#slayers evolution-r

Radical Acceptance means acknowledging that bad things happen to good people and accepting the adverse events in your life and your feelings about them. This is a therapeutic principal that has roots in various Buddhist traditions and in Slayers you see some characters embody this and other characters fight this, and ultimately in the novels Lina has her own struggle with this when Luke merges with Shabranigdu. In Slayers, characters who embody Radical Acceptance would be Sylphiel, Rubia (novels), and Gourry. Characters who resist would be Rezo, Luke and Zuuma. And there are those in this grey zone in between, Naga and Amelia would be examples there, both of them having different maladaptive reactions to their mother’s death (alcoholism for Naga, and Amelia’s rigid justice based world view and excessive “I’m okay” cheeriness). Going back to Sylphiel, she has to accept that Sairaag was destroyed and most of the people she grew up with and loved have died and that the man she loves loves someone else. Her feelings of grief and rejection and whatever else she feels are understandable and valid and worthy of compassion and while we only get hints of her grieving process, are likely something that she works through. This is how some people heal from terrible tragedies and move forward.

But other people get stuck. They can’t accept that it happened or their feelings. Some try to reverse it (Halciform). Or they try to make it right by hurting others (Luke). And the process invariably destroys them.

In the novels, Zuuma is stopped because he still loves Abel. This is where the deviation in the anime gets interesting, because Zuuma doesn’t have enough humanity in him to still love Abel. His suffering and inability to heal have literally transformed him into a demon. And rather than embrace the son who is the last remnant of the love he and his wife shared and who his wife lives through, he killed him.

The way it is set up in the anime makes sense to me. Zuuma felt betrayed by his father and blamed his father for his wife’s death. After going through a betrayal like that I would imagine that Zuuma’s ability to love his son was stunted. I can see him clinging to an irrational belief (cognitive distortion) that everyone would eventually betray him or let him down as a result of having a powerful figure like a father do that to him (and in Zuuma’s case it became what is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy as Abel tried to stop him from hurting others. Zuuma in the anime couldn’t see his son as a boy to be nurtured but someone who would inevitably betray him and thus lost his humanity in the process.