The Pain Induced by Watching The Witch from Mercury
This article is a reflection on Suletta’s emotional journey in The Witch from Mercury. It contains full spoilers (and even spoilers for Love in the Time of Cholera).
While I also believe the progressive nature of The Witch from Mercury stems from its depiction of a world where a right-leaning capitalist society has developed to an extreme, with conflicts that provoke deep thought, and even the seemingly absurd school sections are filled with satirical education for the audience; that is not today’s topic.
Describing the Pain
It was so painful. That was my strongest feeling after watching S2 ep5. It felt like being hit by a data storm, like something was about to shatter.
It’s half an hour later now, 1:15 AM. I’m holding my head, hands rubbing through my messy hair. My eyes are wide open, staring aimlessly at the pattern on my mousepad, forcing myself to take a breath every now and then to avoid feeling suffocated. I’ve been in this daze for over half an hour. It’s not a dull ache, not a “Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,” but pure pain, causing the dam of emotions in my heart to burst, releasing my own inner pain along with it. I want to cry out loud, but not a single tear comes to help me release this emotion. So it scorches me, reverberating within this body, creating wave after wave of more painful aftershocks.
As for the reason for the pain? — The Witch from Mercury itself is emotionally impactful enough. When I came to my senses and searched online, trying to grasp something, people on the internet were always joking, explaining it as “slaughtering the yuri fans.” — Was it my own emotions, the experiences of this past year? My mind is weak, my thoughts sluggish. This pain still courses through my heart. Do I even have a heart? But if I don’t think this through a bit tonight, I probably won’t sleep. Then, with severe sleep deprivation, a more vicious demon will be unleashed by the next afternoon: I’ll lose the ability to work as dusk approaches, lose the will to sleep, lament another day gone, despair at the fading sense of meaning again, and waste more time—time that could have been used for something at least slightly better than the above.
I am deeply aware of the impermanence of the world; I know the buildings of this city are too dark, so emotional projections dissipate into that darkness; I know the sense of powerlessness caused by my own weariness and laziness; I know everyone in this world must grasp something to construct their daily lives, and these daily lives are built around their own traumas—just as I am desperately trying to grasp this article now, trying not to let it abandon me.
So, forcing my emotions to settle, I struggled from being a puddle of mud slumped on the bed back to sitting in front of the computer. I don’t want to become Lady Melancholy’s trophy to be hung up, at least not while I’m young.
Writing this far, aside from a small lump of charcoal-like substance in my chest still scorching, the situation is much better.
Examining the Pain
Let’s use the reflections on The Witch from Mercury as a clue.
From S1 ep11, the protagonist Suletta experiences an existential crisis: she begins to move from a state of “being-in-itself” towards “being-for-itself”—from initially just wanting to act normal (completing a wish list), to later becoming human because she gradually built connections and had people she cared about.
Because she had people she cared about, she was no longer “in-itself,” no longer in a carefree state. Suletta, pure as a blank sheet, began to be shaped.
Because she had people she cared about, she had to offer her heart to them. This heart was pure, yet also fragile and sensitive.
And so, discovering that she might have misunderstood, that the reality seemed to be that she wasn’t needed or cared for by anyone, that no one noticed she was hungry even without getting a lunchbox, fear took over. So she hid alone in a bathroom stall and cried. Here, Suletta detests this pain. How we wish to undo the things that cause pain when we are hurting! But since the pain is already here, can taking back the move solve the problem? No. Not even destroying the world can solve it.
Here, I want to digress, seize this spark of inspiration to dissect this night-like pain. Like the end of Love in the Time of Cholera, where the bachelor finally pursues his beloved after fifty years, I have felt since first reading it four or five years ago, and still do emotionally, that this is the cruelest thing—the beautiful youth is gone, the weathered soul is full of holes, and the one now bathing in the sunset on the ship is no longer the romantic young man in love who communicated through letters. That young man died, died in Fermina’s repeated cold rejections, died in the empty trysts with one lover after another, died in the regret of the black girl’s misplaced time. I too once held my head and wept for this, mourning that lost time, mourning that dead young man. To this day, I can still hear my own sobs from another summer night after finishing this book alone. Only now I understand, this is the lament of the dead young man, not the lament of the bachelor over seventy. Perhaps my stubbornness prevented me from seeing what the author clearly wrote: the bachelor was bathing in the sunset with a sense of fulfilled love. It was just that I was too young then, too young to follow the thread of time even in a book, to understand the bachelor’s fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days of gradual progress. Thinking of this, I have clarity. This part of the pain can be defined: What if the young man’s future is not the heroic journey of Odysseus, but the gradual withering and decay of linking the fire in Dark Souls? This is the pain born from fear of the unknown. But the future never reveals its form. Whether it’s Odysseus or Dark Souls is still unknown. So the young man moves forward cautiously, in the light of hope, under the shadow of fear.
And Suletta encountered her first existential crisis, so she instinctively wanted to return to the maternal state, to confide in her mother.
Until the crux of Suletta’s issue—the person she cares about—comes to save her, tells her that she needs Suletta, and imperiously demands that she “stay by my side always,” “don’t lose the duel,” “add more soil to the tomatoes,” “clean the room twice a week,” “send three messages a day.” Only then is that soft, young heart freed from pain, carefully nurtured, not trampled and shattered.
As a viewer, I felt intense empathy here because I’ve had such moments too—being rejected, being needed. Simple, decisive resolutions are always satisfying, and this time it was genuine heart for genuine heart, truly, really sweet.
But Lady Melancholy always arrives unexpectedly.
In the very temple of delight, veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.
The young man ultimately drifts further away because he doesn’t understand why fairy tales always end with “happily ever after,” while life never stops. At this sweetest point, I began to worry for Suletta. Passionate love will cool down; sweet troubles might eventually leave only the troubles. And Suletta only has the sweetness, not the troubles. She can’t even be independent, can’t leave her mother or Aerial or the person she cares about. She hasn’t become a true individual human yet.
Therefore, at the end of S2 ep5, it’s all paid back. One must endure pain equal to this sweetness to bear its sweetness. Being told she was used, being stripped of the uniform representing honor, being labeled as the country girl from Mercury—being humiliated, humiliated by reality, humiliated by the person she thought could hold her heart, desperately howling, unable to lift her head.
Forlorn, the very work is like a bell to toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Even understanding from a god’s-eye view that the purpose of this is to sever the umbilical cord of the overgrown infant Suletta, this pain was still projected onto me in a massive dose, so much so that even as I write this, I can’t stop trembling, unable to type properly.
Why is it so intense?
Choosing to advance, one inevitably gets a bloody nose. Although Suletta was well-protected, naively to a pathological degree, although she never thought about the meaning of piloting a Gundam, just as she never thought about the consequences her choices might lead to, she still tremulously chose to advance within her small world.
Perhaps the emotional projection comes from here. A year ago, when I chose to resign from a big tech company and start a business, I couldn’t foresee the earth-shattering changes in life this year would bring: starting to feel the loss of security from a salary in the second month after leaving, the sense of defeat from quick initial success followed by even quicker failure at the start of the venture, and the ensuing personal financial crisis; I started feeling embarrassed to call my grandma. Then, in that wave of failure, I painfully picked up the pieces, summarized lessons, and slowly began to solidify the foundation, trying to make everything better. Before starting, I always thought entrepreneurship must be轰轰烈烈 (grand and earth-shaking) every moment, and people would be无限亢奋 (infinitely excited) as if pumped with adrenaline. I thought I was prepared to face any difficulty, but I hadn’t thought about how “any difficulty” would strike me in every aspect of human life.
Ultimately, I rarely think deeply about my own situation. I’m even mocked by people I care about for my “unrealistic optimism” because I still believe things not yet concluded cannot be judged. But I can’t avoid possibly chewing over these losses in the depths of my subconscious in dreams, to the point that seeing Suletta fall hard in this episode broke my defenses wide open, and then dragged these words out of my head.
Like Suletta, I, with my pathological naivety, plunged into the soil of reality and was immediately pruned and cut by reality’s scissors, ending up battered and bruised; like Suletta, I plunged into the mud of reality, and though battered and bruised, there is fertile nourishment to absorb in the mud; like Suletta, I also have people who care for me. Unlike Suletta, my life is not a 24-episode TV drama that must end happily ever after or die within 24 episodes.
Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, But Death intenser – Death is Life’s high meed.