I have been rereading Wuthering Heights (actually getting to teach it - yay!), and it has made me think again about how the story resonates with Mirage. This is not exactly a new thought, but it's coming home to me powerfully: perhaps the crucial difference between the two (besides thousands of pages in length) is morality. The core crazies at the heart of WH, Cathy and Heathcliff, aren't very concerned with moral or ethical issues outside their own crazy. Heathcliff positively enjoys being bad (a lot of the time), and Cathy is basically good-ish but very, very childish and lacking in insight into others. The core crazies in Mirage, however, are inextricably entangled with moral and ethical concerns: a sense of higher duty to a higher good is basically why they're there in the first place.
I adore WH, but this is probably the essence of why I adore Mirage more. They're both about obsessive love and the harm (and good) it can do, but Mirage has a significant layer beyond that: it's about obsessive love trying to coexist being a good person in the world. And that's a whole other ballgame.
I can't believe I didn't see this until now! I've been away too long.
I'm actually re-reading Jane Eyre right now, written by one of the other Ms. Brontes, and it's also very concerned with morality, isn't it? The opposite of WH, Jane is scrupulous in her morals. She's so cautious, to the point of being uptight. WH characters seem to have no issues with morality at all, acting completely on their feelings and mostly making themselves miserable by doing so.
In that way, Mirage characters have a lot in common with both books. Naoe is moral when he can keep his head, but as he falls deeper down the well of obsessive crazy he can't control himself and gets as bad as Heathcliff (or maybe more like the girl who falls in love with Heathcliff and ruins her own life marrying him, ha). But then his morality bothers him--much more like a JE character, like Mr. Rochester in particular who does evil and then tortures himself over it. Takaya is more like a Cathy, totally emotional and carried away by his feelings, which he always assumes to be right, and driven by passion. The more we learn about Kagetora, though, minus Takaya's immaturity and confusion, the more we can see a leader, though how logical he acts is open to debate.
I hope teaching WH is going well!
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Can't I even dream? Would you shut my heart in my chest? -Kagetora, Yonakidori Blues