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Seeing Yourself in Strange Phenomena: God Bless the Mistaken as Disability Analogy
🕑 Added 2024-04-27 23:10:45 +0000 UTCAuthor: Patricia C. Baxter
Editor: Alex Henderson
Spoiler Warning: The following article contains spoilers for major plot points revealed in volumes 2 and 3 of Nakatani Nio’s God Bless the Mistaken.
When creating works of fiction that represent or allude to the experiences of marginalized people, a creator can tackle this heavy and challenging subject matter in many different ways. Some will implement the direct approach, reflecting a current or past example of these issues people encounter. Others will provide indirect examples, relying on metaphors and analogies to showcase a fantastical experience that the audience can impose their interpretations onto. While there are pros and cons to both approaches, the latter can be especially tricky to pull off, as some metaphors lose track of their central message, or unintentionally cause more harm than good in what they are symbolizing. However, when an analogy works, we can experience a narrative that can truly resonate with an audience who may find it difficult to find explicit depictions of their lives and experiences in fiction.
Nakatani Nio’s most recent series, God Bless the Mistaken, is a manga that provides an excellent example of an analogy done right. While the setting and experiences of the characters are fantastical, they were still able to resonate with me and my own lived experiences. The series’ ability to showcase the various ways that being different from what is considered “normal” impacts people, and from the perspective of two completely different characters no less, was exemplary in its execution. With this in mind, I will analyze and discuss how this series can serve as an analogy for the experiences of marginalized people, using my personal experiences as an autistic woman as the frame for my analysis.
The world of God Bless the Mistaken is very similar to our own, with the major difference being that the planet is frequently impacted by exceptional phenomena, aka “bugs,” meaning that the laws of reality that we take for granted change in peculiar and unexpected ways. These can cause changes in the environment, living beings, and human perception in a variety of intriguing ways, from flora spontaneously growing throughout a city, to people gaining the ability to walk in the air, to cryptids appearing.
Despite the seemingly random nature of the bugs, there are still core principles and rules ascribed to them, such as only one bug occurring at any given time; and bugs that cause a greater impact on the world only lasting a few hours while less dramatic bugs can last several days. With bugs playing such a monumental role in the lives of people, humanity has researchers and analysts who devote their time to studying exceptional phenomena and assisting people in moving forward during especially cumbersome events. One of those people is the series’ deuteragonist Himesaki Kasane, who aside from her scientific curiosity about bugs also has a personal connection to them, as she is a rare example of a human who is never directly affected by bugs.
From a very young age, Kasane has lived with the knowledge that she is different from literally every other person in the world, due to her being unaffected by the universal constant of bugs. When people’s ages temporarily change hers remains the same, when people temporarily grow tails she has none, and when people flip their sense of left and right she retains hers. Environmental bugs are things she can still witness and observe, such as sweet flavors becoming salty and vice versa, but bugs that directly influence people never impact her. As a result of this, Kasane finds bugs to be fascinating from a scientific perspective, but she also finds them to be frustrating as she is an exception to a supposedly universal rule.
On a more personal level, Kasane also has complicated feelings about bugs, as having such a singular experience with them has caused her to question whether she is truly human, an inquiry she has considered since childhood. She has also encountered antagonistic people who question whether she is faking her singular existence as a form of attention seeking, and while she has shrugged these incidents off it is clear that these experiences were still frustrating. While Kasane has grown up and accepted her difference from the rest of humanity, the question of whether she “counts” as truly human still occurs to her as an adult.
I found parts of Kasane’s experiences of feeling disconnected from the rest of humanity to be comparable to my own feelings as a child before I received my formal diagnosis on the autistic spectrum. From a young age, I could tell that I was different from the rest of my peers but, unlike Kasane, I did not have a visual indicator like “bugs” to highlight these differences in obvious ways. For me, the differences cropped up in subtle ways, such as my difficulty in establishing meaningful connections with my classmates, and my inability to understand turns of phrase and body language “naturally” like other people. These stark differences became increasingly daunting to me, as I could not explain why I felt so different from others in a meaningful way, and my inability to “fit in” would often result in my being bullied. Thankfully, I was eventually able to get those questions answered, and better still accept and love myself as an autistic person, but the feeling of isolation and being othered that I felt as a child still lingers even into adulthood.
Kasane’s character showcases how the experience of being marked as “abnormal” at a young age can continue to impact a person, even if they have grown up and accepted themselves. She finds there are many benefits and positives in her experiences as a person who is never impacted by bugs, but the question of her humanity still lingers. These questions are further accentuated when she encounters another person who has a unique relationship with bugs: the series’ protagonist Wataya Kon.
Kon is Kasane’s assistant who lives with her and three other tenants in the shared home she leases. At first, Kon appears to be a standard protagonist for this type of supernatural series, being an average middle-schooler whose curiosity for how the world works is a stand-in for the audience’s questions about this fascinating reality. However, Kon is far from “ordinary,” something the series has cleverly foreshadowed since its first chapter. In chapter nine, we learn that Kon is not a typical human with a family and personal history to match, but rather he is a human that was created during a bug which temporarily added new people into the world. He is also one of the few examples of a “remnant”: a trace left behind by a previous bug despite it being resolved in the rest of the world.
After the bug that created Kon is resolved, he soon finds that there are several gaps in his memory, such as what his alleged parents’ jobs are, where he previously attended school, how he befriended his new friends, and how exactly he knows things that everyone has taken for granted as basic knowledge. This further comes to a head when he tries to contact his parents but learns that the address he supposedly used to be from does not exist. As Kon struggles to find his way back home—further disoriented by a new bug that causes people to get lost even when they know where they are going—he finds his panic growing as he begins to question his reality.
Thankfully for Kon, Kasane arrives and explains his unique existence to him. Kon is quick to accept this reality, as it answers many questions he has about himself and resolves various inconsistencies in his alleged past. Despite these reassurances, Kon still feels insecure, as he feels he isn’t a “real” human and that he has deceived those he has grown close to. Kasane reassures Kon by attempting to drive him home following his instructions, but due to the bug, Kon is unable to get there, just like every other person impacted by the phenomena.
To Kasane, this is proof that Kon is human as, except for herself, all other humans are experiencing this difficulty. Taking Kasane’s explanations to heart, Kon decides to move forward in his life even if he isn’t “normal,” reassured that he has answers for his unique existence and knowing that he still has a place to call home.
While not an exact one-to-one comparison, Kon’s situation felt very reminiscent of the feelings I had growing up learning about the autistic spectrum and how I fit within it. Before my diagnosis, I had no way of explaining why I experienced the world the way I did, or why I felt different from other people despite my best attempts to connect with them. Learning about autism was an epiphany I never realized I needed, and while the road was not without its fair share of bumps, the relief I felt in learning there was an explanation for my feelings and experiences was palpable. Having a word to explain things meant I could conduct more research on the subject and discover that there were people out in the world whose lives and realities overlapped with my own, making me feel significantly less isolated and lonely.
Another aspect of Kon’s story that parallels part of my own experience as an autistic person is his ruminations surrounding disclosing his identity to others. As Kon grows as a person throughout the series, he begins to feel more confident in disclosing his identity as a human born from a bug to the people he considers to be his family and friends. The series devotes an entire chapter to the topic of disclosure, chapter eleven, with characters going over the pros and cons of the process, and how children whose identities and circumstances should be approached with discretion for their safety and wellbeing should be protected by the adults in their community. Seeing such an in-depth discussion on a topic that has been so crucial to my life, as a queer disabled woman, being given such a nuanced discussion was, and still is, frankly astonishing to me.
Disclosure is something I always think about whenever I consider making connections with people I want to be friends with, or during the hiring process of a new potential place of employment, especially regarding being autistic. There is always a bit of underlying fear, whether it is that disclosing will lead to me missing opportunities in the workplace, or that people will be unwilling to take the time to understand who I am and what my disability entails. As I’ve grown older, I feel confident in disclosing my autism as a default, but I acknowledge that not every person is in a safe or comfortable position to fully disclose their identity to others. Seeing a discussion of this concept handled delicately and tactfully in God Bless the Mistaken is reaffirming and validating, even if Kon’s circumstances are entirely fantastical.
Nakatani Nio’s God Bless the Mistaken may be a manga series that takes place in a fantastical setting, but the experiences and emotions that its characters encounter are still remarkably real and grounded. Kon and Kasane’s experiences may not be an exact parallel to my identity as an autistic person, but the emotions they feel, whether it is being isolated or validated, are so deeply reminiscent of my journey of self-discovery and acceptance. The series uses its larger-than-life premise to address themes of otherness and isolation, focusing empathetically on characters who are forced to ask if they are really “human” if they are so out of place from what is meant to be the “universal” way of experiencing this strange and disorienting world.
Kasane and Kon’s experiences with being a fantastical “other” are very different, but they find commonalities and support one another. Kasane, especially, recognizes an echo of her own experiences in Kon, and aims to give him a protective mentor figure and guardian, mirroring the many unconventional but emotionally important relationships, be they intergenerational mentorships or found families, to be found across marginalized communities. They exist in a bizarre and unpredictable world, but find solace and companionship in each other, and the language and concepts to give a name to their own phenomena.
God Bless the Mistaken is certainly not the only example of a story using speculative elements to play with themes of otherness, humanity, and community, but it is a very effective and nuanced example. It invites the reader to empathize with characters outside of the norm, to ask what “normal” means and to question if it truly exists. While Nakatani may not have intended for her series to be a direct analogy for the experiences of disabled people, the fact that her story can be interpreted as one showcases the power that a good analogy can have on an audience, allowing people to feel seen in ways that are both unexpected and welcome.
