Kindness in Tragedy

 Recently, I watched Darker than Black.

I had heard it was a show that had an honest depiction of qualities of sociopathy – even holding a main character with the traits.  However, it also sounded almost cringingly edgy.  Here are super-human assassins, all of whom fight unceasingly for shady organizations, and here is are the government officials who try to catch them.  Throw in dead-eyed women who exist in silence, called Dolls, and it starts to seem like something to pass over.

As it turns out, Darker than Black is very aware of what it is.

With the first two episodes, it cements itself as a “next Tuesday” humanistic story with tinges of a sci-fi that, for a rare moment, is not obsessed with beating off about its world building.  Featuring a Chinese main character who encounters well-meant compliments that are shown for the microaggressions they are, featuring women whose interiority is the point of the episode, featuring a range of age and experience that is all affected by the fact that 10 years ago, the world changed and not at all – Darker than Black has a lot to say, but is not very interested in the “Whys” of a science-fantasy wall that makes entire regions of the world disappear.

That focus is its greatest strength.

Scientists throw around phrases that sound like foreign islands.  Police name off star systems to disclose superhuman Contractors.  But the common person – the people most episodes are about – they don’t have the same words.  They don’t know the hidden mysteries of the world.  The answers of the Hell’s Gate, the one that is blocked off by a massive wall that bisects Tokyo, are unavailable to the average citizen.  Let alone the poor resident, or the undercover agent who is only told enough to survive.  In this way, Darker than Black gives tell to what kind of viewer is watching, and the reality of our situations.

Rather than discussing science, or the theories behind why Contractors came to be, the main character talks to a scientist while star-gazing about the fake sky above them.  The most the scientist can say is it’s there “Just Because.”  There’s no scientific basis for this tragedy and instead, he takes it for what it means to himself.  The two of them continue to stare at the sky, because it is an echo of dreams the two of them once had.  In the show’s eyes, that’s enough.

In another episode, two contractors spend more time talking about the past, before becoming Contractors.  Never the why, never the how.  They discuss what mattered before the new sky came, rather than the target they are chasing down.  A doll regaining lost memories does not explain why or how she became a doll.  Only that she has found something here, something that lets her make the honest choice in what she wants to do.  There is no language to explain themselves.  Contractors and Dolls only have what words and stereotypes the world has given them.  The show, in its own way, is the experience of using questions to find answers that people have not been allowed to have.

This element of the show is striking, but with that honesty in mind, it also displays my favorite quality of the show.  That is, the importance of kindness in tragedy.

Tragedy is a genre that inundates the abused and traumatized.  It is what most major characters in Darker than Black are heading toward.  Or it would be, if not for an in-series awareness of what people like this go through just for the sake of survival.

Tragedy in media has a flawed history.  For every empathetic and intelligent depiction, there are a hundred more far more interested in the spectacle of human suffering.  Kindness in tragedy is not the narrative of a suicide victim that makes others realize the beauty of life.  It is not a terminally ill patient who alights on the shoulders of cynical youth to teach them the flaws of their ways.  It is not the person filled with righteous anger and murderous vengeance at the expense of a rape victim, yet again allowed no interiority.  It is not the white savior inspired by the injustices of a land they have never been to.  It is not the story of a starving worker donating their last dollar to charity.  It is not the narrative of the worker who stays in the midst of the fire to keep doing their job.  It is not the tale of a person giving up safety for the sake of survival.

Kindness in tragedy is when, even if some tragedies are inevitable, the people involved still try.  When an investigator two decades past his prime still does everything in his power to aid a young girl who died years ago.  When a young woman beset with the harsh reality of her own trauma and adulthood still wants to open the door for a girl like her.  When a girl dealing with the mysterious and suspect deaths of her entire family chooses to believe in magic rather than chasing down an impossible truth to her death.  When people have destroyed their lives and died, but come together in their way to give each other a life beyond their assigned fate.

Darker than Black means that people die.  That friendships perish and loved ones leave you, betray you.  It means the world will not change, so people change themselves.  It means that even when the main character knows a woman he is guiding is no longer herself, even when she does not realize what has happened to her, he still helps her as though she is alive.  It means that a young girl does not give up on a classmate who has given into how the world expects her to be.  It stands for the child who loses one family, and despite the terrible circumstances that lead them to meet, finds a new one in her personal tragedy.  It is the man who knows he should not be capable of dreaming, but keeps looking to false stars anyway.  It is the sibling who fights because he refuses to accept the monster society has painted his Contractor sister to be.

Kindness in tragedy is the fact that, even if the world says otherwise, individual people are capable of seeing each other as human beings.  The hardest part is that there is no easy option.  The kindest part is that you can choose more than the binary options, the us-versus-them mentality that plagues institutional society.

The most revolutionary idea in Darker than Black is that people are never just one thing.  It’s simple.  But the execution is never easy.  There is no button that can be pressed to fix the world, no wish that can help everyone.  At the end of the day, at the end of mad scientists and corrupt officials, is only the fact that regular people have to change – that they have to acknowledge their evil and their good.

Tokyo is split into two.  Who cares how the wall was built or what exactly Hell’s Gate is.  What does it matter the materials of the wall or the rational explanations of scientists to explain something that is about much more than equations and elemental composition.  To the characters, it is the reflection of their own personal struggle.  The constant reflection of Tokyo’s false skyline against a wall is the cast’s lost opportunity to understand what lies on the other side.  In the wall, the gate, and the breakdown of both, viewers can only find the reflection of what the cast comes to decide about the people they have chosen to be.