Abstract Eden

Tower of a Crazy Mage: spoilery rant about nuramago 204

nayrael:

 Is it sleeping or resting? As resting is quite often also meant as resting in death.

 Also, in mythologies resting places of dead famous people often have special powers. Seeing as the same chapter showed Rihan as a guardian ghost I doubt Hiroshi is intending to revive him. However, the place might enable Rikuo to converse with his father in Underworld which I somehow think we will get sooner or later in some form.

Honestly, in my experience, 寝る (neru) isn’t really open to interpretation. It means to go to sleep/lie down/go to bed. Maybe a native speaker could shed more light, but that pretty explicit definition of the verb is what made me so wary. I’m pretty sure Shiibashi would have used a different verb if he wanted to make it more ambiguous.

I know about mythological resting places having special abilities (I’m a huge mythology and Arthurian nerd), but the hanyou village existed before Rihan died. The chapter where Nurarihyon was in the sea of trees also seemed to indicate that the magic tree pool has been around for a long time.

Likely part of the problem with Nuramago at this point is that we really don’t have a good idea of the series’ concept of hell/the underworld. It’s clearly an actual place and evidently being sent there isn’t necessarily permanent, but other than that, all we have it that flashback scene with Sanmoto and Seimei that basically showed a giant cave-like area. What exactly is hell in the Nuramago universe? What enables someone to escape from it? Why can the living enter it with seemingly no difficulty? If there’s a hell, is there also a heaven-like place? Is there any discrimination between where humans go and where yokai go? If you don’t manage to return from hell, are you just stuck there, or is there some sort of potential for reincarnation? There are really far too many questions, and for me that makes things rather difficult - especially in a potential situation like this.

…I really ramble on way too much. “OTL Maybe one of these days I’ll try and do an analysis to work out Nuramago’s concept of hell/the afterlife.