#accas

So the Accas say they need soldiers of Eros to fight away Thanos. Eros is the Greek god of Love, and Thanatos the Greek god of Death.

Thanatos’s brother is Hypnos, the god of sleep; this may be invoked by how the characters are in the dream world fighting, and how Momoe says she can’t go to sleep at the end of the episode.

But more than that, in Freudian theory, Eros represents the part of us that longs to live and experience basic human pleasures. Sex, food, fun, warmth, belonging, love, safety. Thanatos is the death / destruction instinct, which represents trauma and agression, and when directed inwards with no outlet is what (in his theory) leads to suicide and self-harm.

I’m still not sure what their goals are with all of this; they might legitimately be looking for a way to defeat the death instinct in people .. but using teenage girls as their soldiers of Eros which is um. Not great. Basically a probably illegal scientific experiment conducted underground.

If you just look at the basic surface level, you could say her death was caused by her genuinely having having a crush on her ‘uncle’ and being rejected, or that Frill manipulated her and she had no problems beforehand and died for no reason. Both of these seem very shallow and wrong.

In short, she felt guilty for her mother’s death and responsible for maintaining the happiness of the Accas. She proposes to Ura that she can essentially replace her mother, but is rejected, so she feels like the purpose she’s been given this whole time has been lost.

Himari was always more of a tool or device for the Accas to distract them from their sadness, the same as Frill was made to ease their boredom. They didn’t care about or take the proper responsibility for the personhood of the two girls. This isn’t to say they didn’t love her, they did, but in a selfish manner that was always more about what the Accas wanted than for Himari herself.

When they are talking about Himari, instead of talking about her as her own person, they relate everything she does back to how it benefits them.

Her mother died for her sake, technically - Himari was probably told she died in birth. There is some survivor’s guilt there surely.

She felt like she was there to make them happy, and that the absence of her mother was causing great grief to them. So when she reaches the threshold of age fourteen (which symbolizes here the middle ground between child and adult), she passes onto an archetype of a grown woman and that she should be a lover now. Replace her mother and continue making them happy. She’s not really her own person, she’s just there to hold the position of the female in their lives. The Accas have proven before they have very specific rigid ideas of what women should behave like.

I see more of the misogyny themes the more I think about this particular episode, it really resembles the traditional ideas of father and daughter. The father owns the daughter first as his pure maiden and she is loyal to him, until she comes ‘of age’ and is married off (passed like property) to a husband, becoming the mother and wife.

Himari feels like she can’t live up to the ideals and roles that have been subconsciously projected onto her, so she kills herself.

*on a side note

Ura-Acca has the same reaction both times Frill and then Himari confess their feelings. He knows something is seriously wrong, but he fails to realize that he and Acca are the problem and the roles they’re putting on these girls are what is causing this.

https://youtu.be/c0vTn177UVg

If we want to get further down the rabbit hole, this is just so similar to these Father Daughter purity ball events which are meant to symbolize that old tradition I mentioned earlier. And they create eerie undertones of pedophilia and incest that are also very similar to what the Accas created with their daughters, even if not intentional.