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the "Lost One" mentioned in Neru's "Lost One's Weeping" isn't a generic phrase meant to refer to depressed people, the word "Lost" refers to the adolescent generation of Japan's "Lost Decade" specifically (of which Neru, born in 1992, is), send tweet
Japan had the 2nd largest economy in the 80s, in the early 90s the bubble burst followed by a decade marked by bankruptcies, unemployment, scandals, the Kobe Earthquake, the Sarin Gas Attack, etc. a nationwide sense of loss.
people lost their jobs and became homeless, netto-kafe nanmin, NEETs, hikkomori, etc. of course children and teenagers were affected too. futoko (children refusing to attend school, usually out of fear of failure/bullying), parasite singles (young adults refusing to get married)
if you were born into a period of Japanese history in which the economy was fucked and everyone blamed you for shit you didn't do and yet the gakureki shakai (education credentialism-based society) still expects perfection out of you. like. WELL
in Neru's older works I see a LOT of the things young Japanese people had to see growing up in the 90s, at an age too young to understand economic and political problems but old enough to realize something is deeply wrong and be hit by the social and mental effects of it
those older works are clearly about school-age people, the characters in the PVs regularly wear school uniforms and environments often contain desks or pens or chalkboards, his more recent characters are now like. adults, living in post-recession Japan
the Lost Decade of Japan had a wide impact on modern-day Japanese media, the park at the beginning of Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" is stated by Chihiro's father to have gone out of business specifically due to the economic crash in 1991.
FromSoftware (developer of Dark Souls) was a company that originally made productivity software, when the recession hit they started to lose money and changed to gamedev. the gameplay theme of "overcoming tremendous odds" in Dark Souls has a lot to do with
the feeling of a "life or death battle" Hidetaka Miyazaki faced working at a failing company on a failing project (Demon Souls, although it would become popular later with the popularity of Dark Souls). a large part of Pokemon's popularity in the 90s has to do with the
social isolation and distrust in others that many Japanese people felt at the time, so seeking companionship with animals or virtual characters was a way lots of people tried to find emotional healing.
if you're into VOCALOID you've probably heard the "VOCALOID music looks happy, but actually it's super depressing" stereotype-- yeah because a lot of the young nonprofessional producers who make VOCALOID music are a part of the same generation who were hit by the Lost Decade.
Hatsune Miku for a LOT of Japanese people was someone who could sing out their hardest and darkest feelings while still preserving their anonymity, providing safety in a society and time where depression/mental illness could cost you your job or relationships
anyway i see Neru's CYNICISM album as an extremely powerful collection of artwork because its stories are told from a mindset that has aged out of the Lost Decade and into the 21st century and well? that mindset is exactly as it states, cynicism.
his old teenage characters struggled to understand why they were in pain, amidst that pain-- "there's something wrong with me, i'm the problem." his new adult characters now understand that society and its institutions are plagued by corruption and hypocrisy.
that society has "been like this the whole time." it's nothing new, it's not personal. they're adults now, with a broader view of society, although it no longer actively antagonizes them. "there's nothing wrong with me, society is the problem."
i feel like the question the album asks is "even if you planned to die young, well, you made it. you have decades of your life left, with no plan to get through it. how will you continue to live until the day you die?"
and i think that's a question a lot of those living in the post-recession are asking themselves. "whatever whatever whatever"'s answer is "i'll do nothing! i'll lay in bed all day if i want! nobody cares about me anyway." "Law-Evading Rock"'s answer is
"i'll become indulged in the internet and TV..look how ridiculous some of this stuff is! surely this will keep me entertained until i die." "SNOBBISM's" answer is "i'll cause trouble! people are always horrible to each other, let's have some fun with it!"
a lot of people seem to think the takeaways of Neru's more recent work is "don't be a bad person," since a lot of his more recent characters deal with their emotional scarring in counterproductive ways but.
honestly, i think Neru is just as critical of society as he's always been, not the outcomes of it. i don't think he's saying those who chronically slack off, indulge, or even mischieve are "bad people." his songs are social commentary (and more recently, satire) for sure but
i don't think he's ever really had a "call to action" or "moral of the story," i've always just seen his work as a reflection of the life he grew up seeing, the life shared by the others around him, a catharsis for those who made it to adulthood.
i'm also pretty sure the lyric "it's non-fiction" in Lost One's Weeping points to the fact the song has a real-world context, its Japanese title "Lost One no Goukoku" even keeps the specifically-English word "Lost" intact
additional notes on how the Lost Decade influenced various anime/game franchises if you're interested https://twitter.com/Robotic_Reborn/status/1303641838587383809?s=19
