Mirror shards

[salinea]

So I rambled some of those TB/X analyses things over at megganbmoore's and I guess I might as well post it there too - it's about the mirror motif.


On the mirror : CLAMP loves duality - duh - but TB and X are two of the series where they explore duality the most, I think. In TB... Interestingly Subaru sorts of transition from one set of (opposite: male/female, extrovert/introvert) twins to being Seishirou's opposite/reflection. There is the theme of yin and yang - of Subaru and Seishirou as two sides of the same coin. As Onmyouji, but also as person. Subaru is the person who cares for everyone and thus doesn't really love (in that possessive, selfish way Hokuto wants him to) anyone; Seishirou is the person who doesn't care about anyone. Subaru is criminally selfless, Seishirou criminally selfish. To me, only together do they feel like a full human being.
I keep wanting to relate it to nondualism (insert your own Ursula Leguin quote here) without knowing if onmyoudo is similar in that to taoism for it to be obviously intended or not ^^;;

We have two mirror scenes. The first one is interesting mainly because it's one of Seishirou's contradiction. He acts and speaks in that scene in a very outrageously villainous way which contrasts with the apparent tenderness he just showed to Subaru; yet the breaking of a mirror... I'll let TV Tropes speak for myself on this one : Rage Against the Reflection.

The second one is even more interesting because it's the answer to the main theme that run through Tokyo Babylon. We can't know what others feel really. We can't claim to know. We don't speak the same language. There is the negative side of this : loneliness, and all the misery we see in Tokyo through Subaru's cases. But here we have Hokuto who says : even if we are twins we are not the same person and this is a good thing. That means we can works at connecting, at getting to know one another more deeply, and this works through the most simple rituals of politeness - and we're given the counterexample with the mother who hurts her baby because she sees it as hurting herself. The concept of personhood, how it's explored in Tokyo Babylon, laid out overall in such fakely naive terms yet so fundamental and, yes, often forgotten. And this is "love". Seishirou doesn't understand personhood - see other people as the same thing as objects - until Subaru. And that process of learning it is brutal, lengthy, destroys the life of several people and utterly breaks Subaru - yet we've got Hokuto saying, even a you Seishirou, actually I like you, and I want you to have a chance to learn it and works things with Subaru (which is seriously awesome of her).

And of course what Hokuto uses is a "Mirror spell".

Comments

[twhitesakura.livejournal.com]

Hmm...interesting thing about the mirrors. I understood how Hokuto, Subaru and Seishirou acted as "mirrors" against each other, but I never realized what a big symbol it was in TB.

I think Tokyo Babylon has a very unique idea about personhood. We often hear about being sympathetic to others and how we are the same -- and this sameness is usually why we are supposed to understand each other and feel for each other. In TB, we can never know what others really feel, but that is what makes it important to try to understand each other -- the differences.

[maylene-autumn.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! I didn't see the mirror theme they had going on, but I'm glad you shared this. I'm adding this to my favorites.