The morality might be gray, but the hair colors sure are gaudy.
The story of Shiki is about a tight-knit community living in a rural village, which is preyed upon by vampires (called shiki), though from their perspective, it appears to be an epidemic of some sort at first. For the running length, it takes most of the protagonists a very long time to figure out what's really going on, as villagers are picked off one by one. Eventually, they fight back, and the prey becomes the predator.Emphasis should be placed on the prey becoming the predator, or even the prey and predator being one and the same when boiled down to their essence (this is partially the message found in the monk's Cain and Abel-inspired story); this is reflective of a trend in horror fiction to humanize the monsters while also relying on gray areas of morality for the sake of social commentary about humanity. The show starts by depicting the shiki as being very ghoulish in some nighttime scenes (two scenes where Masao's and Tohru's houses are visited especially stand out as being creepy), but by the end, the villagers are portrayed in just as ghoulish of a light.
Many reviewers and fans relish this aspect, but the humans, while maybe becoming a bit more cruel and spiteful than is necessary at times when confronting the shiki (probably best emphasized by the segment where the villagers leave the shiki to a slow death, but one human delivers mercy killings, as well as the infamous tractor scene), are just acting in their own best interest for survival.
The shiki brought the situation upon themselves by terrorizing the once idyllic village. Due to the shiki's bloodlust, the villagers were left to watch their friends and family wither away and die. And among these villagers who died, some came back as shiki, and they are manipulated or groomed by the veteran shiki in preying on their remaining loved ones in a vicious cycle. Tatsumi, one of the shiki, is particularly sadistic in how he directs these newly recruited companions to prey on former family and friends. The shiki's intentions appear to be the death and/or conversion of all human life in the village. There are no benign alternatives conceived of amongst their ranks. Muroi seems to be an exception here--Sunako and the rest seem to view him as a potential human ally like Seishirou.
Cows are featured prominently as livestock to emphasize that what the shiki are doing to the humans is no different than what humans are doing to other animals. Like another reviewer, I similarly found this to be insipid for the same reasons: humans survive by devouring animals, but shiki only need the blood of humans to survive, meaning killing is not necessary for the latter. However, the series makes it clear that the shiki are trying to survive AND they're trying to replicate themselves.
The Kirishiki family is shown consuming blood from wine glasses, an important story arc has one character trying to convince a shiki who was once his friend to coexist with humans and not kill them, only to be betrayed, and there is only one other subplot that features a shiki making a concerted effort to survive on blood without killing.
Throughout the series, it's shown that the shiki can easily blend in with humans, other than their aversion to sunlight. They open stores in the village, have a city unit of shiki engaging in similar ways, and even seem to own a moving company, and they can afford to own the obviously expensive and out-of-place European castle on the outskirts of the village, so they clearly have shiki-specific infrastructure in place and a lot of money.
Couldn't they conceivably purchase human blood (whether non-human blood is viable or not is never addressed) and forego preying on humans altogether? This is never explored at all.
But on some level, I accept the argument that what humans do to cows is no different than what the shiki are doing to the humans. One can even argue that humans don't require meat to survive either. We can become vegetarians. However, humans enjoy the taste of meat, and a balanced diet with meat, fish, etc., is nutritionally superior to vegetarianism. We also harvest the bodies of animals for many items we create.
Similarly, shiki need more than just blood, because they can only replicate themselves not through passing on their DNA, but by converting humans into shiki. If we consider the instinct to reproduce in some form an imperative for all lifeforms, then how can the shiki really be blamed, for It appears to be a biological necessity for the shiki (I can't help but wonder if a shiki is merely a human host infected with a type of parasite)? They do what they do to survive and to reproduce, yet it necessitates antagonism between humans and shiki. The shiki use every part of humans, not just blood; just as the humans use every part of cows.
Just as wolves are predators and sheep are prey, we have a similar relationship with our livestock. The shiki are a natural predator of humans. Is it really immoral for predators to hunt prey as food? Certainly no one would consider a non-human animal consuming another animal as immoral. It only becomes a topic of morality for humans because of their sentience and insecurities. Many will debate that having alternatives makes this process inhumane and morally objectionable--obviously, I disagree, but that's a debate for another time and place.
The killing of humans by other humans without a justified cause would almost universally be seen as immoral by the standards of today. Could the same be said of relations between shiki and humans? Certainly there are many similarities between shiki and humans, but is an equivalence in intelligence and other criteria more important than the nature of being predator and prey when it comes to evaluating whether or not something is moral?
The shiki may have once been human, but they should obviously be regarded as a completely different species, and something altogether different than even denisovans or neanderthals, which are other species humans mated with in the distant past (this is part of why I previously brought up the shiki possibly being parasites that inhabit a host, though I have no proof for this being correct).
Essentially, the shiki are in direct opposition to humans. Both are engaged in competition for resources as various creatures would be in an ecosystem, while also engaging in a predator-prey relationship, eventually resulting in a predator-prey reversal as the humans gain the upper hand. The shiki, as the minority, must always be fearful of the human majority exterminating them, and the humans must always be fearful of the shiki surreptitiously parasitizing them and taking over their society, as can be seen when the shiki replace the entirety of the local government (and seemingly some closely adjacent government facilities outside of the village), with aims of taking over the village.
I'm honestly not sure the focus on morality that the show had, where they went to great lengths to make the humans seem wicked or "just as bad" was all that compelling. In many cases I'd say the humans are portrayed by the writers as far less sympathetic than the shiki, the true aggressors here. I'd rather have been spared the moralizing tone and the pathologizing of the villagers. Both the humans and the shiki can be humanized in their own right with a recognition of them being competing entities, concerned first and foremost with their own survival and growth in numbers. You can portray a person doing something we might find objectionable without giving them evil-looking expressions and sinister music, which this show often did in the second half (and come to think of it, the very acclaimed anime series Monster was also very bad about doing this, too).
One point that will sometimes be made is that Ozaki, who led the bloody campaign against the shiki, was too brutal. Yes, they would have been obligated to kill many of the aggressive shiki, but they could have imprisoned some of them or brought in the government to contain them in some way. Even the shiki couple who decided to stop preying on humans, unconscious in their cell, were killed by the humans. Amusingly, Ozaki even says something like "We need to clean this up," indicating the bloodshed needed to be concealed from any outsiders or non-local government. Not only do people conflate what happened to actual genocides, but the writers seem to be suggesting as much. I guess they didn't have to kill all of them, but shiki, who have an overwhelming desire for blood and can pretend they're humans, are extremely dangerous, and eradicating them altogether would probably be for the best. All it takes is one shiki to deceive the humans, convert more humans into shiki, and have the same incident all over again. They could quickly take over entire cities. But it's also true that having captives to gain information about the shiki in the cities would have been prudent.
I realize people want to make these kinds of productions into metaphors about the human condition and humans massacring other humans, but the shiki are undead, for Christ's sake--they shouldn't even exist in the first place, not to mention all of the other points that make them an enemy of humanity.
I never questioned "who the true monsters were." I always sided with the humans (although I couldn't agree with some of what they did to humans near the end, like at the temple with Muroi's mother), though I often had sympathy for the shiki, given that they were forced to become shiki without any regard for their own wishes and were manipulated, not only by their newfound hunger, but by the shiki leaders. From the perspective of the humans, I see the shiki as something to be eradicated for the benefit of man, as we usually view vampires in fiction, but I can also respect that the shiki are acting to benefit their own group, though it goes against human interests.
score 4/10
CantileverCaribou 18 July 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5917020/14470
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