A lesson in Alternative Literature-by X on human worth

My mock exams are finally over. Chemistry was boring as usual, Biology was interestingly hard, Maths was just plain annoying, but English Lit was seriously fun! Anyway, the computer room in my school is finally available, so here's the article I wrote. This is the factual evidence-as to how I respond to this I will talk about another time, the post is already ridiculously long.

The thing that got me thinking was the anime movie X. Though it may seem draggy at times, that was probably because it failed in its primary motive-getting you to think, to ponder the storyline and ideas it introduces. This, along with a handful of other techniques, help make the anime a thinking one. If you are one who always thinks about what you are watching you will find this anime quite appealing. It was also a real eye-opener, its using of these techniques making it an excellent case study for Alternative Literature. Violence, for example, was used quite effectively; skillfully manipulating emotions with it to exacerbate the sense of sheer waste and suffering that was the central idea of the anime as a whole. I feel, however, that there are too few issues raised to make this anime "good" solely because of its intellectual worth.

The storyline in X is a simple one-there are 2 sides-the dragons of earth, dedicated to the purification of earth through the purging of mankind, and the dragons of heaven, dedicated to stopping the former from accomplishing their objective. It is thus easy to draw a line between the 2, separating them entirely with the dragons of heaven being "good" and the dragons of earth being "bad". An issue raised here, though, is that if this is really fair.

It is easy enough to separate the 2 as such in the film, as certain things that are done in the movie are quite able to make you feel as such. The protagonist, Kamui Shirou, for example, joins the Dragons of Heaven. Furthermore, we are also shown the argument of the Dragons of Heaven first, thus giving their case added "clout" in a viewer’s eyes. Even without these techniques, it is still easy to make such a distinction. After all, killing of all humans!? So much death and destruction! Of course that’s bad!

But is it? Yesterday, I watched a documentary about "killer squid". The species examined in particular was a certain species called the Humboat, whose main dwelling place is a sea off the Mexican coast. Fishermen there fear the creature more than sharks and tell stories about how many have met a horribly grisly fate under this "sea monster" It has also been known to exhibit cannibalism, painting a picture of it being a lethal, remorseless killing machine that eats anything that moves.

The documentary, however, continues to say how the Humboat is fished extensively and in an extremely violent, similarly grisly way called jigging. When the squid was observed away from the threat of being jigged by fishermen in their natural habitat (supposedly for the 1st time) though, the divers observed them to be peaceful, playful creatures that exhibited astounding intelligence-quite unlike the picture the fishermen painted. What thus emerges is that the squid’s viciousness is thus a defensive reaction to being overfished, which you have to admit makes sense. In other words, humans are the ones that made the squid turn violent.

All this devaluation of human beings could not have come at a more appropriate time. Ms Beautifuk's and Fr0's blogs also offer ocassionally the flip side of the story, and I have even seen an organization- www.vhemt.org -with the motto "May we live long and die out". It advocates humans to stop having children on similar grounds.

"Because after all, your next child has a higher probability of becoming a serial rapist than finding a cure for AIDS or cancer."

So what do you all think? Tag tag tag!!!