Heterochromia

The philosophy of Kaiba can be roughly summarized as such:
1. The intellectual smart bloggers find Kaiba OMFGAWESOME and post horribly insightful comments on it.
2. I find Kaiba awesome and will post some horribly pretentious comment on it.
3. Therefore I am an intellectual smart blogger.

Actually Kaiba is able to produce a cute character!

On a more serious note, I have actually really started to like this series with the third episode mainly for two reasons. The first is that I have finally begun to understand the world of Kaiba after watching the third episode with much more concentration and in a less tired state than the first two. The second is that finally the characters in Kaiba (or at least the girl featured in the third episode) actually has a human characters. Her feelings, her past and even the wishes about her future, in short: her live was shown through the series in a way that moved me tremendously. I don’t care for the artsiness and the (in my opinion) a little bit too complicated ‘exposition’ of the world of Kaiba was not exactly my cup of tea, but now with the characters actually coming to life and this simple, yet touching portrait of their struggle in this dystopian world is exactly what I was searching for.

Memory storage outside the body is probably not exactly a new concept, but I feel like writing about it, especially because “memories” have become a somewhat important aspect in my life after I read The Book for Laughter and Forgetting. As the title suggests, Kundera stresses the aspect of “forgetting” and addresses the multitude of problems that come with forgetting, remembering and especially the filtering of memories.

Thus, what I really would like to see in Kaiba is how people deal with the control they have over their memories. Given that you have the money, you can forget whatever you want and remember whatever you want. Naturally, the majority of memories are much more controlled by the subconscious and we basically have no control over it. As we are progressing in time, memories alter and can fade because the human brain only has so much capacity for them. This process of “altering” and “fading” memory over time becomes non-existent when you can simply download them, or transfer them to another body. Isn’t it that this altering and fading is exactly what makes our personnality and our psyche? It’s not what we really experienced, it’s not the facts, but how we processed these memories. In the world of Kaiba, everybody seems to want to gain control over their memories. These people deliberately destroy this possibility of naturally dealing with their experiences. Is that really such a good thing?

Furthermore, if a person really deletes all their bad memories (such as hunger, for example), would s/he actually be able to actually enjoy their good memories (such as the feeling of being full and well-fed)? Sure, define happiness first. But suppose if we that we can rank events on a happiness-scale from 1 to 10 and cut off everything under 5, we might feel unhappy about the 6-scored events because it’s unhappier compared to the score 10. I believe happiness is a relative feeling - which is why a hungry child feels happy about some bread and a person with cancer feels happy about living while I don’t care much about either of them. So the comparison with unhappiness would be necessary to feel happiness. In the end, the rich people in the Kaiba world probably are just as unhappy or happy as we are naturally - and I want to see the first person who continuously deletes his memories because he keeps picking out memories perceived as unhappy so that they ultimately tend to zero. Someone should write a short story about this. Or make it a Kino no Tabi episode.

Because graphs are needed.
This one is somewhat serious though and is supposed to be y = (1/2)^x

Another aspect Kaiba could address is the transfer of your body itself. Considering how people change when their body is altered or even gender-switched, I can imagine that a personnality change that comes with the switching into another body could be really interesting. I doubt that Kaiba has enough of a personnality for this to be visible in the given short time (13 episodes?).

Finally you could ask why I’m not talking about Himitsu: I don’t care about its memory reading aspect. Himitsu is a criminal story in which memories are not altered or influenced at all - the ‘only’ moral question it poses is whether it is questionable to make somebody (especially a dead person’s!) memory public, and oh well, I would care about that if this technology were real (how scary!) but it’s fictional anyways.