#tamano

Cruelty of the mountain fire demons

Here's some sweet juicy angst for @purble-turble

"My darling mk, you will marry me and live by my side for all eternity!"

"My Tamano, you are mine and mine alone! No one will take you away from me again!"

"No, I will never be with you! You lied to me and imprisoned and tortured me! You hurt and nearly killed my friends! You can forget it!"

Throughout the episode, its clear that Riku doesn’t help Tamano out of the goodness of his heart.  He uses Tamano’s problem in order to get rid of Homura, all while casually manipulating everyone around him.

While Tamano is disturbed by Homura setting himself on fire, Riku looks thrilled. Like the cat who ate the canary and the cream.  This is what he wanted: not to rescue someone from an abusive relationship, but for a personal agenda.  Destroy the one who burned the forest.

His reasoning is quite striking.  “Nothing good comes from loving a human being; not for the Great Dog Demon, and not for Sesshoumaru”.

Could it be Riku, being a hanyou, blames his troubles on demon/human relationships? Or more specifically, does he believe all demon/human relationships are bad?

Its interesting because, we already have hanyou hate on the show.  In the OG series, Shiori and Jinenji suffer from discrimination.  In Yashahime, both Konton and Nikosen detest hanyou and believe them to be abominations.  But Riku, being hanyou himself (most likely - he has rounded ears but can use the pearls), sees it from the other side.

I wonder if Riku is an inverse foil to Inuyasha.  Inuyasha had a rough childhood though he did have a loving mom.  He grew up and got to be accepted by Myoga, Kikyou, then Kagome, Miroku, Sango, Shippou and everyone else.  He ultimately realized there was nothing wrong with being hanyou.  But maybe Riku never got that validation. Maybe he saw too many relationships like Homura and Tamano and began to paint them all with the same broad stroke.

Another thing that’s interesting is how he judges Homura in the same lot as Sesshoumaru and Inupapa.  Inupapa died for Izayoi, but out of love, not jealousy.  Sesshoumaru presumably gave up his title for Rin, but he still got separated from her all the same.  There is definitely a tragic element to being inlove with a demon.  But not all tragedies are the same. To insist every demon/human relationship is doomed because of power imbalance is a terrible judgement to make.

So I re-watched the episode: Towa drops her cell phone and we can see 10:39 on the screen, then Setsuna picks it up and they start talking about what a cell phone is. The first time I saw this, it seemed like a totally unnecessary and out of place scene, but apparently if you headed to minute 10 of Inuyasha episode 39, you would see Kagura appear for the first time.

And it's true! that is exactly the minute we see Kagura for the first time in the entire series:

This seemed very strange to me, so I continued to watch the episode. Towa explains that on a cell phone you can check the time and watch videos and search the web, among other things. And while she talks, we see the screen of her cell phone again, marking the time 10:41. So, based on what we know so far, we would have to take the minutes on the screen as the chapter to which we should go.

And if we go to episode 41 of Inuyasha we find:

Yeah, Koharu's Chapter!  (You won't see this scene in minute 10, but 41 is Koharu's chapter). Now, I know this might just be a coincidence, but I found it very interesting that, in fact, Koharu's chapter has a lot of similarities and parallels to the chapter we are currently in in Hanyo no Yashahime, Tamano´s chapter. 

Not just the story of both girls being 13-14 years old and being harassed by older men and needing help from the protagonists to escape from them. The message is also similar, about how terrible and disgusting it is for an adult to approach a child like that. Also the visual parallels, like, the first time we see Tamano and Koharu, both girls are running away from their abusers.

Look at this visual parallel when both girls tell their story:

And how they show us the fear they both feel when grown men approach them inappropriately. 

Another character, this time in Yashahime, wearing the infamous “birthing kimono”, just like Rin’s. 

This is not actually a theory, but I will tag it as so, because it is my own analysis about this episode.

After Tamano told the YashahimeGroup about her story with Homura, the group began to discuss about jealousy and Towa and Moroha’s answer got my attention:

I was uncomfortable with their saying, but then I realized that they are 14 years old, and they don’t know what jealousy is, so they relate Homura’s jealous actions to their own life experience to form their opinion about this matter.

Moroha has openly said that she is a lonely kid that doesn’t like to be alone, so getting someone’s attention even by jealous actions feels nice in her own conception, because that means that someone cares for her and that is exactly what she is missing.

Towa, by the other side, relates jealousy with obsession for something and compares it with the addiction she has with her phone.

For grownups it is a sad thing that both of them said, but it is how teenagers react to something “new” to them. Making assimilation with what they know already is the best way to form their own ideas about some topic (that is my teacher vein talking right now), and that is what follows during this episode.

After comparing her own obsession, Towa knows what Homura will do after losing Tamano, the focus of his obsession:

But having an opinion made only with things related to their life experience is not enough to stand by their ideas about something. After experiencing it and seeing the extensions of Homura’s actions, they changed their mind about Homura’s jealousy.

Moroha was the first to react. She understood that having jealousy for someone, doesn’t gives he/she right to make their person his/hers:

And Towa realized that having an addiction is not a good thing, because in the end it can kill you, like it did with Homura, so she reasoned her thoughts and choosed to let go of her phone:

It can still sound cold by a lot of viewers, but Sunrise is passing a message through it, aimed for teenagers like those girls. Sunrise is telling us that caring for someone is not the same as wanting to possess it and an addiction is bad, be it with someone or something. And for adult viewers, Sunrise is directly saying us that jealousy will destroy us, like it did with Homura.

I am not enjoying Hanyo no Yashahime very much, but I think it was a well thought message made in a way that will reach all the audience of this anime, though.