Dealing with Despair

How to Write Against the Nihilism Infecting the West

The main cast, L to R: Raiden, Anju, Kurena, Theo, Lena, and Shin.

Not too long ago I finished reading the eighth volume in Asato Asato’s series 86 – Eighty-Six. It is a good series. Although the English translation is repetitive on occasion, has misused some words, and has some misspellings, the story flows well. This makes these items less bothersome (to this reader/author) than they might be otherwise. Asato’s storytelling carries through, despite the errors, making it easier to appreciate the prose that does translate well.

For context, the last book series produced by the entertainment industry that I have any praise for regarding technique and style is Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. Mistakes or not, though, 86 – Eighty-Six absolutely leaves Games in the dust. Yes, Asato is that good. Her characterization also tends to be deeper, more visceral, and her plot moves at a clip that would allow her to keep up with most of the Pulp Rev group if she were publishing this series in the U.S.

 Apart from this praise of her skill, there is something else of interest in Asato’s series. It is a phrase introduced in book two that sets up a motif in the series; one that is highly disconcerting, especially in this time of rampant despair and apathy. It is a motif that more or less mirrors a trend in modern Western literature but which Asato uses to emphatically state that it is not a right attitude or a healthy one for people to have.

What is this disturbing line in 86? Read it for yourselves: “This world doesn’t need humans.”

This world doesn’t need humans. Did you shiver after reading that? Good. It means you are healthy of mind, if not in other areas of your life.

For the 86, however, health of any kind hasn’t mattered much. Forced by their own country to live, fight, and die in a warzone, they have been “whittled down” to their bare essences. Asato states that the child soldiers, the only remaining 86 who can still fight, have cut themselves off from every happy memory they possess and any aspirations for the future they may have had in order to become weapons capable of surviving a hellish battlefield meant to murder them. Left with nothing else to call their own, these young 86 can only take pride in fighting to the bitter end against the mechanical Legion.

It is a nihilistic view of life, yet it is all that they have in the 86th sector. But as the series progresses, the 86 are liberated from their enforced encampment near the combat zone and their situation improves rapidly – some might say too rapidly. Removed from the battlefield and given proper schooling to help them reassimilate into society, a great number of the 86 volunteer to return to the fight to face the Legion.

Of course, part of that choice is sheer practicality. What kind of future will they have if the Legion wins? Leaving the field of combat to pursue a normal life when that life may be ended at a moment’s notice by the adaptable drones holds no appeal for them.

Moreover, the 86 are survivors; they have fought the Legion in inhumane conditions for so long most of them know the machines’ better than the adult soldiers who rescued them. Additionally, their constant conflict with the drones has honed their combat skills and reflexes to near superhuman levels that normal fighters cannot match. Regular soldiers are terrified of the child combatants, considering the 86 monsters fit only for combat. Having had to rely on sheer tenacity and ferocity to survive, the 86 appear wild and suicidal when they charge into battle against the mechanical demons unleashed upon their world.

Though it seems unfair, the soldiers’ appraisal of the 86 is not inaccurate. Some of the children and teens are, in fact, suicidal to a degree. Shinei “Shin” Nouzen, known by the Personal Name “Undertaker,” is one of these teens. He has survived fighting the Legion for five years, from the time he was eleven. Every squadron of which he has been a member has been obliterated, leaving him the sole survivor.

Shin developed a practice of euthanizing severely wounded Processors to prevent them from being assimilated by the Legion. Since the 86 were not allowed to be buried and had no dog tags, he would take pieces of their mechs – the Juggernauts – to turn into an impromptu name tag for his fallen comrades. This leads to the other 86 referring to him with the affectionate, frightening, awful title of “the Reaper” (“Shinigami” in Japanese).

These items combined to make Shin feel as though he is the cause of a great deal of grief in the world. That he really is a Reaper, a bringer of death. Although his talks with Vladilena “Lena” Milize lead him to respect and fall in love with her, for a time he struggles with the despair and lack of purpose freedom from his burdens gives him. While his perspective is not the one from which a reader first sees the line “this world doesn’t need humans,” Shin does think this later on when he nearly surrenders to nihilism on the battlefield.

By book eight, however, Shin is much healthier psychologically than he has been prior to being sent to the 86th Sector. But Theoto “Theo” Rikka (“Laughing Fox”) has not yet found a reason to keep living beyond combat, and he is still trapped in the mindset he had in the 86th Sector. In some ways, he has it worse than Shin did, since he has no family left and no one for whom he feels strongly enough that he is willing to fight for them. All he has is his pride as an 86 who fights to the bitter end, but the bitter end is no longer assured.

Theoto “Theo” Rikka (Laughing Fox)

When confronted with the loss of even his pride in fighting the Legion with his last breath, Theo becomes unnerved and psychologically unbalanced. He loses track of the fighting, has no idea how to live in the present anymore, or what to do to keep going. “This world doesn’t need humans,” he thinks, looking out at the beautiful scenery.

Book eight hints that his transformation is coming, that he will indeed learn to live on without his pride. The change has yet to occur and solidify fully as of this writing, but it is promised. And it is that promise which makes 86 – Eighty-Six so much better than most present-day Western novels – including The Hunger Games.

Far too many YA novels, middle grade stories – yes, it extends that deep – and a multitude of books meant for adults presents nihilism as the truth of reality. These state that humanity is brutal, cruel, and not worth saving. A great many novels, films, and television shows not only suggest but applaud the idea of wiping humanity from the face of the Earth, which “doesn’t need humans.”

It may well be true that the Earth doesn’t need humans. But how many of us have actually pictured an Earth where humanity no longer exists – or never existed in the first place?

Somewhere around the age of twelve, I wondered what Earth would look like without humans. I did my best to picture the world as we know it today minus not only the people, but everything human-crafted. Only the plants, animals, birds, insects, and the oceans remained.

Can you see that image in your mind’s eye, readers? No buildings. Only the natural world, untouched by men and never to know mankind’s distinctive tread. The deer are in the field, the mountain lion basks on the cliff, the sharks swim the ocean in search of natural prey. The raptors scream overhead, with only other raptors to answer back. Songbirds in the bushes twitter and chirp, but no human whistles or pleasant prattle answers them. They can only hear their own kind call them.

You don’t hear any hammering, because there is no one to build anything. You don’t hear any cheerful whistling, any happy singing or laughter. You don’t hear any screams of terror or joy; the rumble of traffic is nonexistent. Man never existed, never walked the Earth, never put a mark on this “virgin” world. There is no order here, only the chaos of nature untrammeled, unchallenged, and running rampant as a garden left to the mercies of weeds and time.

What an empty little blue ball of rock, readers.

The first time I pictured that scene in my head, I scared myself so badly that I shivered and immediately wrenched my mind to more pleasant topics. Who would want a world bereft of people? I wondered at the time. It would be boring, empty, and – and not worth having, not worth creating in the first place.

You can doubtless tell that I was a child when this thought occurred to me, because I failed to realize just how many people would prefer an empty, boring, desolate world with no humans in it to the one we presently call home. The nihilistic trend in fiction points to the prevalence of this belief on the part of academia, the entertainment industry, and far too many people in positions of authority across the institutions of the world. Some of them are, like Alexander Pierce in The Winter Soldier, quite open about their desire to severely reduce the population of the planet. Only they do not wish to sacrifice the “few” to save the “many”; they want all but 250-500 thousand people to die. The loss of so many will surely allow these elect individuals to inherit a pure or “virgin” Earth, after all.

86 – Eight-Six ably pushes back against this trend, and it does so by starting from a position of nihilism. Shin and then Theo are the characters who have so far faced the greatest existential crisis after dealing with “the nameless sin,” as Chesterton called it. While Theo still needs to progress, his Reaper has already cleared the path for him by leaving the 86th Sector behind psychologically as well as physically.

In a society drowning in nihilism, 86 is a series I recommend as a lifeline out of the storm. It takes time to build up from that nihilistic view, of course – one doesn’t overcome psychological trauma in a single day, or even a period of a few months. But the trip is more than worth it for reminding a reader that, yes, there is meaning in life. You do not make it, either; you find it. Or it finds you, just as Shin’s girlfriend found him.

But pursuing that meaning – that is where the real adventure begins.

I hope you enjoyed this post, readers. If you so, be sure to subscribe to my Substack and/or my blog, www.carolinefurlong.wordpress.com, for more. Make sure to check out my published stories on my Amazon Author page as well, and stay tuned for more to come. There is more on the way!