I have been completely shattered. Emotionally. I wept. This has happened before, but not so competently or effortlessly. Made In Abyss is deeper and more treacherous than any emotional explorer is prepared for. It has a clear and precise focus on the core of your humanity. Like a black hole, it beckons you deeper with each episode, slowly drawing you in, compressing your emotional core into a singularity. You are more aware of your emotions than you have ever been. Theoretically, you could come out the other side of a black hole in a significantly different time and place, transformed into an entirely new being. That is what I feel like now. Not a new person, but much more aware of something I have long since ignored. My emotional self.

Made In Abyss is the story of orphaned Riko, a young cave raider living in an orphanage on the outskirts of a deep crater in the earth, the depths of which are filled with dangerous creatures and an invisible force that makes it difficult to return to the surface once traversed. Still, it calls to the strong willed who want to discover and study its mysterious origins and profiteers who wish to make money on artifacts long since forgotten. Riko believes that her mother, a legendary cave raider, is still alive at the depths of the crater and plans to search for her. One day, on a cave raid, she encounters a robot boy who saves her from certain death. The robot boy Reg, suffering from amnesia, wishes to know his origin, which Riko convinces him is in the depths of the caves. Together, they plan to reach the depths of the crater, find Riko’s mother, learn Reg’s origins, and discover the truth of the crater.

Colored in pastels, penciled in children’s book animation, and characterized by boundless optimism, Made In Abyss is one of the most disarming shows I have seen in many years. It starts out reminding me of children’s adventure films like The Goonies, Honey I Shrunk The Kids, or Spirited Away. There are real elements of danger, things that could take these kids lives without missing a beat, and yet, you have this feeling that they will come out the other side with a minor scrape or bruise. Still, just under the surface, the Abyss has something so much more sinister. And to call it sinister is to look at this world as though it was planned when it’s really just the nature of the world. Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. Are own world is like this, but it’s often hard to recognize because humans live and colonize the world in such a way as to protect us from this truth. We live on a small blue dot, hurtling through space at a million miles an hour, and the nature of that could destroy us and the universe would not bat an eye. With every step that Riko and Reg take into the depths, the story reminds us of the perilousness of their journey and our own mortality. It further disarms us by making this the journey of wide-eyed children. As you get older, leaving the happy meals and kids clubs behind, you realize how sheltered or naive you once were. You may have been armed with all sorts of knowledge, but generally you were only able to parse it from one perspective. The adults warnings are heeded, in so much as they are understood, but they are not enough to stop these children from diving head first into events that will surely lead them into suffering. And soon you find yourself suffering with them. Still, knowing that they will suffer, they will keep pressing on. They will keep feeling.

Made In Abyss unlocked a thought somewhere deep in the densest part of my ego. It helped me realize that I insulate myself from emotion in my own life with a thick barrier or reason and logic. To be clear, this is just what I recognize as reason and logic, though both of these are predominately related to one’s own perception of the world and themselves. I have been told this is how most people cope with emotional sensitivity, but I believe people more commonly do this re-actively, where as I feel as though I have a tendency to do this proactively. I am not a young man anymore and having these kinds of realizations happen further apart as you become more set in your ways. You have to work at being open to new ways of thinking. Having finished its first season and having a profound personal realization such as this, it is little wonder that Made In Abyss has achieved critical acclaim and success. Either way, I often feel that reaching the depths of feelings like loneliness, sadness, anger, hate, love, or happiness not only difficult to reach, but unbearable, like poking at a raw nerve.

In a pivotal moment in the final episode, my guard having been chipped away, I felt an intense pang of sadness, to which I re-actively rationalized the character’s decisions. It is in these moments, when something has disarmed me so completely, I felt that I owed it to the author and myself to chase this feeling. I felt like I had to physically push the feeling to the surface, with just as much focus as it takes to bench-press beyond your abilities. This is when I realized a grave weakness to my own creativity. It has long been a dream of mine to find a way to translate my inability to fully imbibe in feelings into fictional characters of my own writing. For me, to write is to feel. If I were to put a character in a hazardous situation, I can only express it as well as I am willing to feel it myself. And because accessing those feelings is a process I shy away from, I will never truly be able to express it in a way other people can understand. So, in a way, writing can be my own personal journey through my own feelings. Giving a villain his just deserts is just as difficult for me as giving lovers their first romantic moment.

I thought it would be in my best interest to put myself out here in this hybrid review. I very much recommend this show, but I would like to add while it is child-like, it isn’t really suitable for children. The shows honest perspective on the innocence of childhood and the ease at which this innocence is abused is striking in its simplicity. Pain is pain and love is love and everything in between is worth enduring. And you will watch them endure and subsist and survive and lose. I also recommend giving this show your full attention, though most likely if you are interested, you won’t have a choice.  I don’t think everyone will have such a strong reaction to Made In Abyss as I did, but I hope it unlocks something/anything for you. At the very least, it will certainly be worth your time.