Can someone explain this to me?

Please don't bully me Sup Forums. I just want a discussion on what exactly a Karma Demon is. I relate a lot to the story, but can't quite understand the moral. Someone please help?

"This story is from about eighty years ago. There lived a boy in the village. He was an incredibly bright child, but had one flaw. As he grew older, this flaw became more and more obvious. He was extremely proud of his intelligence and looked at everything else with disdain. He pretended to accept the teachings in school and from other adults, but the important lessons never really reached his heart. He began to sneer at the foolishness of adults and laugh at the laws of the world. Arrogance sows the seeds of karma. The boy gradually drifted away from his circle of friends. Loneliness became his only companion and confidant. Loneliness is the seedbed of karma. In his solitude, the boy spend a lot of time thinking. He thought about forbidden things and questioned things better left alone. Unclean thoughts cause karma to grow unchecked. The boy unknowingly built up more and more karma, and transformed into something inhuman — a karma demon. Before anyone knew, the village was empty; everyone had fled in fear of the karma demon. It went to live in the forest, but all the animals there disappeared too. As the karma demon walked, the plants around it twisted in all sorts of unimaginable shapes and rotted. All the food it touched instantly turned into lethal poison. The karma demon wandered aimlessly through the dead, deformed forest. Eventually, it came to realize that it shouldn't be living in this world. The karma demon left the darkness of the forest. Before his eyes, he saw it, wreathed in a glittering radiance. He had arrived at a deep lake nestled in the mountains. It walked into the lake, thinking that water as pure as this would surely cleanse him of his karma. But the water surrounding it instantly became dark and murky, and started turning into poison. Karma demons should not exist in this world. It understood that, and quietly disappeared into the bottom of the lake."

^^^ for reference, if this thread doesn't die in about 2 secs

Damn. Why does Sup Forums always ignore me

Basically a cantus user who loses control of his power, thus nothing is stopping his/her power from affecting the world

But I'm looking for the real-world application

BUMP SOMEONE PLEASE

It's science fiction, user. Cantus isn't real. You could draw connections with modern psychology but the point of the karma demons is to advance the story and provide a counterpoint to how depressing the fiend child was.

There must be a moral behind the story. I get that it's a jumping off point for the plot but I want to know if it's something more.

The moral is that life isnt fair, and dont believe everything the government tells you

fugggg

How's this: Cantus is the direct externalization of human imagination. It can be used for abominations like the queerats, it can be twisted into fiends and karma demons and the Emperor of Harmonious Clapping, and it can be used to erase Shoe from main girl's mind, but it can also be used for good things, like Shoe sticking around in spirit form to save everybody in the end. Humanity's capacity for evil does not negate our capacity for good.

But asking for "the" moral is a high school kind of question. Novels are complex webs of morals. To fully describe the moral of SSY you have to write it.

The moral is don't worry and fuck your friends more often.

moreeee

Cantus normally needs to be used consciously, Karma Demons however lose their ability to control it and they use the cantus with their subconcious so very weird things happen around them.

For example, poison is ineffective on Shun because his unconscious survival instinct kicks in and makes his cantus transform the arsenic.

sometimes it's best to kill youself so you do not become a threat to your country and fellow people. and you need to overcome your subconscious inhibition to suicide to do what is necessary.

Do people really not look for morals in anime?

If I took my morales from anime I would be keeping schoolgirls as pets, take government property as I please and murder for sport.

You can find moral in pretty much any story, what you're asking for is for us to overanalyze it instead of simply taking what the author gave us and appreciating it in the scope of the story

Are you trying to tell me you don't do any of that?

not much of a sports guy

Good. It just means you're not a 14 year old Japanese girl that gets her panties soaked by big muscular men kissing.

>tldr; please don't think about things we don't want you to think about, don't question society and follow your orders, do your duty, and stay normal
Pretty fucking disgusting.

Well, that is what they enforced in their society in the anime to the absolute extreme after the years of extermination from both sides, they got stuck in a a self feeding loop of paranoia over what any of them would do if they got over the various psychological and biological locks they used their bio engineering to create

You aren't supossed to see them as correct, but as a horrifying society

>Don't eat the apple

>let me tear apart the delicate social structures that keep us from freezing and starving so I can feel big sometimes
real selfish pham

work it out yourself

Shit, legitimately never thought of it like this

It's about mental illness.

how

>everything around you is crashing down and it's all your fault and you don't even know how that could be possible

Doesn't seem mental illness related

In the story a Karma demon is just somebody who thinks too much so their mental energy distorts the world around them. That's why the boy was floating those balls around him, to keep his mind busy and not corrupting the stuff around him.

The overall moral of the story is doing things for the greater good and accepting that even though things aren't always clear, they happen for a reason and people with more information are making good decisions for you.

All of the problems in the story can be blamed on the kids who didn't obey their elders

It's about the bitterness that grows in the heart of lonely faggots with superiority complex. Basically what you see in /r9k/ today.

>it's an "user learns literary criticism is not precise or easy" thread

Not to sound edgy but shouldn't the natural state of an individual be "selfish"? I think it's unreasonable to demand the labor and time of people without giving them a choice. I something inhibits individual growth and development ion favor of maintaining itself, it isn't worth it. Not even if I'll freeze or starve. Besides, the idea that every single person will freeze and starve without society is brainwashing in itself, plenty of people know how to survive in the wild, and even more would if our society taught these skills as basic functions to have. The thing is, people aren't raised to function properly as individuals, they're raised and taught with only a certain society in mind. Someone raised to have individual skills such as survival can survive in any society, an individual raised for a specific society can only survive in that specific society. I'm not going to burn the government buildings or start raping and murdering people, that would be unreasonable and completely bullshit. But I would like the choice to go off on my own and be left alone, or do things that are not harmful to society directly yet have been made taboo to keep people from leaving. If people want to work together voluntarily to maintain a system, of course they can do that, but to demand people work to maintain it involuntarily is unreasonable. Yes, I am selfish, what of it? I would help people on an individual scale if it was in my power, but I also believe that one man can not do everything, and should not subdue himself to a system simply because of the vague ideal that he could help less people without the system. First and foremost I place my own safety and interests, then those of the things I care about, and then others who are neutral to me. Seeing as I am my self, why wouldn't I be "selfish"? I wouldn't kill everyone on the planet, but at the same time it's not unreasonable of me to ask for true liberty. If you think that's edgy, I really don't know what to say.

>The overall moral of the story is doing things for the greater good and accepting that even though things aren't always clear, they happen for a reason and people with more information are making good decisions for you.
This this this this thank you user

Big brother has got your back, huh?

Pic very much related

loneliness and isolation from others is said to be one of the explicit causes of becoming a karma demon, the boy is said to think of forbidden things and become excessively cynical, all ending in a suicide motivated by the fact the boy believes he shouldn't exist in the world, how the fuck is this not related to mental illness and specifically depression you idiot

furthermore karma demons are just another part of this shit show that makes no fucking sense, oh we can strictly genetically program homosexuality into the kids from 14-18 so they don't fight and get pregnant, with no possibility or consideration of the risk that anyone might stay gay and not continuing on our incredibly small and pruned population, but we can't make it so people don't develop severe destructive depressions, fuck off this show's world is ass, the character designs blow, there's no tension since it's told through flashback, the directing is ass, and the twist with the mole men is so obvious it's painful

Can anyone post the story which makes Nagi no Asukara a sequel to Shin Sekai Yori?

Will the Queerats ever be fixed? Surely if you can insert a genome you can take it out...right?

On their monotous society, the elderly Saki and Satoru knew that the control mechanisms of their predecessors were destined to fail and that one day a mayor world scale catastrophe would cause the entire species to disappear. To save humanity from this tragic fate, they called scientists from many different areas to tune ideas; they decided to go with a new genetic engineering experiment with the goal to modify embryo with the capacity to survive underwater thanks to the a new membrane which they denoted "Ena".

Knowing that the root of all evil was the power of the gods, they limited their Cantus and reduced it to a spontaneous ability when the Ena had contact with water, a full opposition to Raman-Klogius. To protect them from any kind of surface threats, they conditioned these organisms with hibernation that which could last centuries, but conserving every bodily function, an antithesis of Hashimoto-Appealbaum. Saki's partner, a brilliant Cantus genius, let go of everything he loved, his partner, his friends, and his family; he altered his own organism to survive deep below sea so that he would be the guardian of the new generation, he would be the one that would watch over the new humans so that they would never reach for the surface and others would reach the sea. He didn't even gave it a name, he was only knows as the Sea God.

With the increasing frequency of fiend sightings in villages, the destruction of everything known reduced the population of Cantus users little by little, as they went kept being brought back to smaller rudimentary societies; this threatened every single living thing on the surface. Of course, the humans with Ena escaped this era of destruction since they were hibernating in the deep sea waters. Thousands of years passed and peace returned to the surface, the remains of what used to be an ancient civilization disappeared and a new era in the history of humanity begun.

The Sea God watched and this new civilization flourished in little time, surpassing the previous civilization. With the passing centuries, the population grew and massive migrations started to happen in the sea. With this, the Sea God divided his conscience and incorporated it with the ones with great potential, those of which would take an appearance similar to him. These beings would be knows as Scales and as such they would replace the Sea God by watching these new villages. For this reason, many say that the Sea God isn’t gone, it’s more that he’s dispersed over all the oceans.

Time passed and it was inevitable that many reached the surface and slowly adapt to living on the bare ground. These groups of humans grew and the Exodus of the ocean grew more and more. Many of the firstborn adapted to the surface and the offspring of their offspring eventually didn’t have the ability to survive on the sea, they were born without Ena. Their culture, much similar to their predecessors, got reinforced, their enormous scientific advances marked a distinct course for these new conquerors of the surface and, possibly because of fate, reached the same social complexity reached by the postmodern societies of the first millennia of the planet.
Not knowing their common upbringing led to conflict between both surviving parties, but they learned to coexist. To this day, both the people of the sea and the humans from the surface don’t know the truth about their origins…