Sin

Aniwords – Noragami Aragoto and the Failure of the Gods

iblessall 8 Comments

After a couple of weeks of idols, I’m back on the Serious Anime Writing train with my analysis of the Bishamon Arc of Noragami Aragoto. The nature of Noragami‘s gods and the way they interface with the humans in the show has always been the most fascinating element of Noragami for me, so being able to find the material to write this article was quite a pleasure. This arc articulated a bunch of things I’d kind of half-said about the first season of the show, and as it happens having the second half of the show around to finish articulating what Yukine arc started helped a lot in that regard.

Here’s the link~

Noragami Aragoto

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Catholicism in Anime: The Consequence of Sin in Noragami

iblessall 7 Comments

In lieu of a traditional review, I have opted to take a different approach for Noragami. It really is fascinating to see the overlap between different religious traditions. Noragami, with its (mostly) Shinto-based characters, displays a wide overlap with Catholic teaching on the nature of sin. It is a fascinating and hopeful experience to be able to bring two different traditions together and find, for once, the similarities, rather than the differences.

Disclaimer: Before I begin this discussion, I want to first guard against the criticisms that may come from undertaking an interdisciplinary approach to this topic. Any analogies that are made within this article are first and foremost that: analogies. When I discuss Yato as a Christological figure, I am not forgetting that he is a Shinto god of calamity, whose existence is directly resultant from the evil wishes of humans. The analogy is not perfect. I recognize this. But in fact there is no perfect analogy between God and anything extant on earth. My concern here is to distill parallels where they can be found, not to draw the perfect metaphor for the Catholic concept of God using this anime.

Noragami Yato

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