Claymore and Anarchism

When you are experiencing a work, you are as much influenced by your worldview as the work at hand. What is not written can matter as the things are written. What is not paid attention in the worldview can tell about the setting as much as things that are chosen to shown. Therefore, as long as one stays in good faith, different interpretations should be encouraged. Otherwise, it would be less fun to over-analyzing nerds like me. And in this edition of over-analyzing, we will look at the links between Claymore and Anarchism.
Spoilers abound. Content warning for violence and disturbing imagery. Reader discretion is advised. although in this case it is likely not very critical because the general direction of the story makes the revelations somewhat obvious and the strength of Claymore come from character interactions and action rather than tightness of its plot.
Let's talk about Anarchism first. It is a political theory that is founded upon distrust and disdain of authority and hierarchies. There are many different schools of anarchism but all of them are explicitly anti-state. In a general sense, a state is an organization which controls a territory, exclusively holds right of organized force, makes and executes rules and demands the allegiance of the inhabitants of that territory. By keeping the world-building just heavy enough so that its sufficent for the story and the reader has enpugh material to fill the gaps, Claymore ends up having a rather clear commentary about the state.

The Hell World

Claymore is set in a fictional world which consist of a single continent with a culture roughly equivalent to Late Medieval North Europe. Its inhabitants are haunted by Yoma, flesh-eating monsters. Yoma are stronger and hardier than humans but what makes them so deadly is they can assume the appearance of humans they eat, meaning they can remain entirely hidden. Try to imagine the horror of people in your town dying one by one and the possibility that anyone can be the murderer and there is literally nothing anyone can do to stop them.

just your average monster of the week

This is where, "Claymore" comes in. Warriors, made half-human and half-Yuma, can detect Yoma and hunt them. This is not for free of course. Any village that demands the service of warriors must pay the Organization a large sum of gold. The Organization, elusive and scar,  trains warriors and protects people at the exchange of the gold. Throughout the manga, we learn the Organization's shady practices, such as mysterious Yoma invasions that happens the towns that doesn't pay, their dislike of warriors that question much and an overall disregard for their lives, picking up unfortunate children and putting them up to really harsh conditions to turn them into warriors which binds them to a life of loneliness until they die or become monsters themselves ... But, no matter how repugnant they might be, overall they are a necessary evil against an existential threat, right?
Well, it turns out they are the ones that creates Yomas in the first place, so they can create the warriors from its flesh. Warriors turning into monsters when they lose control isn't a flaw in their design, it is the intention. The Organization's purpose is to create controllable Awakened Beings(the monsters which warriors turn into, the process is called 'awakening') to fight in their wars. Essentially, the continent is the lab of Org. and inhabitants are the subjects.

The Rulers of Hell

You can see the similarities between a state and the Org. but so far it mostly looks like a mercenary corps. So let's dive into examining the relationship further.

• Monopoly over force: There is nothing that technically prevents a villager to go after Yoma, but as we mentioned ordinary people are completely defenseless against them and even the weakest warrior of the Org. is far stronger than a human. The Org. holds the exclusive right of force by its sheer power over everyone else.
• Tax: Org. tells that collecting money is just an exchange of its services, but in reality it is non-optional. Just like refusal of paying taxes is punished in real states, the Org. actively punishes towns that don't pay by sending them Yoma.
• Conscription:  Org. just doesn't pick up helpless kids for lifetime service, it actively creates purpose in the process of destruction of towns. We learn that it even engages in slave trade so it can create monsters to destroy said towns. And once again, no one can really object if the Org. wants a child for itself.
• Law: While the Org. doesn't intervene with the daily ongoing with humans and doesn't explicitly rule over them it has few laws that it observes strictly. For example Warriors cannot kill civilians at any cost. This provides some kind of social contract between the people and the Org. ensuring people would trust it. Warriors who show disobedience is quickly punished, even when they are not openly marked for execution, they are disposed by being sent to impossible missions. Also, the whole payment deal can be considered simple law and punishment itself.
• Highest Authority: This is the part where the light world-building particularly benefits us. The small towns and villages are mostly autonomous, they have their own elders and most likely their own traditions and taboos they follow. Besides that, we have shown that there is only one fully fledged city, which seems like a theocracy, but we are not actively told about any ruling body. There is a one person that could be similar to a Pope, but we are not told the extent of his powers as a ruler. But all autonomous bodies in the continent are subject to the Org. This is interesting because anarchists don't just oppose stereotypically totalitarian states, for them "hands-off" states are still fundamentally coercive and equally deserving of overthrown.
• Myths: Divine right of kings, nationalism, religions, flags... States always created their legends and myths to justify their authority and make them higher than ordinary organizations, to make them seem inevitable. The Org. too has several myths under its belts: Making people believe Yoma always existed, setting themselves up as defenders of humanity, telling people the continent is the only place in the World. The Org. is not only doing this for controlling the information but also making sure the warriors will remain loyal even in the face of questionable actions. Just look at its lack of a name, that alone gives it as a omnious, larger-than-life, inevitable existence.
• Circular justification: The Org. justifies its existence by the threat it creates. Observe how states say they ensure their citizen's independence against other states, but that problem only exists in the first place because states threaten each other. Manufacturing threats is also how wars and violence against internal trouble makers are justified. Targeting different religions, races, ethnicities, deeming certain actions as unlawful, a state always finds itself new threats to defend against, thus justifies to preserve and extend its authority.

All these comparisons are nice and well but what really makes Claymore feel Anarchist is that how coldly and undeserving of any sympathy the way Org. depicted. Avoiding certain details really gets effective here. Near the end of the manga, we learn that the goal of the Org. is to create a force that can aid their war in their homeland. But we don't learn much about anything else, whether their war is righteous, their struggles, hardly anything about their enemy. From the reader's perspective, this makes the Org. rather one-dimensional. However, it makes total sense from the perspective of the citizens of the continent. Civilians, children in training, the warriors, Yoma, Awakened Beings are all victims, mere fuels to support the war machine. The Org. is a colonial state who is totally indifferent to the lives of citizens. When you read the manga, you can get a glimpse of the pain, the terror, the brutality, the lives it ruined for their hundreds of years. You really can't get more anti-authority than this, I believe.

Revolution in Hell

Of course, no anarchist narrative can be complete without rebelling the authority thus in the end we get our revolution. Warriors fight back against the Org, it commits its lasts set of atrocities and eventually gets vanquished. Its experiments lies ruined, its agents dead, no more new warriors are trained, the last of Yoma are destroyed and the land is now free of hundreds years of oppression. The important thing is however, there is no authority to replace the Org. The remaining warriors don't actually want to rule over people. The rebellion doesn't happen to usurp the power or mere revenge but because the rebels fundamentally value human life, something the Org --the state-- doesn't. That's the only thing warriors want, living a human life that has been denied from them for so long. They don't want to be larger-than-life monsters and dominate people, they don't want to be authority, they want to be human.

Reaching for Heaven

There is always the possibility, all of these might just be my ramblings, but when I am reading the manga, I can't help but feel all the similarities. For me, this makes the overall message of friendship and hope far greater. No matter how brutal and inhuman the present is, we might have a future that human relationship is based on cooperation instead of domination. Instead of becoming tools of greater purposes, we can all just live like humans, living alongside of other humans, giving the respect and dignity we all deserve.
This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Alexandra Morgan, Laura Watson and Spencer Gill.