The Vision of Escaflowne

Episode 13-14

“I do not think,” wrote British author Elizabeth Bowen in the postscript to her 1944 short story collection The Demon Lover, “that the desiccation, by war, of our day-to-day lives can be enough stressed.” While the entirety of the postscript, and the book, really, is a powerful picture of life during wartime, it is to this line that my mind kept turning as I watched these two episodes of The Vision of Escaflowne. It is both a war story and a wartime story according to Bowen's definitions; it covers both the actual acts of war and the lives of people just trying to live through it. Hitomi, and to an extent Merle and Millerna, are all caught in both halves of the tale: Hitomi simultaneously waits on the homefront for Van to return from battle even as she functions as a sort of military intelligence for Van and Allen's combined forces. What she used to use as a means of self-expression, a “fun” piece of her life—her Tarot readings and dowsing—have now become instruments of war, another phenomenon that Bowen documents in her postscript. Trapped in Gaea with everything turned as upside-down as possible, Hitomi is even at risk of losing some of what makes up her sense of self.

Granted, that's not quite as awful when compared with what others stand to lose. Allen has already lost his son, and when the Duke decides that it's obviously divine will that Gaea be faced with the destructive power of the Atlanteans (I'd argue that he had a break with reality), Chid loses his father and the people of Freid lose the war. And Van is at risk of losing his life when Hitomi's dowsing lessons have the unexpected side effect of bonding him to his mech in a very real way. In Van's attempts to better steer the machine of war with his mind, he becomes merged with it to the point where any damage to the Guymelef's body becomes a physical wound on Van. And as if that's not bad enough, his Draconian blood seems to amplify the link, not only causing him to go on what is essentially a vengeance rampage, but also voiding the warranty, which as we all know is never a good thing.

All told, these are two very brutal episodes. While there are certainly plenty of gruesome deaths—episode fourteen is certainly a stand-out in that respect as a crazed Van squashes Dilandau's troops—the emotional toll is also high. Mostly this is for Dilandau and Hitomi, and it perhaps says something about the former that he is genuinely upset by the loss of his men (boys), and ultimately turns and runs rather than insisting on fighting Van to the end. It goes back to that idea of losing the self; when Dilandau is surrounded by his loyal fighters, he feels himself, able to take on anyone no matter what his orders say. But when he's alone, he can't go on, and reality comes crashing down on him in a way he's been working to avoid from day one. And while Van is haunted by the ghosts of those he's just killed, Hitomi has to live with the fact that he's out there risking a much worse death because of something she taught him. Her battles are entirely internal, and that means that her foe is herself.

Between her horrific vision of the duke's death (and how appropriate that it shows him slowly sinking into a pool of blood in a voluntary drowning) and the battlefield scenes there really aren't many lighter moments this week. In some ways that's good, because it really drives home the horror of what's going on. But on the other, the constant barrage of badness makes it hard to stomach the episodes to the point where I caught myself singing the dink-dink song from Spaceballs under my breath when Dryden summoned the Escaflowne's original mechasmiths, just to have something to break the mood. Dryden's entrance on the scene as Millerna's not-as-skeezy-as-he-seems fiancé is a welcome addition, not just because he pays to save Van, but also because he stands to kick Millerna out of her shock at discovering that Allen fathered Chid with Marlene. And I've never looked forward to a village of cat women like I have for episode fifteen.

Although they are dark and violent, there's something about these two episodes that remind me strongly of my grandfather's stories about the fighting he experienced in France during “The War.” (That always means WWII in my family.) Bowen says that she feels war “more as a territory than as a page of history.” It seems to me that these episodes agree, because no matter that they're fantasy people in a world different from our own, we can still recognize the same old story that we never seem to learn from.

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The Vision of Escaflowne is currently streaming on Funimation.