The Trope of Medieval Myth & Legend in Netflix Anime Pt. 1

[vc_row][vc_column][title type="subtitle-h6"]Colten Parr[/title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text]The first episode of The Seven Deadly Sins will enamor you with its bizarre situations, serious absurdity, and over-the-top hilarity. The show opens in a mead hall called 'The Boarís Hat.' The hat is literally the hat of a giant pig, probably the mother of the pink baby pig which is the protagonist's talking sidekick, and I'm not sure how this works or if this is even exactly true; this is just the first episode.The show characterizes itself as a tale of ancient times when the human and non-human worlds had not yet split. This offers a brief outline of the basic overarching premise of the show. Sometime, in the re-imagined past of humanity, the Holy Knights, the defenders of the realm, possessed tremendous magical powers and were both feared and revered. Ok, believable, it continues. But among them were a few who betrayed the realm and made enemies of all Holy Knights.The brief outline, simple in scope, suggests a moral binary of right and wrong. The Holy Knights defend, and have defended, the people. Some among the Holy Knights betrayed the order and became the Seven Deadly Sins. The Sins, human personifications of the seven vices immortalized in the Western classification system, haunt the world.The show plays on the trope of medieval legend, a theme common to anime, or at the least, common to anime I've seen on Netflix. Watching just the first five minutes, opening in a mead hall filled with drunken gossiping men, well-read spectators of Anglo Saxon literature, pop culture, and anime will be reminded of the Heorot of Beowulf, the Hogís Head of Harry Potter (Boarís Hat here), and/or the guild hall of the folkloric anime Fairy Tail. In each, the mead hall stands for a place of community.The protagonist of The Seven Deadly Sins is Meliodas, a short smiling boyish blonde, who easily defeats a larger armored knight in an epic showdown on a cliff using only a broken sword. The battle, complete with total environmental destruction, self-sacrifice, and the revelation that Meliodas is actually the 3000 year old Sin of Wrath, completes episode one.Meliodas, a cute Sin, troubles the moral order imposed by the Holy Knights. Accompanying him are Hawk, his obnoxious talking pig, and Princess Elizabeth - a runaway royalty seeking to stop the Holy Knights she believes are the true source of suffering. Meliodas shows kindness quite uniquely to Elizabeth and his pig. He offers to cook his pig up as bacon when the holy order knocks on the door to his mead hall, and squeezes Princess Elizabethís breasts more than once, she blithe and blind to his harassment. She ignores or doesnít notice his groping, but the show reconciles weirdness with weirdness: itís ok because the pig reminds Elizabeth to hit him. The pig however, is definitely not okay with being fried and presented as a side of bacon. Interesting how he sees his pet as food and the princess as an object. He is, after all, a deadly Sin.The battle in the first episode reminds one of David and Goliath of the Bible. Goliath is a Philistine, a word which has come to mean a person hostile to culture or the arts. Meliodas, whose name may be an anagram of the Spanish word ëmelodÌasí (melodies), defeats the knight with an unconventional but highly functional weapon, inspiring the knight's last words: This extraordinary power is that of the legend.True. When the show absorbed the legend of the seven deadly sins into its own plot structure and bureau of characters, it also absorbed its multifaceted history. The show identifies, or intersects, with the roots of early modern Christian ethics, recorded across canon. Chaucer's The Parson's Tale records a sermon against the seven deadly sins, Dante's Purgatorio designs purgatory's structure around them, and Spenser's The Fairie Queen personifies the seven vices in the advisers of Lucifera of the House of Pride. The show encompasses a history bigger than itself by reimagining the past and narrating an imagined history: an epic romp of knights against knights, showdowns between primordial human and non-human beings, all set in a medieval world where almost all things are possible.Watch for the talking pig.

Featured image courtesy of Netflix

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