I like to sing the praises of shows I like that don’t get top billing among the English-speaking fandom, and Casshern Sins probably falls into that category. As I write this, 12,083 MyAnimeList members have it on a list somewhere (in other words, have taken notice of it, and have shown enough incentive to indicate as much); to compare it to other shows from Fall 2008 and Winter 2009, 42,389 lists include Toradora! and 30,851 lists include Clannad ~After Story~. Certainly Casshern Sins could do worse, but it could do better, too, and, in my opinion, it’s on par with anything that aired when it did.

In one of the Voice Modules, lelangir asked me whether Casshern Sins was somewhat obtuse in terms of getting its point across. And…yeah, it definitely is. It isn’t especially subtle most of the time. But it’s the kind of show that paces things well enough that you don’t really care, and it doesn’t hold back when it comes to sheer drama and sheer strangeness, and for that I can’t help but like it. It’s the kind of show that provides a refreshing change of pace from subtlety without falling into too many of the common pitfalls of the unsubtle.

My moment of choice is, in fact, the ending, so you’ll want to get out of here and watch it if you haven’t already. That’ll be sort of a trend for me this year, actually; often when I have trouble choosing a favorite scene, I’ll default to the end, and I’ve had more than a little trouble choosing favorite scenes for this round of moments. But, with that said, that isn’t really the case here. I found the ending of Casshern Sins especially satisfying — which should tell you something about me, I suppose.

Casshern has gotten around a bit by the last episode, as you may imagine. He’s traveled barren landscapes ravaged by the Ruin, the very wasting away of the world, which ends the lives of robots and humans indiscriminately — which, in turn, allows artificial life to know death. He’s met (or re-met) Luna, who grants robots immunity to this death, provided they aren’t in bad enough shape when they petition her that she doesn’t simply order her servants to get them out of her sight. Because, see, she isn’t such a big fan of death.

Casshern’s no stranger to death. He’s a killing machine, for one thing. And, after witnessing a frivolous community of immortal robots, whose unending lives seem to have no meaning at all, Casshern and his companions choose death over the alternative. As such, he’s present for the deaths of his creator and his friend/enemy/love interest (it’s complicated; if not the final episode, I would’ve written about the episode in which Lyuze sorts her feelings out), deaths that occur even as new plant life begins to take root in long-barren soil.

Casshern doesn’t take it well — not because he doesn’t understand the value of death, of life with a beginning and end, but precisely because he does. Life isn’t “life” without death; if his many encounters have taught him nothing else, they have taught him this. Presence is judged through absence; in the great chain of signification (alias différance), death is the signified to life’s signifier. (Yesterday’s moment deals with the same idea, in fact.)

Our hero has a choice. He could do away with Luna and end her little operation. Or he could put his immortal body to use.

To kill Luna would be to kill hope itself, and Casshern doesn’t want that. He simply wants to make hope possible at all, to render “hope” identifiable as such, by ensuring that the fear of death continues even in Luna’s deathless world. And so Casshern becomes death.

This is, in my estimation (and such things are wholly a matter of personal estimation, after all), one of the most profoundly heroic acts I’ve witnessed in all the fiction I’ve experienced. I’m not even sure I can tell you in all honesty that, if given the choice, I wouldn’t choose to live forever, and maybe that makes me a coward, in a way. But life and death, hope and fear, love and hate — our existence, our experience is all of these things. Casshern understands that, and he makes possible a world in which others are free to understand it, a world in which such a thing as meaning can exist. Perhaps the alternative is “better,” but I can’t see it that way — I’m only human, after all.