nikkimacahon

Awesome article, I loved this!

Good stuff, thanks for the advice!

Awesome article! Articulated a problem that’s been plaguing writing programs for year. I especially like the point of teachers not urging one way or the other, not forcing students to choose between academic acclaim or popular success. Honestly, the two aren’t always mutually exclusive. Look at works like “Catcher on the Rye”, “The Great Gatsby”, and “The Lord of the Rings”. All technically genre books intended for entertainment, all enjoyed commercial success, and yet all rich in intellectual rich. They leave something for the scholar and the civilian, proving that being literary and genre aren’t always separate entities.

I watched this show about a year ago in one binge sitting, going back to my favorite episodes once and awhile ever since. It’s so stylized in the way it approaches discussing themes like life, death, and a afterlife based on a moral system. Such a great show. Going back and thinking on it, yeah, there are a lot of humanistic ideas. Great article!
Thinking further on Decim’s relationship with humanism, what can be said about his fellow arbiters? Decim’s supervisor, Nora, spends the entirety of the series guiding Decim and protecting his true nature from her boss-Oculus. Most of her peers either are hesitant or outright disapprove of Decim’s human nature, and Oculus’s words in the finale have a haunting ring to them when he recounts the rules, stating that arbiters possessing human emotion will be the end of them. Yes, we see Decim perform his duties twice, perhaps better off with emotion. But we never see the prolonged effect. That put up against Oculus’s last words leaves the impression that we’re never given a real conclusion to the show’s underlying conflict. Seeing as arbiters hold a God-like occupation, even without perfect omniscience, it begs the question; is a humanistic approach the best way to fair judgement? Should our Gods think and feel like we do?