Different worlds: Ash (1)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Originally posted on 3 June 2019 in Turkish here.

Previously, I wrote about what I thought of Ash’s father and now it’s time to delve into what kind of damage James caused to Ash’s mental state.

Content/trigger warning: This meta discusses child sexual abuse.

James Callenreese is a bad parent in every sense of the word, but unlike the Cape Cod police, he’s not so degenerate as to claim that a 7-year-old boy seduced his abuser. And Ash knows that his father doesn’t blame him for getting raped. This allows him to be confident in the knowledge that what his abusers were doing to him is wrong and that it’s not his own fault. That’s why Ash never takes the responsibility of the abuse he endured upon himself. Consequently, he never thinks that he “deserved” to be raped.

However, there is another incident that affected Ash just as much as getting raped and that is his first murder. Like I mentioned here, the adults who were responsible for Ash’s safety failed to protect him, and so Ash took matters into his own hands and killed his abuser to put an end to what he was doing to him. Obviously, 8-year-old Ash was the victim in this case and couldn’t be held responsible in any way for the killing. But his words to Eiji in the following scene tells us that he holds himself fully responsible.

What I mean is, whatever the reason, Ash simply admits to killing a person. He talks about this incident only once and only to Eiji with no “but”s or “because”s scattered in-between, just the facts. Why is this important? Because Ash thinks that he lost his innocence at that age when he killed his baseball coach and that his life took an irreversible turn as a result.

The official English version took some liberties with the translation in this scene. Here’s a more direct translation of what Ash says: I’m scared of myself. To think that I killed Shorter… I don’t even know how many people I killed until now. And I feel nothing. Nothing…

It is in this scene that we witness just how traumatic killing is for Ash. He’s crying because he came to realise that he’s slowly losing his human side. Deep down Ash feels like he has to pay for all the lives he took regardless of the circumstances. So he doesn’t think it’s even possible for him to lead a different, a more “normal” life, because he doesn’t see himself worthy of one in the first place.

I believe James is the root cause of why Ash came in with this toxic mindset. If there’s anything that caused Ash to get hurt more than his father’s negligence, it is his helplessness that Ash seems to forgive him for. Perhaps James didn’t blame his son for getting raped or told him that he deserved it, but we know that he called him a troublemaker.

Ash’s loneliness

Originally posted on 1 April 2019 in Turkish here.

Let’s take a closer look at this loneliness that Eiji’s talking about.

Ash’s mother abandoned him after he was born. James was hardly a father to Ash at all. Griffin, who was ten years older than his little brother, assumed the role of both parents before he was drafted to Vietnam. These are the facts we know. So then, was there no one around Ash who cared about him until he met Eiji?

Take Blanca, for example. He’s not any different from Ash as he’s very lonely too. But he’s not deprived of his humanity like some other adults in Banana Fish. Still, he swallowed the bitter pill long ago and learned the hard way not to try to bend the rules of the game. Also, Blanca can’t dissociate Ash from his past. He can’t see beyond the bruises on his wrists and ankles when he looks at him. And that’s perhaps his biggest mistake.

We kind of have an idea about what Blanca lived through but I can only imagine how fucked-up life has been for him to be so damn practical about what to do with Ash when he first meets him. Instead of rebelling at the idea of a child ending up in such circumstances, he simply thinks to himself, “This world is the only place this child can belong to.” That’s why Blanca teaches Ash how to survive in the underworld, not how to escape from it. But that’s not what Ash wants. Ash never wished to become a king in the world he was thrown in. He wants to tear it down at the risk of his own life.

From Ash’s perspective, Blanca is probably the best thing that happened to him in those years. Other than Private Opinion, the preview of episode 22 unexpectedly gives us an idea about how little Ash saw Blanca. In the preview Blanca tells Ash, “You used to be such a sweet boy. You’d secretly read the books I had finished, scrape the food you didn’t like off your plate to mine and follow me around like a duckling.”

Yeah, I’m melting inside too. Someone please draw fanarts of these scenes? Like this maybe?

Back to our point… Since Ash is a child, he behaves around Blanca the same way a child behaves around a trusted adult as this preview tells us. But I don’t think he ever forgot who Blanca was and why he was there. Blanca would make sure he always remembered that in the first place.

So Blanca never becomes a parent figure for Ash. He doesn’t (can’t) really give him the love and care he needs at that age. What’s more, the Central Park scene at the end of the story kind of proves to us that these two have never and will never be a cure to each other’s loneliness.