A boy is indirectly connected to the fate of the world through a girl: that’s Kojima’s sekaikei! (Wrong.)
A lot of people have pointed out that some of the imagery in Death Stranding obviously draws on EVA: the Beach and the sea of LCL, giant Amelie and giant white Rei, the sixth mass extinction and Third Impact. If you go looking, you really can find plenty of similarities between Death Stranding and EVA. When Sam wakes up on the Beach, for instance, with five or however many human figures floating on the horizon, my first thought was of the Mass Production Evas swarming Eva Unit Two in EOE.
But I am not talking about connections this superficial. Look closely and it is easy to see that the whole story structure of Death Stranding is Eva-like as well: both become “stranded” at the level of the “mystery of the world.” Preventing the sixth mass extinction never becomes the emotional climax. What takes its place is the “personal mystery”: the love and hatred within the holy family of Sam, Amelie, and Cliff. Kojima has Higgs and Die-Hardman deliver a barrage of metaphors about ropes and sticks, knots and handguns, while on the gameplay side he builds a system of asynchronous connection among players.
You can find any number of similar plot elements. But simply talking about connection is not enough; you have to say what kind of connection it is. The UCA’s metaphor of the nation is easy to spot, but how many kinds of connection does it contain? The asynchronous connection of the gameplay can be understood as the connection of Nozick’s “minimal state,” founded on spontaneity: the connection of Austrian School economics and neoliberalism. Die-Hardman and Higgs’s metaphors of ropes and sticks, knots and handguns, are the connection of the “power state,” and also the connection that ultimately wins. The love and hatred of the cutscenes are the connection of the “sacred state,” the connection of the “Kingdom of Heaven”: blood relation, the Son of Man or Son of God, and God’s love.
But what actually connects this story? It is still “The Beast That Shouted ‘Ai’ at the Heart of the World.” It is the “quasi-family” formed, out of a longing for family, by people who cannot make a family: by sending Sam back from the Beach, Amelie becomes his “quasi” mother; by awakening Lou, Sam in turn becomes Lou’s “quasi” father. In the end, this is really a story about the “father,” a story about finding the “Name-of-the-Father” and becoming a father. It is a story like EVA. It is a sekaikei story.
That is why, as I see it, Death Stranding has a major narrative flaw: its gameplay and its cutscenes are completely severed from each other. The “connection” in the gameplay is the connection of an “A-mei-ni-kan” community, a simple moral sentiment—“one for all, all for one”—oxytocin and a sense of satisfaction. The “connection” in the cutscenes, by contrast, is the connection of blood within a family or quasi-family. In Kojima’s version it is made still more concrete: it is the “strand” or umbilical cord. Every one of the game’s long stretches of story that uses the “umbilical cord” as a clue points in this direction.
Here we might bring in what Azuma Hiroki makes central to his discussion of sekaikei in his essay on AIR, “Stopping at Impotence, Before Moe—On AIR” (「萌えの手前、不能性に止まること――『AIR』について」). AIR is also a story about the “father.” The player meets the heroines, tries to become their husband / father, and ultimately fails. So although sekaikei often looks enormous in scale, its core is actually very small: it does not exceed a single family. A boy and a girl meet; in fact, they are two people who have never formed a family, trying to take responsibility for the other as an adult, to become a “husband,” or, over a longer span of time, to become a “father.” (I mention only the “father” here because sekaikei is unquestionably a genre dominated by the male gaze, especially in sekaikei eroge.) The emotional tension of sekaikei lies in the process of becoming a father being blocked, in this impotence—that is, in “inability.” If we look at Death Stranding, it is easy to see that its most badass emotional peaks are concentrated 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. Thoroughly orthodox sekaikei.
In fact, this is also why I have never had very high expectations for EVA: Final. The “mystery of the world” is not as important as people imagine. Even if Anno can finish filling in the worldbuilding, it would still be a story without much of a climax. What matters most in sekaikei is how the “personal mystery” is handled: whether Shinji, Asuka, Rei Ayanami, and Misato Katsuragi can take one more step forward—or whether there is even a step available to take.
But we have all seen Jo, Ha, and Q. Have they loosened the deadlocks of the original even slightly? Have they even touched those deadlocks? The answer is obvious. To be frank, the Rebuild films have already fallen into the status of an oversized fan work. Is the atmospheric re-entry battle at the beginning of Q well animated? Yes. But I do not feel that I particularly need an animator called Anno.
Then I want to add that Kojima’s Death Stranding is much more sekaikei than Makoto-bro’s work. I do not want to compare the two stories, but when Weathering with You, as the centerpiece of its commercial promotion, was printed onto everything in everyday Japanese life that could possibly carry it, the “alienation” of sekaikei produced by the dissolution of the social middle layer ceased to exist. Sekaikei originally took people away from everyday life; Weathering with You, through its omnipresent offline promotion, brought its audience back. Conversely, to play a video game (excluding AR games), you have to enter cyberspace; games therefore possess an intrinsic virtuality. Perhaps this is also one reason for what “鸭子” calls “you can’t win.” Kojima’s name contains the character for “island” (島), while Shinkai’s contains the character for “sea” (海), both common motifs in sekaikei—but their works should be reversed: what Kojima makes is what really resembles the sea, while Makoto-bro … can just go on being an island …
There are other things one could say. For instance, Death Stranding completely concretizes the feminine metaphor of the nation-state in sekaikei. Traditional nation-states all take the image of a “Big Brother,” a typical masculine signifier; in sekaikei, however, the state becomes a feminine signifier associated with a girl. The image of “the fate of the world” is simply too vague, whereas the UCA is clearly a state founded by women, a system concretized through feminine symbols. But there is not much more to say about that either.
One last thing can be said: why do we need a quasi-family to resist neoliberalism? Because under neoliberalism we can be anyone, and therefore we are no one. To see this, just look at community groups on some platforms with names like “A Grand Survey of X Fetishes.” Everyone seems to have developed logorrhea, covering themselves there with all kinds of labels, increasingly marginal labels, fleeing toward ever smaller niches as if in pursuit of something. This is only because we have begun to notice that even in sexuality, which seems to be the one thing we possess, we increasingly amount to nothing at all. So in this world where we increasingly are nothing at all, who can answer the question of who Sam Bridges really is? Only “blood relation” remains. Family forms our last root. Is it any use? Definitely not.
Tea-Drinking Comments
Red Tea: What 喵哥 argues here, in terms of Azuma’s definition, is closer to the intellectual environment behind sekaikei—the postmodern decline of grand narratives—than to the distinctive otaku imagination that emerged within that environment. In an intellectual environment where grand narratives decline, multiple kinds of imagination will arise that reflect that environment. Sekaikei should be one that reflects it on the level of feelings between “you”—a girl—and “me.”
So 喵哥’s use of the family problem to interpret Death Stranding, and the claim that Death Stranding is more sekaikei than Weathering with You, really amounts to saying that Death Stranding is more “without a grand narrative,” not that it is more sekaikei. If we are going to discuss it in these terms, I think the main issue should be how to replace Death Stranding’s contingent “solidarity” with some unspecified person by the necessary solidarity with one specific person that belongs to sekaikei—that is, the relation between “you,” a girl, and “me.” The essay still needs a deeper interpretation here. Once 喵哥 lifts the veil of sekaikei, he is still talking about whether the narratives of the quasi-family and the nation-state remain reliable, but in doing so he overlooks the element of contingency in Azuma Hiroki’s family problem.