PART 2: RELATABILITY
As confusing and complex as Sameji is, I would dare to posit that she is actually one of the most relatable characters in the anime. Personally I think her relatability is only second to Naota, but that’s an irrelevant idea right now.
I’m going to get a tad bit personal, but hear me out:
Sameji’s character is actually quite accurate and depicts the machinations of a person quite like myself (minus the pyromania and lusting after someone way too young). Especially after this past year, I have come to understand the effects that things like bullying, depression, and an unstable family life can have on a person, and how it can reveal some rather destructive tendencies.
For someone to experience a lot of unnecessary stress and malicious behavior and then find a comforting attachment to someone only to lose that attachment, it doesn’t do well for a person’s emotional or social health. This is where Sameji’s unhealthy attachment comes from, and I believe I can pinpoint this so well because I’ve actually experienced it.
And it’s funny because I didn’t realize how closely related a fictional story correlates to something that has happened to me and can happen for many others. I’m not asking for people to show their emotional scars, but if you are someone like me who analyzes a lot of things like this, when going through the social mazes of middle and high school, when coming into social independence, when navigating the complexities of your job, or when watching your favorite anime, you can see how this is something that’s not so arcane or abstract, but in fact something both intelligent and artistic.
The same token applies for Sameji’s apparent childlike nature that initially bothered me. Last year I had faced some serious emotional turmoil—I wouldn’t go as far to call it “depression” because
a) There wasn’t a clinical diagnosis in my situation
b) I don’t take that word lightly so I don’t casually throw it around
But for a very long period of time I felt lethargic, my appetite was weird, I had very little motivation, I would be sad for long periods of time, I had a hard time getting any sleep, and to a certain point I think that there may have been some physical effects of the emotions I had internalized but had not been able to process well or have the time and availability to come to terms with. And in those moments of emotional frailty and distress, you start to regress and long for a time quite like childhood, when things weren’t so stressful and complicated.
This is a topic that has lightly been touched in various forms of media, not just one extremely unorthodox anime. If you think about it, this is where we get concepts such as “Mid-Life crisis” that has been used for comedic fashion in many American television shows, some that are live-action and some that are animated. Or if you look at pieces of literature (of course I’m going to come back to “Catcher in the Rye”) you can observe that this struggle, this longing for the ignorant innocence of childhood is something that is common in teenage archetypes. I don’t think I need to bring in an entire case study to drive this home, so I’ll let that point stand where it is.
And yes, part of my mind was fixated on when I was 7 years old and life wasn’t as grim and unfortunate as the circumstances that I was facing alone. A great example of this is actually Sameji’s little “poem” in episode 1 in this scene.
I believe that most of these things she listed were things that would appeal to a child, or maybe even her specifically. Suspend your own ideologies and wonder if maybe a blackboard eraser or a panda or metaphorical sandals could hold some significance for a child, a person who doesn’t necessarily think beyond the surface levels of things like sight and smell. It may not make sense at first, but think of your childhood and whatever minute objects or things somehow made you smile and maybe you can find something in common.
Or I can be contrarian to my point and direct you to what the lovely akidearest surmises of Sameji’s “poem” (See 4:32 to 5:20 if you don’t want to watch the whole video)
(P.S: Akidearest---I’m a huge fan and I wish I could meet you at a con one day)
But at the end of the day I find my new respect for this character quite ironic. I remember a few years ago I thought of this project and I foolishly thought that Sameji’s complex character could be a parallel of a mental disorder, but ironically enough the issue that I dealt with last year was a result of someone in some weird way trying to do that to me.
Yet another way in which FLCL is art imitating life.
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