Hugo: Even if it is a stupid dream, holding on to it is my only proof of who I am!

Hugo

Michael Isenberg
9/14/97
English, per 2

Character Sketch
Nightfall. The sun is setting over the pile of scrap. Over the crest of the hill staggers a small boy, carrying a bag filled with cans, fruit, and loaves of bread, panting from the trek. As he reaches the top of the hill, his eyes widen. He drops the bag, spilling groceries over the ground. Above the factory that had been his home for the past few years, a plume of thick gray smoke rises into the night sky. The boy runs as fast as he can travel, towards home. As he approaches the factory, he sees his brother's balloon. The balloon his brother had worked on for years. The balloon that his brother had put his life into. The balloon that his brother had planned on using to get away from the wasteland of scrap metal. The balloon that is now writhing in flames like an animal. In the shadow of the flaming balloon, there stands a dark figure, and there at his feet lays another. That standing figure is a bounty hunter from the Scrapyard. And that laying figure is the boy's older brother. A pool of blood spills onto the ground from the body's neck.
"N-No... B-big bro---", the boy utters.
Just then a woman, the boy's sister-in-law, rushes into him. "You mustn't look, Hugo! You mustn't look!"
But Hugo looks, and Hugo sees. Hugo sees a head, hanging from the bounty hunter's hand by its hair. The head is familiar.
"Hurry.. please take it away quickly!" from the sister-in-law.
The bounty hunter merely grunts a "Hmph" in reply, as he walks somberly away with his bounty, walks somberly away with Hugo's brother's head. His attendants follow, carrying away the body.

This betrayal of Hugo's brother by his sister-in-law is what starts the path that he is to follow for the rest of his life. Before I get into that, however, I should clarify things with a bit of background information. The time is the distant future. The place, the Scrapyard. The Scrapyard is merely a city built from, as the name implies, scrap falling from the city above, Tiphares. Tiphares is a utopia. It hangs from a shaft thousands of miles high. The city below Tiphares exists only to serve the good of the floating city. Farms at the edge of the Scrapyard produce food that is sent up through tubes to Tiphares. Only the leftovers and the scraps are sent back down for the citizens of the Scrapyard. Instead of a police force, the Scrapyard pays bounty hunters to track down those who commit serious offenses. No one in the Scrapyard is permitted in Tiphares, and flying devices of any kind are a bounty-list offense, hence the killing of Hugo's brother.
Tiphares and the Scrapyard are the setting for Yukito Kishiro's epic graphic-novel series Gunnm (pronounced Gahn-muh), which tells the tale of a young cyborg girl named Alita, as she walks the path of self-discovery. The character Hugo is from the second book, Tears Of An Angel.
After Hugo's brother is killed, he runs away from home, and learns to support himself. By chance he meets up with a man named Vector who claims to have been to Tiphares. In keeping with his brother's dream of going to Tiphares, Hugo asks Vector to bring him there. Vector promises Hugo transportation to Tiphares for 10,000,000 chips, an enormous sum of money.
Hugo dedicates himself to getting to Tiphares. He becomes one of the hardest workers the Scrapyard has seen during the day, fixing things and doing manual labor. But at night he turns to crime. The Scrapyard is filled with cyborgs, and as such cybernetic parts can be found in high quantities. But one of the only parts that is very difficult to reproduce is the spinal column. Hugo turns to spine theft. He and a few accomplices attack passing cyborg citizens and pry out their spines, for which Vector gives them good prices. In a twist of irony, they often call a cyberdoc for their victims after they've gotten the spine.

Hugo has a very strange mix of extreme independence and extreme dependence. He lives on his own, takes care of himself, and doesn't need anyone. He is so certain of this that he completely blinds himself as to what others think of him. Even when Alita professes her love to him, he still can't see. She has to almost attack him to get him to notice that he does have an effect on other people, and that he is not completely alone. Directly quoting the book, he thinks "I-I've been so set on Tiphares.. I never really noticed before... what beautiful eyes this girl has." Despite his independence from the population of the Scrapyard, he is completely dependent on his dream of Tiphares. This is most apparent by how he reacts when his dream is suddenly pulled out from under him. When Hugo realizes that Vector had bluffed about being to Tiphares, and had been playing him the whole time, he goes crazy and attempts to climb the tubes to the floating city. He had been so obsessed with getting to Tiphares that nothing else had mattered. Moral issues, social life, the opinion of others, they were all shadowed by his desire to reach Tiphares. When this dream is suddenly severed, he realizes what a waste his entire life from his brother's death and after had been. The dream that had acted as his safety net was all of a sudden gone.
Hugo's dependence and independence can teach us all a lesson or two. They teach us that an extreme of either can be deadly. Extreme independence will blind you, shut you off from the world. Everyone needs something from somebody; those who don't sever themselves from society. One who is completely independent could very well become a hermit in even the most urban of areas. Extreme dependence on something is equally bad, if not more so. While it's nice to have something to lean against, an excuse, perhaps, for your daily actions, one should be prepared for a time when that which you are dependent on is suddenly gone. Hugo lost his dream of Tiphares, and with it his rationalization of, not just his crimes, but his whole life.