High banks become valleys; deep valleys become hills.
A boy is indirectly connected to the fate of the world through a girl—that’s Kojima’s sekaikei! (Kidding.)
Many people have pointed out that some of Death Stranding’s imagery clearly draws on Neon Genesis Evangelion: the Beach and the sea of LCL, the gigantic Amelie and the giant white Rei, the sixth mass extinction and Third Impact. If we care to look, we can indeed find plenty of similarities between Death Stranding and Eva. When I first saw Sam wake up on the Beach, for instance, with five or however many figures suspended on the horizon, I immediately thought of the Mass Production Evas ganging up on Unit-02 in The End of Evangelion.
But these superficial connections aren’t what I want to talk about. Look carefully, and it’s easy to see that Death Stranding’s entire narrative structure is also Eva-like: both get “stranded” when it comes to “the mystery of the world.” Preventing the sixth mass extinction does not become an emotional climax. Its place is taken by “the personal mystery”—the loves, hatreds, passions, and grudges of this Holy Family of Sam, Amelie, and Cliff. Kojima has Higgs and Die-Hardman deliver reams of metaphors about ropes and sticks, knots and handguns, while on the gameplay side he devises asynchronous connections between players.
There are plenty of similar plot points to be found. Talking about connection is certainly not enough; we have to say what kind of connection. The United Cities of America (UCA) is an obvious metaphor for the state, but how many kinds of connection does it contain? The asynchronous connections of gameplay can be seen as the connections of Nozick’s “minimal state,” grounded in spontaneity—the connections of Austrian economics and neoliberalism. Die-Hardman’s and Higgs’s metaphors of ropes and sticks, knots and handguns are the connections of the “power-state,” and these are the connections that ultimately win. The loves, hatreds, passions, and grudges in the cutscenes, meanwhile, are the connections of the “sacred state,” of the “kingdom of heaven”: they represent blood ties, the Son of Man or the Son of God, and God’s love.
But what really holds this story together? Still “the beast that shouted love at the heart of the world”;1 still the “quasi-family” formed out of longing for family by people unable to form one. By sending Sam back from the Beach, Amelie becomes his “quasi-mother”; by reviving Lou, Sam in turn becomes Lou’s “quasi-father.” Ultimately, this is a story about “fathers,” a story about searching for the “Name-of-the-Father” and becoming a father, a story like Eva, a sekaikei story.
English-edition note: Teaser poster for Evangelion: 3.0+1.0, advertising a June 27, 2020 release. Its taglines read: “Continuation, and the end.” / “Not, and anti.”
So, to my mind, Death Stranding has major structural flaws in its storytelling: its gameplay and cutscenes are completely disconnected. The “connection” in gameplay is what binds America together as a community. It is a simple moral feeling, “one for all, all for one”; it is oxytocin and satisfaction. The “connection” in the cutscenes, by contrast, is a connection through blood ties within a family or quasi-family. With Kojima, of course, this takes a more concrete form: “strands,” or umbilical cords. The game’s long stretches of story, with the “umbilical cord” as their narrative thread, all point to this.
Here we might bring in Hiroki Azuma’s most fundamental definition of sekaikei, from his discussion of AIR: “Moe’s power stops at incapacity.”2 AIR is also a story about “fathers”: the player meets the heroines, tries to become their husband/father, and ultimately fails. So although sekaikei often spreads itself across an enormous canvas, its core is actually small—no bigger than a family. A boy meets a girl: this is really two people who have never formed a family trying, as adults, to take responsibility for the other person, to become a “husband,” or, over a longer span of time, a “father.” (I mention only “fathers” because sekaikei is, without question, a genre overwhelmingly dominated by the male gaze, especially in sekaikei porn games.) Sekaikei’s emotional tension lies in the blocking of this process of becoming a father, in this sexual impotence, this “incapacity.” Look at Death Stranding, and it is easy to see that its most fucking powerful emotional climaxes all center on becoming/being unable to become a father: Mama and the Bridge Baby, Heartman’s endless cycles, Cliff and Sam, Amelie and Sam, Sam and Lou. Perfectly orthodox sekaikei.
In fact, this is also why I have never had particularly high hopes for Evangelion: 3.0+1.0. “The mystery of the world” is not as important as people imagine. Even if Anno could fill in the rest of the worldbuilding, this would still be a story without much of a climax. What matters most in sekaikei is how it handles “the personal mystery”: whether Shinji, Asuka, Rei Ayanami, and Misato Katsuragi can take another step forward—or whether there is even such a step to take.
But we have all seen 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 (Q). Whether they have loosened the original’s intractable knots even slightly—or even touched those knots—is obvious. Frankly, the Rebuild films have sunk to the level of an oversized fan work. Is the atmospheric-entry battle at the beginning of Q well done? Yes. But I don’t think I particularly need an animator called Anno.
Another thing: Kojima’s Death Stranding is a lot more sekaikei than Makoto Shinkai’s work. I don’t want to compare the two stories, but when publicity—the commercial core of Weathering with You—is printed on every available surface in everyday life in Japan, sekaikei’s “sense of estrangement,” produced by the dissolution of the intermediate social sphere, ceases to exist. Sekaikei is supposed to take people out of everyday life, but Weathering with You brings its audience back through its ubiquitous offline publicity. Video games, on the other hand—excluding AR games—require you to enter cyberspace to play them. They have an inherent virtuality. Perhaps this is one reason for Mamoru Oshii’s remark that cinema “can’t win.” Kojima has “island” in his name, and Shinkai has “sea” in his—both familiar sekaikei images—but their work has it the other way around. What Kojima puts on screen is more like the sea; Makoto … can just carry on being an island …
There are other things to say. Death Stranding, for instance, makes sekaikei’s feminine metaphor for the nation-state fully concrete. Traditional nation-states all take the form of “Big Brother,” a typically masculine signifier. In sekaikei, however, the state is a feminine signifier associated with a girl. It is just that this image of “the fate of the world” is too vague, whereas the UCA is clearly a state founded by women, an institutional order given concrete form through feminine symbols. But there isn’t really much to say about that either.
One last thing: why do we need quasi-families to counter neoliberalism? Because under neoliberalism, we can be anyone, and so we are no one. Just look at groups on various platforms with names like “X-Fetish Compendium.” As if afflicted with logorrhea, everyone sticks labels on themselves, ever more marginal labels, endlessly fleeing toward smaller niches as though caught in a chase—all because we are beginning to realize that even in our sexuality, the one thing we seem to possess, we are dwindling to nothing at all. So, in this world where we are dwindling to nothing at all, who can say who Sam Bridges really is? Only “blood ties” remain. Family is the last remaining basis of our identity. But is it any use? Definitely not.
Discussion over Tea
Red Tea: In terms of Azuma’s definition, what Miao3 is discussing here is closer to the intellectual environment behind sekaikei = the postmodern withering of grand narratives, rather than a specifically otaku form of imagination arising within that environment. The withering of grand narratives gives rise to various forms of imagination that reflect this intellectual environment. Sekaikei should be one that reflects it at the level of the emotional relationship between you and me.4
So when Miao interprets Death Stranding through the question of family and says it is more sekaikei than Weathering with You, what he is really saying is that Death Stranding is more “devoid of grand narratives,” not more sekaikei. If we are going to discuss it in those terms, I think the central problem is how to replace the contingent “solidarity” in Death Stranding—solidarity with an unspecified someone—with sekaikei’s necessary solidarity with one particular person = the you-and-I relationship. The article still lacks an in-depth interpretation of this. Lift the veil of sekaikei from Miao’s piece, and it is still asking whether narratives of quasi-family and nation-state remain something we can rely on. But it overlooks the element of contingency in Azuma’s treatment of the question of family.