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“Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.” - Edward Young
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“I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than walk alone in the light.” – Helen Keller Twilight Sparkle , My Little Pony’s Princess o...
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“I’m doing the show. The stage is my canvas. I’ll put whatever up there for the visible eye.” – MF DOOM Steve , Minecraft’s most honorable ...
It's pretty decent blog. But when it comes to analysis of Ajin I have to disagree with many points.
ReplyDeleteIn the chapter 75 in which Ikuya Ogura explains nature of demi-humans it's pretty clear that you can't take EVERYTHING he says as pure fact: he himself says that "I[He] don't believe in chance, I don't believe in quantum randomness", he says pretty clearly that he believes that everything was destined to be the way since birth of universe; his assessment that IBM is "a kind of matter that didn't exist in this universe's design came into being..." isn't based on the facts but rather comes from his belief that universe was destined to be one way(and that is called out). Later other guy pointed out that his works about demi-humans have "no evidence... no proofs" and "It's more like mythology than science" to which Ikuya Ogura simply says, "human life is meaningless. It has no value. But what if humans' beings fated simply to live, then die, had been able to oppose the will of the universe and create something truly new? You'd want to believe it, right?" Ikuya Ogura is incredibly pessimistic, he lost will to live after his son's death and in the next chapter he is ready to embrace his own end. His vision on how demi-humans came to be don't stem from facts but his belief about insignificance of human life in face of universe and his desire to believe that humans can oppose it in some way.
"You think author would dedicate whole chapter for made up story?" Well, I am not saying it's 100% made up and we can't trust Ikuya Ogura at all, but it's pretty clear narratively that this explanation is heavily influenced by his mental toll and pessimistic character and is directly called out as being unreliable and baseless by other characters for a reason. In fact, I think his explanation of origin of IBM is best you can get but using his assessment about IMB based on belief of destiny to say that they in fact exist beyond universe logic is very sketchy.
And the final nail in the coffin of the whole idea of IBM's transcending logic of the universe like Go Beyond is direct statement by Ikuya Ogura in the chapter 76, "in the end their bodies are still bound by the greater laws of the universe."
Not only that, when it comes to action, we can clearly see that Black Shadows aren't unbound by logic whatsoever: they are invisible due light reflection properties but still are tangible creatures, they can be killed by bullet and are weak to water (guess who has ability to literally summon whole rain?).
None of this is necessarily true.
DeleteOgura's reasoning is one I would take quite directly as it is his description of the events and he's the sole source of information regarding all of the details on the nature of the IBMs; IBMs are a form of energy that exist created by human emotion that extend far beyond the physical form an Ajin, capable of regenerating their bodies. Toru can interfere with the physical body, but he cannot explicitly interfere with their regeneration capabilities nor a Black Ghost's physical form. This is actually 1:1 with how Stands are described by Araki in that both propogate well beyond the laws of reality, and that's only further pushed by Go Beyond weaponizing the nature of Spin in a form that cannot be controlled. Stands themselves also consistently retain this information; They cannot just be controlled by a Calamity but have to be actively taken out by either destroying the user or redirecting the energy they create, something that cannot be done by just punching Toru, hence why someone like Joshu was killed by physically crushing him before his Stand could land a punch. Inversely, while an Ajin is physically existent, the fact that their regeneration has no limit that Calamities also cannot control means that Sato can explicitly push himself well beyond what Calamities can do. This is especially notable in that the ways that an Ajin can be taken out -- that is, knocking them unconscious or merging them into solid ground -- cannot be done by calamities due to them always pushing for highly severely lethal damage and never incapacitation methods. On the other hand, there is no metric for Calamities to be able to interfere something out of sync with the laws of the universe as that is an established loophole of calamities, and is how Toru's life has been threatened several times within the series which could only be circumvented by the weaknesses of Stands that Sato's Black Ghost lacks.