Contains spoilers
As far as I know Ogres and Karmic demons are regular humans who
(explained in conventional terms) have suffered and become full blown
Sociopaths and heavily depressed individuals, respectively, who use
all their might in throwing and restraining, again respectively, all
their power at those surrounding them, but one way (consciously) or
another (unconsciously) it goes out and hurts others.
My first question is: Does this affect anybody or just a few? The
Second question is more a set of questions than anything: If just a
few, then who? Talented/powerful people? If everybody, then does that
mean that the world was filled with Ogres and Karmic Demons before the
current order came in to place? If so, when why did the false
Minoshiro (whatever that means) forgot to mention it? Or did I forget
to watch it in the 3 times I watched the episode?
Before the current order, power users had no in-built restraints on their power. So ordinary people could, and did, cause tremendous damage. Basically every time someone lost their temper there was a risk of nuclear war....
To prevent this, humanity re-engineered themselves and their society with heavy constraints on power. They put in place a multi-layered defense against using power against other humans:
Genetic engineering:
- Attack Control from wolves - A strong aversion to hurting their own species
- Sex and affection from bonobos - An inclination to resolve stress and conflict with sex rather than violence
- Death feedback - The ultimate control. A physiological response to the guilt of hurting people which would kill the perpetrator. My understanding is that the death feedback kicks in, at a modest level, even when contemplating hurting someone. Therefore it actually prevents attacks. If for some reason you accidentally or unwittingly hurt someone, the consequent guilt is lethal. So it also punishes harm.
Taken together these mechanisms mean that a human CANNOT volunatarily harm another. In particular it is not possible even to decide to suicide-attack another person - you just can't bring yourself to attack in the first place at all.
Social conditioning:
From birth the people are raised with stories, conditioning, and hypnotism to control their behaviour. The biological controls are strenghthened with this process. In addition there is a huge emphasis on obedience and harmony. Because it is impossible to control people with violence in the new society, you can't have normal policing and punishment. Instead the control is psychological.
Selection:
Children are closely monitored as they develop. If they don't develop properly they are weeded out. The show portrays the selection as very heavy handed, because they would rather kill many innocents than let one failure slip through.
Ogres and karmic demons occur when these methods fail.
Karmic demons lose conscious control of their power. Shun says that in fact a little power leaks out of everyone, but in most cases it does little harm. Karmic demons leak a lot of power from their unconscious. They are potentially extremely dangerous as a consequence. However they near no malice. The karmic demons we see retain their human morality and voluntarily kill themselves to prevent harm to the world around them. They are dangerous, but not excessively so, for this reason.
Ogres/Fiends are a nightmare. They are humans for whom the safeguards have utterly failed. They are psychopaths. The Death feedback relies on guilt emotions to function. Psychopaths lack such guilt, and the other emphathetic emotions that control Power. They are able and willing to use their Power against other humans.
Precisely because of the various safeguards, other humans are unable to counter-attack, making ogres capable of causing essentially unlimited harm. A single ogre could destroy the entire planet. Hence the excessive selection above: you can't afford to run any risks.
Ogres Power is no stronger than anyone else's. Although there are degrees of control over Power, the idea is that any normal adult has almost unlimited power. They can do almost anything. There is no practical upper limit to what they can do. So even a weak person, if they become an ogre, has civilization ending capabilities. Normal folks around them may have equivalent or even materially stronger Power, but their self-imposed constraints prevent them from deploying it.
But the one thing that bothers me the most, which is basically based
off all the previous questions is my third and last question: Why the
hell are Ogres so goddamn powerful?
I mean, look at the Messiah, child of Maria and Mamoru, taken off them
by Yakomaru. The first and only human kid the rats get in their hands
on, breed to adolescence (which is when they get their powers) and
turns out to be a killing sociopath with powers as immense as the most
powerful dude in the village. This case essentially brings up all the
previous questions I asked, which if you didn't notice, is driving me
mad.
So, does anyone have any answers?
The Messiah is not an ogre. All the constraint mechanisms work great in them. But the constraints work for monster rats, not humans, because they believe they are a monster rat.
They are not a sociopath. They kill humans as lightly as humans kill monster rats, because they don't see them as fellow creatures.
The Messiah is probably a rather weak human, because they wouldn't have had the sophisticated education in manipulating their Power. But they can deploy 100% of their (relatively) weak power, whereas others cannot deploy any of their far stronger power.
The reason the Messiah whips the most powerful guy (Shisei) is due to an additional piece of information we are given:
You can't make two Powers interact. If they come into contact, space time is warped and you get a rainbow iridescence effect.
This makes it very hard to use Power defensively.
Basically, the Messiah attacks Shisei directly. If he does nothing, he dies. If he tries to counteract the Power with his own, they interact. This is what we see: we see the rainbow and he gets warped as space-time bends. This kills him.
Power is useless defensively.
In the last arc, Saki figures out that the Ogre is no ogre. She and Satoru try to show it that it is really a human, using Satoru's mirror skill. This doesn't work - the Messiah just seems confused. They defeat it by using Kiroumaru. Once Saki understands they are not really dealing with an Ogre, it becomes rather easy to defeat.
