If you’re following along with me on my special Darker than Black Google Notebook, you’ll know what’s coming, at least in general. This post is about fear.
Episodes three and four are horror from beginning to end. The one decent fight is even minimized and cast into hidden cause and effect (like knives appearing from off-screen to pierce a Contractor’s arm) to amplify the sense of horror.
The new focus of the arc is a schoolgirl (of course — in fact, if all the affected people in each arc are women of one “cute” type or another, I’m going to be very irritated) who is a firestarter, though she doesn’t know that. The episode engages spectacularly horror of the self. Mai learns she is a firestarter slowly, coming out of dazes to find trash afire. This is her, nothing outside of her.
I put on my gnote that “Horror is often the interruption of everyday life by the extraordinary; it illustrates how fragile our created system of life is.” I can’t put it better than I did, so there you go. Horror messes up our lives. It’s one of the ways to tell the difference between a horror story and an urban fantasy story: how fucked up does the protagonist’s life get once things start to get out of the ordinary? If you’ve read any of the Anita Blake books, you’ll know that Anita’s system of life stays pretty much the same, though her personal issues increase. Those are fantasies, even though they’re about vampires and zombies. I am Legend, on the other hand, destroys the artificial but functioning system of civilization, first for Neville, then for the entire world. That’s horror. It pulls away the mask we’ve put on the world and shows us we’re at the world’s mercy after all. That’s why it’s creepy, even if you don’t believe in vampires.
Darker than Black has plenty of horror stuff in it; I don’t think this arc is the only time that will be clear. But as a single story, this arc functions as horror more than anything else. It has a father experimenting on his daughter to protect her, only to actually make things worse (like in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Hawthorne — the flower motif also plays into the resemblance). It reveals that the Contractors are born, not made, adding to the horror of lineage we’re already feeling (you like that? You should read “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by Lovecraft). Mai comes to accept her lineage, but only by murdering her friend and (circuituously) her father. She destroys her own past and is forced to sing over the ashes, at the feet of her father’s corpse. This is some creepy shit. Her personality seems to drain away from her in the final moments, leaving her, apparently, what everyone assumes a Contractor is: less than a person. Are all the Contractors without affect because of the trauma that marks their early lives? Or is she like Li: affectless when using her powers, but still human otherwise? Is Li’s life a preview of hers?
Yeah, sucks to be her. I thought I should also mention something I forgot last time: the Hell’s Gate reminds me of the area affected by the quantum disaster from the novel Nova Swing by M. John Harrison. People are drawn to it, the rules of nature don’t seem to apply (really, no one has understood them yet), and it acts like a center for the town in which it hits, drawing people to it or pushing at the lives of those outside it, though never without a volition of its own. It’s simply a place. Anyway. Thought I’d mention that.
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