SeiSub and the City: The Point of Doomed Romance in Modern Times (p.2)
Part 1.
Later, after a patient in the hospital dies and Yuuya's mother is becoming increasingly desperate in her attempts to save Yuuya, Seishiro and Subaru have a talk about organ donation... I suspect CLAMP already had some of the story beats of X/1999 in mind because what Seishiro says here is definitely foreshadowing. (Also saying this while hugging Subaru is just pure crazy)
As we know from X/1999, Seishiro leaves his healthy eye for Subaru to use. I don't think Seishiro was predicting the future but what he says is what he genuinely believes. I'm sure that in his mind, dying from Subaru's hand and leaving him a part of his body, therefore being reborn in his lover's body, is the most romantic shit he could possibly do, and not, you know... a tragedy.
Also he loves to use "they say", "people say", "many say" expressions - who are these people in question? Does he say it like this because he actually cannot make his own opinion on "normal, human" matters, or is he just obscuring his own opinions by saying "well, other people say so"? There's a certain distance in the wording, like that's not necessarily something he believes, but "people say so".
Seishiro is a bit of a mirror, in a way that in trying to reach and achieve normalcy, his perception and understanding of it is completely twisted. Coming back to his attempts of dating and wooing Subaru, in CALL Hokuto is not very happy by the plans Seishiro had for the date because Seishiro's plan.... was to just spend the whole day eating at different trendy spots.
It's a small inconsequent joke but I think, that again, it points a light at how bad Seishiro is at being 'normal' and understanding dating - he knows people go out to eat for date, but then in his mind it turns into "we need to go to every cool place in Tokyo and gorge on food". No wonder the guy thinks tricking his lover into killing him and leaving him his eye is the endgame
And then... we reach the turning point.
Seishiro stands in to protect Subaru from getting stabbed and loses his eye in the process. This event pushes Subaru's realization of his feelings for Seishiro.
I don't think I'm the only one who found Seishiro's act weird and unnatural. There are so many other things he could do apart from literally getting in between them physically. He could use his onmyoji abilities, he could let Subaru get hurt since he was planning to finalize the Bet soon anyway. He didn't necessarily need to white-knight Subaru to earn some cookie points; they are quite close at this point anyway.
When Subaru apologizes in NEWS, Seishiro explains his decision:
God he can be dumb as hell.
Because Seishiro is unable to understand human feelings in a "normal way", because he sees existence and attachments as inconveniencing and selfish, his whole view and perception of love is skewed. He doesn't understand that his instinct to protect Subaru comes from his attachment to Subaru, that it is because Subaru means something to him, that he is willing to make sacrifices. He doesn't account for his own lack of 'normalcy' and expects that the love is supposed to change him altogether as a person, make him 'normal'. So when he does experience a feeling of some kind, he is already decided that the feeling is defect because it doesn't match his expectations, and he just puts it in his "selfishness" pile.
Hokuto comes to babysit Seishiro, and basically lets him know she can see through him.
Hokuto knows well he's Sakurazukamori, as she states it literally in the beginning. She knows what he does for work, and she knows that he is being duplicitous. Still, at this point she trusts him well enough to not hurt Subaru, and for her, the good outweighs the bad.
Seishiro doesn't realize that he is special to Subaru. I always thought the Bet didn't make any sort of sense. If Seishiro would fall in love with Subaru, he would stay by his side and protect him forever, but if he didn't, then it means Subaru is not special enough and should die. Ridiculous as it is, I think Seishiro's expectation is actually for both of them to come to the same conclusion. He thinks Subaru doesn't care for him because Subaru cares about everyone. If everyone is special, then no one is.
After this conversation, the press starts covering the incident. Seishiro refuses to press charges, and disappears.
In PAIR, Hokuto pushes Subaru to reflect on his feelings towards Seishiro.
She makes a specific point by asking what Subaru Sumeragi thinks of Seishiro Sakurazuka. Not what other people would think of Seishiro, not the summary of who Seishiro is as a person. She wants him to think deep and hard on how Subaru himself perceives Seishiro, what he thinks (and feels) about him.
Subaru encounters a blind man with his guide dog and has a talk with him about the reality of living in Japan as a disabled man. This conversation makes Subaru realize that his reaction to Seishiro getting hurt, with his vision impaired, was fear of Seishiro hating him. Even though he met so many people through his work, people he genuinely felt for, he never necessarily cared for what they would think or feel about him. But Seishiro is different.
And just as he runs to Seishiro's hospital room to confess, he is swept away into the illusion.
We are fucked.
Of course, END as a chapter is, well, a big reveal. We get more context, the explanation of what has been going on, and also - get out heart broken. I find END a bit gratuitous, but of course, the goal is to showcase that Seishiro is literally the monster and the worst human you could fall in love with.
I love these panels, you can literally feel the foreboding sense of dread and horror as the recognition hits Subaru.
Seishiro as the new Sakurazukamori was doing his job, when Subaru, in his unlikely act of disobedience, strays away from his grandmother and stumbles on the scene of crime. It was his first day of performing onmyoji duties, and he tried to cleanse the sakura tree to no avail.
Rather than killing the child, Seishiro decided to toy with him and make the Bet.
Seishiro's verdict in the end is: he feels nothing. To prove his point, he breaks Subaru's arm and beats him in a sadistic joy.
This is not something new in BL genre. In the traditional BL dynamic where you have a masculine, dominating male and the feminine, helpless one, something like this is common. BL, back then and now still, is riddled with toxic relationships, abusive alpha males, power imbalances and such. It is weird to say but I believe Tokyo Babylon subverts the expectations - because in a way CLAMP is torturing the audience. The crumbs were all leading up to this. We knew of Seishiro's connection to Sakurazukamori from the beginning. We could feel he was up to something bad. And still, we fell for him.
This is the equivalent of tearing your heart and feeding it to the dogs. Did you expect a fairy tale? Did you expect a morally grey character who will be fixed and changed by love?
That's not happening. Get your arm heart broken.
Seishiro is almost breaking the 4th wall while saying that. In a way, we are all Subaru. "Are you still expecting a happy ending after reading countless stories about how ruthless Tokyo is as a city/how terrible we are to each other as people?"
Subaru is saved by his grandmother, and Hokuto dies in self-sacrifice by Seishiro's hands. Subaru swears he'll kill Seishiro for this - starting the wild goose chase that will end in X/1999.
The funny thing about love is that it is not incidental. Even though we cannot just fall in love with anybody, it's a feeling you can nurture and cultivate. Love takes time, it takes patience. It is the most gratifying thing to experience love, to do something for love, but it is also extremely hard. Love can be slippery.
As a teenager I believed that finding romantic partner is the goal. I believed in happily ever after, it's almost like I expected for the credit titles come rolling as soon as I would find "my person".
But the most heartbreaking part was, is that falling in love, being in love, being loved, - really didn't fix anything about me. It didn't make my mental health issues disappear, it didn't make my self-hatred disappear, it wasn't a salvation. I've been with a partner I am with currently for many years, and there have been a lot of highs and lows. I've been suicidal since then, I've been the happiest since then, I've felt everything I could feel and the support of a partner, of course, makes a difference, but never could it bring a fundamental change of turning me into another person.
Seishiro, throughout Tokyo Babylon, is looking for a salvation through Subaru. Someone that will change his nature, someone who he will sacrifice his duty for. But while he pondered for a year, and time passed while he roleplayed a normie, nothing really happened, and his heart didn't really change.
The scene in X/1999 gives more context: in her dying breath, Seishiro's mother prophesizes: he will die by the hand of the one he loves. I believe this is something that strikes a spark in him, a fascination of sorts, since he believes he cannot love anybody, that he is void of any human emotion. We are all fed the concept of romantic love as something to strive for, and in a special fucked-up way, Seishiro was primed to believe he has to find his love, as well. Of course, one can argue that he seeks a potential lover to prevent himself from dying but then... did it work out for him in the end?
SeiSub and the City: The Point of Doomed Romance in Modern Times (p.1)
Disclaimer: I started writing this with the goal of dissecting every line Seishiro says in Tokyo Babylon, to understand his behavior and motivations better. Slowly it transformed into the exploration and analysis of Seishiro’s and Subaru’s relationship dynamic, and how their fundamental differences make their relationship doomed.
In no way I am reinventing the wheel, or writing something revolutionary (ha) new, there were and are many many many other people analyzing TB, but considering I’ve been a crazed fan of this piece of media for like… 17-18 years, I feel obligated to do something about it and put out all my thoughts on digital paper. These are just my opinions.
Something I've been slowly digesting and ruminating on while jumping back on my Tokyo Babylon train is that even though Seishiro tricked the twins by misrepresenting himself, he never really was a liar. Meaning his thoughts and opinions as Seishiro the Vet and Sakurazukamori are quite consistent.
Throughout the chapters, as Subaru deals with one assignment after another, Seishiro is a guide, a mentor, and a friend with which both twins discuss their views on society and the world they live in. It's important because even though Tokyo Babylon is a story about magicians, the magic is more so a smokescreen and a plot device to comment on societal issues, especially pertaining to Japan of the 90s.
I wanted to examine Seishiro's and Subaru's conversations to observe their dynamic and look into the fundamental differences they have. So here are some opinions and thoughts shared by Seishiro in TB, which, I think, align with his identity as Sakurazukamori, serving as anti-thesis to Subaru's character.
In the end of TYO, Seishiro shares that he still holds appreciation for Tokyo because of how hedonistic the life style is, even if this hedonism in itself is self-destructive. I see it as definitely something he himself thinks as someone who is totally opposed to Subaru in his values.
The basic characterization of Seishiro as Sakurazukamori is someone who is selfish and self-centered, which translates into his lack of care for other beings. We are never shown what Seishiro does outside of his Sakurazukamori clock-in hours, or how his day-to-day life looks like. But if we think about the fact that being Sakurazukamori is his job, he works with top government officials, and his position overall is being a magical hitman, it wouldn't surprise me that one of his main motives for doing the job is money and the comfortable lifestyle that this money provides him. I always saw Seishiro as a quite hedonistic person; connecting this to his shopping habits, incessant smoking and sweets consumption in TB might be a stretch but altogether it builds up a profile of a person who prioritizes his own pleasure and gain before anything else.
In BABEL, Seishiro reprimands a ghost of a suicide victim, who blames the outside circumstances in her choice to end her life. Specifically, she blames a more famous actress in taking an opportunity away from her (by quitting and consequently cancelling a project), a less experienced actress. Her residual anger causes her to haunt the place.
Seishiro disagrees with her and expresses these beliefs:
No one is created equal -> inequality furthers progress and development but also - no one owes anyone anything. You are not owed opportunities and success just because you're trying hard.
Anyone's existence in one way or another inconveniences someone else's - you shouldn't openly discriminate or slight others, but spending your life apologizing for your existence and not taking initiative is not a right thing either. The actress inconvenienced the girl by taking away her prospects, but the girl inconvenienced others by taking her life.
It's interesting that Subaru tries to prevent him from speaking out, and generally expresses disagreement with his points. As a person driven by empathy, he cannot help but feel for the ghost - Subaru is a glorified therapist for a lot of TB's cases. Seishiro is very individualistic, while Subaru is not - he appreciates and cares about other people; you can say he is quite community-oriented. Already in the beginning, we get one of the main thesis points and the highlight of their differing worldviews.
In DREAM, Seishiro is mostly pushing Subaru to process his feelings about himself. The lack of 'normalcy' in question can be read both as Subaru having supernatural abilities, being abnormally selfless, or being gay.
There is this tidbit, referencing Subaru's endless kindness being his downfall. To me it seems that THIS is the main obstacle they have as a couple with their whole "will they, won't they". Even if we remove the whole Bet ordeal (and the problematic age gap), throughout Tokyo Babylon's plot Subaru is selfless to the point of sacrificing his own happiness, which includes exploring any possible romantic future with Seishiro. Seishiro drives Subaru around, tries to schedule dates and hangouts with him, initiates deeper conversations - for Subaru just not really be present. I am in no way victim blaming Subaru for anything that happened, but the whole relationship was doomed from the start not only because Seishiro is crazy but also because Subaru was never committed to following through with anything until the end (we can argue that Seishiro is actually doing the same thing but this would be another essay... tiktok would diagnose them both with avoidant attachment styles for sure).
Seishiro also mentions "modern times"; this pertains to another theme of TB - tradition versus progress combined with globalization/Westernization. As the world was going through the crazy technological progress in the 90s, and the influence of the West was becoming more prominent in Japan (+ the consequences of the bubble burst and the lost decades), the traditional Japanese culture and lifestyle was becoming less popular. Seishiro and Subaru are "the last onmyojis" - they are the ghosts of the forgotten, old time, both of their practices considered unneeded in the time that is modern.
Seishiro tries to approach his work in a more "modern" way - clocking-in, clocking-out, getting paid, continuing with his life while not caring for or remembering his victims. Subaru, though, is much more sensitive to his position, more attuned to it (he also grew up in Kyoto, one of the oldest places in Japan with abundance of shrines). Subaru is committed to his craft through fasting, meditating & purification rituals, donning the robes, while Seishiro cuts corners (pets in the clinic). City vs suburbs, modern vs traditional, paid job vs a calling/craft.
In CALL, Subaru is trying to resolve the conflict softly but it backfires on him, forcing Seishiro to intervene. Seishiro's meddling in Subaru's cases is also something to highlight - he basically gets Subaru out of hot water multiple times, saving him from situations where his life could possibly be on a line. Of course, there is an eye loss™ as a very important instance of that, but I think it's important to acknowledge that even before that Seishiro would constantly save Subaru from danger that Subaru himself would cause. Subaru's empathy and kindness prevent him from being aggressive or harming others, but while he is playing fair, his opponents often don't.
Rereading these lines, it almost feels like the normal people are fascinating to him, and he envies them in a way, wants to see himself as an ordinary person. Perhaps that is why his persona as the veterinary guy is so plain, just a normal worker living an "ordinary life". Does he feel like his life is not entirely full because he doesn't experience the feelings of "living in reality" that he mentions? To me personally it puts his motivation in the Bet in a different light - it's like he really wants to have someone to attach to, a connection to "being ordinary" through having feelings for Subaru but even the way he approaches it (and the person he chooses) is incredibly abnormal.
CRIME is one of my favorite chapters because of the moral dilemma Subaru faces and the conversation he has with Seishiro afterwards.
What Subaru does in making a decision for the grieving mother can be seen as a quite selfish act he does to keep his conscience intact. He immediately feels guilt about lying but Seishiro says it was the right decision.
Seishiro is not necessarily evaluating the situation and providing Subaru with his personal opinion. For Seishiro, the decision Subaru made was the right thing by default because it was the decision he made. Seishiro's personal feelings/opinions on this matter are irrelevant. He won't judge Subaru for lying because he respects Subaru's right to make his own decisions.
His follow-up reaction is weird though:
Shattering the mirror feels emotional and umprompted, unsuited for his usually cool and collected demeanor. Did something in the conversation make him uncomfortable? Different from playful flirting and joking around with Subaru, this was an actually genuine, vulnerable interaction between the two. Jumping to the "i guess i'm winning" right after is somewhat of a weird reaction that feels a bit defensive...
SAVE is a chapter that's a further exploration of the idea that you cannot understand other person's feelings fully. You can empathize but you cannot fully comprehend the experience someone else went through. This is the only chapter in which Subaru is assertive and confrontational.
Even if Subaru is an empath, he wouldn't claim someone's experience for his own. He feels deeply for others but in the end respects their emotions and decisions. That is why what happened in CRIME chapter rattled him so much - he let his own principles and perceptions of good and bad, right and wrong, affect someone else's right to make their decision.
This is the one thing where Seishiro's and Subaru's opinions overlap. I would say, that's their common ground, where their yin and yang connect. Even though they start from opposing foundations, they could agree on this - your life is your life, and my life is my life, you can only make your own decisions, your feelings and experiences are intrinsically yours.
Then there's this exchange between Seishiro and Hokuto:
We, as readers, understand that Subaru is not as black and white, he's not a perfect angel and has his own flaws. Seishiro stating that Subaru is "the personification of morals and good sense" comes off as defensive mechanism. "He is soooo good, and I am sooo bad, we are sooo different". It feels like oversimplification and idealization of Subaru as this pure, untouchable entity.
There's not a lot of Seishiro's lines in OLD, but he says this:
"From abuser to abused" is the line that struck me the most. It's like he sees the richness of life while being young and able-bodied as something abusive, as, again, something inconveniecing others. This can be connected to his hedonistic nature, and later, to the ideology of Dragons of Earth in X/1999.
In REBIRTH Hokuto tells Seishiro about Subaru's self-sacrificial nature, how his empathy combined with supernatural abilities makes him feel other people's feelings. She says "Subaru loves everyone but himself."
Seishiro really likes to focus on how much Subaru is different from him, doesn't he? I would say that qualifies already as Seishiro seeing Subaru as "special" but Seishiro is expecting normalcy, he is holding certain expectations for how he's supposed to feel if Subaru is the one winning the Bet. In his defensiveness he is already making a decision for both of them without really knowing what Subaru is feeling or thinking. Isn't this the type of behavior he was strongly disagreeing with recently?
And that was it for the part 1, because I decided to split this essay in two, in fear of using up my image limit.
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