the waves clasp one another

Many of Miyazaki’s male characters carry a curse of some sort, an expression of internal conflicts: Ashitaka’s toxic arm in Princess Mononoke, Marco’s pig face in Porco Rosso (Kurenai no Buta, 1992), Haku’s magic indenture to Yubaba in Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 2001), and Howl’s imprisoned heart in Howl’s Moving Castle (Haoru no ugoku shiro, 2004). These are the most obvious examples, but even the seemingly happy-go-lucky Lupin in Castle of Cagliostro (Rupan Sansei Kariosutoro no shiro, 1979) and the remarkably mature five-year-old Sōsuke in Ponyo (Gake no ue no Ponyo, 2008) bear traces of a gravity unusual for protagonists in movies aimed at a young audience. Although these choices make aesthetic sense in helping to create more intricate and compelling characters, they also suggest a view of the world that goes beyond simple family entertainment.

Curses in Miyazakiworld are not limited to human beings. In one of the more memorable speeches in the blockbuster ecofable Princess Mononoke, the cynical monk Jiko-bō states, “The whole world is under a curse!” The traumatic landscapes of the film support that statement as we see woodlands destroyed, skies shrouded, and the god of the forest brought down with a rifle shot. Spirited Away makes the curse on nature even more specific: the enigmatic character Haku is not actually a human but a river god, and it is his river that is “cursed.” Another river in the film is so polluted that its god has been turned into a “stink spirit,” signifying both spiritual and environmental pollution.

[…]

Even in Miyazakiworld’s most apocalyptic expressions something always endures. In his animations of lost or unreal worlds the director presents catalysts for hope and action, not simply vehicles of escape. In this regard Miyazaki may be said to engage in what theorists David L. Eng and David Kazanjian label “a politics of mourning”—neither passive nor resigned but activist, concentrating on “what remains” rather than “what is lost”: loss motivates more than memorials; it also motivates art. Along with Takahata, Toshio Suzuki, and the dedicated staff at Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki would go on to make films that inspire action when confronting loss, community when dealing with absence, and resuscitation in the face of ruin.

“In this film not only can we envision the Other in ways never before presented, but the Other looks back at us. From the impishly smiling visages of the kodama to the fearsome hatred emanating from a wounded boar’s eyes. Princess Mononoke offers a panoply of gazes from the Other.”

“Rendering the shishigami in all its simultaneous beauty and grotesqueness, Miyazaki takes the film squarely in an ethical direction that goes beyond the truism of humans’ dominating nature. In this regard, the film contrasts with Disney films in which even enthusiasts acknowledge a “cute-ification” of nature occurs. In his analysis of Bambi, for example, Disney scholar David Whitley acknowledges the movie’s sentimentalizing of nature, nothing that “the choreographed interactions between animal ‘friends’ of different species, the wide-eyed enhancement of facial features designed to appeal to human ideals of attractiveness and the elimination of natural predators to create a world of idyllic innocence all combine to create a sentimental viewpoint that is difficult to reconcile with full respect for the integrity and otherness of the natural world.’”

“Princess Mononoke depicts engagement with the natural world on a level that manages to avoid much of the typical anthropomorphizing tendencies of conventional nature representations. Through the brilliance of its animation, the movie offers what the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls the “strangeness of the Other,” although it goes beyond Levinas’s concern with the human to suggest a whole new category of Otherness. The film’s revelation of this “strangeness” wakes the human audience to its proximity to, and intimacy and interdependence with, the natural world.”

“Many of Miyazaki’s male characters carry a curse of some sort, an expression of internal conflicts. Ashitaka’s toxic arm in Princess Mononoke, Marco’s pig face in Porco Rosso, Haku’s magic indenture to Yubaba in Spirited Away, and Howl’s imprisoned heart in Howl’s Moving Castle. These are the most obvious examples, but even the seemingly happy-go-lucky Lupin In Castle of Cagliostro and the remarkably mature five-year-old Sasuke in Ponyo bear traces of a gravity unusual for protagonists in movies aimed at a young audience.”

“Curses in Miyazakiworld are not limited to human beings. In one of the more memorable speeches in Princess Mononoke, the cynical monk Jiko-bo states, “The whole world is under a curse.” The traumatic landscapes of the film support that statement as we see woodlands destroyed, skies shrouded, and the god of the forest brought down with a rifle shot. Spirited Away makes the curse on nature even more specific: the enigmatic character Haku is not actually a human but a river god, and it is his river that is “cursed”. Another river in the film is so polluted that its god has been turned into a “stink spirit,” signifying both spiritual and environmental pollution […]”

“However, looking at the ending with the long gaze of twentieth-century hindsight, it is clear that the forest of the shishigami no longer exists except, perhaps, as an archetypal shadow on the contemporary unconscious. In this regard, the complex, intriguing, and enigmatic character of Eboshi and her association with the proto-industrial Tatara take on pivotal importance. In the film’s refusal to destroy Eboshi or Tatara we see an implicit acknowledgement of the inevitability of “progress”. Princess Mononoke’s abjected Others function as an all-out confrontation with the notion of modernity as progress, but the film is too sophisticated to offer only a simple antiprogress/antimodernity message. By acknowledging Eboshi’s humanity, the film forces the viewer out of any complacent cultural position where technology and industry can be dismissed as simply wrong. It is worth reemphasizing that Eboshi’s femininity, especially her nurturing capacity, ensures that the viewer cannot slip so easily into a simplistic moral equation of industrial equals evil.”

“Miyazaki problematizes the issue even further by making Tatara not just a site of industrial production but a site of weapons manufacturing. In addition, one of the weapons it produces, the iron ball that lodged in the boar, has engendered a lasting curse on humanity.”

“However, it is these weapons that give employement to Tatara’s outcast citizenry, who surely have as much right to survival as the denizens of the forest.”

“In contrast to a vision of a fundamentally approachable world in which conventions may be destabilized but never totally undermined, Princess Mononoke subverts the traditional history, aesthetics, and gender relationships of Japanese society. In opposition to elitist and masculinist versions of Japanese history, the emperor and the court are seen as struggling with powers potentially beyond their control, while the only authoritative guidance comes from a female wolf and the female leader of a weapons manufacturing community. Most shockingly […] Princess Mononoke uses female characters who exist in their own right, independent of any male interlocutor. Furthermore, these independent females are not domesticiated by marriage or a happy ending but are instead interested in living separate but presumably fulfilling lives. San with her companions in the natural world. Eboshi with her industrializing community.” 

“In contrast to the traditional tropes of homogeneity and harmony, the film offers a vision of what might be called a Japanese form of multiculturalism. This observation is supported by a striking essay by critic Saeki Junko in which she compares Princess Mononoke to director Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner. Although acknowledging the obvious difference between an American science fiction film set in the twenty-first century and a Japanese historical fantasy set in the fourteenth century, Saeki points out that the films possess a significant commonality in their mutual fascination with the problem of Otherness […] Blade Runner and Princess Mononoke answer this question by promoting a willingness to accept difference as an essential part of life […]”

“Saeki’s vision of what I have called Princess Mononoke “multiculturalism” is intriguing not only in relation to Blade Runner but also in regards to a more recent work, the 1999 animated Disney film version of Tarzan, released two years after Princess Mononoke.  Both films feature primordial natural settings and human protagonists raised by animals, and both privilege to an extent a fantasy of revenge by the natural world upon human technology. However, the narrative strategies and imagery they employ are significantly different, as are their ultimate ideological messages. While Princess Mononoke insists on difference, the Disney film attempts to erase it.”

“Thus, despite its jungle setting and an ending that seems to suggest the autonomous power and appeal of the natural world, Tarzan’s underlying message privileges an anthropocentric view of the world, emphasized by the film’s final scene, in which Tarzan, Jane, and her father are seen frolicking with the anthropomorphically rendered apes in a paradisial jungle. In a sense this is a vision of a Garden of Eden, in which all species live together in contentment. It is also a vision that ignores the steady march of history, technology, and progress that ultimately destroy any hope of such an Eden in the contemporary world.”

“In contrast, Princess Mononoke’s world is one in which nature, emblematized by the inhuman shishigami, remains beautiful but threateningly and insistently Other. This is also a world in which technology cannot be erased or ignored but rather must be dealth with as an unpleasant but permanent fact of life. While Tarzan uses fantasy to gloss over the inconvenient facts of historical change and cultural complexity, Princess Mononoke employs the fantastic to reveal how pluraity and otherness are a basic feature of human life […] In Ashitaka’s and San’s agreement to live apart but still visit each other (the opposite of the inclusionary ending of the Disney work), the film suggests the pain involved in choosing identities in a world in which such choices are increasingly offered. Although set in a historical past, Princess Mononoke reflects the extraordinary array of pluralities that suggest the ever more complex world of the twenty-first century.”

It honestly almost seems like he became MORE pro murder post-redemption, which is funny, but it's more like he'a pro righteous murder as long as someone else does it. Not him.

Notably he's all "Aang you have to kill my dad" but he didn't actually kill Ozai when he had the opportunity. He's all "it's the Avatar's destiny!" but come on. that was an excuse. He just didn't want to do it. Which is understandable, even though he knows Ozai deserves it, it would still be extremely traumatic for him to kill his father. So he passes it off to Aang. And then berates Aang for not wanting to kill his dad, the exact thing he didn't want to do, like a loser.

And fittingly, only time he seriously tries to murder someone was when he hired Combustion Man to kill Aang in peak desperation and even that was "someone else should do it. I don't have to be there or think about it. I didn't technically kill him someone else did"

(You can also argue that him being so passionate about helping with the righteous murder of people who were agents of the genocide is driven by a sense of guilt too, which is why he's so extra about it. It probably is. On top of that, I think he very much dragged his own mom issues into helping Katara specifically)

Katara

The Painted Lady. Also known as Katara

[after Captain Wentworth recovers Mrs. Smith’s property] “Mrs Smith’s enjoyments were not spoiled by this improvement of income, with some improvement of health, and the acquisition of such friends to be often with, for her cheerfulness and mental alacrity did not fail her; and while these prime supplies of good remained, she might have bid defiance even to greater accessions of worldly prosperity. She might have been absolutely rich and perfectly healthy, and yet be happy.”

This is satire on the religious moralizing of novels about how poverty, illness, and other kinds of suffering are inherently redemptive forces that will somehow purify the soul and improve that person’s character. 

Here I will cite the late and great Orson Welles:

“Did my poverty help my creativity? Uh, no.”

So I find it difficult to believe that Austen thinks Anne’s rejection of Frederick, eight years of mutual separation, and the resulting grief are directly responsible for their being “more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting;” they did that on their own. The growth they did to reach this point was motivated by their natural goodwill and mutually intelligent, conscientious characters. In fact, Anne admits that heartbreak didn’t magically induce character growth and she’s being a hypocrite when she advises Benwick on how to stop wallowing:

Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

What does help Anne recover from her depression - because that’s really what it is - and gain confidence in herself is time spent in pleasurable, jovial company like that of the Harvilles and engaging in their daily activities and hobbies like Captain Harville’s carpentering and toy-making, and going on nice walks by the sea and feeling the sun and wind on her face. If anything, she stagnated in those 7-8 years immediately following her heartbreak and her personal growth was actively hindered by the resulting suffering. While Anne’s diminishing and “loss of bloom” are more explicit in the text, it’s underappreciated that heartbreak also reduces Frederick to his worst as we see him in the novel - he may have been “unjust,” he is “weak and resentful” with Anne (though note that he still maintains polite civility with her, just nothing more).

Hence Anne’s assessment at the start of the novel that the years have only improved him in every way is a mistaken notion, confirmed as mistaken when Frederick at last confesses that he has been just as affected by her absence as she was by his through his letter. This also provides irrefutable proof of Anne being an unreliable narrator in the first half of the novel, which was only increasingly hinted at before, e.g. even when she notices Wentworth’s disappointment at her not staying with him to nurse Louisa, she self-deprecatingly decides that it was only because he saw her utility to Louisa as opposed to wanting her company for herself; this, of course, is very untrue. On the other hand, toward the end of the novel when Frederick leaves the concert after an abrupt goodbye, she doesn’t decide that it was because he was displeased with her, but rather correctly attributes it to jealousy of Mr. Elliot for being so close in company with her. Thus we as the readers evolve to more closely trust Anne’s own judgements just as she herself does.

But anyway, I find it particularly difficult to believe that said grief and heartbreak could be in any way responsible for Wentworth’s success in those eight years, especially with the reasoning that it was accompanied by spite. Austen doesn’t reward spite. Austen characters who exhibit spite include the likes of John and Isabella Thorpe, Lucy Steele, Mrs. Ferrars, General Tilney, and Mrs. Norris. It’s especially silly because 1) we know Wentworth was ambitious from the start, he was planning to do all that he did regardless of whether he had a wife and family:

He was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy.

(…) he was confident that he should soon be rich: full of life and ardour, he knew that he should soon have a ship, and soon be on a station that would lead to everything he wanted.

(…) All his sanguine expectations, all his confidence had been justified. His genius and ardour had seemed to foresee and to command his prosperous path. 

2) Naval officers, especially those who hadn’t yet earned the rank of post-Captain, didn’t get to choose whether to take risky commands/missions or not; they had to go wherever the Navy sent them. When the Admiralty gave Wentworth the Asp; he would’ve had to accept it even if he didn’t want to. But of course, literally any and every officer would want to, any possible risk wasn’t a deterrent at all:

“The Admiralty,” he continued, “entertain themselves now and then, with sending a few hundred men to sea, in a ship not fit to be employed. But they have a great many to provide for; and among the thousands that may just as well go to the bottom as not, it is impossible for them to distinguish the very set who may be least missed.”

“Phoo! phoo!” cried the Admiral, “what stuff these young fellows talk! Never was a better sloop than the Asp in her day. For an old built sloop, you would not see her equal. Lucky fellow to get her! He knows there must have been twenty better men than himself applying for her at the same time. Lucky fellow to get anything so soon, with no more interest than his.”

“I felt my luck, Admiral, I assure you;” replied Captain Wentworth, seriously. “I was as well satisfied with my appointment as you can desire.”