To Hell in a Plushie Backpack
I am a dragon of heaven, and you are a dragon of earth. Fuuma, I… wait, wrong CLAMP series. Yeah, you can tell it’s a CLAMP series if you begin with someone coming to a new town and perching on some high point to oversee the land, all while making some vague comment about things to come. Throw in some cherry blossoms and BAM! There you go, CLAMP stuff.
Unfortunately I don’t think we’ll be seeing any X-styled decapitated-head-cradling in this one. But I do foresee some Chobits-level twisted morality. Let me tell you why.
According to Kobato, she has come to Earth to carry out a series of tasks that will allow her to go to “a certain place.” She’s awfully vague about where, exactly, she wants to go and why. All we know is that A) she’s not from our world and B) she wants to go someplace that we ca only assume is not our world. In order to do this, she must collect “scarred hearts” and place them within the ever-so adorable bottle seen above. The anime would like you to think that she’s going around, Sailor Moon-style, healing people’s troubled hearts with a wave of a magic wand. And I’m sure people will go with this interpretation.
But we have to remember that this is CLAMP we’re talking about. This is the same group that gave us Chobits, a seemingly innocent and cute anime whose ultimate moral was “it’s OK to fall in love with your computer, so long as it’s smoking hawt!” This is also the same group that gave us X and Tokyo Babylon, two nihilistic, apocalyptic, twisted series that involved people flailing almost-hopelessly against fate and being forced to kill loved ones. CLAMP likes the play hard ball. They like to screw with audience expectations. Sure, Xxxholic and Tsubasa were crap that pandered to the audience, but CLAMP has a history of “going there.”
No, I’m convinced that Kobato wants to go to Hell, and she’s collecting the souls of troubled people in order to enter Satan’s kingdom.
Ioryogi is the primary reason why I feel Kobato’s mission is nowhere near as kind as one would believe. His appearance is something of a combination of Snoopy, a punk, and a Street Shark. He speaks in a low-toned, aggressive voice, and when Kobato’s antics annoy his devilish and sophisticated sensibilities, he bellows forth hellfire to turn Kobato into a crispy critter.
He does this quite often, seeing how Kobato offends his ideals with great regularity.
Why in the hell would someone who is a good-will mission to save souls and mend hearts carry around a demon-voiced, fire-breathing plushie who is essentially her master and commander? It only makes sense if she’s not as kind and good-intentioned as we’re led to believe. No, Kobato is definitely an agent of Beelzebub. She’s a devil-in-training, and she needs to acquire the souls needed to broker a deal with the darkness.
“But what about her innocence? What about how she tries to help people? What about how inept she seems to be? How could someone with that smile and those eyes be evil?” Those may be the questions running through your mind at this moment. Don’t let those preconceptions fool you. Kobato is the spawn of Satan.
In the first episode, while Kobato and Ioryogi are in a park, Io tells Kobato that in order to fit in with her surroundings, she must behave “properly.” How does Kobato interpret “behaving properly in a park?” Does it mean admiring the flowers and greeting passers-by with a smile? No! She interprets it to mean “rummage through the garage, get some newspaper, create a makeshift blanket, and go to sleep on a park bench like a homeless person.