Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun

Episode 7

“What are you hoping to find, down there?”

It's the question that every Cave Raider must have been asked by someone they loved, or at least what they must have asked themselves, at some point or another. Even when you factor in the borderline religious levels of reverence given to the best Raiders in the city of Orth, and the easy answers of “wealth” and “fame” that I'm sure plenty of low level adventurers would offer, after a certain point, the utter horror and calamity that one must face when delving deeper down has to be reckoned with. Especially knowing that there is a very real point of no return that exists, and that the consequences of even a single misstep eventually become as utterly destructive as they do, one can only imagine what is going through the minds of anyone who would willingly travel as deep into the Abyss as we have come thus far. At the very least, I am dying to know: What were they hoping to find, down there?

Then again, for the likes of Riko and Reg, maybe it really is as simple as, “I want to find my mother” or “I want to learn about my past”. As the Interface Units tell Wazukyan and the other Sages when they discover that terrible little stone, adults can be “motley and complex”, but even a world as beyond comprehension as the Abyss can be relatively straightforward to a child. Riko wanted to find her mother, and maybe see what she was capable of herself, so down she went. Reg knew that he needed to protect his first (and only) friend, so down he followed. We don't know exactly what Irumyuui wished for when that relic was placed on her chest, but we do know that she placed a lot of value on the idea of motherhood, and that she loved Vueko more than anything, and so…well, so it goes.

I suppose it would have been foolish to assume that the Abyss would be so kind as to spare even a dying child's wish from corruption and debasement. Vueko herself was all too aware that this place is cruelty incarnate, a thousand times darker and stranger than the mundane hell of the world above, but its cruelty is nothing if not impartial. If Made in Abyss' preoccupation with its prepubescent heroes has had any lasting impact beyond pure, leering shock, it has been to teach us all the lesson that we spend most of our days actively trying to ignore, civilized and modernized as we are. We sprang up from the darkest shadows of the trees and the mud once, eons ago, and the earth will take us all back, sooner or later. Mercy for the weak is not a law by which nature has ever, or will ever, abide.

Does having all of this on the mind make the act of watching “The Cradle of Desire” any less stomach churning? No, not particularly, at least in my case. What it does do, however, is provide some much needed context, a thematic shell in which to frame a truly harrowing episode of television so that we can at least make the attempt to transform all of that suffering and pain into something…well, into something of value.

Akihito Tsukushi may have his quirks, but the son of a bitch has me there. It all comes back around, in the end.

There's also the fact that, on the surface of the thing, Made in Abyss continues to be one of the most compelling and well-told tales of survival in the face of nature's sheer impossibility that I've ever seen. It takes all of the most fascinating elements you get researching real-world accounts like the stranding of The Terror or the ordeal of the Donner Party, and then it all gets further amplified and distorted by the Abyss' particular strains of high strangeness. It's one thing for the Ganja to all get ill from drinking a contaminated water source, but only in the Abyss could the party take every safety precaution available to them – checking for potability, boiling to decontaminate – and still suffer the most horrifying deaths imaginable, because the water itself is actually a living web of parasites that have been trapped in the calcified bowels of some ancient, dead creature for who knows how long.

Only in the Abyss could you discover—all too late, of course—that survival might be far worse a fate than a slow death of rotting from the inside out. Only in the Abyss could a literal Magic Wishing Egg twist a poor little girl's desire to become a loving mother so that she ends up transforming into the Hollow-spewing wretch that Irumyuui eventually becomes. Only in the Abyss could a mad “prophet” like Wazukyan happily drink the infested water that he knows will kill him one minute, and then happily offer his people the stewed remains of a undying child-thing's stillborn monsters the next. It's a glimpse into a very real and profoundly human kind of horror that itself has become so twisted and uncanny that the end result is positively eldritch.

In other words, this episode of Made in Abyss is a deeply sad and often genuinely disgusting record of one found family's descent into the bowels of hell, a climax of revulsion that speaks to all of the series' most deeply rooted themes while also indulging in a spectacle of suffering the likes of which I doubt has ever been depicted on television before. Do I recommend it? Is it a valuable use of your time? Is it successful as a work of art? Not for the first time, I don't know how well I am able to answer that question, even though it is ostensibly the purpose of writing a review in the first place. All I can ask you is the same thing that I would ask Riko, and Reg, and Vueko, and Wazukyan, and all of the others that came before and after them, if I could. Considering everything you already knew, when you came back to the Abyss this week, what did you expect to discover? What were you hoping to find, down here, exactly?

I will let you all know when, or even if, I ever find a satisfying answer myself. Until then, I suppose the only thing to do is go further down, and reckon with whatever is there to greet us.

Rating:

Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.