Haibane Renmei (E8-10)

This review was commissioned by @Aris Katsaris


"You send yourself to hell."

It can be an insincere statement, depending on the exact theology of the person saying it and on how literal they're being. It can also be a very earnest one. In the world of Haibane Renmei, it seems to be...well, adjacent to the truth, even if it's not exactly spot on. After all, they're in something more akin to purgatory than hell. It is the Haibane themselves who keep their stay here ongoing though, until such a time as they learn to stop doing it to themselves, so the sentiment is still broadly applicable.

I already had a sense of this from the first half of the series. Episodes 8-9 reinforce it, and also start to hint much more heavily at what exactly it is that they're in for. Episode 10...starts to make things more complicated again. Not in a way that casts doubt on the previous implications, but in a way that suggests that there's also more to the picture besides them.

Episodes 8-13 were commissioned as a single bloc, but after watching partway through episode 11 I decided to pre-emptively split it here. Because I have a lot of thoughts on what I've seen so far, and they're probably going to change (or at least be added to a lot) by the final stretch, so I think preserving my unspoiled perspective at this juncture will add some value to the review as a whole.

Anyway, to recap this very hard-to-recap story as efficiently as I can manage: a small group of angel-winged amnesiacs called the "haibane" are born into an isolated town after hatching from giant pupae. Each is born with memories of a melancholy dream involving a fall or a journey, and a sense that they had a life before this one but no details about it. They live a monastic existence, doing community service for the (wingless) townsfolk and living off of secondhand materials and excess food. Every so often, one of the haibane will be compelled to spread their wings and fly away over the city's walls, never to return.

There are at least two groups of haibane living in this walled town. One all-woman group residing in a traditional monastery in the outskirts, and another mixed-gender group living in an abandoned factory in town. The latter are mysterious, having had only minimal involvement in the plot so far. The two groups seem to really resent each other though, and the factory group overall seems far more rebellious and defiant of their circumstances than the monastery girls.

This whole system is overseen by an army of creepy, silent, masked and hooded beings called the touga, who communicate only through the mouthpiece that is their even-creepier-than-the-rest Emissary, who keep all the information on a strictly need-to-know basis.

Our main character is a girl named Rakka, and the newest member of the monastery group of Haibane. Her pupa-dream had her falling from the sky while a raven desperately tried to pull her back upward, though she only remembers bits and snatches of it. She's become a close friend and confidante of longtime haibane Reki, both of whom are secretly hiding a wing-discolouring malady that they somehow seem to have decided is reflective of innate sinfulness and needs to be hidden. Recently, the group also saw the departure of Kuu; a haibane who'd only been with them for a short time before vanishing into the rainy sky one miserable fall afternoon.

We pick up with Rakka and Reki coping with Kuu's departure, and working ever harder to hide the growing dark patches on their wings.


Episode 8, "The Bird." As winter fast approaches, the haibane prepare for the snowy season. Since the Old Home monastery includes a large number of children-haibane (or "little feathers" as they are affectionately called), this means a lot of work getting warm clothes for them and sewing custom wing-coverings out of thick cloth. The townsfolk who they get their stuff from secondhand don't have wings, so they need to make these bits themselves. Throughout this activity, Rakka's quiet, lonely anguish as she hides the worsening state of her wings from everyone except Reki gets more and more unliveable. Especially as she considers that Reki is the haibane who's been here the longest, and has had to see every newcomer disappear and leave her behind without a word, and that - if the wing-spots really are symptomatic of a spiritual taint - then that mean both of them are doomed to stay in this rustic second-class-citizen limbo and watch everyone they get to know and love effectively "die" for them forever.

While they're getting some supplies from a particularly generous (if also particularly paternalistic and condescending) shopkeeper, an idiot customer comes in the store and starts squeeing at the sight of the haibane. Guess she's new around here herself, if she's never seen them before. When she gets up in Rakka's face and starts mewling about how beautiful her wings must be under those cloth insulators, Rakka finally snaps and runs out alone into the afternoon gloom.

I wish I could say she kicks the twit in the shins before bolting, but unfortunately I can't. Ah well.

While Rakka is outside, alone, she starts crying. Whimpering various permutations of "I don't even know what I'm supposed to do here, but I've failed anyway" and "there was never any place for me anywhere" and "I wish I would just disappear."

...

It's kind of funny that I'm watching this right after the second "Amazing Digital Circus" episode, because this scene immediately made me think of Pomni's opening nightmare. As with that scene, this one really feels like the things the character is despairing about don't all follow logically from the circumstances that allegedly pushed them to despair. Both characters are also amnesic, with unknown lives prior to their arrivals in the world of the show that the viewer can only guess about.

Now as then, I got the strong impression that we're looking at baggage Rakka was carrying long before she hatched out of her tyrranid pod. The contents of the next episode and change pretty much confirm it.

...

As she weeps her self-pitying tears, Rakka eventually notices a group of ravens watching her intently. She suddenly remembers another fragment from her chrysalis-dream. The raven, pulling at her. A feeling of guilt overcomes her, reinforcing her self loathing spiral and pushing it further. And then, she feels something calling to her from the nearby woods. The woods near the wall, that they've been warned away from entering alone or unnecessarily. She doesn't care about the rules just now, though. If going into the border forest is dangerous for her, then so much the better.

The sensation of something calling out to her, seemingly echoing through the ravens, brings Rakka to a dry, crumbling well near the wall.

The air takes on a cold, uncomfortable quality, and the wind picks up. As if Rakka were up in the atmosphere falling downward, rather than standing on the ground in a sheltered forest. She is somehow sure that the ravens wanted her to investigate the well, specifically, and looking down into it she can just barely make out a gleaming white object sitting on the dry earth at the bottom. Climbing down into the well, Rakka discovers that it is the skeleton of a raven.

She has a total recall of her pupa-dream in detail now, and realizes that this is the raven that was trying to save her. It tried to pull her up as she was falling. It couldn't, though, no matter how hard it tried. And she didn't even spare a thought for it as she plummeted onward and bade it an understated goodbye.

It died trying to save her.

Its body crashed into this well as she herself took the form of the fucked up alien plant that eventually grew a hatching pod. Alone, in the dark, because of her. Forgotten. Now rotted away to just bones.

And this entire time, she's just been thinking about herself. And, the crowning irony of it all, is that she was having such a hard time when Kuu left the group and flew away. Ironic, or perhaps...karmic.

The raven isn't actually a raven, of course. Or rather, the raven(s?) in this world are a manifestation of something from the previous one, or at least a manifestation of something the haibane remember from it.

She apologizes profusely, while giving the raven skeleton the closest thing she can manage to a proper burial. Not that she can manage much, since the handholds she used to climb down the well broke in her hands and she's not really sure how to get back up from here. This is the situation at the start of episode 9, "Well, Rebirth, Riddle."

I vaguely had thoughts about this maybe having to do with their predicament, when the significance of the forest, specifically, started being emphasized. But it was only a passing thought until now.

...

The Wood of Suicides has been a thing in the western tradition since Dante Alighieri's time, which was also right around the same time that the portrayal of angels started being standardized into the "pretty people with donut-halos and feathery wings" incidentally. In Japan, there's also another thread tying "remote forested area" conceptually with "suicide."

The ethereal, almost Ophelia-like look and feel of the Haibane does correlate with a romantic view of suicide that suicidal people sometimes harbor. The emphasis of wings as their defining feature - signifying escape, the cutting of ties. And then, from the first episode onward, the irony of how mundane, prosaic, and undignified the lives of the haibane actually are, despite their angelic appearances. The wings don't actually let them fly; they just hurt while growing in and inconvenience them from that point on. They have the romantic image, but it's just an image. Beyond the photo-op frozen in time, there's still life that needs to be lived. By someone, somewhere.

Or, in the case of the "raven," maybe not.

Rakka sees that it's not just herself in the symbolic grave under the forest now. It's also the person who tried to hold her back. The person who she ignored when she decided she was alone. Whose love for her meant less than nothing to her when she decided she was unwanted and unbelonging. Where the hell was she when they needed her? Flying free and unweighted through the clouds?

No, she doesn't get to have that after what she did to the people who needed her.

...

The ethics of suicide are something I have complicated feelings about, personally. On one hand, yeah, I think that everyone should fundamentally be able to say that they own their own lives and can do what they want with it. On the other hand, I think that - at least in the vast majority of cases - ending your own life is a real dick move. For exactly the reasons that Haibane Renmei is exploring. Wanting to kill yourself doesn't just devalue you. It also devalues everyone who would rather continue having you around.

On the other hand...I feel like treating suicides as people who have committed a sin that they need to atone for is more than a bit wrongheaded. Depression is a very self-absorbed and self-important state of being, but it's also not something people just decide to do. It's a mental health issue.

To be fair to Haibane Renmei, the show isn't actually taking the moralistic view of suicide as a crime that requires punishment. The next few scenes make that clear enough. However, it still falls close enough to straying into that kind of thinking that I felt the need to be at least momentarily critical before moving on.

...

After tearfully apologizing to the raven while she crouches over its improvised grave for a while, Rakka is rescued by a party of silent, masked touga. They don't do anything to help or comfort her besides extracting her from the well, though. Asking about the fate of Kuu gives them momentary pause, but ultimately they still walk away without a word.

Rakka approaches the nearby wall - the wall that the haibane have been expressly forbidden from touching - and tries to climb over. However, the wall proves to be icy cold in a way that even the cursed air around the well wasn't, and also touching it summons the Emissary himself.

Surprisingly, he's more helpful and forthcoming with information in this situation than we've ever seen him be before.

He tells her that she'll need to get home quickly before the consequences of touching the wall start to effect her in force, and even lends her his walking stick to help deal with her hurt foot and her growing feeling of tiredness. As they walk toward the monastery, he answers some questions, and shares some riddles by way of advice.

The wall apparently makes itself impassible to those who are not yet ready to travel beyond it. As for the dead bird...the fact that Rakka was not afraid or in denial when she found the skeleton, but rather recognized its efforts and tried to make amends for rebuffing them (even if it's too late now) is a sign of progress for Rakka. In fact, the manifestation of the "bird" in this world has now served its purpose for her. In his words "to recognize one's own sin is to have no sin."

Of course, that leads to a paradox. If recognizing one's own sin causes one to become sinless, then does achievement of the state of sinlessness not cause someone to become sinful again because they have stopped recognizing their sins as such? When Rakka asks the Emissary that, he tells her that that's the next puzzle she needs to solve. In the meantime though, the dark splotches on her wings have vanished, and she no longer has anything to hide.

He leaves her alone again near the monastery, where Rakka finds that the others have been looking for her for hours amid the season's first snow.

The aftereffects of touching the wall before she's ready render her lightheaded, feverish, and...almost ghostly, in a sense...for a while. The others need to mother hen over her for the rest of the night and well into the morning afterward.

Rakka appreciates them. And makes a point of making sure that they know how much she appreciates them.

Reki, as always, is the one who stays by Rakka's side the longest, well after the others have left and Rakka has fallen asleep. When she notices that the splotches on Rakka's feathers have vanished though, she's more bitter than she is happy for her. Once again, Reki is left as the only one with tarnished wings. The only one who will never be able to move on from this place, even as she helps newcomer after newcomer who passes through and leaves her behind.

Of course, her feeling sorry for herself about this rather than happy for them is implied to be exactly the reason why she can't unstain her own wings. Her dedication to helping every newcomer and doting over the Little Feathers, I gather, is more out of a desire for validation, or to convince herself that she doesn't actually deserve her stained status and can thus feel self-righteously self-pitying, than actual altruism.

At least, that's where I think it's going. The subsequent episode, "Rakka's Job," starts us off with a backstory sequence for Reki. It...complicates my reading, to say the least.

Unlike Rakka, Reki seems to have hatched out of her birthing pod with her wings already fully developed, and already spotted and stained. Granted, we don't know if this is unprecedented, but the handling of Rakka's arrival in the pilot were implied to be much more typical of how this tends to work. Also, Rakka's wings only got blotchy after a while; they weren't like that when they first grew in.

So yeah. There is something different about Reki. It's not just a matter of her being more resistant than the others to letting go of her guilt and self-loathing. Or, if it IS that, then her guilt and self-loathing are such that they manifested themselves immediately upon her appearance in this purgatory.

We also get a more sympathetic explanation for why she's so attentive to the newcomers. Apparently, her own pod wasn't discovered until after she hatched out of it, making her first moments in purgatory incredibly lonely, frightening, and confusing. It's at least strongly suggested that her desire to prevent anyone else's hatching from being like that is part of what motivates her. She was also, in general, not treated well by the other resident haibane at the time, with a single exception (who had her Day of Flight after promising Reki she would never abandon her).

This explains why she ran off with that boy from the punky Abandoned Factory group at one point. It's implied she may have touched the wall and had a similar feverish episode to the one Rakka just suffered during that escapade.

So, yeah. Reki's situation is more complicated than it was starting to seem. And the Powers That Be are looking a lot more dickish again. Even if (as it increasingly seems to be) said Powers are literally just a manifestation of the haibanes' own subconscious.

Speaking of the Powers That Be who may or may not actually be external entities at all, the next day has Reki visiting the Emissary in his shrine to get medical advice for helping Rakka recover.

And...apparently the fever episode isn't enough. Rakka needs to do something else as well to atone for touching the wall.

He gives us some hints as to what enables a haibane to ascend. Apparently, the reason Kuu's tenure in limbo was so brief was because she was convinced that if she could breach the walls and escape, then that would enable the others to follow her in short order. This belief, in and of itself, was a big part in her gaining the ability to fly over the wall.

He also darkly implies that there IS a time limit here. And that a haibane who takes too long to ascend will instead have...something else...happen to them. He doesn't say what, but Reki seems to already know what he's talking about. As if she's already seen it happen to someone else.

...

Yeah, my confidence that I'm starting to understand what this whole show is about is starting to crumble away again.

...

He also implies that at least one other current Haibane, Nemu, has only been held back from ascending because she's waiting for Reki to do it first, and would feel guilty abandoning her like she percieves everyone else to have abandoned her. Hearing this obviously makes Reki feel even more guilty and self-hating than she does by default.

However, the Emissary assures her that this isn't her fault. Or her problem. Nemu's overly self-sacrificing nature is her own problem, and part of the issue she needs to solve for herself before her own Day of Flight can come. If it wasn't Reki, it would be someone or something else she'd be latching onto and holding herself back with.

There's also a mention of each Haibane having an "ordeal" that they need to overcome on their own as part of ascending. Rakka's is all but stated to have been the incident with the raven skeleton in the well.

The conversation ends with the Emissary giving Reki the instructions on where to get the medicinal herbs she needs to help Rakka, and also warning her that she must not envy Rakka for progressing passed her. Reki denies that it's envy rather than loneliness that's motivating her unhappiness, which, well. That's probably part of her problem.

The subsequent morning, the haibanes find a summons for Rakka posted on the monastery door.

Reki is outraged on Rakka's behalf, and decides that this is bullshit, she's already suffered enough, they should just take this sign down and tell the touga to fuck off if they come to punish Rakka. She'll accept full responsibility for preventing Rakka from answering the summons, if it comes to that.

I thought that this was Reki finally having her own ordeal now. Willingness to risk her own spiritual status even further in order to protect Rakka's. But...after what come next, I'm not sure.

Rakka has to go to the shrine anyway, to return the Emissary's walking stick. So there's no plausible way of stopping her.

When she goes there, the Emissary says that he punishment is to work part time cleaning bits of magical halo-metal out from this weird watery trench that runs under the wall.

While working there, she wears a touga uniform and ornamentation. There aren't nearly enough haibane in the town for the touga to ALL be moonlighting haibane, though.

So, yeah. I really don't know anymore.

Meanwhile, Reki runs into some ruined factory people at the midpoint between their residences. They have some presents to passive-aggressively give her, with instructions to pass on to the other monastery haibanes.

There's an apology note for Rakka, for the unpleasantness that happened earlier in the series. And also a bunch of homemade cookies; enough for all of the monastery haibane and also their little feathers.

And um...apparently, the ruined factory has its own Little Feathers population, but the monastery group has been fostering them due to the factory being no place for children. The kids from the factory group get to go back and visit a few times a year, like some kind of weird custody arrangement.

Yeah. I'm lost again. What IS the deal with the child-haibanes? Or with the wingless townsfolk, for that matter? How much of this is just the suicide victims' minds inventing a shared world to imprison themselves in, and how much of it actually exists outside of themselves?


Well, three episodes left. By the time I write the next post, this show will have either made sense to me, or not.