's not just a feeling in anime that's a transformation those sorrows i have about the people i've lost in my life that's more than just a feeling in my gut in anime is something tangible something i can perceive and at least to some degree understand because it's taken a physical form and you know the part that really brings me a lot of solace is that these happenings in anime are all relational we all contribute to mementos we all have anxieties that lend themselves to a common foe our relationships with others are often what brings out the mental or very physical strength to carry on the body swap and bunny girl senpai happened because of a connection between sisters all of shinji's struggles and eva manifested because of his struggles to get close to others darius's blindness stemmed from a desperate need to please the father that he loved and admired so deeply it's all relational we're all connected in one way or another for better for worse through the good and the bad we're not alone we're all in this together and the feeling that i share both my anxieties and my hopes and dreams with the rest of the world is a sensation that i think only anime has ever really given me [Music] oh that was a damn fun video to write look i'll be honest i have really needed something to shape things up because i have felt creatively in a rut the dark souls video i made earlier this year has felt like my only quality work all year honestly so i i think i needed this and hey maybe it sucks maybe no one likes this but man i had a good time thanks for letting me get a little bit weird on this one i promise the tight empirical research will be back next time also real quick please know that buddhism is one of the many rabbit holes i fell down researching this and i almost certainly oversimplified something in this video if you are buddhist or know a lot about buddhism i'm sure you know how the comment section works and i would love to hear you clarify what i was trying to get at here down below this has been a huge learning experience for me and i don't want it to stop at writing this script i'd also like to take a moment to say thank you truly thank you to my patreon supporters for making this video possible on patreon we have these goals we try to hit right once a certain amount of pledges are hit to celebrate i make a highly requested video a psych of anime was the first big milestone we hit which is how we are here now and once we hit this goal a psych of play on dating sims will be in the works you can support the show for only a dollar a month let's make this happen if you'd like to be a part of this follow the link in the description or in my pinned comments down below once again a colossal thank you to my patreon supporters especially this month's featured patrons meadow ronald gaida joe mcgowan piyo heliobros bleeding plaid jean paul a corey kraushaar and aiden chia or or is it kia thank you aiden as always like the video share subscribe and let me know an anime that had a deep effect on you down below thank you again take care and please have yourself a damn good one

Channel: Daryl Talks Games

Views: 477,089

Keywords: Psych of play, Daryl talks games, Psych of anime, Chainsaw man psychology, Psychology of chainsaw man, Psychology of anime, Anime psychology, Daryl talks games anime, Anime daryl talks games, Anime psych of play, Makima psychology, Jujutsu Kaisen psychology, Anime, Manga, Manga psychology, Anime explained, Manga explained

Id: FMXwp-B1m84

Length: 31min 16sec (1876 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2022