(Yesterday, 06:57 PM)Labster Wrote: I definitely had considered adding some Haibane, but got caught up in other stories. It's nice to see someone thinking of writing them. It will be interesting to see them come into a new place where they can actually remember their prior lives.The show is a mirror; you get from it a reflection of what you bring to it precisely because it is meant to be a meditation.
I'm honestly not sure how you get that the show is absolutely not Judeo-Christian. In the former, there's almost nothing known about Sheol, so the Jewish idea of afterlife is close to a tabula rasa. In the Christian conception, don't the Catholics have Purgatory? I mean, if I had to describe the show in an elevator ride, I'd say it's teenage slice-of-life set in Purgatory. Ya know, high concept. It doesn't match the Protestant depictions that well, I'll grant that. But to me some of the Shinto-ish elements are window dressing, just like how the Christian elements are simply window dressing in Evangelion. There are hints of reincarnation, so perhaps some Dharmic influences as well.
But as to our setting, it's essentially a mixture of different religions, which goes with my own philosophy that no religion has a monopoly on wisdom – but atheists are absitively, posolutely wrong. Some aspects of celestial existence can be understood by humans, but some things are literally beyond human understanding, so it's okay to be very vague when writing about the celestial (dis)order.
Someone would be the tutelary of their residence, who is the being who would manage their spiritual progress. Their residence manager is traditionally in our setting a self-insert character. But you could also consider some sort of priest, or at least someone spiritual, who guides progress both spiritual and temporal for whatever haibane become. We have other characters who can take on that role, too, so self-inserts are of course still welcome.
Very, very speculatively, all of the displaced characters in our setting are actually secretly haibane. Not what we're writing, but fun idea.
Also, they have wings and haloes because Haibane Renmei started as a weird doujinshi, and something about sexy halo girls.
As for the resident caretaker, it'll be a self-insert character, yes. I'm not entirely sure how much of my own Jewish background will work into the character, as (in part) I wouldn't want to be foisting any specific religion onto 5 confused young women, and because I'm also something of a "strong anthropic principle" person, philosophically (specifically the Barrow-Tipler version -- see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_...e#Variants ), with my own cynical twist: The universe needs observers. Humanity is only special because we drew the short straw.
It works much better as a story with my character helping them figure things out, there to help guide them, yes, but not to steer them to one faith or another.