STRESS, STRATEGY AND SHELLFIRE/ WAR FIELD AS A WORKPLACE

ALEXANDRE HAÏOUN-PERDRIX - Writer, 3rd Year, Philosophy

Think to Verdun in the midst of your final exam despair. It will bring no relief, but hopefully you will be a bit distracted.

There are jobs hated or loved for the level of stress, of pressure, and the height of stakes they do involve. There are not so many that are so more than army officer in times of war. Notwithstanding the losse though very specific and interesting way in which the lateral problems of religion and fate are tackled, the core of the series Saga of Tanya the Evil resides in the approach it provides of such a situation, within the framework of an international war, growing so as to become a global and in appearance everlasting one.

What begins as a classical isekai very quickly distinguishes itself. A very important feature of the series is that the protagonist is not the usual teenager-who-met-camion-san. Rather, it is a full-grown adult, who has already experienced workplace as a salaryman – who was obsessed with his work, and whose death is even related thereto. It is not just, thus, someone who gets into a given work and performs it as a hero; it is a character with his methods, his conceptions of things and people, all strongly influenced by his former job, who tries to have them applied in the new one. Tanya the Evil can very well be conceived as an anime centered on the question of similarity and adaptability –between several workplaces, several worlds and so on.

It has major themes, of course. Two of them, perhaps, dominate all others: reason and strategy. Both are very easily connected. But more precisely, strategy here always gets played between two extremes – reason, of course, and folly. The latter does not merely play the role of that which disturbs and hinders the former, and subsequently, strategy as a whole: it is often part of strategy, and often strategy serves it much more than it tries to avoid it.

What is strategy? The coordination of goals and means with respect paid to the similar process as adopted by an adversary – or, in the very case of Tanya the Evil, several (and soon, plenty) adversaries. Neither goals nor means get well defined in times of war, although one tends to emerge very clearly in what looks like a strange mixture of First and Second World War: the annihilation of the opponent. It is as much an end, towards which all means are progressively redirected, as it is a means – that for an illusionary and cruelly temporary peace.

Tanya the Evil is a tale of power and of faith, not the slightest bit of greed, and rarely of pride. A World War leaves little place to such considerations in comparison to its more classical parents. It does not mean the disappearance of grandeur; but very often, this latter appears as hypocritical, and very much a pleasure of officers as remote as it is possible from the field.

This remoteness proves a dangerous characteristic of the organisation of the fighting armies, but hereafter a unique opportunity for the protagonist, who can discern how ill-defined and irrealistic the generals’ targets may be. He becomes once again ”the brilliant worker of the frontline”. It can indeed quite frequently be seen how nearer to the enterprise realm his death has forced him to leave than to our public sphere this war-asworkplace is.

The very survival of the whole organised body is permanently under an existential threat – projects to guarantee it necessarily involve a great deal of audacity, and high risks being every time taken. They also involve direction, decisions – the “visible hand of managers” – and responsibility being taken, including for the most cruel acts. They involve administrators sometimes excessively demanding, with interests either different or downright misplaced. More than anything, perhaps, they involve stress, stress management – and they involve failure. The workplace can not always be where you shine.