"Magic" by Amane Momose (MILGRAM)

"Magic" (Cover)

MILGRAM is my special interest right now, and it's consuming my thoughts and genuinely effecting how I feel. So I wanted to talk about one song/character that makes me sad if I think about her too much. MILGRAM is a Japanese project, so each song has been translated into English. THIS IS ALL FICTIONAL! (Parataxis in italics.)

Amane is a 12-year-old girl, who is imprisoned for murder. This first song/music video is a look into her mind and her feelings towards the crime. The first song is also her first trial, and is her first out of three. The first two are out and the third one is still in progress. The fun part is that the audience is who votes/voted on whether or not they are guilty or innocent for their crime.

Some important background on Amane is that she comes from a very... religious background. The 'religion' she comes from is a mix of both the Unification Church cult and the Happy Science cult. The Happy Science cult's doctrine is much more fitting for what we get from Amane's backstory from the Wiki. Both ideas (Happy Science and Amane's cult) follow a "'The Fourfold Path': love that gives, wisdom, self-reflection, and progress." In Amane's music video, there are four figures that represent each of these kind of doctrines. The Unification Church and Amane's cult also have very strict donation rules.

A big doctrine shown throughout Amane's trial is to pray to heal. There is a cat that gets a light fixture dropped on it, very comically, and Amane goes to help it. One of the figures tells her to pray, but she defies them and puts a bandage on the cat, trying to do in secret. Once she does that, all four figures 'punish' her. They punish her with water, electricity, sleep deprivation, and physical punishment. It's shown in a cutesy kind of way, but its still pain; basically torture because she refused to let a cat be in pain.

The chorus lines are Amane asking "Dear wise one, Am I worthy? / Is it ok to spoil myself?" and "Is it ok to be weak sometimes?" She's asking the object of the cult's devotion if it's okay to be human. What is extremely messed up in this, is that the people decided to vote her guilty, telling her that it's not okay to be human, and that she needs to follow the doctrine of her cult. More on that later.

The video is extremely upbeat with constant bright colors, and very cutesy imagery. I mean, Amane is 12. She is a child, but the topics that she is dealing with are extremely mature, and the fact that she is in this prison for killing someone (she's 12). We get to see how she is just a child based on the way her first music video looks like a children's show.

There is one scene in this music video, where after she is tortured by these four figures, she holds her hands together in prayer before opening her eyes where her irises and pupils are bright yellow surrounded by a dark green. To me, that represents her having fallen into her religious psychosis. Once she opens her eyes, she grabs hold of a magic scepter, and grows wings, almost like she has been approved by her cult, and can become an angel. The Happy Science cult does have a lot of imagery with angels, as they believe that a human can be reincarnated into an angel. Amane believes that even though she may falter with some of the doctrines, she can still achieve greatness within her cult.

This 12-year-old has no business making me so sad. What really gets me is how this first song was an innocent (sorta) girl trying to break free from her indoctrination and wanting to be accepted as a human. The people who voted, real people who watched that music video, decided to vote her guilty. They voted against her trying to express her freedom, and in turn made her revert to her religious doctrine. Her second trial, "The Purge March" is such a shift in aesthetic from this video, but that is something I will absolutely talk about later.

I don't know if it's that fact that she is just a child, or if it's that she was victim to a cult's indoctrination. It just makes me so sad to think about her in a moral sense. Yes she killed somebody, we don't know exactly who just yet, but the fact that she is so young, and was victim to such horrific torture, presumably by her mom (more on that in the post about "The Purge March" coming soon), makes me so emotional.

She is 12. She was manipulated by a cult. She was punished for helping a cat. She was forced into sleep deprivation, she was electrocuted, she was waterboarded, and physically abused. She killed somebody. Now she is dealing with more mind games.

It all just makes me sad, but in a very fascinating way.