Good Old Fashioned Breakdowns In Anime: Part 1

Good Old Fashioned Anime Breakdowns

 

 

Anime characters are awesome but even the ones we love sometimes aren't glued together all that tightly. Sometimes this means witnessing one hell of a nervous breakdown or psychotic breakdown that makes you suddenly feel like your Sigmund Freud.  Watch people unravel sometimes literally as it transforms or scars them forever. Here's just a couple that make the list of our first part of: Good Old Fashioned Anime Breakdowns.

 

 

Kiddy Grade – Memory is a tricky thing especially when it’s been rewritten so many times, so it’s harder to remember that voice inside your head  telling you no matter how many times you do, the past will always come back to haunt you. Add in a little political mistreatment toward people and you might find yourself on the run, being hunted from the very place you worked for.


 

 

Neon Genesis Evangelion – Being sent into a machine  that might be more than it seems, forced to link your already fragile mind with it and fight there seemingly indestructible creatures from outer space that have already ravaged where you live once before can wreak havoc on your mind. Especially when the person on the top that recruited you is your father, a man you are pretty sure despises you and wouldn’t know affection when it came to you if it hit him in the face. Then again you’re not alone everyone around you is on the verge of a breakdown and might have already go through one. Don’t worry if this still makes you feel isolated group sessions can be help just as much and by the end of this show that’s basically what you’re watching. It’s up to you if you call it a silver linings by the time the credits roll.

 

 

 

 

Yu Yu Haksuho- Chapter Black Arc- We’re spotlighting the baddie in Chapter Black of the long running series, Shinobu Sensui.  Trying your best to protect humanity against demons since you were wee boy,believing through the horrors of what you were forced to be aware enough of in the first place that you were doing the right thing. Only to break in on a strange ritual by rich humans that are torturing and killing demons in ways you could never imagine, hundreds of times worse.  Well that would send anyone off the deep end I suppose and killing every human you could find in the place wouldn’t be enough, you’d find a hatred for humans especially when you find a tape called Chapter Black with the proof of it. That just makes a person want to open a tunnel from demon world to the human world to erase his own kind now doesn’t it? Not before you show six other humans the same thing, after all everyone needs to be enlightened.

One that followed in his footsteps that had a moment of going completely bonkers was The Doctor, a real doctor who had seen death on a daily basis and Sensui showing him Chapter Black seemed to give reason to something that at a certain point just doesn't make sense anymore. So he decides with his new psychic abilities to infect an entire hospital with the virus, give people several foot scars and convince the Spirit Detective trying to stop him, to kill him, only to see what he believes is the reasons all humans should die. He's definitely cuckoo for coca puffs. That's why he also makes the honorary list of anime breakdowns.

 

 

Fruits Basket – Who would have thought of all people Tohru Honda could be prone to a breakdown, one of the nicest characters in anime period. To her credit she did see a person turn into a very large cursed creature that despite them being turned into a cat when hugged by the opposite sex (outside the Sohma family), it looks like a giant evil rabbit. Oh but not so evil a victim really, yet it doesn’t stop her from throwing up all over the place. Hard to talk to somebody after that, well why not have the evil head of the household whisper in your ear that it’s what you get for helping out members of the family. You just can’t make anyone happy these days it seems.  I guess that could mess with your mind a bit.

Then again Akito is hanging on a thread to sanity as well and he's been the cause of quite a few people to come undone. Even without his/her little touch you still have people reacting in all sorts of messed up ways to the Zodiac curse. Like Momiji's mother for instance after giving birth to him, yeah never let it be said that anime characters have it easy. What...a....bummer.

 

Full Metal Alchemist- Trying to bring your mother back to life using alchemy is a serious no no but if you’re a kid you feel like you should be able to after all it was wrong she was taken away so suddenly in the first place isn’t it.  However instead things take a turn for the worse, you lose your arm and leg, your brother loses his whole body saved his soul which you have to attach to a suit of armor in blood and man that thing you’re looking at it totally not your mother.  That would make you prone to a breakdown.  Of course that isn’t enough is it? Somehow being the older brother you try and become a state alchemist to find a legendary stone with the power to hopefully restore your bodies. But oh the revelations along the way. The ones you bring as well, revealing a priest to be false and a woman who hoped her lover to come back from the dead to really be nothing more than a meshed up, flesh from various things, not really alive and not really dead.

 

X- Here’s an interesting one after all there’s the TV show and the film both have alternate endings. The TV show introduces all the characters with a steady pace, so you get to know them all so it hurts more if something bad happens to one.  The movie brings things in faster but the ending at least the first time I saw it felt kind of haunting, like a sad ending to a horrible nightmare.  For all the devastation the main character was put through emotionally perhaps there was sense of healing by the end. Notice how I devoid from the dirty details. Spoilers abound in all these but with a movie and a TV show there’s a chance that one hasn’t been seen before.

 

 


Berserk- Having a breakdown could literally be the end of the world sometimes. At least that's the case for Griffin. Whose destiny seemed broken and allows him to tap into something far more sinister that unleashes hell on earth. Killing and raping along the way, allowing one that survives to mentally be broken and the other haunted while fighting for revenge.

 

Attack On Titan- Seeing your mother murdered isn't going to do well for your mind. It's happened often in anime but the way Eren's mother goes out just isn't right. While he snaps, it's one that would drive him to kill these titans. Along the way though he sees many people have breakdowns because truly it isn't easy to kill titans. People die constantly and it makes it very frightening to live in there world. To be honest seeing these large naked things run around would give anyone a nervous or psychotic breakdown.