I have been watching a video essay by Salari titled "Japan Doesn't Understand Nihilism (Mostly)" which explores why anime and JRPGs so often default to theatrical nihilism as the motivation for their villains, and what that tells us about Japanese society, and the conclusion hit me like a truck.
At the end of the video, Salari posits that this kind of writing, which usually advocates for the heroes' power of friendship as the only cure for the villain's nihilism, can actually completely backfire if it doesn't realize that a lack of meaningful relationships is exactly what makes people into nihilists in the first place. To someone who feels as if life has no meaning, the idea that bonds give life meaning, is not only hypocritical, it might even be infuriating. It's offering the cause of a problem as a solution.
To quote the essayist in question: "The problem is, according to the stories being told so frequently, the solution is to find friends, and to form unbreakable bonds with them, which simply isn't an option when you're working 80 hours a week or studying at a school every day but Sunday. It's a nice message, and these stories can indeed be inspiring, but I think it can also end up serving as a reminder for what people don't have, and make them feel even worse."
These words hit me like a truck, because I realized I was one of those people. I grew up practically without friends, and instead inundated myself with stories about how friends are the only things that can save you from utter despair. Surely that can't have been healthy. I remember getting depressed when I realized that the characters in Persona 4 weren't actually my friends, that they had been designed and written simply to convince me of an illusion.
Now, contrary to what Salari implies, this realization didn't make me into a nihilist. I mean, I would say I am a nihilist — at least in the sense that I agree with Salari's (and Albert Camus') view that existence is inherently meaningless — but I am not the kind of nihilist that anime and JRPGs usually cart out as the embodiment of all evil. For starters, to me the inherent meaninglessness of life is the very reason why we should provide meaning through kindness and empathy, as opposed to an excuse for callousness and cruelty.
On the other hand, I do believe the often naive moral many Japanese stories love to hammer home has had some negative effect on my mental health. For the longest time I have held the belief that a friend isn't a friend until your relationship is as intense, your kindness is as unconditional, your values and beliefs are as common and your trust is as mutual as all of these aspects are when portrayed in anime and JRPGs. This has caused me to set absurd standards for other people and be absolutely terrified of opening up too much to others, just in case they might scatter the illusion of true companionship by not thinking or feeling the exact same way as I do on just about any old triviality.
Because of this seemingly wholesome ideal nesting itself in my impressionable brain, I can still only count the number of people I would consider true "friends" on a single hand. Does that mean that there's less than five people standing between me and absolute despair? I would not like to find out.
On the topic of the portrayal of friendship in anime and JRPGs―and I think this goes for the glimpses of other people's deep and meaningful friendships we are privy to in real life as well―we frequently get to see only a slice of these friendships; we see them as they exist after having ripened into intensity, unconditional kindness, and mutual trust. But it takes time to get to that point; there was a whole plot arc that we didn't see leading up to the slice that we do see. The same goes for friendships in our own lives, but one we find ourselves in the middle of our own plot arcs, two we don't know ahead of time which of the plots end up being a major story arc and which end up being a random side quest, and three sometimes those plots are a really slow burn.¹
Nevertheless, I think, if we never allow ourselves to start treating our friendships as if they had the potential to flourish into an intensity, unconditional kindness, and mutual trust that they do not already have, then we're drastically reducing the chances that they will flourish. We have to acknowledge that our friendships are not as deep, meaningful, and close as (we think) would be ideal, so we can't treat them as if they were. But at the same time, we have to go about them as if they were merely not as deep, meaningful, and close as (we think) would be ideal yet. That means, sometimes, taking risks; for instance, trusting someone when we don't completely know that they are trustworthy. Sometimes, that means getting hurt; and sometimes when we get hurt we have to have the courage to admit to ourselves that the reason wasn't that they did us wrong, it was that we read things wrong.
¹ To take a personal example, I started dating a guy in 2004, broke up in late 2005 but stayed friends, went through several periods of the friendship being alternately more distant and more close, started dating again in 2015, he proposed in 2016, I said yes in 2018, and we've been married since then.
I just made a big deal about taking risks, and yet―I'd known him for a dozen years and it still took me two years to get to the place where I thought we were ready to get married. Well, that's in part because over the course of our relationship there were a couple of times where I made a mistake and read things wrong and got hurt, so I had to move back and let things ripen more. But in this case, just because it wasn't ripe yet didn't mean chucking it onto the compost heap!