[Spoilers for Season 3 of Yu Yu Hakusho follow.]
In the universe of Yu Yu Hakusho, the rulers of the Spirit World keep a record of humankind’s atrocities known as the Chapter Black tape. The ravages of Vlad the Impaler, the human meat grinder of the cult of Huitzilopochtli, the psychological torture of the church of Scientology, the apocalyptic slaughter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a thousand other examples of the worst humanity has ever had to offer fill the hours and hours of Chapter Black. This testament to the devoted, pervasive, inventive, bloody monstrosity of the human race is, the lore goes, enough to convince anyone that humanity is utterly beyond redemption. The collected iterations of horror in Chapter Black are so intense and omnipresent that they tar the entire human race by association.
In the series, humans who watch even a few minutes of Chapter Black are rendered into quivering, genocidal shells of their former selves. A former agent of the Spirit World, Shinobu Sensui, watches Chapter Black and hatches a plan to turn the whole of the demonic realm loose upon humanity. The group of psychic teenagers he forces to watch the tape join him in his quest to let demons feast upon all mankind, unable to reconcile their previous morality with any desire to let the depicted species persist. For what could redeem any collection of sapient creatures whose accomplishments include depopulating two continents and creating monsters like Elliot Rodger and Ratko Mladić, Che Guevara and Pat Robertson, Ogedei Khan and Pasha Küçük Mehmet?
It’s an interesting thesis, the idea that the only response to such an outpouring of horror is violence. But what if we can look on the monstrosity of the human race’s record, and see a different solution?