A recent animated American drama "Sex, Death and Robots", referred to as "Love Dead", has become a hot topic in various media and has been talked about countlessly. The plot is yellow and explosive, the key is to open up the brain.
It is said that the operation mode of the production company is that the producer selects the short stories, and then searches the world for an excellent animation production company. In the first season, 18 episodes were produced. The styles are diverse, and many ideas are also eye-opening.
Of course, to be honest, it is also limited by space, and many things are still too abstract. So in fact, not many of them really touched me. The third episode of "The Witness" tells a story that repeats itself over and over again, and I guessed half of it to the end. Even so, it was a very exciting episode.
What I really like is episode 8. An oriental story, check the background, it really is a short story "Happy Hunting" by a Chinese writer Liu Yukun. Liu Yukun, also known as Xiao Liu, translated "The Three-Body Problem" and "Beijing Folding".
He told this story very restrained, but made me feel very emotional. Because this story is actually anti-Western.
First spoiler, you can bypass it if you mind.
The story of this episode is very simple. A pair of monster-hunting father and son meet a pair of vixen mother and daughter. They kill the vixen mother. But there is a friendship between the children.
Many years later, the forces of the West arrived in the East, and under the pressure of survival, the grown child went to Hong Kong with the little vixen. The child becomes a train driver and is fascinated by machinery and steam at the same time. But the female fox lost her mana and was trapped in her incarnation, unable to extricate herself, so she became a prostitute.
One day, a perverted foreigner cut off the limbs of the vixen, installed a machine, and turned into a machine sex slave. At the end of the road, a childhood friend avenged her and helped to refit the mechanical body, making it a mechanical vixen.
With the help of the mechanical power, he immediately returned to the state of boundless mana, and then hunted down those foreigners who did evil.
There is a line in the play that tells me that when I was young, my life was full of magic. I remember the first sentence in Grimm's Fairy Tales, too, saying, " In ancient times when magic was still possible ."
But the concept of magic is also expressed a lot in Miyazaki's films. Like "Princess Mononoke". Hayao Miyazaki talks about the relationship between man and nature. The tradition of our scholar-officials cares about the collision between technology and culture.
Modernization is actually the result of Westernization. What literati regret is that modernization has made those ancient Chinese villages lose their aura.
Where does this story make me feel?
After all, the East entered the industrial civilization slowly, and in the culture, there are still memories of strange and strange monsters. And ghosts are part of culture. We throw away a lot of things as dross, but so much that we find ourselves emptied of our old selves.
So the fox spirit is more like a kind of symbol. In China, or in the East, they grow, multiply, and toss around those cranky scholars. Afterwards, he was either beheaded or cherished, and as in "Strange Tales from a Liaozhai", he also achieved a positive result. When they exist, they may be regarded as lagging behind in ignorance. When they are not there, we will regret the paleness of the spiritual world.
The fox fairies continue in a natural way. They have mana, charm. However, it coexists with the secular violence and warmth, until one day, the East meets the West in a hurry. Those ships are strong and cannons, those mechanical steam, and those ideology, they are almost covering the entire eastern land. Efficiency and materialism solve many practical problems, but cannot solve the lost soul of a piece of land.
Vixen, just like our culture, has lost its soul and charm. Then it was ravaged by the West, until one day, it was transformed with Western technology, and then it took revenge.
Well, this story, any way you look at it, looks like everything that happens in reality today. When the U.S. surrounded and suppressed companies like Huawei out of fear, it should have known that companies like Huawei grew up completely in the Western way, but only combined with our Eastern thinking to grow into a completely different so-called monster.
When they are afraid, they forget their original sin.
It's as if we've introduced capitalism that emphasizes efficiency, but we're fighting back with more efficient state capitalism.
When the conservative trend of thought began to prevail in the West, it was not known that the anti-Western trend of thought was already spreading on a wider scale. Well, I don't want to be so narrow, but how to put it, everything is disappointing because the status quo is broken and hope is not seen. Those who have the ability do all evil, and those who are incompetent only know how to criticize and abuse. No one should be held responsible, everyone fell into trouble when they tried to get the best price. Then, replace goodwill with utilitarianism, and replace reconciliation with opposition.
When you open Pandora's box, should you complain about the disaster in Pandora's box, or should you complain about the person who opened the box?
Today, we basically use Western thinking to think about issues and establish a view of right and wrong.
But when you really look for the source, you may find an ancient oriental fox demon, with bruised and unrecognizable eyes showing sadness. She cursed everything that happened and didn't mind including you in it.
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