There’s this little meme edit I’ve been meaning to make for a while. Mostly as a dig at myself and the kinds of analyses and interpretations I know it can be too easy to default to.
I mean it’s definitely fair to presume that artists laboring under the exhausting death throes of such a system may be inclined to comment on said system. But like the depths of an unexplored dangerous labyrinth, there are layers to interfacing with that idea. On that note, there’s the subject of Made in Abyss, specifically its recently under-way second season which sees its adorable moppets of protagonists stumble into a bizarre-even-by-the-standards-of-this-series community of ‘Hollows’. And I admit it’s easy to look at this portrayal of an economic ecosystem where everything including peoples’ lives and bodies is determined to have some kind of market value, itself based entirely on vibes, which will charge you a literal arm and leg for besmirching that system and determine, yeah, might be a little bit of a broad commentary on capitalist systems going on there. But I also feel like jumping straight to that categorization might not be getting the full picture, as I see this story, so far, as tying more granularly into a subject Made in Abyss has analyzed through its whole run: Transactional relationships.
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