At the end of each year, NetEase Cloud Music will launch an annual report for listeners, in which there is a project called "Keywords of the Year".
The so-called keyword of the year is the word that appears most frequently in the lyrics of the songs that listeners listen to during the year.
And my second-in-command salamander, including some of my second-in-command friends, have surprisingly consistent keywords - that is, "world".
In ACGN, the grand concept of "the world" has been repeatedly raised.
"Even so, I have a world that I want to protect!"
This classic line from Kira Yamato, the protagonist of Gundam Seed, can be used to summarize the ultimate purpose of many ACGN protagonists - to protect their world.
The reasons for guarding the world are similar, or that there is no need for a reason to guard the world.
But the maniacs who destroy the world are different, their beliefs, their obsessions, their reasons for destroying the world are all different.
Although they have the same goal, if they are placed on the same set, they may "take the outside first and the inside" and engage in an infighting first.
How many causes of destruction are there in the world of ACGN?
Why is it always the world that hurts in ACGN?
Today, let's shove the microphone of the interview through the dimensional wall into the mouths of those world-destroying maniacs.
01
I destroy the world and I create it
Destroying the original world in order to create their own ideal world has almost become the common behavioral logic of world destroyers.
The subtitle of this section comes from the mouth of Lulu Xiu, who is also a typical representative of this "constructivist" destroyer.
What he wanted to destroy was the "one superpower, two powers" world system centered on the Britannia Empire.
He and his sister suffered from this system— they were taken hostage by the Britannia Empire to District 11, where they were nearly torn apart, and their sister could no longer open her eyes because of the court struggle.
However, the most difficult time for the brothers and sisters has passed, and if they live under the existing system, they are "rich".
Even so, after mistakenly acquiring the absolute power of GEASS, he did not hesitate to press the accelerator button, putting the throttle on the destruction of the Empire.
The most interesting thing about Lulu Xiu's character is his transformation in the process of "destroying the world".
He went from an avenger who only knew how to destroy the world to the founder of the world.
At first, he just wanted to raise everything under the imperial system, just like his "all tactics turned the floor".
Along the way, however, countless souls who died because of him and believed in his ideals forced him, whose conscience was still alive, to think about the problems after destruction.
That's why we can see the "Soul song of Zero", who completed his self-redemption and the construction of a new world at the cost of his own life.
The typical Chaya, another "constructor" destroyer, has a character arc that is different from Lulu Xiu's.
Chaya tried many times to establish a new order, but all of these attempts failed for various reasons.
Finally, in a kind of ambition and anger, Xia Ya no longer thinks about the reconstruction after destruction, but directly smashes Axis to the earth, first raising the earth and then saying.
The charm of such figures often lies in a sense of sacredness, they must maintain a certain distance from worldly desires, and dedicate most of their body and mind to their grand ambitions and ambitions.
Once you fall from the altar and zero falls into the dust, you will immediately become a clown who is ridiculed.
Looking farther away, The Night God Moon's "Can anyone else do it" was made into a comedic emoji, and looking closer, Chairman Ai was forced to lose it all because of a sentence of "Don't do that kind of thing". (Today we change personal persecution, let Chairman Ai a horse)
However, in the final analysis, the destroyers of this "constructivist" are more or less "revenge".
The world showed them the ugliest and most unsightly side, and after being kissed by the world, their first reaction was to return the slap.
Then again, if there really is a happy life, who would want to destroy the world?
The destroyers of the "constructivists" are popular, and there are very few villains who want to destroy the world simply because of revenge, as if they are not worthy to be villains without a lofty ideal.
Perhaps, without the endogenous power of ideals and beliefs, the Avengers are easily untenable.
The discerning audience will pick his faults from various angles, and this kind of character is also easy to be inexplicably influenced.
One example of failure is the white-haired junkie Altaïr in Re-Creator, who crossed the dimensional wall to the real world to avenge her suicide creators.
So, when she finds a world where creator Shimazaki can live, her revenge immediately loses its motivation.
She had never tried to understand what had forced Shimazaki to die, nor had she thought about changing the status quo.
02
Gentlemen, I love war
Although the destroyers of the world often have grand ambitions as a motive, sometimes very personal and small reasons can also propel a person on the path to extinction.
The source of the title of this chapter, the Major in Hellsing, is such a character.
He led the last remnants of the Nazis, reignited 60 years after the end of the war, and led the ghoul's tiger and wolf division to London to slaughter the living.
He was not a Nazi believer, did not believe the moustache's rhetoric, and he even knew that the war he had launched was doomed to failure and was doomed to be liquidated afterwards.
Even so, he threw his whole life into it, into this inevitable defeat war.
For for him, war is not a means, war is his end, the destruction of life and the fall of London are only by-products, he only likes the war itself.
Among this type of "pleasure offender" type of role, the most typical is DC's Joker.
He is simply the personification of the physical phenomenon of "entropy increase", seeking neither money nor status, and moving forward on the road of chaos and disorder.
Because he has nothing but chaos and disorder, he can never be destroyed, he can never compromise with the world.
The Sacred Protector of Makishima in Psychometrician, The YanFeng In the Fate series, Lauru Kruzer in Gundam Seed...
Although the scale of the destruction of the world by these "pleasure criminals" varies: some people just raise a city, some people want to raise the earth and colonial satellites all.
But they all share the same characteristic: their morality is fundamentally different from that of normal people.
The "constructivist" world destroyers always have their own utopian theories, and they have a better world in their hearts that can be built on the ruins of the ugly old world.
And the "pleasure offenders" are pure "killing and burying", and their distorted values make the "destruction of the world" a supreme pleasure for them.
As for how to rebuild after destruction? That's not something they're thinking about.
There is an interesting phenomenon in this type of "pleasure offender" villain - the more they are shaved, the higher their popularity.
Perhaps pure evil is their selling point, and the more their values deviate from secular ethics and the less they are understood by the audience, the more popular they are.
This is the complete opposite of the "constructivists", whose image is more like saints.
If the private motives of the "pleasure criminals" to destroy the world are too close to ordinary people, they will be very grassy, and eventually they will become the target of persecution.
For example, Mr. Tsubaki, who has been installing the Plan Pass for more than 20 years, finally can't hold back in "EVA Finale". He had worked so much and made a mess of the world that in the end he really just wanted to reunite with his wife.
The black hand behind the lens glowing is dead, leaving only a social terrorist intellectual who cries out "only".
03
Destroy you, and have nothing to do with you
Whether they are world-weary people with utopias or fanatics who love chaos and disorder, they are still human beings after all.
Shaya and Amro eventually disappear together in the rainbow light of Axis, and Tsubasa and Wei hug each other to bear the price of creation and completion for Shinji.
They have a tougher will and stronger action than ordinary people, but they can still be defeated and inspired after all.
But there is such a kind of exterminator that human beings have no room for negotiation with them, because they do not regard human beings as the object of consultation at all.
Or rather, they don't see humans as objects of communication at all.
The destruction of the world is only a process they go through when they achieve their goals, and the demise of human civilization is just an ant trampled to death by them.
This kind of world destroyer is the embodiment of the "dehumanization" doctrine in science fiction, which is in direct opposition to the narrative of the "human center" of science fiction in the golden age.
The various gods in the Cthulhu Mythos are typical of such world destroyers.
They have no ill will toward humanity, and just revealing their true identities can drive people crazy.
Perhaps because the roots of these kinds of destroyers can be traced back to the ideas of science fiction, they are often featured in ACGN works with science fiction overtones.
The beta in the well-known GAAGME "Muv Luv" is such an extraterrestrial life.
They are alien mining vehicles made of silicon-based organisms that cannot identify humans as intelligent beings, and they simply "inadvertently" push humans into a desperate situation in performing the duties entrusted to them by the Creator.
The Reverse A Gundam in "Reverse A Gundam" shows the audience a sense of reincarnation and fatalism.
It would erase all human civilizations that had failed to break free from endless infighting and move into the universe, like wiping a stain off the surface of the earth.
According to Yuki Tomino's vision, all the chronicles in the Gundam series were eventually erased by the reverse A Gundam.
It uses the earth as a test field and spends almost unlimited time doing independent and repetitive experiments on the evolution of civilizations.
One civilization is wiped out, ten civilizations are wiped out, ten thousand civilizations are wiped out... It's all just a statistic for it.
Anyway, there was enough time, this time it failed, and it all went back to zero and started again.
04
You can't live without destruction
Destroying the world is not necessarily the prerogative of the villain, and it's not just because there are "anti-hero" protagonists like Lulu Xiu.
It is also because, in some stories, destroying other people's worlds is the only way to protect your own world.
The protagonist has to become a sinner who destroys the world of others, getting back on his feet in self-denial again and again.
And in this kind of story, the most impressive thing to me is the ghost head Mo Hong's "Earth Defense Boy"
Teenage girls sit on giant humanoid robots and fight monsters that invade the world, and at first, they only know that driving this robot will cost them their lives.
Later, they discovered that the place where the robots fought didn't look like any place they remembered.
It wasn't until they were attacked by ordinary people from other worlds that they realized that they were actually participating in a gladiatorial tournament, with the two sides being big robots from both worlds.
Among the so-called monsters sat young men and women from other worlds, and the way they killed the monsters was to blow up the cockpit of the other side.
Only the winning side can win the right to exist for its own world.
In this type of story, "destroying the world" is, in a sense, no essential difference from "killing".
It's a battle royale story in disguise, where the participants change from individuals to worlds.
Of course, having said that, for the three types of world destroyers before them, "destroying the world" is essentially a performance they present to the audience.
There are many ways for authors to show their demands to the audience, but the author chooses the one that plays the most.
This grand processing may be the root cause of the repeated injuries in the world in the ACGN.