Casshern Sins 7 – Walking Through the Empty Age

Casshern Sins is like a combination of Texhnolyze, Kino’s Journey, and Trigun in a brilliant and beautiful tone piece. At this point it’s primarily episodic, though there’s a plot always hanging in the background and leading everything along. In episode 7, Casshern meets a woman who used to work in a factory before the apocalypse and has now spent all of her time building a tower onto the factory. Her dream is to hang a bell on top of the tower that, when rung, will make all who hear it see that the world is beautiful even in the ruin. She tries to use Casshern’s body to make her bell but fails. She then builds a simpler bell (which is broken soon afterward) but she is dissatisfied with the sound it makes. However, Casshern is enthralled by the sound which he feels resonating from the woman’s heart. At the end of the episode, ringo shows up at the tower and listens in wonder at the woman’s bell of the heart.

This episode resonated very deeply with me and actually brought tears to my eyes. First things fist, the tower was awesome. As you may know, I love architecture and crazy buildings, so I came a load at the tower. The woman atop it was nice as well.

It often seems like beauty is lampooned these days and people really fail to see it in all the places they could. When people say ‘the world is beautiful’, they are almost always about to rant about how mankind has ruined nature and how the only beautiful places are those untouched by man. I, however, completely disagree with this.

I believe that the creations of man are every bit as beautiful as what they took the place of. When I stand in a yard of toppled trees, I don’t think about how they were massacred by man’s greed, I think about how cool they look strewn about and decayed. I can appreciate a tower as much as a mountain and a valley as much as a metropolis. To me, this ruined world we live in still has it’s own beauty.

The world in Casshern is certainly beautiful as well, which is one of the show’s biggest draws. The rocky terrain, great mountains and vvalleys, barren deserts, and remnants of a lost civilization are all captivating and wonderful. It is a world I’d love to see and revel in. I certainly would love to ring that bell and try to let people see that beauty. Perhaps I can introduce people to Casshern’s beautiful world in the way I know best – through recommendation.

WATCH CASSHERN SINS!

(It’s also worth noting that watching this show keeps getting the song ‘walking through the empty age’ from Texhnolyze stuck in my head.)