Wolf and the Middle Ages

I have been thinking about two anime—Spice and Wolf and WorldEnd: What Are We Doing at the End of the World? Are You Busy? Will You Save Us? (SukaSuka)—and what the medieval setting does for both of them.

In SukaSuka, Willem loves Chtholly. He gives her hope, and then the world takes it away. The Leprechauns—the girls who carry the ancient weapons—have short lifespans; they are born to burn. This is not a tragedy with a solution. The show’s approach to tragedy is to pile on: give the viewer the most fortunate girl possible, make her life feel completely real, then take everything away. “To make the world’s most fortunate girl and then let her die” is not merely tragedy; it is a statement about the structure of hope itself. Hope is precisely what makes loss unbearable.

Spice and Wolf takes a different angle. Holo the Wise Wolf is ancient and has known abandonment. Her PTSD—if one wants to call it that—manifests as a kind of imperious self-sufficiency: she doesn’t need you, she merely tolerates you, and you had better be grateful. Lawrence the merchant is young and immature, frequently outwitted by Holo in the business schemes that drive the plot. It is an unequal relationship in one direction; the question is whether it is unequal in the other.

The medieval setting in both shows creates what I’d call a floating duckweed feeling—fuping—the sense of being adrift in a world where no structure will protect you, where the next town may or may not be safe, where your skills and your companion are all you have. In Spice and Wolf this creates intimacy: two people against the road. In SukaSuka it creates fatalism: the road leads nowhere that can help.

Holo accepts Lawrence from their first meeting. He doesn’t know this until much later, when he realizes that her teasing has always been the form her affection takes. Lawrence accepts Holo—really accepts her, not just tolerates her—when she reveals her financial genius and he stops patronizing her. Love, in both cases, requires mutual recognition of the other’s full self. It also requires the willingness to be hurt and to stay anyway.

For long-lived beings—wolves, elves, whoever—society must be anarchic in a specific sense: with infinite time, there is no need for a division of labor in the human sense; every individual is self-sufficient across centuries; the bonds that form are therefore purely chosen, not structurally necessary. Two lonely ancient beings choosing each other is, in that context, a more radical act than it appears.

Scarborough Fair: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. The song asks a series of impossible tasks; only by completing them can the lover return. It is a romantic faith in the impossible, which is perhaps the only faith that medieval settings can honestly sustain.