Just realised for the first time that I haven’t been including the starting page number in the OP. How have I gone seventeen weeks without noticing that?
Anyway, I’m halfway through this week’s reading. Nausicaä’s little vision quest, one of the more… curious parts of the story. Though one little parallel I just noticed for the first time: the world before the forest is carpeted with the bones of people, whereas the world after the forest is carpeted with the bones of the forest.
One thing that’s always saddened me a bit: Selm tells Nausicaä that once she learns the secret of the forest, she’ll have a choice to make, and though he never explicitly states the choice, I always took it to mean that she had the option of returning to this world, or moving on to the next. And then he shows her what is essentially paradise… and she elects to turn back, not because the people of this world, or even the world itself, still need her, but because she feels like she’s undeserving of paradise, that she’s not clean enough. The junior Dorok Emperor himself entered the new world, but she doesn’t think she’s deserving?
And one observation I read on the internet somewhere: Up until now, whenever Nausicaä has been in a vision or communicating telepathically, she’s always appeared as a young girl. This is the first time in the manga that she’s actually appeared as a near-adult as she is in the real world. And I guess this one is also her actual spirit rather than her own self-image, but it does say something about her character. Not entirely sure what, though - I do STEM, not humanities, so I never really got the hang of this literary analysis stuff.
Don’t think I’d ever noticed before that the Vai Emperor has a cat sitting next to him in his introductory scene. Or that he hits it with his lute. Boo. But this is a very Thanos-esque “if you want something done, you have to do it yourself” moment.
And the final sequence of this week’s reading is possibly my favourite section of the manga. One of the most heartwarming parts, in any case. But I just love Tepa’s absolute confusion “what are you talking about? The princess would be halfway there already”.
Yes, it was an interesting part. I thought it was very Miyazaki.
I missed that somehow. In which part does she say that? Still somewhere in the vision quest section, I guess? Because after returning when Selm invites her to come with him, it is more that she has too much love for the people in the world (I love that Kurotowa is the one shown in that panel), so that’s not the part that you mean, right?
Being in love with the people of the world is why she turns down Selm’s offer, not why she decides to return from her vision quest. Although, come to think of it, perhaps that was the decision Selm told her she had to make after learning the secret of the forest.
Ah yes, I see what you mean now! It is a sad moment, but it also felt not so much as a choice but more a 仕方がない moment for me. But I guess that’s just a matter of how you look at it.
