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This is a reposting of all my tweets on the anime Earth Maiden Arjuna in a thread so I can have them all organized.
I'm on ep.2 of Earth Maiden Arjuna, and I think it's ethos of radical empathy towards nature can be encapsulated in these lines.
On Arjuna ep.4, and its environmental thematic throughline has reached the point of "Should humans be preserved at the cost of organisms of less consciousness?"
This is a neat little narrative excursion exploring how its like for Juna and Tokio to wander in a forest so they can become more in-tuned with the primordial instincts that humans have evolved from, as they grew further from contact with nature.
Essentially, the food webs are all connected through consumption, absorption, and defecation.
Full disclosure, this sparked a slight revelation. For awhile I held the idea of making the most efficient use of every second possible, but this episode reminded me that the excessive preoccupation with thought of the whole of time can leave less focus to appreciate the present.
Hahaha! Damn! Arjuna dropping bombshells in 2001. In regards of what's being discussed in this dialogue, barely anything has changed nearly 2 decades later, except more people being aware of this. HAHA!
Ep6 of Arjuna was the most up-its-ass, preachy messaging thus far, but it's just based enough and told at such an obtuse and bizarre angle that I can't help but appreciate its poignancy. THEY USED MATH TO EXPLAIN HOW THE UNIVERSE IS CONNECTED AND CONVENIENCE KILLS FULFILLMENT.
Considering one of the first lines of dialogue in ep.1 were Tokio misunderstanding Juna when she said she wanted to go to the sea, this moment represents how Tokio, after being separated from Juna and pondering about what she's going through, is willing to meet her on her terms.
Basically, the Earth is already fucking dying, on a mass scale where eventually the damage will be irreversible if it isn't already.
While Arjuna is critical of many of the advances that civilization has been obsessed with creating, it's not simplistically dismissing all those advances as a net negative. It's just saying that the massive number of advances whose consequences are more detrimental than (1/2)
beneficial in the long term is what's most likely to doom humanity if left unchecked. (2/2)
Arjuna generally is a meditation on how necessary some of civilization's advances were necessary rather than just more convenient in the short-term. While I don't agree with everything is says, I find a large portion of its radical thesis to be agreeable or at least interesting.
Having fictional commercials play within the show might be a wink of self-awareness on how, even in a show about how the corporations have gone way too far and are sometimes even poisoning the world with their products, there were still ad-breaks when Arjuna was on television.
