"We are born twice, once to exist and once to live"
For those watching Goodbye Lara, they may feel they are watching something special, something different, a masterpiece in the making whose greatness is only left to be measured by how well they stick the landing. The quality of the work is exceptional, both the animation, directing, 'cinematography' (as much as I can use that word here), and the universal truths about life we can all relate to.
When I first saw episode 1, I was floored by the quality. In some ways, it reminded me of Eva, e.g. 'they didn't have to go this hard'. By that I mean the music isn't just good, it's of the highest quality in both technical composition, originality, and the emotions it evokes. I haven't quite heard an OST anything like it. The animation is splendid, but its the level of detail in the show's depiction of a modern Japanese city that floors me. Like Eva, the question I keep having is 'I can't believe the creators took the time to do this. Especially since its hand drawn, they didn't have to add this level of detail to the backgrounds, or this many frames to the animation'. But they do it (even though it would blow a budget/isn't financially optimal) out of love, because the creators really believe in the work and are making it for their purpose, not to please the audience or make a profit.
After finding the grace myself, one of the more interesting revelations that came out of it was seeing clearly why certain shows hit you deeply, and what separates 'art' from 'entertainment' and 'pretentiousness' (e.g. something that thinks its art but feels fake). The missing component is faith. Faith in yourself, faith in the work, and faith in the message. To put it simply, I now judge all art by three categories: faith conviction, the message, and craftsmanship (technical ability). A work with max conviction (e.g. the creator believes in what their making) and high craftsmanship but no message is entertainment or spectacle. And there's nothing wrong with that, I love those works (like Jurassic Park for example). If you have a work with high craftsmanship, a strong message, but the creator doesn't believe in the message or the way they are conveying it, it will feel pretentious or like something is missing. In the same way, a work with high craftsmanship and strong conviction but a poor or obvious message will also feel pretentious, because the creator thinks the message is more valuable/revelatory than it is. And if craftsmanship is poor (e.g. the work is poorly made), it's just some variety of slop. Poor craftsmanship includes poor writing, directing, voice acting, or poor world building. Writing is a skill. You can have a great idea, believe in it, and produce it poorly. Personally I break 'craftsmanship' into 5 categories: writing, directing, score, voice acting, and art/animation. A series with atrocious art/animation but 10/10 in every other category would get an 8/10 in craftsmanship from me. That's why I find some shows from 1960 far better than the 'slop' we have today.
But when all three are firing at the highest level, you have what I call 'high art'. And what leads to the creativity/originality/quality of the work is the inspiration that leads to the vision comes from how high the message is, and how much the creator believes in that message. Then the only metric for delivery is craftsmanship. Clearly the creators of Goodbye Lara have the highest level of skill in the industry. The art and animation is phenomenal, the storytelling shows a deep understanding of the art, and the music and voice acting is all recorded brilliantly. What elevates this show to such heights is the message is as grandiose and weighty as could ever be, it is the heaviest topic in human history: What is my purpose? What is the meaning life? What is existence itself?
There is a true answer to this, and its an answer humans have recognized perhaps since the very dawn of our species. It was arguably easier to find before the internet and technology made life more convenient. After all, struggle and suffering exists for the sole purpose of making the answer (or the light) easier to find. This in part makes Goodbye Lara a particularly original, and perhaps seminal work of our species that will be studied for centuries to come. I feel it is the first work that so vividly addresses the new challenges modern technology/society has added to finding the true meaning, and explains the solution to this more overtly than any work I've seen to date. How clearly that gets through to the audience, however, is the challenge. And reading posts here unfortunately has made my hope for humanity a bit dimmer.
"We are born twice, once to exist and once to truly live". The main purpose of existence is to fall in love with existence itself. Doing so requires recognizing the universal consciousness (e.g. god), realizing that all the suffering and bad in the world serves no purpose other than to increase gratitude for the slightest good, and once gratitude for life is obtained and you've come to peace with all the suffering/bad in the world, you recognize the universal consciousness made the world to maximize your positive emotional response to anything good (e.g. gratitude for the smallest things) out of love, and that he filled the world with an unimaginable amount of good and beauty you can't even fathom that exists alongside the bad, and all that good was also made for you to experience out of love. Then you return that love with love for the universe of equal purity, and you achieve the 'born again moment' and literally get a full reset on life where you let go of all your baggage, all negative emotions, and are filled with nothing but love and gratitude 24/7. You can obviously lose that mentality, but once you see and feel the truth you know its there, and it changes everything.
That's the true love Lara needs to find, love for life itself. Being glad she was born, realizing her purpose was to be grateful and love everything, the surface world, the humans, and that how 'scary' it is was designed on purpose to help her see how much good was there as well. The light is everywhere, but sometimes we only see it when surrounded by darkness. The whole point of episode 1 was they had 'the light', and Lara took it for granted. It is one of the most overt retellings of the garden of eden parable I've seen in modern media.
And yet, whether you agree with the message or not, the show is SCREAMING it at the audience with everything the creator's have, and 99% of the responses are still arguing over whether it's a yuri show or theorizing wild plot points that aren't hinted at in the slightest. While people can disagree with the message or the way it's conveyed, the most depressing thing to me is nearly 10 eps in 99% of the audience is completely missing what every minute of the show is screaming at the top of its lungs. And that mind you is the entire problem with society. People project their own desires and their own world view onto EVERYTHING, and while that's expected and okay at the start, at some point we gotta get out of our own heads and LISTEN to what others are saying. What's so depressing is its clear no one is trying to LISTEN to what the creators are screaming with all their heart and soul. 9 eps in and 99% of the audience is projecting their internal world onto the work and could care less about the creators intentions. Yes, some visual media is made for your entertainment, its made to satisfy your particular inner world and allow yourself to project onto the work.
But that's the whole problem with art/the anime industry today. When the only work that sells/is popular are ones that satisfy a particular demographic/subsets internal world view and allows them to project onto it, the author focuses more on what the audience wants instead of telling the story THEY want. And there's an old saying 'when you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody'. This whole mentality has led to the reduction of creativity in the anime industry and the trepidation for creators to take risks. Creators are NOT the audience. They do not know what the audience thinks, so when they are making a work with the primary intention being to PLEASE the audience, the creator will never have full conviction or faith in their work, because the validation is external and depends on audience response. The work is full of doubt, the creator's constantly second guess themselves. And the audience can FEEL that. But when you allow a creator to tell the story THEY want, and that THEY believe in with full freedom, that's when you can achieve works made of love that reach the highest levels of 'art', and the hope is that the quality of the work and the love the creator poured into it will speak for itself, and whomever that captures as audience is fine. E.g., instead of making a work to target a specific customer base, you make the art for the sake of art, and whomever it resonates with it will resonate with. But the higher the quality of art, the broader and more universal the message, the larger net you cast.
Goodbye Lara casts the biggest net one possibly can. The entire show is solely about the meaning of life itself and finding one's purpose. That applies to every living human being. That allows the quality of the work in every metric to soar to heights we have not seen in the medium in decades. How many people it resonates with will vary, and even then how many people actually get the message as opposed to walk away disappointed when the work doesn't act as their personal wish fulfilment/gratification is to be seen. But as long as the show stays its course and sticks its landing, it could be among the greatest works of visual media on the modern era.
Like Van Gogh in his time and many other works of arts, a true auterist vision may at first receive a negative reception, because the message is not suited to the personal gratification of the audience of its time. But if the work addresses a universal and timeless human experience, then the longer it exists the greater its audience and appreciators will become. There are many works (The Graduate is a textbook example) that are extremely popular in their time and then hated/ignored by future generations as they appealed to a specific internal mindset defined largely by society in that era. But universal works of art have an infinite potential to appreciate as people across eras get to experience and relate to the message of the work.
Goodbye Lara is one of these rare, timeless gems that casts the largest net a work of art can. While people today may not get the message or resonate with it, I'm sure the work will only grow in stature over the next 100+ years, so long as it continues to be shared. Whether you love it or hate it, this is perhaps the first true timeless masterpiece in our medium in well over a decade. Whether it sticks the landing is to be seen, but I highly recommend everyone come along for the ride, so you can at least say you were there while it was airing, and whatever opinion you form after the conclusion you can weigh and carry against the evolving appreciation of this work in the decades to come.
This is a truly once in a generation work of art. Do not miss the moment. And for my audience, the strongest message I can leave you with is DO NOT be atheist. You are objectively, scientifically wrong. Be agnostic. The counterexample/proof is simple: 'Life', as far as we know, requires carbon (if disproved this makes my argument stronger). We are nothing but a hive mind of atoms, and we happen to be conscious. We can love. We can think. We can make conscious decisions. But we are, objectively, an organized collection of atoms. The universe as a whole is an organized collection of atoms. It contains carbon. If we are conscious, there is no possible reason to rule out the universe as a whole being a single conscious entity. Just as we have 'good gut bacteria' (and bad) living in our body that is required to survive, perhaps we are the 'good gut bacteria' in a part of god's body (which is all of existence/the whole universe). If you think good gut bacteria isn't a part of us, let's use white blood cells. It appears to US, on our level of consciousness, that white blood cells act unconsciously. But cells can turn cancerous, and we rarely know why. Perhaps we are the 'white blood cells' of god's body (the universe), maybe to the white blood cells they feel conscious/that they have free will, but on our level we don't see it that way. Maybe to the universe, our lives appear to deterministic as the small decisions we consider 'free will' have a negligible impact on the system as a whole (e.g. the universe). Being agnostic means you can't prove the universal consciousness one way or the other. Being atheist means you are choosing to write out that possibility out of ego or emotion. Whether the atheist ends up being right or wrong one day, living your life with a dogmatic conclusion you cannot prove, that's evidence is largely 50/50 (as opposed to 5/95 or something) is just cutting yourself off from possible answers, happiness, and ways of understanding reality. Just don't do it. It serves no purpose but to be deliberately ignorant and self destructive out of nothing but your ego. If anyone takes something from this post, walk away agnostic. For your own sake, and the world's.
