First, the villains: Leona and Reina Morimoto. They are the oppressors of the school the protagonist visits. Reina (spanish: Queen) is the headmistress that pulls the strings in the background, while Leona (leo: lion) interacts with the students, always accompanied by her club. Their last name Morimoto (森本) means “the one from near the forest”. Clearly this is an old Japanese name, and a reference to the ninjas often hiding in the forests, which makes the threat of the two sisters even bigger. This threat is not just from the sisters themselves, it’s the threat of the ancient Japanese traditions, which threaten the modernization and renewal of Japan and lead to abandoning progress and with that, a good future.

Of course there is resistance against them before the protagonist appears. The most overt is the angry old teacher who just wants to have a few calm years until his retirement. Of course the Morimoto’s actions are not very supportive of that. As it comes, he invites Great Teacher Not!Onizuka to teach them some humility. As it turns out, Reina made him her pet when she went to school. Those two are, in their own ways, personifications of the simple man. The old teacher clearly sees that the Morimoto’s acts are not good, but it’s not because of everything they do, it’s because of the few times he’s the victim. Otherwise he doesn’t really care about them. This ignorance lead to him fighting agains windmills. Nonizuka on the other hand stands for the wild, uncouth and easily impressionable young adults. The old teacher invited him to the school, so he arrives in his special order sports car and with gobbles of self-fanfaring. But alas! As soon as Reina Morimoto arrives, he returns to being her pet, just like the delinquents turn into normal people when somebody shows them the way to the light.

Apropos pet, Leona also has one. He’s a quite timid bishonen. He only dares to raise his voice when Leona looks at other men as prospective pets. However, he goes back to timid as soon as she tells him to. Towards the end he is forced to get operated into a futa and brainwashed into loving the protagonist. I guess this is your typical “feminism is stoopid and turns women into slavemakers” strawman argument.

The American exchange student Linda Hamilton joins the gallery of antagonists later on. One might think that her introduction weakens my argument about the Morimoto sisters and traditional Japan, but in reality it only inforces that. She is so stereotypically American, it’s obviously a representation of how the average American is different and a signification that the two nations should stay different.

These things are in a clear contrast to the group of heroes. They don’t care if something’s Japanese or not, they are who they are. One part of them is from the Bible study group. As is common knowledge, Christianity has been occasionally brought to Japan, but not really with great success. Thus, Bible study is either religiously motivated, or – as it is the case for this group – spearheaded by a quest for truth and wisdom, no matter where they may find it. A few of the heroes are from the baseball club. This again is a foreign influence on Japan, but there is a difference! It became quite widespread, and is now an expression of Japanese fighting spirit. Lastly, some of the heroes are in the same dorm as the protagonist. In their free expression of their sexuality they are as unjapanese as they can get, but their characterisation is within the norms of Japanese fiction.

As is obvious to every educated reader now, this work of art sends a clearly anti-nationalist message, without being moralistic about it.

Oh, and the anime? That was just a brainless fapfest with a gormless protagonist whose cum is measured in kilograms. Since his balls seem to be of average size, I’m forced to the conclusion that it’s incredibly dense.

black hole sperm, won’t you cum, won’t you cum~ ♪

The worst thing to happen is that everything just gets forgotten. Everybody just goes on with their live like before and shoves disabled people in their corner, where they don’t get in the way. It’s the most convenient thing for the majority to shout for more justice for fifteen minutes and then do nothing about it. It’s sort of understandable since “only” 1.5% of the world population have a disability and most people see one of them across the street once a year at most. But forgetting them doesn’t stop them from existing.

A better fate would be if the pedestal is kept up. Disabled people would still be visible, they wouldn’t be forgotten. The bad thing is, the pedestal makes them stand out and seperates them for other people. In the best case it can get them help, but in the worst case it can work out like the separate but equal policy the U.S. used to justify racism. It can work out if everybody pays attention so nothing bad happens, but the human race has a history of doing some rather inhumane things every once in a while.

So what would be better than the pedestal? My solution is integration into society. Disabled people don’t come in UFOs from a faraway planet. They are born like other people, they’re alive like other people, they die like other people. Treat them with respect, but don’t put on silk gloves. Be nice to them, but don’t shy away from telling Kenji he’s crazy in the coconut. When you have a cough, you get some medicine. When your leg is chopped off, you get a prosthetic. Don’t marginalize it, don’t make a big deal out of it.

Oh, and all the text in the game is in Comic Sans.

Any similarity with the literary theory are purely coincidental. The way I use deconstruction here is that a characteristic of a certain character is chosen, then triggered until it’s overloaded and the character bursts, forced to show a new side of theirs. With the preparations for the school festival, Kaname gets overworked with his double role as class rep and student council president. Chizuru’s and Yuuki’s usual hijinks only worsen his situation. He gets swept away by the myriads of responsibilities he’s taken on himself. When he finally gets some time to reflect on it, he finds out that it’s sometimes better to just let things flow and enjoy it.

Kimi to Boku likes this way of developing characters. The best example is in episode two, where Shun and Masaki give each other that treatment. Shun is a nice person, Masaki is a tsundere. The development starts when he helps her and brings out her tsuntsun. She plays pranks on him until he snaps and calls her out on it. This in turn brings her over the threshold and lets her release the deredere. Shun can be loud, Masaki can be nice and everything’s right.

Now what’s so good about this sort of character development? One rule of thumb in writing is that you have to torture your characters. In this case, Kaname gets tortured by the defining trait of his archetype. Exactly this kind of torture differentiates him away from the archetype and makes the archetype what it is: the origin, the base, the idea that connects. You burn fire with lava until it’s dead.

As we go deeper into the show, it still continues to unfold the characters. This time it’s Yuuki’s turn. Previously he has been established as a rather lazy troll. This description could as well be used for his twin brother, but somehow they’re not the same. If we had to hang the vague picture on the solid wall, we have three nails so far:
1. His hair is flatter.
2. He never wears the complete school uniform.
3. He likes manga and games.
The first two are completely superficial descriptions, the third is a random characteristic. None of them are character-defining. But if you look at them as a group, they point into the same general direction. Yuuki is the lazier one. He doesn’t put effort into it when he’s not really interested. Together with the typical Japanese view that the younger brother is less mature this makes a nice picture of two brothers who are similar, but different.
Then in this episode they present us Yuuki as a hero. Not a red ranger who stops cake-stealing skeletons. Not a samurai who stops kidnappers. Not even a delinquent antihero. He doesn’t fulfill a destiny or save a country. He’s just a normal dude who occasionally helps people in their everyday life. He’s the greatest sort of hero.

The elephant in the room I managed to avoid talking about so far is the fujoshi pandering. This is mostly because the elephant was the size of a cat. However, in the second half this episode it grows to the size of the Burj Khalifa. The underclassman with an admiration for his hero Yuuki can so easily be read as having a crush that I can’t even really call it subtext. But why does it suddenly come into the foreground so strongly? One way to develop characters is to show how people outside of the group of protagonists view them. With this episode’s focus on Yuuki, it would be nice to see other things than his usual trolling, laziness and manga reading. These characteristics all range somewhere between negative and neutral, so something positive is needed. What’s more positive than a hero? Of course a scenario like this can’t really use heroes. The easy way out of this is someone who admires Yuuki as a hero. Now why does it need the fujoshi pandering? Calling somebody as lazy as Yuuki a hero is not quickly done. A crush you don’t expect to have leads to you looking for excuses. Especially when you’re of the same gender a quick excuse is admiring them as an example to live by. The greatest role model is a hero. This is not an excuse or a justification for the fujoshi bait, it’s only an observation.

I enjoy anime.

Who enjoys anime? A nerd with a blog. (Read: A silly person who wastes their time thinking about a rather obscure subject, and writing about it, assuming there are other silly people who want to share.)

What do I enjoy? The art of animated storytelling as practised in glorious Nippon. (Read: Chinese porn cartoons.)

Where do I enjoy it? On the internet. The place where everybody can talk to everybody. “Have you already seen that new show?” – “Yes, I think it’s the best thing since the invention of sliced tea!” – “Eh, I think it was good, but not that great.” Talking naturally leads to abbreviations for things that are often discussed. “Which girl do you like?” – “Eiko!” – “And why?” – “Because she initially rejects the protagonist, but then grows to like him and in the end protects him.” And thus, words (labels, terminology, slang, buzzwords, what-have-you) are invented, then used as often as necessary, get subdivided into new words if necessary. You need words to talk, if you don’t want to repeat the same words over and over again. Discussion (and if you put enough effort into it, discourse) is there to clarify what the words mean and how they should be used.

How do I enjoy it? By analyzing it. That hapens naturally. As soon I like a show enough, I analyze it. I try to find patterns and deviations, compare it to other shows, ask questions. I dive head-first into the material, trying to get to the core of it, become one with it. It’s not a shallow glance of some feelings, it’s the piercing stare of love. Love for the medium that gave birth to it, love for the hours of bad anime I dug through to find a diamond, love for the raw diamond to cut it into a brilliant.

Why do I keep enjoying it? Because I want to enjoy it with other people. Share the love for the good shows, laugh together about the bad shows, disagree and discuss whenever possible. Disagreements, different opinions give birth to the best discussions, the best thoughts. You examine why you disagree, why you have your opinion, why the others have their opinion, come to new insights. If there was nobody I could disagree with, it would be quite boring. The possibility to disagree and the ability to think working together are what makes me enjoy anime.

Thank you for making me think about stuff, Akira.

What is anime fandom? Many have asked this, many have tried to answer it. On first sight, it seems to be one big sweaty and perverted ball of nerdery. If you look harder, you see circlejerks divided into circlejerks divided into circlejerks. The more you look at it, the more confusing it gets. This post is my mustard on that sausage.

My motivation to write came from this post by Jon. What struck me there was the declaration of 4chan as the heart and soul of the otakusphere. I find it hard to believe that everything revolves around a horde of trolls. The argument there is that everybody uses 4chan terminology and memes. It’s certain that they have a rather big influence on otaku lore. The thing is, the exact author of the lore doesn’t matter, because everybody who participates in it shapes it in some way, i.e. is an author. The creation of a culture is not somebody’s or one certain group’s work, it’s the continuing effort of everybody. It doesn’t matter where the content comes from, all that matters is whether it gets worked into the context or not.

I think looking for a “heart and soul” of the otakusphere is the wrong interpretative strategy. It implies that there is a centre, with layers around it like an onion. This induces a rather questionable and silly hierarchy. Questionable because the inner circles would be more worthy than outer ones and silly because it would lead to fights over who is more worthy rather than sharing the enjoyment of watching anime.

There is certainly a need for other geometries. One approach is a Venn diagram. The outermost circle divides people who have seen anime from those who haven’t. Inside there are many subcircles, for example for those who don’t watch anime anymore, those who like tsunderes, those who like yaoi, etc. The big difference to above is that the circles are not all inside of each other, they overlap everywhere. There are people who like tsunderes and watch yaoi, some who like tsunderes but don’t watch anime anymore, and some for which all three things are true. Even more importantly, these circles can go outside of the circle of anime watchers. There are certainly people who like tsunderes and might even know the terminology, despite never having seen anime. (Helga Pataki from Hey Arnold might be the reason for that.) There is also an overlap between SciFi and anime fans, but those groups are obviously not the same. This overlapping geometry is certainly not restricted to nerdy things, since there are anime fans who eat far too much chocolate and use public transport quite often. The problem is, this extensability is also the flaw of this interpretative strategy: it quickly gets very complicated. It may be good for a rough overwiev or for a careful examination of one small section of the fandom, but it’s not useful for an encompassing and exact description.

A possibly better geometry is developed in  this post on Super Fanicom.

I like this approach for representing everybody with the illustration as simple as possible. You know how open-minded you are to things you don’t usually watch, and you know if you rather give positive or negative judgements. With these two simple answers you can find your position ih the graph. Rather than sorting the fans by what they watch, we get sorted by how we watch. However, that is also the limit of this approach: two people might get in exactly the same position on this map, despite having completely different tastes. Especially in the closed-minded half this problem can easily come up. Maybe there are better values to choose for the two axes.

Even with some acceptably good ways to look at anime fandom, I still don’t think they’re good enough. Maybe it’s a futile search for a good geometry. I won’t know until I try.

When the sun is out
and you see your friends’ true side,
don’t be discouraged.
Your rash confession of love -
it’s not that simple.

Who would put french fries in a coke straw? Is it Chizuru, Yuuki or Shun? Let’s investigate. The obvious choice would be Yuuki. The problem with that theory: he sits on the opposite corner of the table. He is a good troll, but that would have involved some gymnastics Kanade would have certainly noticed. The next believable suspect would be Chizuru. He has a history of doing fun things just for fun and he knows how quickly Kanade is angered. He even sits next to him. What speaks against him as the culprit is their positions right before the discovery:

He was quite far away from Kanade’s cup. Additionally Kanade was in a position in which Chizuru was in his field of vision all the time. That’s the second suspect down. So it was Shun? Judging from the screenshot above he certainly had the possibility. What rules him out is that he’s generally too worried about being nice to people. His reaction after the discovery was too surpised too. Or is he that good an actor? Yuuki and Chizuru accusing him immediately doesn’t help their case either. Further investigations will be necessary.

A quality of Kimi to Boku is the maturity in treating its topics. Confessions behind the school building occur quite frequently in anime. Usually that leads to them sort of coming together, having silly arguments once in a while and then perfect love. In this show it’s a bit different. Takahashi confessed mostly because her friends encouraged her. They thought that a shy girl like her couldn’t muster up the courage to do it and even if she does, that a guy like Yuuta who’s popular with the ladies would certainly turn her down. She knew her friends are occasionally like that, but she doesn’t want to be alone. Yuuta knew this as well and played along to help her. After they hear Takahashi’s friends gossipping about them, they realize that they both knew and decide they shouldn’t pretend to date, because love is not that simple, and neither are people.

How dare they. How dare they! This was such a perfect piece of animation, and now it’s RUINED! Forever! Why did they need Shun to cut his hair? Why? WHYYYYYY! All these seconds I invested into this show have literally gone to waste. Is there a narrative reason for cutting his hair? No! Does it cause some development? No! Does it have some kind of meaning? No! Do the fans (me) want it? Hell NO! This is just so the creators can piss, take a dump and then barf on the fans’ heads, just because they can! They should have their fingernails ripped out and shoved into their eyes, their ears and their penises’ foreskins. My hatred for them is higher than the total amount of energy in the universe and more condensed than the blackest black hole. Kimi to Boku really is the worst show of the season.

On a less silly note, this episode is not as good as the previous ones. Episodes one to three served as introduction to the characters. Additionally, two focused on Masaki and three on Chizuru, developing them and showing how they act and react towards the others. Episode four focuses on Kaname and his environment, giving some more depth to him. The fifth episode throws Masaki and Chizuru into a ring and lets them fight each other, developing both. Now comes episode six, and exactly two things happen: Shun’s hair gets cut and there’s a flashback in which Kaname learns to accept his glasses. Getting your first glasses is kind of a big deal. I didn’t tell anybody about my bad eyesight until it was so bad that everybody noticed. Kaname waits until he has difficulties differentiating between the twins. However, the only development he goes through is that he embarasses himself trying to show kindness. As a result he becomes even more of the same person as before. Showing that he doesn’t hate Yuuki after all could be something new, if the first episode didn’t build that into its framing device. If it really had to be an episode about Kaname, it could have been about something that can develop. They could have unfolded what exactly is there between him and the neighbour girl. This episode didn’t add anything new and I resent it for that.

At least I still have the cats.

A hairy sheep and
a bear and a straw hat and
guns at a summer
festival, first in conflict,
then in alliance.

The sun blushes with a strong eye through the rare clouds. The light is as pronounced as the shadows. The days are hot enough to make the nights warm. It’s the perfect time for festivals. The warm light of the fires lead you through a night. A deep, bright red, containing itself as a shell under the dark sky. What happens at the festival happens only there, what doesn’t happen can never be repeated.

One quality of Kimi to Boku is its playfulness. A normal episode has a major conflict as framework filled with many smaller conflicts which are quickly resolved, carryovers from earlier episodes or possibly starting point for a later conflict. This playfulness turns Kimi to Boku from a trite repetition of a thousand things we’ve seen before into a world like a boiling pot of water. There’s always something happening, wether that’s a joke or some development. This playfulness gives Kimi to Boku a fractal structure, where small segments in one part are similar but different to bigger segments in other parts. It’s a self-similarity that gives depth to the stucture, and the deeper you zoom into it the more you discover.

Shun’s brain is emitting girlification rays. Presumably it began when he was hit by such a ray. Due to his nature he was an easy receptor for them, which isn’t quite that frequent. Starting from then his girlification began. Parallel to that the rays he emitted became stronger and stronger. The others in the group probably developed an immunity due to exposure since kindergarten. The same isn’t true for Masaki and Chizuru. Masaki is nice solely towards Shun since the rays tell her that she doesn’t have to be strong. She uses this as the long awaited chance to open up. She just takes that farther than Shun notices. The influence on Chizuru became especially apparent in this episode. When he visits Shun and helps with baking cookies, he almost becomes a copy until he notices and forces himself to snap out of it.
‘Tis a truly terrifying weapon ye carry, Shun-chan.

Some people seem to think that trying to understand Mawaru Penguindrum is like throwing sausages up Oxford Street. Metaphors, fairy tales, flashbacks, references, perversions and random stuff that might be metaphors all bundled together to tell a story that hasn’t been told before. Their scientific-analytical side is thrown into the deepest, darkest jungle equipped only with an old rag of cotton and a rusty knife. What this reminds me of is early 20th century literature: The world is a confusing and messed up place, so let’s make confusing and messed up stories! The orphic voice entrances the listener, let’s value voice over meaning! Reality is absurd, let’s make the absurd reality! Everybody has a child in them, let that child play!

It’s understandable that you dislike not understanding stuff. It’s the polar opposite of the scientific mind. It’s the base of religious or spiritual practising, the entrancement of cults and sects. It’s not a mystery, it’s magic. It’s easiest to compare it to music. A note doesn’t mean anything. Two notes have a relation to each other, be that height, volume or sound. Some combinations are surprising, some are disturbing, some are calming, some are happy, some are sad. When you add up a bunch of notes, you can differentiate the feeling you want to evoke. The single notes still don’t mean anything. The combinations don’t have a meaning either, but they force a reaction out of you, be that positive or negative, enjoyable or undesired. It’s similar with metaphors. An apple by itself doesn’t mean anything. If you have one in the hand of a morally ambiguous character and combine it with cultural background noise, you evoke a reaction. The reference gives it some kind of meaning, but doesn’t necessarily copy it.

The above metaphor is just one of what I see as the three main types of metaphor. It’s there to explain something. It does that by referencing older, well-known material.
The second type of metaphor connects different parts of the narrative to each other. Take the red rings in the trains. They appeared as a metaphor for the terror attack in 95, with the number in the ring. They reappeared in Masako’s toxic dream when Kanba and her father in a group of ominous people. The most obvious conclusion is the group planning a similar terror attack. The doctor’s words imply the same, but the rings make it clear.
The third type of metaphor there for flavour. Why is the thing they’re searching for called the Penguindrum? Why not the Penguindiary? Why did they get penguins as familiars and not seals or octopi or frogs? I’m sure there are some explanations available in the deepest dephts of the internet, but they’re probably far from obvious. Then what do the penguins add? Flavour. (I’m sure some will object with my use of ‘metaphor’ here. Give me a better term and get a hug.)

As far as magic goes, it mainly works with flavour metaphors. It doesn’t really matter that much which words you’re praying with, what’s important is that you’re praying, and that you repeat it. The most extreme version of this are probably Buddhist mantras, where you repeat one word or phrase indefinitely to achieve enlightenment. In that repetition, the words slowly start to lose their meaning in your mind, the sounds your mouth is emitting blend together and all becomes meaningless babbling.

If you try to analyze Mawaru Penguindrum, you’ll probably hit a mental wall where it just doesn’t make sense anymore. If you don’t analyze it and ride along on the train to anywhere, you’ll find yourself in a frenzy of colors and sounds, with some characters riding along with you, reaching a summit when you seem to see something through the fog outside.