The result of a collaboration between Madhouse and Tatsunoko Production, Casshern Sins, as far as I can tell, is largely unrelated to the rest of the Casshern franchise.
This incarnation tells the story of a man who caused the end of days, an immortal cursed to live forever in a dying world. When he killed the Goddess of Life, Luna, Casshern lost all of his memories and received her gift of eternal life after soaking in her blood. Alas, the world was doomed in the process. The Ruin has started. Nothing can be born or built anymore, nor healed or fixed, and everything that’s alive is fated to decay and die shortly. Now he wanders a post-apocalyptic wasteland trying to piece together his past and search for a way to atone for his sins.
The show is an exploration of the way people act in the face of certain death. Many succumb to resentment and fear. The robots, who in the past took over the world and subdued the humans they viewed as inferior, once timeless machines, are now fated to rust and die alongside the fleshlings. Some are blinded by anger and try to hunt down Casshern in order to exact revenge upon him, while others delude themselves with wishful thinking and cling to baseless rumors believing that if they devour Casshern’s flesh, they, too, will receive eternal life and escape the Ruin. “Kill Casshern! Devour Casshern!” they chant.
Most people, however, try to deal with it in their own private ways. There are those who accept their fate and want to quietly wait for the end. Then there are those who believe that now, thanks to the Ruin granting them the gift of death, their lives as machines finally have meaning, for life only has meaning when it is finite. There are others who try to desperately fight against the Ruin and live their lives to the fullest until their very last second. Some dedicate their last to help, protect, and console the weak and desperate. Others, still, simply want to use the time they have left to leave something for posterity, leave behind proof of their existence.
Each encounter is in some way a formative experience constantly exposing the protagonist (and by extension, the viewer) to new philosophies of life. At the same time, each encounter represents some kind of more or less thinly veiled metaphor for one of the aspects of life, joy, illness, love, depression, sex, legacy, hope, madness, peace, reproduction, war, death, and so on.
How would you behave at the edge of your hope? The end of your world?
