A couple weeks ago, I finished watching the anime Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. As a very realistic portrayal of a major earthquake in a highly populated area, part of the story simply has to be about loss. However, to say exactly how that manifests would be what we refer to on the internet as "Spoilers."
Late into the series, Mirai's younger brother Yuuki dies, and it isn't revealed for certain until a few episodes later. The episodes concerning this aren't so much about the loss itself as they are how Mirai copes with it.
Now, I'll admit that my wife accidentally spoiled what happened, due to a copy and paste error. While I wish I could've seen it without knowing the truth, watching it with full knowledge made it a very different experience.
When Mirai loses Yuuki, she sort of loses her grip on reality, too. She goes almost immediately into full-blown denial after she signs the papers confirming the identification. She finds her brother and walks off with him, heading home. The only thing is, every time someone comes around, her brother disappears.
Then, randomly, Mirai will tear up and border on bawling for a few moments, wondering why she's crying--genuinely puzzled.
While I think that anime (as well as TV and film) have an easier time of dealing with delicate topics due to the total authorial control they allow, it still is a delicate topic that is easy to handle poorly. However, I liked the way TM8 worked with it. Once you figure out what's going on, it never feels arbitrary or rushed. It's something that has clearly been planned from the beginning and the subtle hints before were handled with grace and finesse.
It seems like I keep coming across stuff like this lately, purely by chance. In the course of just a few weeks I've watched TM8 and played Lucidity and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Lucidity was the story of a girl coping with the loss of her grandmother, her first experience with loss, and it was the player's role to act the parent and help her accept the feelings without hurting herself in the process. Silent Hill--SPOILERS--was also about a girl mourning the loss of someone close, in this case her father. As befitting of Silent Hill, it dealt more with the dark side of loss and the self-destructive tendencies that can accompany a major loss. TM8 is about the realization of that loss, when alone. Really all three games are about young children, though Silent Hill more abstractly. TM8 is by far the most direct of the three, but that doesn't take away from its power.
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