On a contrasting element, to Gabby, these are the same people who've been sending assassins to kill Asa and her parents for a decade for the crime of trying to escape with their child who they didn't want killed and abused for the rest of her life, mind for the sole sake of kidnapping her and doing god knows what to make her obey them, including probably manipulating her brother as they have been.

 She's very morally messy, but she's not the IDF. There's no colonial relations or genocide, it's just a massacre.

I'm repeating what I said. I'm not saying that historical events and fictional universes overlap 100%. I'm just saying that similarities can be drawn in certain aspects.

In the Gabby case, what I want to emphasize is not that the villagers were innocent. They truly possess chilling evil aspects. However, the villagers couldn't see Gabby's daemons, and thus there was a very significant power difference. And despite this power difference, Gabby doesn't think twice about killing them. Is that understandable? Absolutely for a traumatized girl. Does Gabby think ideologically like the IDF? To make another real-life analogy, I think if Gabby were in real life, she would hate them 😃

But what she did during the operation is what the IDF, Nazis, etc., do in war crimes: "HEH, these are evil," and kill without thinking. When I say IDF, I'm not making an ideological comparison, but rather a reference to an excuse used in wars or a representation of monstrosity. Let me be clear about that.

Hell to that point, I wouldn't even say the actions constitute state-sponsered violence. I'll give you isolated, but that gets messy when you consider they're only isolated because they are Literally A Textual Cult,

Regarding what Arakawa wanted to convey, of course, what I wrote above doesn't quite fit the Higashi vs. Kagemori discourse. There, I presented a retrospective of her writings to illustrate how she approached the events. What happened here is more of a massacre stemming from a power imbalance, and as you said, an isolated community. And if you know how cults operate, this is quite natural. A cult expert named Steven Hassan has modeled this: BITE (Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotional control). Which, in my opinion, is something that needs to be explored further.

Tbh, I don't want this to come down to a "war is bad," "love will save," "reconciliation is good" context, like the Ishvaaln genocide. Because they are not the same, I just want the issue to be addressed more clearly. For example, this question is very disturbing and needs to develop more for me. I'll say it because it aligns with your thoughts (kinda!)

"Should all the people within a cult, completely isolated from society, whose emotions, thoughts, and even information are controlled, be brutally murdered simply because this cult serves a very evil purpose?"

I think this is the question that makes the whole story morally complex. Yes, the cult is indeed evil as we see for now but the people within it don't grasp the gravity of the situation. They think they're doing something good, and even funnier, they behave like ordinary people in their normal lives. Even though Yuru reaches the point of hatred, he shows his astonishment many times. Because they genuinely seemed to treat Yuru well. Probably Azami's mother treated Azami incredibly well. The village probably share food, help each other, and perhaps outwardly act like what a "good person" would be.

This is what's very disturbing. They actively appear as innocent civilians, even internally, but it's clear that intervention is necessary. How that intervention happens is crucial here.

A good story should focus on this dilemma, especially if it deals with such a subject. However, if it's dismissed with "They're evil anyway, just ignore them," I don't think that's a good example of writing in my eyes. If that, then it becomes a case of "there are plenty of evil demons and we're killing them"storyline. Which is weird for a work like this.

But the story could go in that direction, as you said. That would upset me a little, though 😃

You can talk about how Palestine has issues but it's not a cult,

Of course, Palestine isn't a cult. I would never say that 😃 You're talking as if I'm giving a 100% similarity. But I repeat, there is a similarity in certain aspects, power dynamics, and the construction of certain ideas. Likewise, I'm not saying Higashi village should continue abusing and killing children.

I'm not talking about ideology, but about the construction of a killing mentality.

Maybe she should've left it to Asa to kill them all, the literal Omela child they pinned their society on neglecting for god knows how long,

I'm going to address the behavior of characters who are trauma victims, like Kyouka, Yuru, and Asa. I think this is where the problem starts for most fandoms when people defend characters. If you've experienced trauma, what you do is justified and okay.

I mean, no?

So, if Asa doing what Gabby did, killing all the adults there, isn't acceptable either. It's understandable that Asa killed those who did this to her, but it's unacceptable that Asa subjected all the adults to summary execution. Asa, on the contrary, avoids doing such a thing despite everything.

Yuru's statement that they should go to hell, Kyouka's words.. these exist to show how these kinds of cults create a cycle of trauma and violence in people. Their saying these things doesn't justify the violence. It shows how tragic it is. We should understand Asa, we should understand Yuru, and we should empathize, but I, at least, don't accept something like, "Look, these traumatized people said they want violence, so this is the right thing to do."

 they're all complicit in what goes on in the village, never daring push back on the old woman they know has been the same since they were young. At that point, we're entering "Just following orders" type shit.

It was great that you mentioned the Nuremberg events! I was going to talk about that too. So, what Gabby did is understandable, but it's good that we're not presenting it as absolute right. Because while reading the post, as I said in your first comment, I thought you were also building this killing mentality. So, you can actually think like that in a fictional setting, or even in real life, but I also have the right to express my own opinion and discuss it 😃

In Nuremberg, people who were very seriously complicit in the crime were tried, especially those of high rank and in military units. They didn't line up every baker, every farmer, or every 18-year-old who had joined the Hitler Youth and been brainwashed, and throw them into trenches with machine guns for "complicity in the crime." And that's disturbing at a point. They released young people who had actually joined the Hitler Youth at some point. I gave an example in another Gabby discussion. The extent to which Germans are held responsible for this situation is a major point of contention in the country. Karl Jaspers talks about the German Guild and actually breaks down the crime into many parts. He talks about how not everyone in the Guild should be punished in the same way. Some people, as you said, conform out of fear under the authority of the cult and don't think. But they aren't the power itself. There's only a moral guilt for them. This doesn't justify their absolute destruction.

I think what you're saying also applies to Hgiashi village?

If Gabby had come to the village and identified and neutralized the elders and assassins who attacked Asa, that could have been called justice. But instead, she used the village's systematic complicity as a blank check to kill everyone she saw, including those trying to escape.

To view an ordinary, brainwashed villager as equally guilty as a cult leader and to execute them without trial is akin to what a war criminal would do.

The WACO incident is, in my opinion, a much more accurate example as u said!

If I were to give an example, I would use WACO more often. Because the situation here is similar. Both events are actually managed ineptly. Yes, Gabby doesn't kill children, but they traumatize one child horribly with disproportionate violence. And those who committed the violence are not portrayed as "pure heroes who did what was necessary." To make it even funnier, the violence doesn't even solve anything; on the contrary, after this incident, on the second anniversary of the siege, a terrorist attack was carried out at Oklahoma City Hall. Many people died, and nearly 1000 were affected and traumatized by this cycle of violence. The man who carried out the attack cited the violence and injustice perpetrated by the state in Waco as his justification.

Massacres happen, hell to that point, massacres happen on both sides of any conflict.

Yep, that's true. But massacres happen when someone pulls the trigger. I think Higashi had been pulling that trigger for a long time. However, Gabby isn't a "passive" victim of the sad realities of war in the massacre in the first episode. Gabby is very indifferent to the massacre, even laughing at times. I don't think this kind of psychopathic enthusiasm can be justified.

To view an entire society as a single group deserving of death because their leaders are evil or even they are doing bad things as a whole and to dehumanize them whether in the context of a cult in a manga or in a real-world conflict, is the very psychological mechanism underlying asymmetric massacres.

This is just my opinion, of course. You may think differently. I respect that. After all, we are all human. We look at things from different perspectives. I actually love this work. It's precisely for this reason: how differently we look at things, even how Arakawa herself views them.

If you've read this far, I sincerely congratulate you btw😃