How the Mitama and Momoko Mermaids’ Event (The Call of the Open Sea) Revolves Around Sympathy and Empathy
This event (and its related MGS) do tackle the difference between sympathy and empathy in regards to Momoko and Mitama’s relationship. and since I thought that was neat, why not expand on it more with everyone?
So there’s a scene in their MGS where Mitama thinks about this:
Mitama: “I always thought being with Momoko was so easy because she didn't know the old me.
But today, I realized there's more to it than that.
She's always been so honest and good-natured - someone who gets angry at injustices, and strives to make things right.
She does just the same for me, too.
When I'm doing something that isn't right, she holds me back...and helps me see the light.
Unlike Kanagi, who sticks with me through thick and thin...Momoko is the one who stops me.”
See, here Mitama establishes the difference between her relationships with both Kanagi and Momoko: Kanagi empathizes with Mitama’s pain, as in she understands how it feels having gone through the same thing. Momoko, on the other hand, can only sympathize with that same pain, since she didn’t experience it (being born in West Kamihama). Now you might think that this means that sympathy is inferior to empathy, since you’re only relating from an outside perspective.
But as Mitama establishes here, having empathy can blind you, like Kanagi of all people (the same girl who told Tsukasa that she made her contract by her own free will and thus must deal with the consequences, including their fate of becoming witches) is willing to turn a blind eye to Mitama doing something wrong because she, not only had front row seats to Mitama’s breakdown, but grew up with the same treatment. But Momoko is an outsider, her investment is limited, meaning she has no problem stopping Mitama if she strays off the path.
It’s like… Oh! Imagine some dude told you to fuck off, then one of his friends came up to you and said: ”Please excuse him, there’s a lot going on at home” this is what Kanagi would do. Another friend on the other hand might tell their friend off for doing that, and that’s Momoko. The latter case is someone who won’t take bad circumstances as an excuse for bad behavior (along the lines of “I get that things are difficult but that doesn’t mean you get to be an asshole”). That’s the difference between Momoko and Kanagi to Mitama.
But is that all for empathy and sympathy’s role in this storyline? Not at all! The other instance is depicted with Momoko and Mitama’s feelings towards the past Magical Girl whose story they uncover in the event.
I’m planning on writing about this event at length, but the basic idea is that this girl fell in love with a sailor but the people of her village didn’t accept their relationship (she made a contract with Kyubey to confess her love, giving her the power to imbue her memories and feelings into objects). After tragedy struck and the sailor’s ship sank, she began enchanting her voice, feelings, and memories into mementos which she cast out into the sea in hopes of reaching him. But the girl fell into despair and became a witch without ever seeing the sailor again.
Mitama and Momoko end up finding the mementos and seeing the memories held within, and the difference in their experiences comes into play: Momoko empathizes with the girl’s heartbreak because it’s similar to her own. And while Mitama can only sympathize initially, she finds herself in the girl’s despair over the pain those around caused her and wanting to curse them all for it. But the girl’s feelings carried in her magic resonate with Momoko so much that it ends up overlapping with Momoko’s own memories and feelings (as if she was possessed by the girl herself). The event even opens up with Momoko, standing at a cliff facing the ocean, despairing over never seeing ‘him‘ again and wanting to go to where ‘he‘ is, with her soul gem black (annnnnd they’re outside Kamihama, so no doppels here folks)
But here’s the thing, the event also depicts how empathy can lead you astray; you can get a bad end when the trying to guess where the enchanted Momoko is at, the beach or the village? The beach would be the place where the girl waited for her beloved, while the village was the place the girl cursed in her last moments. Choosing the village here is the wrong answer (this bad ending has a really different tone from the previous ones where Momoko and Mitama‘s relationship becomes awkward and strained. In this ending: Mitama finds Momoko, but she’s too late: Momoko jumped off the cliff, and washed up on the shore where she becomes a witch and kills a tearful Mitama), since Mitama would be projecting her own feelings onto the situation (and it turns out the girl didn’t fall into despair cursing the village, but yearned in her last moments to prevent another tragedy like her’s from reoccurring). Meanwhile, Momoko’s emphasizing is what leads her into getting too involved and enchanted by the memories.
So to conclude, I really love how they made use of the differences between Mitama and Momoko to establish this balance of sympathy and empathy in an event that many of us dismissed as ’BEACH PAAAARTY!!!…but with angsty mermaids’
