namesarentfun

We've all been so desperate for some Asa development, and it seems like our wishes are finally coming true. This new arc makes her a proper co-protagonist for the first time, and I couldn't be happier about it. But it's also bringing out a very sinister side of her character we haven't really seen before, and I couldn't be happier about that either.

The readers of this story have, up to this point, been left mostly in the dark about the actual powers of Break and Seal. We've seen a few examples of their use - broken barriers and contracts, sealed lifespans - but not really a lot that explains why these unfortunate teens are worth starting a war over. Why everyone around them thinks that they can take over the world if they want it. Sure, Asa can decapitate people with her bare hands from 20 paces, but there are lots of ways to decapitate people. Hell, Gabby does the same thing in the first chapter. That's not a power that can take over the world.

And yet, oddly enough, that's the only use-case that Break explicitly tells Asa about.

What other uses, Break? Care to clue us in?

Well, evidently the Kagemoris knew of a couple of others - breaking barriers and breaking contracts - but that's basically been the extent of Asa's skillset so far. Unlike Yuru, she's not really a natural combatant, she has no training, and she's only had the power for about a year when the series begins.

That's all we've seen her do with Break since then, up to the most recent chapter. But something very important happened to Asa a few chapters ago, and I think that's the key to this whole thing.

Asa had the perfect opportunity, means, and motive to kill Ivan Yosano, but she didn't. She couldn't. Murder is just not something that comes naturally to her. She tries to talk tough, but Gabby has been right all along - this isn't her job. If she's going to weild Break, she needs a different way to do it. So she came up with one.

I think we're supposed to read Asa's use of Break in the most recent chapter as more than a little bit sinister. It's obviously a lot less violent than her previous uses of Break (since the previous ones were either the complete severing of contracts or the complete severing of heads) but it's not a nice thing to do to people, and very against the ethos of the series. We're left on that image of Gabriel's shocked, blank, expression to show that this is a violation. Gabriel is as much Asa's friend as Gabby is, and Asa just completely overwrote their will.

And of course, as the great sage Bunbun has told us before,

Now, let me talk about murder for a second. It'll all come back around later.

Fullmetal Alchemist took a pretty standard shonen manga/anime line on killing people: that killing people is basically the worst thing you can do. Neither Ed nor Al ever directly kill someone, and Ed prevents Winry from doing so. The other protagonist characters talk about killing as a permanent stain on their conscience, even when they were only doing that killing either under orders or duress. What could possibly equal the value of a human soul, et cetera.

That point is one of the starkest points of contrast between FMA and YnT. YnT is not - broadly speaking - anti-killing. Both of our protagonists have killed multiple people before (though Asa tries to avoid it) and neither of them seems terribly torn up about it. Yuru is quite blasé about the whole thing. Gabby has killed untold scores of people - including people Asa knew - and neither Asa nor the narrative seems exceptionally concerned about that fact. Killing people is sufficiently normal for everyone in this story that each faction needs to employ a dedicated cleaner to get rid of the corpses. The story actually pays more attention to the cleaners and their role than it does to the ethics of killing. Burying bodies correctly has a lot of moral weight, but making those bodies doesn't have much.

None of this is a flaw in the story, mind. It's clearly that way by design. As I've discussed before, the fundamental themes of the two series are very different. In FMA, killing someone is the worst thing you can do to them. In YnT, that's not true.

In YnT, the worst thing you can do to someone is use them.

In that previous post, I actually missed one of the clearest statements of that theme, which is in Break's speech when meeting Asa. After explaining Asa's two options (accept Break and its powers, or die), Break says:

Death is an option of comparable severity to being used. Maybe even a better one. Mercy is not always the kindest choice, when the alternative is objectification.

Now, back to Asa.

Asa clearly does not agree with the main theme of this series. And that's fascinating.

Though Asa has killed before, she now refuses to do so. Gabby confirmed that she didn't kill anyone in Higashi village, and she couldn't kill Ivan despite clearly desiring to do so. In his current state, Ivan probably does think that death would have been the better option! There was never any chance Asa would kill her way out of the Kagemori manor, but what she did to Gabriel and the guards is still clearly supposed to read as wrong. By refusing to talk to them like people, Asa is also refusing to treat them like people. She's treating them like obstacles to overcome.

Instead, Asa has decided to overwrite the wills of humans and daemons alike. And I don't think we're supposed to think that's a good thing. Her use of it in Chapter 51 isn't too objectionable on its own - just a temporary pause in a couple of orders - but it is evocative. She really can manipulate the wills of everyone around her. And we don't know how far that power could go, and what she thinks the limits of its use reasonably are.

Yuru has a pretty strong moral core - he's willing to kill, of course, but only if he senses killing intent from a person. Otherwise, he's willing to be direct and hear everyone out. Yuru is posessed of an impressive courage of convictions, honed from many years of semi-independent living, and that means he's able to stand up to a lot of moral pressure. He's direct, he's confrontational, and he's willing to do what he wants even when other people disagree. Not so Asa! Asa has no idea where her moral center is. She's never had the freedom to develop one. Now she does. And a terrifying amount of power to go along with it. The decision she seems to have come to is that killing is wrong but depriving someone of their freedom (either directly, like Ivan, or indirectly, like Gabriel and the guards) is ok. And the narrative does not agree with her! The narrative is pretty clear that depriving a person of their autonomy is just about the worst thing you can do to them. And in the case of Gabriel and the guards, she basically just did it to get out of an awkward conversation. That's not a very good reason!

Break didn't tell her she could do this. She figured it out on her own. The girl who has been a prisoner her whole life has turned jailer. The girl who never had the opportunity to decide what she wanted to do now robs others of that decision. It's very juicy.

Am I saying that Asa might end up the villain of this piece? No. But I think there's a dark path ahead of her, and I'll be curious to see where it leads. What happens when she and Yuru have a serious disagreement for the first time? How far will she go if Yuru's safety is on the line?

I won't spend a lot of time here talking about the plot of YnT. If you haven't yet read it - well, you should, but the basic gist is that protagonist Yuru and his twin sister Asa are, through a fluke of their birth, capable of gaining - by dying - powers that act as trump cards within the magic system of the world (which is a bit like Pokemon if every pokemon was two pokemon that represent a fundamental conceptual opposition). Unfortunately, that means that everyone they've ever met is trying to kill them, and Yakuza shenanigans ensue. It's very good, you should read it.

But what is YnT about, really? That's a bit less obvious.

Let's start with Fullmetal Alchemist (since I strongly suspect that any YnT reader is already familiar with Fullmetal Alchemist, and if they're not, they have a busy week ahead of them). Fullmetal Alchemist wears its theme on its sleeve. It's this:

As befits its alchemical inspiration, Fullmetal Alchemist is about what it means to be human - to be finite, limited, and subject to forces greater than yourself. The story comes back to this theme again and again, as various characters try to defy their limits and come up short. The value of human life is called into question again and again in the series. The inciting incident is Ed and Al's failure to recognize the value of human life in pursuit of their ambitions. And eventually, Ed finds peace by accepting his limits. The villain cannot accept his limits and basically... defeats himself by trying to exceed them. It's a story about coming to terms with your humanity, and that theme is woven deeply into every aspect of the story.

I think Yomi no Tsugai is playing to the thematic rafters in the same way. It's also going for a theme just as universal. However, its conflict is less internal than Fullmetal Alchemist's. Most of what troubles Yuru and Asa are the aforementioned people trying to kill them. The philosophical core of the series is also more external to our two leads - the different factions of the series are defined by different philosophical stances, and everyone involved is quite happy to verbally explain why they think they're right. The conundrum facing Yuru and Asa is over who to trust, and who to ally with. This is a sharp contrast from Fullmetal, where the villains are self-consciously inhuman and not particularly interested in justifying their actions to humans. I don't mean this as a dig at Fullmetal at all, but I'd say that YnT's tone is overall a bit more adult than Fullmetal. The protagonists are a little older, a lot more mature (at least on the surface), and a lot more conflicted over what the right path forward is.

If Fullmetal Alchemist is about what it means to be a human, Yomi no Tsugai is about what it means to treat another person as a human. What it means to respect their autonomy, to think of them as having a perspective, and (to borrow a phrase) treat them like an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end. That's right, we've gone from alchemy to Immanuel fucking Kant.

Yuru and Asa's lives are both defined by violations of their autonomy as people. Asa is kept in a literal cage once, a metaphorical cage once, and a more abstract cage of low self-esteem afterward. Yuru thinks he's free, but he too is hemmed in by the deception of his Truman-Show-does-Medieval-Times village and its gang of roving murderers. Asa is treated like an object, and Yuru is treated like an animal. All they want is to live like normal human teenagers.

In contrast, all of the major factions want to use the twins and their powers for various ends. The twins even have a little sit-down with a bunch of the Kagemoris in Chapter 10 where they all explain their different stances on the issue of how Yuru and Asa should be used. We already know that Higashi Village wants to use the twins to conquer the world, and Nishino village wants... well, they seem to want heads for some reason, but there are other options! The Kagemoris mostly represent more philosophically live moderate options.

Gonzo wants to lock the twins away, destroy Higashi Village, and end the whole thing:

Asuma instead wants to use them to instill a sort of benevolent dictatorship:

And it's at this point that Yuru gives a straightforward presentation of our main theme:

No person is intrinsically a source of conflict. It's the act of using someone as a means to an end that creates conflict. The only right way to treat Yuru and Asa is as free humans with a perspective of their own, capable of making their own choices.

Hana makes the same point later:

Treating Yuru and Asa as means to an end - no matter how noble the end - is wrong. That's our core theme.

So, let's build this out a bit. Because it wouldn't be much of a theme if it only applied to Yuru and Asa, right? The whole point here is that you can't make exceptions in how you treat people for people you think of as sufficiently exceptional. People are people.

One thing I have not yet discussed is what makes Yuru and Asa special. What property they have that makes them such a ripe target for exploitation. The power to claim Break and Seal.

Break and Seal are, if you'll forgive the metaphor, the administrator commands in the operating system of the world. The whole way the power system works here is based on contracts forged between tsugai and humans. The contracts are mutually beneficial and voluntary - not unlike contracts between humans. But Break and Seal impinge upon the voluntary nature of these contracts.

With Break, any contract can be severed, no matter what the will of the contracters says. And with Seal, the tsugai are literally objectified - turned back into inert relics. Usually, tsugai are only set loose when they fail their master and their master dies - that is, when they fail to uphold their part of the contract. Tsugai usually only turn back into their relic form when both human and tsugai agree to do so.

Break and Seal override both the terms of the contract and the consent of the parties involved. They don't treat the tsugai as people. And as the great scholar Bunbun so eloquently says, that's wrong.

Tsugai seem to be able to live basically forever, but they are only actually alive when they're in a contract. In their relic form, they are objects. In their stray form, they're like animals, stuck aimlessly wandering whatever place they're in. There's an interesting parallel here to how Asa was objectified and Yuru was treated like an animal by the village. Wonder if that will be relevant later...