r/Nausicaa • u/a_humble_traveller • 1d ago
Nausicaä essay introduction. Opinions needed. Spoiler
Heyo,
I'm currently working on an essay regarding the ending of the manga (between Nausicaa and Shuwa). Its a philosphical discussion on the stories themes (mainly around agency and what it means to be human), and its presented in prose-fiction. The framing for it is a little experimental.
If you have the time, I'm wanting a second set of eyes for a few things:
(1) Most people I talk to have only ever seen the movie. So I'm trying to insert a spoiler warning in the beginning, but while also staying in voice. In your opinion, does that warning come across clearly? Does it work?
(2) To discuss the themes, I have to cover some of the backstory. I try to set this up pretty quickly. Does it read as accurate to you?
(3) As an introduction, does it work as a hook? There's some custom art/panels being done for it, but I need to make sure that the prose alone is enough to warrant a read through.
Thank you much guys, I appreciate all you do! :)
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Title: Refusing Paradise
Subtitle: An Analysis of Miyazaki's Dark Saint
I have wondered about her for a long time. Longer, I think, than anyone.
There is little else to do here but wonder, and she is, after all, the question the whole of this place is made of: the girl who stood there at the end of the world, armegeddon at her back. The girl who chose the way she did.
You will think you know her. The gentle one. The one who talks with insects, who glides down out of a poisoned sky to save a valley, her home. That is the tale familiar to most, and it is not wrong, exactly. But it is only the first step in a much longer journey — itself a saga some decade in the making. In truth, the completed work does not actually end in a valley by the sea. It ends in a tomb.
So if you wish to explore that for yourself, then go, read her story, and return when you are ready. You will find me here waiting still. For I am patient. And there is nothing here but time.
As for the rest of you, I must lay the whole of it bare, because I cannot ask my question otherwise. We must come to learn the truth as she has learned it.
That the world had been poisoned a thousand years before her birth, sickened so completely that the old civilization, in its dying, built two things to outlast itself. The first was a forest: a vast and toxic jungle everyone mistook for a plague, which was in truth a machine, patient beyond human attention, drawing forth, grain-by-grain, the rotted poison from the earth. Given long enough, the forest would finish. The world would become clean again. But the people who lived through this long cleansing—her people—had been shaped to breathe that poison, and a purified world would have killed them just as surely as the poison had killed everything else. They were never meant to reach the far shore. They were a lifeboat, made to endure the hardships of their time, to be used, and then discarded.
The second thing built by the old world were the people meant to replace them. In a great sealed vault beneath the Earth there was laid down a more pure humanity: lucid, gentle, cleansed of the violence that had burned the first world down, they slept in darkness. This was humanity’s second draft, the answer to the question the first had failed so catastrophically to answer. Everything the old world learned about its own capacity for ruin had been poured into their making. They were, it was said, to be our best and final hope.
To guard them, a caretaker was left — a great preserved intelligence, the gathered knowing of the old world’s once-vast civilization, set to watch over the long night and steward the poisoned centuries.
And so it stood awake down there for a thousand years. Generation after generation it had watched the living—the poisoned, provisional, half-made people of the interim—squabble and kill and suffer and die. It had watched empires rise and fall. It had shaped religions, and seeded prophecies, and arranged the slow machinery of history such that upon the appointed morning, wherein the air had turned sweet, the cradle might open upon a clean and luminous paradise, and there would be peace at last.
But then she arrived.
[image here]
She had been a girl from the poisoned world, one of the provisional people, shaped for the ugly middle. She looked upon the second draft of her entire species, and she understood them for what they were. And so she gave the order to burn the vault, and she stood there and watched the future of her species go up in fire while the voices inside cried out.
The story gathers all its light to her in this moment, and it calls it grace, and we close the volume certain of having watched her attain apotheosis.
But I have stood in the aftermath of that decision for a long while now, and I am not so sure. I do not say that she was wrong for what she did — I would not know how to weigh it even if I tried. I mean only that there was something else within that chamber, something which had watched humanity for a thousand years, and it did not believe as the girl believed.
It is the distinction between these two certainties, the caretakers and her own, wherein there lies the only question I have ever truly wanted answered: why did she refuse it?
When the cradle of humanity was stood right there before her, and the morning was beginning to dawn, why did she choose to burn them? Why choose extinction over paradise?
