Mistilteinn – the wisdom of the mistletoes

Even though this is the pinnacle of the offical mugging season, i was wasting some time watching the newly downloaded Jigoku Shoujo ( hell Girl ) I was expecting it to be some kind of J-Horror anime, but i felt that it was more of thought provoking than entertaining. Yes, this is the 2nd anime that had the potential to make me cry and think so much.

A: Say, you know what hell Correspondance is?

B: The one where you post your request to the website at midnight, and it’ll take whatever revenge on your behalf?

A: Yeah, that’s it!

The story of Hell Girl follows a urban legend. A website called the jigoku tsushin (hell correspondance) is only accessible at the stroke of midnight, and the name of the person who is submitted through the jigoku tsushin will be dragged to hell. In the anime, 20 over different stories of bitterness is shown, from a young girl being stalked endlessly to a boy avenging his parents.

When they type in the name whom they want to kill, Jigoku shoujo appears, giving them a straw doll with a red ribbon tied on it. The person who requested for the revenge will put the string, and the person will be sent to hell. However, two holes appears as this is done, and the requestee will also suffer endlessly to hell when he/she dies. Unlike death note, The jigoku shoujo actually looks into a person’s life to see if he/she deserves to be revenged, and the fact that one can only use it once in his lifetime makes it more fair and justifiable.

At first sight, i believed that everyone would find jigoku shoujo as a plain,boring piece of crap because of its lack of “insanely wierd and obnoxious power” and with the center of the story having different protagonists ( a different story filled melancholy and vangeance is featured in each episode ) and jogoku shoujo merely being a somehwat 3rd party character, However, i was astonished how many people loved the concept of it.

I find Jigoku shoujo intriguing is because of the lives that has been featured. I find that it has been actually pretty sucessful of the anime to be able to portray the sample lifes of people without much sensationalization at all, with the depiction being as realistic as possible.

A lot of people watching will maybe symphatise with the show, but few is able to actually emphatise with it because we today simply live in an environment that is too sheltered, to the point that even i have only seen a little fraction of what they have seen. It tells us that even in today’s mordernised society, such radical evil and cruel acts continue to exist beneath our very eyes. This anime not only exposes the evils of the world, but gives a first hand experience to how people are traumatised by it.

The concept of “hell correspondance” also brings up another question:  How far is people willing to sacrifice for Revenge, an act only so humane? Because we want to so desperate change situations that are unfavourable for us and seek a compromise for the injust that is done to us, can we pay the price of endless and eternal suffering later on?  This anime also speaks of how shallow human’smindset ultimately is, and how we willingly let our emotions overwhelm us, only to endlessly battle the consequences after we have commited our actions.

A third season of Jigoku Shoujo is coming this fall, and while i’ve heard almost all writers in THAT comdemning Jigoku Shoujo like no tomorrow,i still think it was a very good niche anime that people should watch. Girls may find it appealing due to some of the dramatic scenes and plots that is inside.But while the concept is good, it seriously does not captivate people to go on to watch the next episode as compared to things like Death Note and Code Geass. You could try it, i suppose.