Ep. 01: Gachiakuta

“Of course, trash can be a lot of things. Old food, worn out clothes, or people.” This is a thought from our main character, Rudo, and it jumps right to the heart of what Gachiakuta is all about. This show made me angry. Scathingly, blisteringly, angry. Not because it was in any way bad as a story or production. In that regard, I’m 100% on board. But on an emotional level, this was not an easy watch.

Gachiakuta is beautifully designed, beautifully animated, and pulls absolutely no punches in examining the way that people dispose of things they consider beneath them or beyond their usefulness. Whether those are things or people. They did a great opening, showing a wealthy mother chastising her daughter for wanting to hold onto a slightly damaged stuffed animal. Wouldn’t she rather a shiny new one?

There is a level where someone can go to far with holding onto stuff. There’s no need to keep every candy wrapper and Amazon parcel box that comes in the mail. But to see generally useful things be so carelessly discarded is annoying enough. Seeing people be viewed as interchangeable with garbage based on their social standing is infuriating.

But it’s not something that is exclusive to the realm of stories. Nor is it something that is exclusive to any one class or ideology of people. This kind of degradation of life can happen at any time and for virtually any reason. Generations blame each other for their circumstances or accuse each other of being lazy, entitled and listless. People make up excuses about why other people think things that the person making up a reason does not understand, rather than having the gumption to learn the truth or the willingness to listen to it.

New technologies come forward at the speed of light, making existing things obsolete and causing them to be discarded. And in many cases, the extent of a person’s worth to another person, unless they’ve taken the time to know them for some reason, boils down to a simple question: “What can you do for me?”.

With hands that are charred black, which he hides behind a pair of dingey, beat up gloves, our MC, Rudo, undoubtedly knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this kind of disdain. While my own hands are not exactly like his–thank goodness, ’cause that looks painful!–I was born with cerebral palsy. My elbow, wrist, and fingers on my right hand are disfigured. I can tell you from personal experience that when something does not conform to what people understand, a person’s humanity can be stripped away by fear as easily as paint is stripped by turpentine.

It’s bad enough when this happens while meeting strangers. It can get a lot more ugly, and leave a wound that runs far more deep, when something happens to cause a rift between friends. Rudo is a trash collector. Someone from this city’s poorer district, the tribes, who goes and gathers things that have been discarded by the wealthier citizens. One of the first things about this that caught my eye right away is the ferocity these people had about making sure other people could not reuse their garbage.

This really leans into what makes envy so much worse than jealousy. Jealousy is when you want something that belongs to someone else. An item, their time, a change in their thinking, control over their actions. Envy is when you don’t want someone to take possession of something. Usually, we think of this as someone begrudging another person their success. It’s not merely wanting the success, but rather wanting the suffering that the loss of it would cause a person.

Likewise, the guarding of the garbage is not about the individual items. Like the stuffed animal discarded at the beginning of the episode, the people of this world place little value on the things around them. Rather, it’s the unfathomable idea of someone lesser than them touching something that was once theirs. The wastefulness of the wealthy in this society is not merely that they abandon things or people. But rather that, once something or someone has been abandoned, they still hold psychological ownership of the thing despite deeming it to have no value. Because it’s very emptiness becomes their new possession.

We see the most powerful example of this kind of abandonment once Rudo has been accused of murdering his adoptive father and is about to be thrown into the pit. His friend Chiwa, who had stood by him up until this point, throws away the stuffed animal he gave her and denounces him. My feelings on this are mixed. I wonder if she truly feels the way it looks, or whether she does this to secure her own safety? The way we see her shift from thinking Rudo wouldn’t do bad things, to being among the crowd and condemning him, is rather shocking.

Unless you are familiar with the working of mob mentality. Even if an individual does not believe something, there is always a risk that if you get caught up in a group of people who are engaged in something, that you can be swept up into it. Personal values and identity take a temporary holiday and the social pressure to conform to the behaviors of the group can alter a person drastically. We see this a lot on social media, or in the behavior exhibited by people at large protests. And likewise, we are seeing the same unreasonably, burn the witch attitude in this scene.

As for Chiwa? If she meant it, I hope she faces consequences for it. Because that’s real scumbag behavior. But if she did it to protect herself here, I hope that with time things can heal. And that her actions to secure her safety now don’t bit her too hard on the ass going forward. It’s easy to sit in my gaming chair and say she shoulda stood up right away. But I know enough about how stuff like this goes down in the real world, to know that wouldn’t necessarily be the smartest choice.

As for Rudo? I was already mad that these jerks were persecuting him for a crime he did not commit. Which only makes me more angry when I consider the reality that they were likely looking for a means to do this. First off, since he’s the son of a man who supposedly killed others and faced this fate. But also because he is an enemy of the authorities and they likely wanted a reason to get rid of him.

Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past these people to have sent someone in to kill Rudo’s adoptive dad to give them an opportunity to pull this stunt. Remember: their possessive of their garbage. In their eyes, that would include Rudo’s fate.

Unfortunately for these wastrels, Rudo has survived. And his adoptive dad, in his final words, gave Rudo a mission. To make this world a better place. I’m pretty sure he and I both agree that the world would be better without creeps like those he just dealt with chucking people away like they’re pairs of disposable contact lenses.

But for the moment, the closing shot of the show makes it pretty clear that Rudo has a bigger problem to address right now. A dino the size of Sharptooth from The Land Before Time, but composed of stuff like it’s some hulking, garbage fueled version of a Katamari. It’s one heck of a way to end an episode, and it definitely makes me eager to see what will happen next weekend.

Although I found parts of this episode hard to get through, because of how they made me feel, Gachiakuta is off to a great start and has definitely got my attention. Are you watching this show? What did you think of episode one? Id love to know, so feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.