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everythingsinred · 2 years ago

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Let's Talk About NatsuMikan: Mikan (pt. 12)

Hi. I didn't post yesterday because I was being irresponsible with my time management and put it off all day and then I fell asleep in the middle of editing. Very fun! I'll just on Monday to make up for it! (Or who knows really. I don't think people are expecting me to be as on top of things with this essay as I was with the Natsume one ;-;)

Last time we talked at length about Mikan's habit of choking when she's trying to tell Natsume something important, as well as the relationship between her alice and Natsume. Today, since the group is finally face to face with Z, we'll see exactly how Mikan's feelings have grown over the course of this arc. We'll also witness a tragedy unfold, and Mikan's reaction to it.

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Chapter Forty

This will be a short chapter analysis because Mikan isn't really doing much now, but you get it.

Mikan comes to in a dungeon, by herself, with only a skeleton for company. She’s separated from her friends, who are all probably in danger as well, and she has no idea how to escape. She imagines Hotaru’s voice scolding her for freaking out and crying. She began this arc with Hotaru’s wishes for her to smile no matter what in mind, and now she’s faced with that wish again. She wishes she could be stronger, like Hotaru, that she can be cool and figure a way out so she can reunite with her friends.

I always loved that skeleton. So cute.

But she’s scared and alone, especially of the skeleton, so she forces herself to laugh instead. She needs to focus.

She’s always haunted by her complex about smiling and crying, especially now. Things may be dire, but she can’t escape easily, even if she stops crying. In fact, the best she can come up with is to attack the prison guard skeleton who isn’t about to set her free. And then she meets her mom.

Chapter Forty-One

Yuka is looking at Mikan, her child, the child of her and her beloved, the only proof that the affair even happened, the dearest person in her life, the person she went through hell to protect. She did what she could to make sure Mikan didn’t have to suffer as she did, but here she is anyway, an Alice Academy student, trapped in the Z dungeon.

Meanwhile, Mikan is also looking at Yuka, recognizing her as one of the Z members, the woman who stole Yuu’s alice, part of the group that shot Hotaru!

Mikan might not be able to do much now, but she knows that she should keep quiet and not reveal any information to this person. So when she’s asked if she has nullification, she refuses to confirm. Instead she confronts Yuka for stealing Yuu’s alice and for shooting her best friend. She tells her that she hates her and all the other Z members, that she’ll never forgive them.

Black and white. No visible nuance so there must not be any. Yuka didn't shoot anybody but she's responsible for all of Z's actions anyway.

Mikan is quick to make decisions about people, quick to decide whether or not she likes them. People are usually good or bad, and whenever someone she thought was bad reveals not-bad traits, she switches to thinking they’re good. Yuka, in Mikan’s mind, has no redeemable qualities. She steals alices and shoots kids! There’s nothing redeemable about that, especially since it’s so easy to ignore Yuka looking horrified at the fact that the bullet actually hit a child. It’s understandable that Mikan would come to these decisions so quickly in the alice world when everything seems so dire. Natsume attacked her when they first met, so of course she thought he was bad. Yuka hurt her friends, so of course she’s bad too! But the alice world isn’t just more dire, it’s much more complicated. The school forces people to behave in ways they don’t want to. It warps people and corrupts them and makes their actions more nuanced than “good” or “bad.” Mikan will slowly start to learn this, especially in terms of Yuka, but for now. Hatred! No forgiveness!

Yuka hits her own child with her bag, causing its contents to spill out on the floor. Enough childish nonsense, she says, and then reaches out to use her alice. It doesn’t work, thus confirming that she has nullification. It’s that easy. She scares Mikan with some threats about a sadist who had captured all her friends already, kicks her stomach, and then leaves.

(Yuka and Natsume are so similar, acting entirely contrary to how they want to out of the desire to protect Mikan. They both have no choice but to hurt her when all they really want to do is show her affection. I want so desperately for them to have a conversation.)

Anyway, Mikan is back to being by herself with just the skeleton for company. She seems to have gotten accustomed to it, no longer frightened, but maybe it’s just because her attention is pulled to the vial Yuka kicked under her stomach. Mikan thinks this could be medicine for Hotaru, but that means that Yuka dropping her things and kicking her was all a way of secretly helping her, which is confusing because wasn’t Yuka supposed to be one of the bad guys?

Mikan does think about Yuka, "that woman," the mysterious SA teacher with her alice... She's smart enough to know there's a connection. There's just seldom a good time to linger on those thoughts.

Mikan reveals herself to be clever when it counts, pretending to be wounded from Yuka’s kick so the skeleton would unlock the door. She seizes her moment and runs for it, but she takes the time to apologize to the skeleton, even though she’d been terrified of it only a moment ago, before running off to rejoin her friends. Mikan is a sweet person. She saw that the skeleton had been concerned for her, and it makes her feel bad. Again, she’s a good versus bad type of person. The skeleton showed her kindness, which means it’s good, even if it had been keeping her imprisoned.

She’s eventually able to find her friends again. She’s been so worried about them and is so relieved to see them again now, that she runs out to join them, even though there’s obviously some kind of hostile situation taking place. She’s distracted and careless, so she’s almost hurt, except that Natsume saves her, pulling her out of the way and shielding her with his alice.

Forever one of my favorite pages!

He rescued her! And it could almost be a touching moment, except that when he turns around, he doesn’t say he’s relieved she’s okay like Tsubasa or Ruka would. Instead, he’s pissed and instantly berates her for acting without thinking. “Do you want to die, stupid?” which echoes what she had asked him after interrupting his suicide attempt. They have both saved each other with their alices now. The difference is that he had intentionally put himself in harm’s way; her own thoughtlessness is what led to her being in danger. But he keeps going, telling her that they could lose her again with that kind of attitude, and Mikan is shocked. She’d seen his reaction before falling into the pit, seen how frightened he looked for her, and hearing more confirmation that he didn’t want to lose her is surprising.

AGAIN. Only a little while ago, Natsume told her he didn’t want her around, that he hated everything about her. Now he’s swooping in to save her, telling her he doesn’t want to see her hurt. He was obviously lying about hating her, for whatever reason. The attacks keep coming and Natsume keeps countering them, protecting her, using his alice. In no time at all, he’s injured, with blood on his face, but he looks just as determined as before.

This is when it really gets through to Mikan. He’s different from the other kids. He acts like an adult, like a soldier. He takes on responsibilities without question and looks at the world in a way the others can’t fathom. He went through some scary stuff to be able to get to this point. “He always stands with a strong back, no matter what,” she realizes. And that strength came from experience; it didn’t suddenly manifest. He had no choice but to become like this. It’s interesting to zero in on her comment about his back, because that’s the part of him she sees the most. He’s always turning away, always distancing himself. He walks away, his back’s what she sees. She tries to connect and he resists, remaining a mystery. But this time, when she sees his back, it’s because he’s shielding her with his body, standing in front of her to protect her. She can see him now. She��s looking at his back, but what she sees now is someone who cares about her and wants to protect her. She sees someone who has never been protected himself. (Mikan’s hair, Natsume’s back, bla bla bla.)

I have a lot of thoughts on this scene that I have trouble putting into words so I couldn't include them... but damn, am I right.

But he commands her to stay behind him, not to leave him, because he will protect her.

And Mikan is reminded of what she said before, about wanting to protect her friends from alice attacks with her nullification. She had said that when Natsume had asked her what she wanted to do for them. He’d viewed her then as an equal, as someone who could contribute something instead of just a brainless and useless little girl. She had said that, but here he was, protecting her instead. So she stands up, gripping Tono’s alice stone, and tells him not to worry, that she can protect herself. She wants to help him too, to be his strength. “Don’t let yourself be hurt so much anymore,” she says. Natsume might be a hostile jerk, a person who lives a shadowy and mature life she couldn’t imagine, a person who always thinks of the needs of others. But Mikan wants to protect him.

It is worth noting, of course, that Mikan did need to be protected when she first entered the room. She was thoughtless and careless and almost got herself hurt. But now that she is aware of the situation, she can protect herself and her friends instead of holding Natsume back. Remember that Mikan's goal, aside from helping Hotaru and Yuu, is to prove herself: to be stronger, to be capable of sacrifice and protecting others. The thing is that achieving that goal isn't quite so simple, which we'll see later.

Firstly, that she wants to be "strong" enough to protect others and not have to be protected. Secondly, that she sees that Natsume is never protected, thus inspiring her to protect him, that she views him as something fragile. Thirdly, that she wants to make him stronger instead of being a burden on him. This was all her plan after all.

Z takes advantage of their moment of distraction and pretends to attack Ruka. But Mikan, demonstrating yet again her usefulness, is the only one to realize that it’s a hallucination, but she realizes it too late. She’s taken away, which is a problem because her alice was the only thing that could protect the rest of them from Mihara’s medusa alice, which he uses against Tsubasa as soon as Mikan is taken to his side.

Chapter Forty-Two

Tsubasa’s foot is out of commission and Mihara has established himself as a far more competent villain than Reo. Reo was all kinds of terrible: kidnapping kids and planning to either sell them to slavery or enlisting them as child soldiers. But he is thoughtless, which means he can be easily outsmarted. Mihara makes sure Z doesn’t look like a bumbling group of evil airheads. Instead, he’s sadistic, composed, calm, and intelligent. It makes sense that the villains (Mikan's antagonists) should be increasingly cruel and sadistic, from Natsume to Reo to Mihara (or Z as a whole) to Persona and Luna to the ESP. Mikan's storyline and thus the manga's tone goes from a simple school comedy (where Natsume the bully is the prime antagonist) to this point in the story where things turn more tragic and dark (hence Mihara as the antagonist).

Keep in mind that this arc is important in shifting the mood of the manga, particularly in regards to Mikan.

Mihara captures Mikan and then instructs Yuka to steal the kids’ alices. Should be easy since they’re kids, right? Apparently not. Yuka’s alice isn’t that strong. So Mihara turns to Plan B: enlisting them as Z members.

Mikan understands now what Yuka meant by “sadist.” This man finds pleasure in causing pain, which means he won’t hold back. She can only watch helplessly as Mihara hurts each of her friends: Tsubasa, Ruka, and Natsume all get struck by the medusa alice. Her friends all struggle in pain, Mihara laughs in amusement, and Mikan just shouts and watches. There’s nothing she can do. She can’t overpower the adult keeping her still.

Mikan is, despite her wish to protect and sacrifice, entirely helpless, which is perhaps the worst feeling of them all.

And yet, when Mihara uses his alice on Natsume one more time, Mikan has had enough. She does her best to attack Mihara, despite his superior stature and strength, grabbing at him to make him stop. She nullifies him and decides that, even though she’s been cast aside, she will do the one thing she can do: use her alice to make sure he can’t hurt her friends anymore.

Why must he attack Natsume twice in a row? Mikan cannot allow it!

Mihara commands Yuka to steal Natsume’s alice, almost like revenge for Mikan bothering him with her alice. You don’t like watching me torture him? Let me do it some more.

Yuka approaches Natsume. He’s incapacitated for the most part because of Mihara’s alice and also because all that fighting has tired him out. He just stands there and waits for her to come to him. Mikan screams for him to run, to get away, to save himself, but he just stands there.

The only sign that Natsume doesn’t want Yuka to get him is when he slaps her hand off. But he’s weak. Yuka overpowers him quickly, grabbing his wrist, taking his alice.

So Mikan screams for her to let go of him.

And her alice reaches them from all the way across the room, even though she’s restrained.

This is my favorite instance of nullification in the whole manga. It makes me so happy.

Again I will repeat that Mikan works best through specifics. Wanting to protect someone, but a hundredfold. This time, it’s I don’t want Natsume to lose his alice.

But it’s actually more than that. Mikan knows from her realizations last night that Natsume hates his alice. She knows that Natsume’s life would be much easier if he didn’t have it anymore. He’s the one person in her class who doesn’t like his alice, who would prefer to lose it. This is his chance. Mikan can see that too. It’s not precisely that she doesn’t want Natsume to lose his alice; it’s that she doesn’t want to lose him.

If Natsume lost his alice, he’d leave the school. He’d be alive, probably healthy and happy. He could be with his family again. But she wouldn’t be able to see him anymore. They wouldn’t have their little arguments. He wouldn’t surprise her with random compliments or touches. He wouldn’t be able to make her happy. She wouldn’t be able to solve him, to figure him out, to find out everything about him. She wouldn’t be able to spend time with him anymore. She wouldn’t be able to make him happy. She wants him to stay with her.

The wish is even stronger, even more specific: I don’t want to lose Natsume.

Long story short, this is proof of Mikan wanting Natsume as opposed to simply tolerating him or "taking what she can get." She doesn't want to be parted from him.

Mikan has always used her alice up close, and almost always through contact or at least proximity. She’s always tackling people or hugging them, and she was only able to nullify Yuka or Narumi’s alices because they were close to her. Natsume and Yuka are all the way across the room, but her alice is so powerful it stops his alice from being stolen. Sure, Tono’s alice might have helped, but Tsubasa had already pointed out that there was very little left in the stone. This was powerful because that’s how badly Mikan wanted to keep Natsume with her.

The rest of the chapter goes by quick. Mikan got her wish: she acted as Natsume’s strength enough for him to be able to cause an explosion that turned the tide of the fight, letting her side win. Yuka stabs Mihara and then offers it to the boys to cure them of their petrified limbs. The building’s self-destruct switch activates. The group manages to find a tunnel out of the building just as it’s about to blow.

Mikan has a moment where wonders why Yuka would help them. She gave Mikan medicine for Hotaru and then healed the boys and led them to the tunnel that would save them. There’s still the question of “good” and “bad,” but Mikan can’t figure out where Yuka lies.

Chapter Forty-Three

The vial Yuka got for Mikan has fallen under some rubble. Mikan is doing what she can to get it. When Tsubasa tells her to leave it, she shouts that she can’t. This is what they came here to get, after all: a way to help Hotaru. Mikan won’t leave without it. But Pengy finally shows its worth, squeezing between the rock to retrieve the vial.

Success! Things always work out! Good always prevails!

There’s a moment of bliss. They saved the vial so they can all head back, safe. There’s nothing else to worry about. It’s all worked out.

But they’ve stayed too long. The floor breaks under her and although Ruka is able to pull her up, Pengy is still in danger. They do what they can to try and save him, Tsubasa dropping Mikan down a little so she can grab it--but she can’t reach and they’re running out of time.

Pengy understands that if they waste anymore time trying to save it, they’ll doom themselves and be caught in the building’s self-destruction. So it does the only thing it can. It lets go.

Sometimes success comes at a cost. Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes you lose.

Mikan has been enthusiastic this whole time about having Pengy with her, like a good-luck charm from Hotaru. She insisted on letting it tag along, even when it caused problems and even when Natsume fought with her over it, even when the situation was dangerous. In the end, bringing Pengy was a good choice, since it saved Hotaru’s antidote. Without it, Mikan would have had to leave this building and go back to school empty-handed.

But this was a dangerous mission, and sometimes people get hurt on dangerous missions.

We see the group again once they’ve gone through the tunnel, back in the forest. Mikan calls for Pengy and then announces that she’s going back for it. She doesn’t seem to fully grasp that it’s gone for good, and she needs Tsubasa to grab her by the shoulders and explain it clearly to her: Pengy is gone and can’t come back. It sacrificed itself and that’s the only reason why the rest of them are alive. Mikan says “No,” and “I don’t want this.”

Mikan, whose life has so far been a school comedy, takes a while to grasp the permanence of this loss. People don't lose (or die) in comedies. She is still naive to how harsh the world can be.

Pengy’s “death” or sacrifice or whatever you want to call it is deeply tragic (makes me cry everytime, even at this very moment, as I write), but it serves an important purpose. It is not tragedy for the sake of making the reader cry; it’s narratively significant.

Each character involved feels this loss: Ruka, who loves animals and has a sensitive disposition was bound to grieve for it; Tsubasa, who had taken a leadership role over the kids and Pengy failed to protect one of the group, but is in the difficult position of grieving while also comforting Mikan; and even Natsume, who had reviled Pengy from the start, feels grief and guilt.

We get an interesting glimpse into Hotaru as well. Her alice works in a very intriguing way; it’s not simply inventing. Anyone can do that with enough creativity and technical knowledge. Her inventions are unique, sure, but that could just be credited to her bizarre imagination. (How fun is it that Hotaru’s inventions are never sleek and mechanical, but always inspired by nature and animals? They are always cute and dynamic--very much like Gaudi in the sense that she also breaks typical rules and looks to nature for more intuitive designs.)

She can feel Pengy's loss, even with all that distance between them.

Even more than simply being able to create amazing and unique designs, Hotaru seems to be like Kaname in terms of her alice. Technical types don’t just create; parts of their alice (or their soul, depending on whether or not those are entirely separate things) seem to be infused into their creations, meaning that what they make contains a part of them. Hotaru has been somewhat aware of Pengy’s actions (specifically Pengy; she’s not magically omniscient) throughout this journey. Hotaru doesn’t just cry now because she knows Pengy is gone; she can feel that it’s no longer around. Whatever part of her used to exist outside of her body is now gone. This gives us a much more personal glimpse into Hotaru and the connection she has with her alice and her inventions.

And most importantly (for this essay), we have Mikan’s reaction. Mikan is the most like a child in the main four, the most innocent, the most outgoing, the most cheerful. This is partly because of what kind of person she is, but it’s also because her life has been relatively easy compared to the rest of the kids. She’s new to the school, so she’s not as aware of the corruption and exploitation as other kids. She’s faced bullies, but experienced little violence and very little loss. Her parents have always been gone, so her grief has always been there. There’s always been a connection and a hole, neither of which she can truly reach because she knows so little about them. Getting kidnapped by Reo was scary, but the moment passed and nobody was really hurt. She, Sumire, and Natsume all got out of there relatively unscathed. Good prevailed, like it ought to. Nobody died.

I’d mentioned long ago that Mikan’s story is reflected by the seasons, right? It’s autumn.

Autumn represents change, reflection, slow maturation and eventual harvest, and even loss, just like plants begin to die before winter.

Mikan took off on this adventure to save her friends. When asked what she would contribute, she said she’d protect everyone with her alice. She told herself that she would become stronger, like Hotaru. That she would become the kind of person who doesn’t cry. She protected and was protected, but in the end she couldn’t protect Pengy. Autumn represents loss, and Pengy is Mikan’s first real loss.

Pengy is the first loved one Mikan has to lose. It’s interesting that when she comes to in the forest, she declares that she’s going back to save it. There’s nothing to go back to--the building has been destroyed--and there’s no sure way of knowing that they could get back to it the same way anyway. She can’t accept that Pengy is gone; instead, it’s been simply left behind. Mikan, dear optimist, wants to live in a world where bad things can be righted with good, where people can be saved if you try hard enough, where heroes prevail, and the good guys always win.

But Gakuen Alice--misrepresenting itself as a “school comedy” with magical children--is actually a tragedy, a bildungsroman (the story of a child maturing). In real life, the good guys can lose, people you love can die. I know that there’s a joke that GA turned around once Pengy died, that it suddenly became dark and depressing after that, but I don’t think that’s really the case. Mikan meets traumatized and abused children as soon as she enters the school. In fact, one of the reasons she goes after Hotaru in the first place is the rumors of children kept as prisoners. “Narumi will never send those letters to your grandfather.” The fourth alice shape. Mikan and her friends are kidnapped within the first twenty chapters. Hotaru was shot. I don’t think at all that Higuchi Tachibana meant to write a happy, lighthearted story.

Natsume’s perspective creates a thread of shadow from the very beginning, like a warning that his shadow could spread over the rest of the story. The manga might start off cheerful, with abuse and violence and exploitation danced over, but that’s only because the story is from Mikan’s perspective and Mikan is a naive child. If this story had been narrated by Natsume, it would be dark and depressing and the humor and light would be notably missing. If it were Ruka, the story would be more restrained, perhaps introspective, suspicious. If it were Hotaru, it might be much more bizarre, clinical. But Mikan is cheerful, sees the silver lining in everything. These dark and depressing moments aren’t exceptions, or random events that break away from an otherwise cheerful story. This is the story of an innocent girl getting dragged into a terrible world that intends to break her, and watching her resist at every turn.

Mikan says, “I don’t want this,” because she has noticed that the world has shifted without her realizing, that the story has been steadily building up to this moment, even if she'd been oblivious. It’s pretty clear Pengy was meant to die, to sacrifice itself, from the very beginning of the arc. Her idyllic pastoral life with her Jii-chan is in the past; this is the new reality. Slow maturation, eventual harvest.

She won’t realize everything all at once, because that’s not how maturation works and there’s more seasons to get through, more people to lose, but she has realized something important: strength has to be earned. Resisting a breakage is only possible if there’s something there to break you. Otherwise, there’s nothing to resist. Mikan both succeeds and fails in terms of her personal wish to be strong and be able to protect others. She has the willpower and the desire, and her alice is capable of protection. But where her strength fails is her naivete, her inability to grasp the nature of life, the inevitability of loss, the fact that sometimes you can't win.

The group does make it back to the school in time.

Mikan is able to give Subaru what Pengy sacrificed itself for. Mikan got part of what she had been looking for when they all set off on this mission. She didn’t get Yuu’s alice back, but she got the medicine for Hotaru, though it came at a steep cost she hadn’t been prepared for.

This is a success, but it doesn't really feel like one.

Mikan and Natsume are very different people who have led very different lives. This moment might be sad for him, but he’s been on dangerous missions before. There’s always the chance that you don’t make it back, or that a teammate doesn’t. He’d known that from the start, which is why his presence was so valuable. He was the only one on the team who truly understood what they were in for, that this wasn’t a game.

But Mikan’s just a little girl. All the times that she’s felt helpless before were moments she could overcome--she discovered her alice or she was able to save Natsume after all--but this is the first time that the happy ending she’d imagined doesn’t feel so happy by the time she comes to it. She had no idea what kind of journey this would end up being, and she didn’t want it to be this way, which is why she argued so much with Natsume, and might be why she found it difficult to admit to him that he was right before. Saying sorry is telling him he’s right. Telling him he’s right would be admitting that he’s right about how the alice world works, that it’s most often life or death, a desperate fight for survival, and not the fun adventure she wants it to be.

Sakurano tells the kids to go back to their dorms. They’re in the clear and will face no punishments, as long as they go back to life like nothing happened.

A character like Natsume will find no problem with that. He’s been doing that the entire time he’s been at the academy. But Mikan has been traumatized in a way she hasn’t yet experienced, something that changed and matured her. Going back to normal won’t be possible for her.

What is normal, then?

The story has so far been a lot of fun, a lot of cheer and humor and light-hearted antics. Mikan prepares a dodgeball game with her friends! She gets kidnapped but saves the day! Right after that, she organizes an event for the culture fest and then studies with her classmates! And then she watches somebody she loves die.

The story will still be relatively light and cheery, because Mikan isn’t jaded or cynical and won’t be. But her innocent positivity has to shift under the weight of what she’s witnessed. The fact that the story continues to be funny in parts is a good sign: Mikan isn’t breaking. But that doesn’t mean she hasn't changed.

Conclusion

I do feel the need to resist against the idea that Gakuen Alice "suddenly" became dark when it's been pretty dark from the start. The issue here isn't context, it's tone. Mikan is our protagonist so we see most things from her point of view, and thus we see the alice world from her perspective. As a result, the story seems light and happy, because Mikan is light and happy. That doesn't mean that the story is or was always intended to be light and happy. It is, in reality, a pretty complex narrative.

Tomorrow we'll wrap up the Z Arc and start moving on to the next season. I hope y'all enjoyed this part! It was emotionally taxing to write, and even to edit and format. <3

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