#psyren analysis

Originally, this was just going to be my quick thoughts after reading the manga, but as I wrote this, I realized I have more to say than I intitially thought. Reading the manga before reading this is recommended, not only because of plot spoilers but because of the plot details I may leave out. I’m mentioning only what I think is relevant to the point I’m making, so if something sounds amiss to you, a non-Psyren reader, then the manga itself probably has what you’re missing.

This is the second review I’ve done, and it also happens to be on a Shonen manga that was mildly popular enough to get an official English translation but never popped off in the west, or in the case of Psyren, sadly never got an anime. I hope to do more of these in the future, since I imagine there’s not a lot of thematic analysis on these types of manga. The average person seems to assume there’s nothing of worth to get out of these childrens’ manga, and only series with big enough followings like Naruto or One Piece seem to get the analysis they deserve. Hopefully, I can right this wrong just a little bit with my reviews.

Psyren is about the nature of humanity. Very original, I know. It’s not the greatest manga ever made, but I’m a firm believer that every piece of media like this has something of worth to say and I would like to hear it out.

Ageha Yoshina is a troubled high schooler. It doesn’t really show in how he acts, though. At least, not at first. Before he time travels into the future and obtains psychic powers, he’s introduced gleefully beating up some school bullies after being paid by a girl from his class. Whether he’s doing it out of the goodness of his heart, to make money, or simply to let out some anger, is left ambiguous. With the context of the entire series, however, what he did it for doesn’t matter. In my opinion, the reason he did this was a combination of all three. Ageha is shown to be unnaturally kind and helpful to people that he has sympathy for throughout the course of the manga. He is also known for being self-interested, not so much to be considered a bad guy, but enough to be considered a teenager making his way through an unsatisfying life. Lastly, and most importantly, Ageha is a bit destructive. This will be fleshed out much more later on, but Ageha himself seems intrinsically tied to destruction.

To imply that destruction is inherently negative, however, is deductive. Drastic measures for the sake of your own justice are common place amongst the heroes and villains of this series. Ageha, who gets himself into the action of the story through his desire to help a sad girl, ends up finding himself unable to feel sympathy for a member of the villain organization that he ends up nearly killing. This character is not written in a sympathetic manner, but this will come up later with Ageha’s refusal to see our main antagonist’s point of view. Other characters in the final arc, who are previously shown to go out of their way to spare villains, swiftly go for the kill during the final arc when the stakes are high.

In chapter 1, Ageha is shown to be deep in thought regarding the current state of the world. Needless wars, global warming... He can’t imagine a future in which these issues are solved. However, he resolves to himself to keep living in the present and not let the future worry him. This is a good and healthy mindset more often than not, but as we see from how Ageha’s future fighting friends feel about it, and how Ageha himself comes to resonate with their feelings, lying back and accepting your fate isn’t good enough. The series makes it very clear that humanity is corrupt, but this is a hopeful story about doing everything you can to fight against the “fate” you’re given.

Before we can continue talking about Ageha, we must discuss our main antagonist.

Miroku Amagi was the third subject of the Grigori project, a project funded by the government which implanted children with psychic powers and subjected them to physical and emotional torment for the sake of gaining their powers. Miroku and his sister, Number 7, were both very kind, sweet children. They were sent to the project by their parents for a large sum of money. Number 7 quickly learned to shut off her emotions to prevent as much mental damage as possible, but Miroku remained cheerful, and hopeful that he would be able to meet his family again soon, which he was lied to about. His parents had abandoned him, they had no means of contacting them. Eventually, as Miroku grew, he became jaded, and the kindness had left his eyes. A sympathetic scientist allowed him a moment of rest away from his psi-reducing technology for his birthday, which gave him the chance to burn the facility to the ground with his psychic powers, leaving only the sympathetic scientist alive, albeit leaving him under strict surveillance to assure he wouldn’t become a detriment to Miroku’s plans. Miroku offered his sister a spot in the new world he would soon create, a world where people with special gifts wouldn’t be subjugated and tortured for their gifts, but she denied, unable to see the man that was once her brother doing such a thing. Number 7 would then go on to create the Psyren game, which lead Ageha and the protagonists into the future world, so that they may find out more about the future and inevitably stop Miroku’s schemes. 

Miroku’s ability to steal the souls of others is likely symbolic of his innate hatred of humanity, not merely their actions but the way that humans are able to shamelessly embody hypocritical traits, such as kindness and destruction, without acknowledging that the things they hate about psionists are present within themselves. While labeling Psionists as monsters without a heart, they themselves created them out of pure greed. The heroes, also Psionists, refuse to accept Miroku’s drastic measures, yet they themselves will kill for what they believe, from Miroku’s perspective being the same thing as he is doing. Such hypocrisy doesn’t compute with him, and so must be destroyed. By using their souls to power himself and leaving them an empty husk, he strips them of such contradictions and leaves them the same as him; empty.

In contrast, Miroku Amagi himself may very well be void of contradictions, at least on the surface. The mask he wears to others is that of a God, beckoning destruction and creation for a new future. Unbeknownst to him, however, he is not completely void of the feelings which he observes in humans. He longs to fix this corrupt world just like Ageha, but their methods and points of view are very different. To be described later, he is also a person that wants love. 

“I am the sky around which destiny revolves.”

This quote was in my head for the majority of the climax. It took me a bit to realize what the core message of this manga was, or at least how it tied into the story and characters. I realized after reading, however, that I was focused on it for the wrong reasons. Psyren isn’t a story about fated rivalries or destiny, but it’s about the issues with deeming people as “special.” Miroku, who is artificially created to BE special, is naturally, well, special. However, out of hatred for his captors, and for the human world that allowed such a thing to be acceptable, he seeks to remake the world to accommodate special people like himself. A world filed with PSI, where normal people are either given psychic powers, transformed into monsters, or killed.

Both normal humans and Psionists are portrayed as complicated people, not intrinsically good or evil. Not to say that every character is morally gray, but for every twisted monster from one group there’s a genuinely good, yet troubled person, or an awful person now attempting to do good.

Miroku attempts to ascend above the humans that made him. He attempts to distance himself from this gray cycle by establishing himself as the dominant force in this new world. However, in his final encounter with the heroes, he would get to meet his sister again, and through receiving her will, he recalled her words.

He realizes his mistake. In his delusions of grandeur, he lost track of what made humans truly happy. It’s easy to get lost in the despair of the modern world, as Psyren’s post-apocalyptic setting makes clear, but despite being capable of both great good and great evil, humans are simple beings that need only love to get by. In the final battle, Ageha as well is nearly killed, but is awakened by his friends calling out to him. In this battle, may I add, Ageha and Miroku work together for the first time, in order to defeat the embodiment of Psionic energy that was attempting to swallow the planet. Although unfortunately rushed thanks to the series’ early cancellation, the idea here is clear. The two opposites, the Sun and the Moon, manage to overcome the physical representation of the idea that some people are special, as in they are exempt from what makes humans human. Nobody can escape the nature of humanity within them, as much as a person may try to shut off their emotions, like Number 7 or Sakurako, or attempt to force everyone into subjugation, like Miroku or Grana, everybody is human, and everybody does what they believe is right for a cause they believe is just. 

While I’m not here to analyze every character, the majority of the main cast serves to strengthen the general theme, while mainly serving as their own characters. Kyle’s overwhelming desire for the thrill of combat during the final arc when stakes are the highest they can be, Kirisaki’s cowardly nature coming back around and causing him to become an incredibly powerful anti-psychic powers combatant, and Oboro’s original nature of being a curious, slightly emotionless man becoming warped by his long trip through the future as he implants himself with Taboo cores, the power sources of the monsters that live in the future, and acts purely out of his own desires to have an interesting life, chaotically “supporting” the protagonists near the end. Most notably would be the main love interest, Sakurako Amamiya, who stores the emotions that she can’t handle away in her subconscious, becoming a cold woman. However, her deep thoughts become a sentient personality and threaten to overtake her, but through accepting this part of herself, the two sides may fight together, expressing both sides of her personality and both sides of humanity. Sakurako harnessing this power and fighting alongside it is an inherent contradiction. One part of her was born from hiding her emotions away, and the other is the result of lacking said emotions, so how can they both exist? The answer is, they are not so simple. They are people, they are humans. They have their own will beyond why and how they were created.

Getting back to Ageha for a moment, his character arc is not inherently a positive one. If it were purely positive, it likely wouldn’t get across the message the way the author wanted. My only complaint is how quickly he comes to terms with himself and his issues, but this is due to a forcefully rushed ending by cancellation and I’ll be discussing it nonetheless, as the core idea gets through, simply subpar execution.

In the final battle against Miroku Amagi, Ageha is overcome with rage at Miroku’s attempt to kill his sister and cut off the last bit of human connection he has stopping him from reaching true impartiality. His ability, the Melzez Door, takes over his body and gives him a new form, where he becomes unable to hold back his anger and hatred for this man. While it had been heavily suggested up to this point that the nature of humanity is to act according to one’s own beliefs and not what is correct or incorrect, Ageha here refuses to listen to Miroku, and simply crushes him. Whether this is morally justified or not, Ageha is becoming more and more like Miroku. Number 7 even notes that she chose Ageha to help her because he reminds her of Miroku.

In the aftermath of the fight, Ageha is once again worried by his own turbulent emotions. If Ageha represents destruction, then one can only invoke change by accepting the destruction within themselves, however Ageha was swallowed by it. The one who can change the world is one who can accept the destructive nature of humanity, not one who denies it as Miroku does.

Ageha struggles to accept, however. Naturally so, no one person can achieve true enlightenment, and “accepting destruction” is not a naturally positive thing either. The light and the dark, human nature, is complicated, nobody will ever be satisfied with one single conclusion, other than the one you decide for yourself.

The final battle is against Ouroboros, which was earlier mentioned to be a reference to the deity of creation and destruction, the snake which continuously swallows itself in an endless circle. Wholeness, infinity. Ageha confronts the present Miroku, in his new “monstrous” form. By becoming a monster, he’s able to confront humanity’s destroyer. However, he is gravely injured during the fight and nearly dies. He is awakened from his 6 month coma by his friends calling out for him. The only way for one to truly confront humanity’s, they must steep themselves in said darkness, but through the bonds and connections you’ve formed, you tether yourself to reality, no matter how far gone you may be, no matter how hopeless the future may be.

A common symbol that reappears throughout the series is phones. By picking up mysterious phone calls from Nemesis Q, later revealed to be Miroku’s sister Number 7, the heroes are transported into the future, so that they may find out the truth about Miroku for her. Although Number 7 portrays herself as a hardened, empty person, describing herself as above the good and bad that humans are so engulfed by, ultimately she began the story so that she could get closer to her brother and learn why he became such a person, even if she doesn’t say it like that.

Phones are the method through which the characters are able to communicate with themselves in the present and future. Phones connect people. Nemesis Q’s catchphrase whenever transporting the heroes between times is “This world is connected.” You see how it becomes relevant by the end of this manga. As much as it may feel impossible to communicate with people sometimes, or as much as you may feel like you can’t even communicate with yourself, through basic human kindness, embodied by Number 7 through her message to Miroku and telephones through their connection to Number 7 herself, the world may become connected once again, and we can face our future with a smile.