User blog:ThatScrewyDuck/PE Proposal: Izamura

I’ve got just one more formality post I’d like to do for the time being to get a villain I feel is deserving officially approved. Like my last candidate, this one also hails from the wide, wonderful world of anime. The specific film they’re from is several years old now, but I just had the privilege of seeing it near the beginning of this year.

What’s the work?
Patema Inverted is a 2013 Japanese animated science-fiction film written and directed by Yasuhiro Yoshiura. In 2067, an experiment conducted by scientists to harness energy from Earth’s gravity went horribly wrong, and resulted in gravity reversing, sending almost everyone and everything around them flying up into the sky. In the aftermath, the totalitarian nation of Aiga was formed, with those who supposedly fell into the sky, but managed to not drift away entirely, creating an underground society where they have strict rules about staying away from “danger zones”, which are shafts where they can potentially fall through into the sky if they aren’t careful.

The story mostly focuses on Patema, a young teenager who is highly respected and liked due to being the late chief’s daughter, making her a princess of sorts. Not being able to help her curiosity, mostly due to hearing tales from her older friend Lagos, who hasn’t been seen in a while, but often traveled there and told her about how beautiful the world is, including by giving her a photograph which she keeps as a gift from him, she often heads out to explore those danger zones anyway. One day however, she comes across an intimidating figure in a cloak and mask, and ends up falling through one of the shafts. Soon she finds herself clinging to a fence for dear life to avoid falling into the sky, but luckily for her, she is helped and rescued by a young boy around her age from Aiga named Age (pronounced like the Japanese name Eiji, or saying the letters “a” and “g” together). Perplexed but intrigued due to having only heard about these people who live in reverse gravity from his society, Age takes her to a small abandoned shed nearby where she can stay and hide on the ceiling until he finds a way to get her back to her people. In the meantime, the two seek to learn more about each other’s societies from each other, as well as uncover the mysteries behind the origins of their world. And now to introduce our “guest of honor”…

Who is he and what does he do?
Izamura is the current leader of Aiga and the movie’s main antagonist. Running Aiga like a totalitarian dictatorship, Izamura regularly appears everywhere to the citizens on large screens, including where Age goes to school, to practically brainwash them with propaganda about how Aiga is the only true society, and that those who fell into the sky, whom they dub as “Inverts”, are sinners who need to be punished. The citizens are conditioned and expected to be so faithful to these beliefs that even looking at the sky earns them demerit points, which gets Age in trouble due to his fascination with their society in spite of what he’s told, unlike most of his classmates. He also has cameras set up everywhere so he can keep an eye on them at all times, which is how he quickly discovers that Patema came to their society and that Age is hiding her in an abandoned shed, so he sends out several state officers (which is what she encountered previously and caused her to fall in the first place) to capture her.

Izamura later interrogates Age himself in his classroom at school, where he has his second-in-command, Jaku (credited as Jack in the English dub credits), pin him to the ground while he grinds his boot into the back of his head. He tells him that what he met “wasn’t human”, mocks him for getting attached since she “looks like a girl”, and threatens him to forget all about her, since he would “hate to see him have an accident like his father did”, who supposedly died when he fell from a flying machine/craft he built a while back.

He then goes to visit Patema, whom he has chained up in a room in the Control Tower, and intimidates her by explaining his racist philosophy about how they cannot allow what remains of the “filth” that survived falling into the sky after that catastrophically failed experiment to contaminate their “perfect” society based on law and order. He then displays a glass chamber with Lagos’ corpse in it, whom he captured and had died sometime during his captivity, but whose appearance influenced him to start tracking the rest of his kind down. He then menaces her further by dragging her out onto the balcony and threatening to drop her into the sky with the heavy weight she has on her foot, causing her to cling to him, after which he gloats that her life now depends on him, and him alone.

Meanwhile, out at the fence, Age runs into Porta, one of Patema’s best friends, who’s gone after her to try and save her. After reluctantly being brought to the inverts’ underground society and conversing with the Elder, the two agree to work together to infiltrate the Control Tower by using an underground shaft that’s connected to it, where Patema is being kept on the top floor and mostly just has the glass ceiling separating her from falling into the sky. While this is happening, Izamura starts showing a disturbing obsession with Patema, remarking to Jack that she’ll soon realize he holds absolute power over her. He then asks him if he saw the look on her face when she clung to him before remarking that he “looks forward to seeing that again”.

Shortly afterwards, he discovers Age when he makes it to the top of the tower where Patema is being held and goes up there with a bunch of troops, which leads to a confrontation where he once again gets a hold of Patema while cornering him at the edge of the roof. This is where Age pieces together that what happened to his father wasn’t an accident based on Izamura’s comments about their similarities; we later see in flashbacks that he was associating with Lagos and becoming intrigued with the inverts’ society, which influenced them to build a flying machine together to show everyone how great it is. When they were discovered, Izamura had Lagos arrested and ordered one of his troops to snipe Age’s father while he was demonstrating it to others, which is why he fell from it. He admits to this, saying those that violate their rules must die, even if they’re from Aiga. Even after Age tries to convince them that they’re all just too scared to find out how small Aiga really is by discovering the joy of flying and being able to look down on it, Izamura passes his pistol to Jack and orders him to shoot him in cold blood. However, before he can (reluctantly) carry it out, Patema manages to kick herself away from him before anyone can react, and the two fall into the sky thanks to the weight attached to her foot. Izamura later angrily fumes over why she chose Age over him, before ordering that Age’s “death” be reported as an accident to set an example.

Ultimately, instead of drifting endlessly into the sky, the two eventually hit a mechanical ceiling that manufactures Aiga’s atmosphere, where they also discover Age’s father and Lagos’ flying machine, along with a journal of notes made by his father, which explains his history with Lagos, including how they built it together. They eventually get it to work again and use it to travel back. Quickly picking it up on the cameras, Izamura commands his troops to capture it, after which Patema and Age jump from the vehicle and use each other’s weight to float down to the shaft to let the rest of her society know that she’s alive and well along with what they discovered. However, they are soon interrupted by Izamura and his troops, who use the commandeered machine to be lowered into the shaft after them. However, they crash harshly into the bridge, which leaves some of the troops injured and struggling to hold onto it for their lives. Gloating at having finally found the inverts, Izamura then commands for Jack to start arresting them in mass, but he refuses in order to help their men. Angrily dubbing him a traitor just for that, he pulls out his pistol to shoot him, but Porta lunges into him before he can, which causes the machine to dislodge from the bridge and fall to the bottom of the shaft with them in it, along with Age and Patema.

In a final stand-off, Izamura pulls his gun on Age, who is now holding onto to Patema to keep her from falling the other way through, asking why he clings to a “filthy invert/sinner” like her. After trying to reason that she must be really scared in a situation where she’s upside down with no ground to stand on and that he wants to do what he can to support her, Izamura simply shoots him in the leg, saying he’ll go on to shoot the rest of his limbs to see how long he can hold on to her. He then extends an offer to Patema to give herself to him so he can “save” her. After she understandably refuses due to being terrified of him, he prepares to shoot Age again, but before he can, Porta engages in a struggle with him. He grabs his gun away, but Izamura sends him falling through the shaft to his supposed death (thankfully though, we later find out Jack returned the favor and saved him from falling). Laughing at supposedly making him fall up, he then pulls out a blade to finish off Age, after which Patema engages him to defend Age. However, Izamura quickly has her at his mercy again, and prepares to let the sky swallow her up once and for all.

However, before he can loosen his grip, Age shouts loudly enough that the floor, which was already cracking from the impact of the craft crashing down on it, completely gives way, revealing none other than Earth’s true surface, including all the ruined buildings from the aftermath of the experiment. Shocked at the revelation that the citizens of Aiga are the true “inverts”, Izamura struggles to hold onto to Patema, but loses his grip when the remains of the flying machine fall into the Earth’s real sky and collide with him, sending him up with the wreckage to his unseen death.

Does he have any redeeming qualities or a valid excuse for his actions?
Nope. While he talks about maintaining law and order in Aiga, Izamura is blatantly and repeatedly shown to be a racist fanatic who’s driven by his own prejudice and hatred towards inverts, forces these beliefs on the rest of his society, and refuses to listen to anyone who doesn’t go along with his way of thinking. Even if he didn’t know that he, along with the rest of the citizens of Aiga, were the real inverts, it still doesn’t justify him labelling all of them as sinners who deserve punishment just for having any connection to those that conducted the experiment which caused the gravity-reversing incident, which at that point, occurred as long as centuries beforehand. He even tries to shoot his own second-in-command just for trying to help his subordinates over arresting/rounding up the inverts, which, in of itself, shows how utterly insane he is since with most of their troops still above ground, they were at such a numerical disadvantage that it would have been impossible to do so.

Oh, and his sick, unhealthy attachment to Patema? Yeah, that’s obviously not mitigating in any way either. If anything, it makes him come off as even more depraved, because it falls squarely into the possessive “submit to me or die” mentality that’s exactly like Frollo’s infamous obsession with Esmeralda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It’s bad enough that he tries to terrify her into being reliant on him for protection, which would be Stockholm Syndrome at its finest, but what truly makes it disturbing, if not outright disgusting is that Patema is probably only about 13 or 14, while Izamura’s middle-aged. Yeah, the less you think about it, the better.

Is he heinous by the standards of the work?
Izamura is the main antagonist and the main reason why the setting is the way it is, at least in the present, so he sets the standard. And considering that Patema Inverted is actually relatively family-friendly, or at least tween-friendly, unlike many of its sci-fi peers that revolve around dystopian futures of some sort, he sets it considerably high. While I’m not sure if he says it outright, it’s very clear that once he finds the inverts as he intends, he’ll have them rounded up and wiped out just for being sinners according to the fanatical rules he forces on everyone.

On top of it being strongly implied he intends to commit genocide on a whole community of people, let’s see; he regularly uses propaganda to condition the citizens of Aiga, particularly the younger ones, to apathetically conform to his beliefs and not think for themselves; he has anyone who associates with the inverts and their culture eliminated, up to and including young teenagers, who are practically children in his eyes; he’s completely willing to kill them in cold blood himself, most chillingly shown when he planned to shoot each of Age’s limbs until he bled out enough to drop Patema, and he even develops a disturbingly pedophile-like attachment to the young inverted girl, whom he tries to mentally break into being obedient and entirely reliant on him. I don’t think he has any trouble being sufficiently heinous. Tellingly, out of any anime character I’ve encountered so far, he’s easily the closest in characterization to Judge Claude Frollo, to the point it’s very tempting to personally nickname him “Anime Frollo”, or “Frollo 2.0”.

What’s the verdict?
By all means, this seems like an easy approval.