We are coming up on Halloween and these types of post will also be coming to a halt as well. However, we still have one more to go, but this one specifically will be about curses, simply based on the title, since I couldn't think of a better one. So if you missed last weeks post, be sure to check it out and with out further ado, lets get going.
Newly transfered into classroom 3-3, not really knowing many people in your new school of Yomiyama North Middle School, you arrive to preform your introductions in front of the class. Unfortunatly, you aren't well welcomed as you would have hoped. So you quietly sit down in the empty seat right in view of a female classmate with short, black hair and an eye patch.
You realize that she is the girl you met yesterday on an elevator in the hospital, right before you get discharged from what you were in the hospital for in the first place, a collapsed lung. When you try to ask your classmates about her, Misaki Mei, most of them would just give a blank stare, like you were crazy.
Trying to get to the bottom of this, you ask Misaki about all the strange behaviors of your classmates. She explains that she is someone you shouldn't get close to and your last name, Sakakibara, mean death around this city especially in classroom 3-3. Later on we find out about sometime called 'The Calamity', the curse that lingers inside of class 3-3 of Yomiyama North Middle School.
So welcome to the plot of Another, a horror anime based around a curse, The Calamity, the claims tons of live and this is also what I will be focusing on as well. Just to start I don't really like the concept of curses in the first place simply because dropping down to the supernatural to explain a mystery isn't the best way to solving it. However, since this is a work of fiction I can let it slide, to some extent.
Curses have this quality that makes it extremely easy to explain some kind of recurring event, in Another's case the large amounts of deaths inside of class 3-3. However, the down side of ease of use is counterbalanced with the uneasy feeling of these the event happening without an source to really blame.
The unsettling feeling does, ironically, settle for me fairly soon with the calamity in Another, leaving me curious of who and how a person would die because of my wonderfully dark sense of humor. Which is the second problem I have with curses, the focus often, for me at least, shifts from the curse it self to the destruction it is causing. Lastly, it does let you focus more on the people and how they react to the evens, which is a plus.
So that ever lurk curse has cons that sprout pros, make it a strange beast to deal with. Overall, the idea of curses in horror doesn't seem that all that horrific in my opinion, because it takes me out of the immersion of the anime and make me feel like an observer. The observer watching over a wonderful disaster where many people die, many people lose their minds and in the end, the surviving protagonists, change their lives.