Hannah Unincorporated

Anime has been a shock to the system after growing up with largely western media. This is true across a variety of categories, from the patterning of the stories to the tone of the characters.

Attack on Titan was/is a shock to the system in its own right. I hated watching it, and loved watching it. Its hard to stomach that kind of violence for me, even in a comic.

I guess I haven’t come to any conclusions yet, after finishing it two days ago. It feels awkward to even admit to enjoying things still, even movies. I’m not sure why the self-consciousness about this clings so closely even though I don’t believe in fundamentalism anymore. I hate to love things. I hate to like things. Writing it inside this blog is enough of a filter, anonymous enough, that it’s tolerable to me, but only barely.

Evangelicalism really wants everything to be parced and clean and morally upstanding and stories (especially anime) doesn’t lend itself well to that. The evangelical in me would dissect it, but the idealist in me refuses. It would be criminal to dissect stories that are so vivid, that stand in their own right, just for the sake of adding them to a moral framework. Nasty reductionism.

So I’ve loved anime ever since I began watching it a year ago. I love it secretly because it flies in the face of logical dissection; everything is emotive and colorful and human.

Still, I keep evangelicals from knowing about it to protect myself from being scoffed at as a casual at loving God. If you really loved God you would parce everything…this is what fourteen-year-old Hannah would say to me at twenty seven.

It’s nice to be human, even if it is only secretly.

I wonder if it’ll ever be comfortable to like things publicly. Food. Movies. Fun clothes. I wonder how people who deconstruct shake off that cold aloofness that I always feel within myself.

I finished AOT recently. Hated the ending. Hated a good many things about the show, but loved the dynamic characters, even the nastiness of the world itself, it felt very honest. The show isn’t about religion but it led me to this idea, which was new to me:

Men are not expected to maintain their softness and emotional availability under duress, under threat of war.

Christianity says that everything is life or death, salvation or eternal torment.

This extremist thinking does things to the mind, requires a certain amount of emotional numbness. Doubly so if you are a child when you’re first confronted with “the unsaved (the unsaved people you love) will be tortured forever if you don’t save them.”

Whenever I watch military stuff, which isn’t often because the gore makes me kinda queasy, I always sort of sit there afterwards and stare at the wall. I always come back to books and movies and stories about people having to make horrible, heartbreaking choices under pressure, because that’s how I felt, at five, nine, fifteen, trying to arrange every little thing I did to save one more soul. I even joined a street evangelism group in college. I was miserable. I was terrified. It didn’t matter though, because saving souls was more important.

There’s a war on.

I don’t believe in the war anymore, like I don’t think it rests on my shoulders at least. I don’t know what I do believe.

I do know that I was born and raised as a soldier (literally, the Quiverful movement says to have children as arrows and then train them to save the world, it’s crazy) and that militarism is deep inside me in a way that I’m not sure if it’s reversible.

I used to always be criticized for being so black and white about things. Mainly because I was always being a major dick to people about legalistic stuff. But its awkward and saddening looking back on it now. I was raised so extremist. It was terrifying. And then that extremism bled out onto everything else and people noticed.

But like…what does one do with a veteran who was never even in a real war? How am I supposed to get better from this?

Nothing I even did was necessary.

I “fought” for a cause that didn’t even exist.

When COVID stuff was scary and uncertain, I didn’t give it a second thought before flinging myself into homesteading, buying a farm. I was out there, still disabled at the time, digging out the soil by hand with my baby strapped on my back. I was too sick to even brush my teeth or wash the dishes. I would collapse on the floor and not even make it to the bed before falling asleep at night.

I didn’t even hesitate, because I was raised in wartime. In a crisis, brushing your teeth doesn’t matter. Survival matters. The war wasn’t real but what it did to my mind is.

Even now, I am so quick to abandon my own dignity. I drop self care without noticing. I am wired for radicalism, for extremism. At ten, reading books about the martyrs and visualizing myself being skinned alive, bracing myself for it. I would do it for God, if asked, and I needed to be ready. Giving up your dignity is nothing.

Being raised in war shuts you down.

I liked AOT for this. Levi was the best character, clearly damaged and consequently emotionally closed. It felt like looking in a mirror in terms of how I see the world during crisis. Nothing matters. You just do what has to be done.

But then…the whole ‘keep sweet’ thing.

This idea is hard to explain.

But somehow watching AOT highlighted this for me, this idea that as women, we are expected to operate under the CONDITIONS of war, but we aren’t supposed to emotionally shut down. That “Levi” sort of coldness is denied to women, even though we, too, are facing the threat of torture every day, even though we are expected to be braced for literal martyrdom, even though you are supposed to continue having children even if your body is breaking, even if you fall into poverty.

It’s not fair.

Mikasa is striking as she poises herself, vulnerable and emotionally available to Eren. I don’t think the writers intended it to be coercive, but it was a stark contrast to Levi, who is closed. He does not feel the need to offer vulnerability to anyone in the midst of combat. Mikasa as “helpmeet” is always there, right at Eren’s shoulder.

Maybe she does it freely.

But a lot of us don’t.

To put young children on the front lines, to subject them to the emotional pressures of war, is going to do war-like things to their minds.

But somehow evangelicalism creates these traumatized kids, then turns to the girls and says, “Ok, now stay soft, unguarded, emotionally available.” The boys aren’t asked to do the same for the girls.

It’s not the boys’ fault, the children aren’t the ones putting this expectation on each other.

But the “helpmeet” idea starts SO young. So you literally have girls like me, who were raised militant, extremist, almost jihadist in our willingness to commit sociological and emotional suicide for the cause, and then ALSO told that 1. the highest calling is marriage/children and 2. you MUST be soft, sweet, emotionally available.

It’s not possible without splitting your mind in half.

How can that be possible?

Levi is a hero in AOT, a leader who operates with incredible mental dexterity in crisis. But his exposure to war has clearly stunted his emotional availability. We don’t care, though. We intuitively understand that such is the cost of facing combat.

I got no such mercy under fundamentalist theology.

When I became an extremist kid, a damaged kid, in the face of combat, the elders in my community did not know why, or how to handle someone that angry, that radical. I was told to “give the anger to God” and to grow into a soft woman, a submissive woman, a helpmeet.

Even now people say “how could we have seen this coming?” or “it’s so strange that some people hate the church after growing up in it” or “women keep turning away from the church, and we don’t know why.”

But it’s kind of like…is it strange?

Or is it obvious?

Of course men leave less frequently, you aren’t dealing them the death blow of expecting them to take off all their armor in the middle of combat.

I don’t know what the elders expected would happen when they taught eternal conscious torment, the great commission, and spiritual warfare to children. (Warfare is in the name.)

The kids who really believed you, who deeply and fully absorbed this, are war kids.

Then you asked all the young girls to marry and have kids WHILE the combat is still going on, and demanded that they be soft, sexually available, emotionally available. You made us take off our armor.

Holy shit. Imagine if we did this to literal veterans. Told them to come back and be gentle and soft or else they are failing their God given calling. It’s laughable.

Some people aren’t extremist like me, I get it. And honestly, I have sisters who were smarter than me or braver, and rejected the soldier/war framework at a young age. They didn’t come out of the oven like me, and I’m glad.

But if people could stop fucking blaming traumatized girls for leaving the church that would be nice.

I never asked to be anybody’s soldier.