Noragami: Stray God (What's in a story)

[Egon]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpFjMtWTmsY

While Berserk is a mixed bag of positive and negative elements, Noragami has the most positive message I have ever come across in anime/manga. The story centers around Shinto mythology, focusing on the lives of a more humanized version of the Gods, not in the literal Advanced Extraterrestrials like we know them to be, but to denote certain aspects of Spirituality like in the ancient legends, and their relationships among themselves and humans.

The 'Gods' here do certain works in the astral plane to clean Earth from Ayakashi, spiritual dross in the form of spiritualy corrupted deceased souls that cause many problems for humans.

For this task they take some human spirits as protégés and give them a name to work as their Divine Weapons. If these spirits dwell on remorse and repeating bad habits, it may spiritualy curse them and ruin their relationships with their head Gods.

The interesting part is the truth that souls aren't automatically immortal, they can have a second death, and the past life karma (dross) can curse you.

Akin to the conversation about being grateful to the Gods, there is a subplot of the betrayal against the War Goddess Bishamonten/Vaishravana by a follower/s who "knew better" how their Head Goddess should be like or behave.

The Gods are kind and understand the ephemerality of human life and hate the spiritual blight that comes from wasting away ones life and letting it get cursed by repeated mistakes.

 

[Jack]

Definitely going to see it now

 

[lilquote]

I'm so glad someone made a post on this anime. It's an interesting story and the scenery and music are beautiful. I like how it seems to depict humanity's situation well. Even though believing in the gods is a social norm in the show, they are still depicted to be disconnected from them. When the main human character meets a god, nobody around can see him and she's in shock about the situation. And the gods in the show can be protective of specific humans.
I never wanted to suggest it to anyone because I wasn't sure if it connected to satanism in a positive way.

 

[Egon]

I'm so glad someone made a post on this anime.

The anime is awesome but the manga has many important details that were left off in the adaptation. I suggest if a person wants to get started in Noragami to watch the anime first then read the manga from the begining and not just from where the anime left.

 

[Egon]

I preffered to keep this anime in this same thread because of the similarity in themes

Spice and Wolf is another very good anime/light novel with Pagan elements that's worth your time, even though it's more about the history of trading and is heavily focused on economics, there are very interesting conflicts with christardism and the discussion about people leaving their Spiritual roots and replacing it with materialism.

It's also nother anime that deals with the theme of a human building a relationship with a Daemoness (or local Deity), like in The Ancient Magus Bride or Noragami. The dialogues and relationship of the wold deity Holo and the trader Craft (couldn't stop thinking of the pun Holo & Co$t lol) is very well writen, sensitive and inspiring. One of the best character driven animes I've watched.

Trailer
https://youtu.be/PEXSppSq25Q

I've watched the Nep_Blanc blu-ray version of subtitles.