Destiny and Fate, Inevitability and Futility: a Look at X

It occurred to me recently that we have a tendency to romanticize the winter season a bit.

We look at the season as a time of warmth, friendship, fellowship, etc.  We think of shopping malls full of people looking for the perfect gift for so-and-so, a light dusting of snow making everything look silvery and enchanted, building snowmen, sledding, spending time with loved ones, exchanging gifts, having entirely too much Christmas ham or turkey or whatever you normally have for Christmas dinner (and enough cookies, candy, chocolate, and other miscellaneous sweets to provide job security for any number of dentists), and so on, and so forth.  Maybe you even go Christmas caroling; I don’t know.  I never did.  Well, I did once, with some friends.  On Halloween.  Because we were all stupid high-schoolers at the time, and it was all so random and lol.

Anyway, all of that is pretty much within the first couple of weeks of the official beginning of winter.  And then it’s over, and the hard reality sets in.

Winter is a son of a bitch.

Winter is long, and cold, and dark, and bleak.

Winter (if you’re an adult, living well above the Mason-Dixon line, and with no time for sledding and no possibility of snow days) is waking up before the sun, which tends to slack off around this time of year, and shows up far later in the day than is reasonable.  It’s scraping ice — sometimes frost, but all too often, it’s actually ice — off your windows, and going to a job where you will in all probability work until the sun has gone back down.

Winter is the miserable cold walk between your warm house and your freezing car, and the hope that you have everything you need already in your house, because you don’t want to go anywhere once you get back from work.  But it’s more than the outside cold.  It’s the inside cold, the feeling of bleak, frigid desolation in the very center of your being that no amount of turning up the furnace and curling up under blankets will ever dispel. 

Because winter is more than a season unto itself, as if that wasn’t enough.  No, instead, winter is the universe’s dirty little secret, the grim foreshadow of the inevitable future which, if we are fortunate, we will never live to see.  Winter is the foretaste of how the whole universe ends.  Oh, sure, first there will be the fire of the red giants and supernovas, but this is nothing more than the candle guttering before it goes out entirely.  And then?  When the last star burns out and collapses in upon itself, and there is no longer light, nor heat, nor sound, nor movement: That will be the winter that ends all winters.

These are the bleak thoughts I try hard not to dwell on, and I normally succeed.  Against them, I comfort myself by remembering that I will be dead, and that whatever happens after death, I will be beyond caring.  But these thoughts are always closer to the surface at this time of the year. 

Christmas and the New Year are over, and with them all the excuses for fun and family and fellowship that make the winter seem even remotely desirable.  Now it’s time to settle in for the long, dark freeze of the bleak season.

It’s time to read some X.

*             *             *

X wasn’t the first manga I ever bought (that honor belongs to Fist of the North Star).  It wasn’t the first series I really got into (that would be Bio-Booster Armor Guyver).  It wasn’t even the first CLAMP manga series I got into (that would be Magic Knight Rayearth).  But it was probably the first one that exerted such a strong grip on me.

I don’t read a lot of manga these days.  I don’t know why.  Part of it is the sheer cumbersome nature of collecting easily a dozen paperbacks’ worth of material (quite often much more) for just one story.  And of course, fans of American comics are laughing their asses off at me, because they've been following Batman or Superman or the X-Men or Spiderman or whatever for God knows how long now.  Those are comics that began well before I was born, have not stopped at any point since, and show every sign of continuing well on into the future, long after I am gone.  But the point remains.  I only have room for so much stuff, and eighteen volumes of anything seems kind of excessive these days.

Like most things, I got into X completely backward.

I was in college, in the year-and-change between when I graduated high school and joined the Army.  At the time, X the manga was being published under the name X/1999, because there was another comic being published in the U.S. at that time which had the X name.  So I got my first taste of X late, late in the fall semester of 1999 (appropriate, I know).  I had never heard of X before this at all, or of the four-woman group of manga creators known as CLAMP.  I just heard a few of my friends describing the movie based on the manga, which had recently come out, and it sounded pretty amazing.

I managed to acquire a fansub copy of the movie from my friend Sean.  In these days, that meant a VHS copy dubbed from an imported laserdisc.  Well, actually, it meant a standard VHS tape copied from a high-quality master VHS tape with subtitles, dubbed from a laserdisc.  Literally a copy of a copy.  Low-quality as it was, with its washed out colors (which seemed simply to add an extra layer of ethereal effect, to me) and slight blur, I was mesmerized.

It may help somewhat to understand that X had an unfair advantage at the time.  First off, I was a relatively new-minted anime fan.  Now, I had been a fan of anime for a few years by that point, but it was only recently that I had gotten a job.  With the job came the ability to start buying as I liked rather than recording whatever the Sci-Fi channel was showing on Saturday mornings — which was to say I was able to buy anime at all.  Having had my horizons so newly broadened, I was therefore highly impressionable.  Which is a charitable and somewhat roundabout way of saying that I wasn't terribly discerning.   Then there’s the fact that X struck me right on the unexpected intersection between my odd fascination with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, and my weird soft spot for shoujo-style artwork.

I could try to explain why I have the fascination with apocalyptica (pinpointing the when is easy; it’s the how and why that will take all day), but I’d rather focus on X, since it’s what I meant to write about in the first place.  The shoujo thing, I can actually explain with relative ease.  I like the sort of willowy, elegant designs.  It’s interesting to me to see the human form stylized in a way that expresses beauty without reference to power or sexuality, but rather emphasizes simple grace and elegance.  I don’t want everything to look shoujo, but I certainly enjoy some of the things that do.  And at that time, for me, it didn't get more shoujo-looking than CLAMP.

Unfortunately, the movie was the easiest thing for me to get hold of.  The manga was harder to track down.

What you have to understand is that these were the bad old days.  The whole market for anime and manga was different then.  Tokyopop had yet to really come into their own.  They were around, but not as they were in their heyday just a couple of years later.  They were publishing manga under their Mixx label (an offshoot of their magazine, Mixxzine, which was meant to provide a mixture of shounen and shoujo manga).   The manga boom hadn’t happened yet.  Most manga came through two publishers so far as I can recall: Viz and Dark Horse (by way of Studio Proteus).  At any rate, those are the only two prominent publishers I remember from that time.  You might have found a slim selection of manga at a bookstore back then, but chances were better at a comic shop, and even there, the selection could be most generously described as “a hodge-podge”.  God alone knew what they might have in stock on a given day.  I certainly didn’t, and it never felt much as if the person running the store gave even half of a damn about it.  It’s a small miracle that I managed to collect even most of the series (let alone all of Magic Knight Rayearth and all of the Guyver manga that was ever made available in English) before my manga-buying slowed to its current trickle.

*             *             *

It’s always interesting to see your own culture and its trappings viewed from a very different perspective, or borrowed by people who didn't grow up steeped in it, especially if it’s purely for entertainment.  It can just as easily be an offensive experience, I suppose.  And I can imagine some people feeling that way about X, since it involves religion, and in this case it’s less a matter of “borrowing” than it is of “flat-out misappropriation”,  but whatever.  To the extent that I’m religious at all, I care far more about the people and the ideas native to my religion than the mythological structure.

In loose terms – very loose terms – X tells the story of the end of the world, as originally outlined in the Book of Revelation.  Sort of.

Kind of.

You have seven seals and seven harbingers, and a Beast, and… you know, I think that’s pretty much it.  It’s been a long time since I felt compelled to read through the most metal part of the Bible, but I don’t recall there having been any psychics, super-computers, young and irreverent Buddhist monks-in-training, Shinto shrine maidens who can summon swords from their palms, or anything like that.  I mean, again, it has been a while.  But you’d think they’d mention something like that in sermons.  I can guarantee you it would spike attendance.

So it goes down like this:

The year is 1999 (at the time, you see, this was The Future).  Powerful forces are gathering in Tokyo, a modern-day Babylon, which will determine the fate of the world.  On the one side, you have the seven Dragons of Earth, also known as the seven harbingers.  These are seven individuals specially gifted with various destructive powers, whose goal is to wipe out humankind.  Though they themselves are of course human, they believe humanity is a blight upon the Earth, and must be destroyed for the Earth to survive.  Opposing them are the seven Dragons of Heaven, also known as the seven seals.  These are people likewise gifted who fight in defense of humankind.  Both sides are guided by dreamseers, a pair of sisters who, through their dreams, prophesy different versions of the future, and guide their followers toward the outcomes they see and desire.

It turns out that the fate of the world rests on the integrity of seven specific locations throughout Tokyo, particular landmarks of the city.  If all of these places are destroyed, that destruction will trigger the end of the world.

The Dragons of Heaven attempt to stop this by way of an ability each of them has, which the Dragons of the Earth do not.  Each Dragon of Heaven is capable of creating a barrier called a kekkai, which pulls any combatants and the area encompassed by the barrier into an alternate dimension.  Damage done to the area within the barrier will not be reflected in the real world, unless the barrier’s maker dies within it.  If the attacking harbinger can be driven off, and the seal survives, then the damage dealt to that location never actually happens.

The end begins when Kamui Shiro returns to Tokyo after several years’ absence.  His mother (his only living relative) has passed away under mysterious circumstances.  Her dying wish is that he would return to Tokyo and try to change his fate.  He knows the power that lies within him, as do both sides of the emerging conflict.  Both sets of Dragons, Earth and Heaven alike, seek to recruit Kamui to their side, in the certain knowledge that he is destined to lead one side to victory over another.  Both dreamseers have seen it and know it to be true.  Kamui, meanwhile, simply wants to protect his childhood friends, Fuuma (a young man Kamui’s age) and Kotori (Fuuma’s younger sister, and a budding dreamseer in her own right).

While he initially comes across as callous and uncaring, we quickly learn that this is Kamui’s defense mechanism.  As with all the other players in this game, Kamui knows the stakes, and he knows the path he is destined to walk – or rather, the paths from which he is expected to choose.  At first, he wants no part of it, but it becomes all too clear that the conflict is unavoidable.  He will have to choose a side, and fight, and so he determines that in order to save his childhood friends, he will have to side with the Dragons of Heaven, and fight for humankind.

It’s at precisely this point that the story takes a hard left turn into the horrific.

A friend of mine (it may well have been the same friend who helped me acquire my VHS copy of the X movie) once told me that pretty much every work by CLAMP is notable for having a dark twist somewhere in it.  Not only does X fail spectacularly to avert this particular tendency, it stands as perhaps the single greatest example of it in CLAMP’s entire catalogue, then or now.

It turns out that both dreamseers were right, after all. 

A Kamui is destined to lead the Dragons of Heaven.  A Kamui is also destined to lead the Dragons of the Earth.  It comes down to the dual meanings of his name, which don’t really come across in English.  I’ll let Wikipedia do the heavy lifting for me, here:

“His name (神威 Kamui) carries a double connotation: "the one who represents the majesty of God", meaning the one who protects the world and carries out God's will; and "the one who hunts the majesty of God", meaning the one who kills those given God’s power and destroys the world.”

Kamui is not simply the character’s name, but a title.  And there is another Kamui in the story, a twin star, destined to take on the opposite role, regardless which side Kamui chooses.

That twin star, that other Kamui, is Fuuma, one of the childhood friends who was Kamui’s whole reason for coming back to Tokyo in the first place.

While the theme of fate and inevitability is shot through the whole story, it’s at this point that we see exactly how heavy-handed it gets.  And for me, this is the only real sticking point for the story.  I like the idea of duality (another major theme in the story), and I can appreciate the dramatic irony of Kamui being forced into a deadly conflict against one of the two people he specifically wanted to save.  And the conflict is deadly.  Rightly or wrongly, both sides seem to have surrendered themselves to the idea that the only way to win is to slaughter the enemy.

But Fuuma’s adopting the role of Kamui’s enemy happens for no better reason than, as we say on TV Tropes, “Because Destiny Says So” (I hate resorting to Troper-speak to describe things, but when the shoe fits…).  Fuuma has no stake, either practical or ideological, in the fight between both forces.  Indeed, aside from Kotori’s vague and frightening nightmares (which he has no reason to believe are anything but just that), he has no reason to believe such a fight is even occurring.  If he had a reason of his own to join the Dragons of the Earth, so that Kamui’s alliance with the Dragons of Heaven would push him over the edge into making the opposite choice, I would be set.  I would be goddamned riveted, is what I would be, and in such a way that I could not be more so without the use of actual rivets.

But even this only serves to demote X from “sublime” in my book to “really, really good”.  Maybe for me, it just scratches that itch.  It hits all the right notes of duality, touches on eschatological themes, and it has some truly gorgeous artwork.  It’s not a coincidence that my first art book was the price-gouging X Zero, which, ninety dollars or no ninety dollars, has still somehow been worth every penny.

Even at its most gruesome (and it gets very, very gruesome), X manages to be compelling – darkly poetic, if not always beautiful, when it revels in the gore.  In this, it straddles the boundary line between shounen and shoujo manga in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen.  For those not in the know, shoujo manga tends to focus on the relationships between the characters, and on their thoughts and feelings, and is generally marketed toward girls and young women.  X has this as part of its focus, and gives us the graceful, elegant character designs we’ve generally come to expect from most shoujo manga as well. 

Neatly balanced against all this thoughtfulness is the savage violence that erupts whenever the two sides of the conflict engage.  This is generally the territory of shounen manga, which often focuses more on action and conflict, and is generally marketed to boys and young men.  Given the nature of the conflicts and the violence, it might even be more accurate to describe this aspect of it as seinen, which is marketed more toward adult men.  Shoujo typically shies away from this level of brutality, but CLAMP is happy to shove your face right in it, perhaps to show how desperate and terrible people can be when this much is on the line.

There is a profound sense of duality within the story.  On the personal level, we have the potential and mutually exclusive fates from which Kamui can choose.  In a larger sense, we have the two groups diametrically opposed to each other, whose goals and ideologies make it both impossible for them to coexist and equally impossible for them not to come into conflict.  In a still larger sense, we have the two potential, and also mutually exclusive, fates of the world.  One side seeks to eliminate humankind from the world, while the other has faith that humankind will not destroy the world (despite how things appear at present), and chooses to leave the world in human hands.

The duality is even demonstrated outside the story proper, by the very juxtaposition of the narrative and the title itself.  The story relentlessly plugs the idea that fate cannot be denied.  Choices may be apparent, but consequences are fixed.  The destined order of events will not be flouted.  Yet the very title itself, X, was chosen because the letter represents possibility, and the lack of any fixed value, quantity, or inherent meaning.  This is a story all about constants and named after a variable, where most of the characters know that they are irrevocably committed to a particular cause and course of action, and treat all of it as a foregone conclusion.  They come to this sense of inevitability with feelings that range from grim determination, to stoic indifference, to cheerful fatalism.

Let’s take a look at one of these characters, to give some idea.  We’ll look at Sorata.  It was foretold in the stars when he was born (this series has kind of a thing for astrology) that he would die protecting the woman he loved.  Therefore, he was raised pretty much from birth to stick to Kamui’s side at all times and fight for him with all his might when the time came.  The logic here is very clear.  Since it is known that Sorata will only die protecting the woman he loves, then it is impossible for him to die any other way.  Thus he can serve as an invincible shield for Kamui, since nothing he does as such can possibly lead to his death.

The sense of fate is near what you see in Greek tragedy, where the will of the gods cannot be defied, and every time the heroes act to prevent it, they find that those same actions were in fact what would lead them to it all along.  You feel sometimes like it's just the knowing that's truly damning.  Oedipus would never have been set on the path to kill his father and marry his mother if his parents hadn't heard it from the oracle in the first place, after all.

Really, it's all very neatly put together.  The only really troubling thing about X  is its ending.  Endings. 

It’s complicated.

*             *             *

There are three ways to experience X, and each of them is a bit different from the others. 

The first, of course, is the manga, originally published by Viz Media.  It has the advantage of being closest to the creators’ original vision, and having a larger story with more elements to it.  It also has the disadvantage of being unfinished.

However much it may straddle the shounen-shoujo divide, X was published as a shoujo comic, in a shoujo magazine, and was subject to the same expectations as other shoujo manga.  As it turns out, you can’t go brutally subverting the expectations of your publisher without some consequences.  X was put on hiatus by the original manga magazine that was publishing the story, and it was a few years before CLAMP either found another outlet for the story, or convinced the original publisher ot give it another go.  I'm not sure which.  But it was again put on hiatus by the publisher due to the relentlessly dark nature of the material (and probably some of the graphic violence, also).  This time, it seems to have been for good.  Wikipedia lists it as “ongoing”, but this is probably wishful thinking at best.  The manga remains unfinished, and is increasingly likely to remain so the more time goes by.

The second X experience is the movie.

I have very conflicting feelings about the movie.

On the one hand, X the movie is gorgeous.  It’s not gorgeous in perhaps the same way a Ghibli film or something directed by Mamoru Oshii tends to be, but the quality of the artwork and the fluidity of its animation is consistently high.  The movie was made in 1996 (before the manga was put on its first hiatus), and holds up extremely well today.  It’s a feast for the eyes and the ears, keeping in mind of course that it preserves virtually none of what makes the X story any good.

I don’t mind spoiling it, because I have no respect for the story of the movie.  The movie, for its part, seems to have no respect for the story of the manga, so it all evens out.  And anyway, I can’t think of a better way to explain how much the story has been pared down to its absolute barest essentials to even fit it (uncomfortably, for all that) into the framework of a feature film. 

The cast of X consists of seven seals and seven harbingers, two dreamseers, Kamui, Fuuma, and Kotori.  And Kamui’s mother, in a sort of flashback.  That’s twenty named characters, all of whom are important to the story in the manga.

Of these, Kamui alone survives the movie, which is about an hour and a half long.  Some characters even manage to die multiple times, by way of dreams or visions.

The movie is a fucking bloodbath, is what I’m saying.

Now, again, it is a visual and aural feast of a fucking bloodbath, but it’s still that, just the same.

X the movie has a kind of slow but steady, crushing weight to it.  It doesn’t pick up speed much, but then, it doesn’t need to.  It moves forward relentlessly, killing off its cast without granting any particular sense of importance to any individual death.  These are people we are meant to care about, and they die with impunity.  There are so many of these deaths that their collective weight wears on you in a way that any one character’s demise never could (though some stand about for being remarkably cruel or brutal).  There is such a relentless, overbearing weight of dread in the story that, very early on, you will come to assume (correctly) that nothing truly good will happen to any of these people by the time the movie’s done.

A better movie might make you feel wrung out at the end of this sort of meat grinder.  But this isn’t that better movie.  So you simply come out of the movie feeling disappointed, and maybe a little disturbed.  And if you’re new to this, and don’t have the sort of weird predilections I do, which make you say “More of this, please!” when you watch a movie like this with no real grounding, you’re probably just going to be confused.  And disturbed.  Most definitely disturbed.

The movie may prove difficult to find, as it was originally licensed by Manga Entertainment.  The license has since expired, and has not been picked up by anyone else.

The third and final way to experience X, which has the benefits of being both more coherent and also finished, would be the 24-episode TV series which ran from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2002.  Animated by Madhouse, the TV series is both very technically proficient and also well-paced (if a bit sedate).  Happily, you can still find it, as Funimation picked it up after Geneon lost the license.

While there are some elements of the manga that didn’t make it into the TV series, and not all of the characters get the same amount of development (or any at all), they at least get some room to breathe, and enough time that we can care about the ones we’re supposed to care about.  The ending to the TV series also feels just about right, as opposed to the movie’s, which just felt sort of tacked-on and a bit anti-climactic. 

*             *             *

I began this with a frankly dark, maybe even morbid introduction.  Part of it is the season, and part of it is just that those thoughts exist, and they don’t disappear, they just kind of go away for a while.  But they always come back.

Earlier, I said that I didn’t want to wrestle with the hows and whys of why I like apocalyptic stories.  And that’s still true.  I don’t.  Not here, anyway, and not now.  But I can offer up one bit of explanation in closing, to hopefully end this on a positive note.  It’s this:

Whatever my feelings about the grim inevitability of things at any particular moment, I still wrestle with it.  Nihilism and cynicism are so easy.  They are too easy, and I long ago learned to distrust very easy solutions to big problems.  Simple solutions, sure.  Big problems usually do have simple solutions, in my experience.  But simple isn’t the same thing as easy. 

What I like most about X, maybe even love, is the characters.  Even as they recognize the sheer immutability of their fates, they play with those certainties.  They find the wiggle room, sparse as it seems, to be who they are, to have their own lives, shortened though they may be.  There is something in that struggle, however much more immediate and urgent it is for them, that resonates with my own to an extent.

I like the idea that you can face the inevitability of annihilation, so long as you can give meaning to who and what you are, and what you do.

There is something amazing in that, to me, that I’m not sure I will ever have the words or the ability or the time to untangle completely.