Animated Discussions: Critical Essays on Anime

Animated Discussions

Critical Essays on Anime

Jen A. Blue

Smashwords Edition

Copyright (c) 2016-17 by Jen A. Blue

Published by Eohippus Press

All rights reserved

All discussed works and related concepts are copyright their respective owners, and are used for academic and review purposes under the principle of Fair Use.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Weaving a Story

Chapter 1 | Once Upon a Time: Narrative Traps in Revolutionary Girl Utena and Princess Tutu

Chapter 2 | Ran Out of Ink, You Bastards: Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Third Impact as Narrative Collapse

Chapter 3 |Eternal Labyrinth: Narrative Collapse and Substitution in Madoka Magica

Chapter 4 |The Secret History of American Anime Fandom

Her Tragedy

Chapter 5 |Excerpts from The Very Soil

Chapter 6 |EVA Pilots, Rose Brides, and Puella Magi: Heroic Trauma in Anime

Chapter 7 |Hinamizawa Syndrome: Time Travel as Trauma Response

The Other Side of the Gateway

Chapter 8 |Beyond the Inferno: Situational and Virtue Ethics in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Chapter 9 |Fullmetal Alchemy

Chapter 10 |The Fist of God: One-Punch Man and the Menace of the Divine

Chapter 11 |The Duel Named Revolution: A Reading of Revolutionary Girl Utena

Chapter 12 |On the Origin of Mecha

Chapter 13 |Break the World’s Shell: Anime and the Apocalypse

Notes

About the Author

Other Books by Jen A. Blue

Introduction

Where monsters rampage, I’m there to take them down. Where treasure glitters, I’m there to claim it. Where an enemy rises to face me, victory will be mine!

—The first line of the first anime I ever watched(1)

This book is a product of procrastination. In January 2016, I finished the third volume of my series My Little Po-Mo. By that time, I had already completed the online portion of the project and begun my next, The Near Apocalypse of ‘09; the logical thing to do would therefore have been to take the as-yet unpublished My Little Po-Mo work, research and write some book-exclusive chapters, and put together a final volume of the series.

This was exactly what I planned to do, but as 2016 drew to a middle, I had yet to start. I was, I realized, severely burnt out on My Little Pony; I wanted to write about something else. At the same time, I wasn’t ready to start publishing book collections of Near-Apocalypse; I felt that had to wait until after the My Little Po-Mo series was complete.

Then I remembered a book I had toyed with the idea of writing a couple of years prior. In 2013, Mark Oshiro, a popular Web personality and media critic, began blogging about Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.(2) I began commenting on his posts with notes about the series’ use of alchemical concepts, and at the end of the series, I floated the possibility of compiling those notes into a short e-book. Other commenters on Mark’s posts showed interest, but the idea fell by the wayside.

By the time I was procrastinating on My Little Po-Mo, I had quite a bit of work on anime that could be adapted into a book: episode-by-episode commentaries on Revolutionary Girl Utena, notes toward a book on Neon Genesis Evangelion that never gelled, an unpublished paper on anime fandom, and the notes and presentation slides for several panels I presented at various anime conventions. With the addition of the alchemy notes on FMA:B, I realized, I had the beginnings of a fairly solid book, work on which could easily give me several extra months of justifiably ignoring My Little Po-Mo. That book is, of course, the one you are now reading.

About This Book

Animated Discussions is divided into three parts, organized by theme.

The first part, Weaving a Story, discusses narrative technique, structure, and history. The first three chapters form a set, an evolving discussion of rigid narratives as potentially confining, and an exploration of how several different anime—Revolutionary Girl Utena, Princess Tutu, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica—recognize and confront this problem. All three are new content unique to this book, although portions of the first chapter are adapted from Utena episode commentaries I wrote some time ago.(3)

Finally, the fourth chapter is adapted from a piece on the history of anime fandom, and its evolving attitude toward Western animation, I initially wrote in 2012 for a book Lex Winter was editing. That book, a collection of papers on anime fandom by anime fans, for a non-fan audience, never came to be, and so this work has languished on my hard drive ever since, although one part, the history of Western animation, proved adaptable to a number of different projects I’ve worked on over the years. Nonetheless, this is the first time I am able to present it in its original planned form. Lex's book was planned to be more social science than humanities, and my views and interests have shifted somewhat, so the chapter has a different approach and style than most of the rest of the book.

The second part, Her Tragedy, is an exploration of psychological trauma through its depiction in anime. Given its intimate relationship with trauma, Chapter 5 is therefore a selection of excerpts from my prior study on Madoka Magica, The Very Soil. Chapter 6 then explores the application of heroic trauma—a theory arising from the study of superheroes in American comic books—to anime, adapted from a panel I gave on the same topic. Finally, Chapter 7 looks at how a number of anime use time travel, and especially time loops, as a metaphor for trauma and trauma recovery.

The third and final part of the book, The Other Side of the Gateway, has perhaps a vaguer theme than the others. It includes chapters on how Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood defines and depicts morality, adapted from a blogpost I made in response to a Mark Watches commenter; the discussion of FMA:B’s use of real-world alchemical concepts and symbols that combined with my procrastination to create this book; musings on the depiction of godhood in One-Punch Man commissioned by a backer of this book’s Kickstarter; a lengthy exploration of (some of) the themes and symbols of Revolutionary Girl Utena; a special guest chapter by Lex Winter on mecha, legendary weapons, and the divine; and an adaptation of one of my most popular panels, on the history of the apocalypse and its depiction in anime.

Overall, the theme of the third part is transcendence and the mystical, which is at least somewhat connected to all of ethics, alchemy, divinity, the apocalypse, and Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Acknowledgments

To begin with, I’d like to thank my editor, Katriel Paige. Without their tireless efforts and fundamental disagreement with much of my philosophy, this book would be a poorly argued, shortcut-riddled, disorganized mess. Knowing that they will be reading it judgmentally, red pen in hand,(4) has forced me to search my arguments for holes and make sure my claims are backed with solid sources.(5)

I’d also like to thank J.P. Rafols, with whom I have lost touch over the years, for bringing some tapes of The Slayers to watch with our friends when we were kids. It was my first time seeing anime, and I’ve not stopped since.

Thank you, as well, to all the Kickstarter backers who funded this book:(6)

Chris Adamson

A.H.

Vince Avarello

Vincenzo Avarello

Harrison Barber

Nicole Barovic (and Alex Hancock, Kim Barovic, Bridget Conley and Marley Lindner)

Benjamin Blue

Chloe Blue

Jason Blue

Adrina Brousseau

Thomas Bunting

Alex Clayton

Adrian Dalen

Shane Martin DeNota-Hoffman

digijen

Sean Dillon

Jeanette Donato

Eruditorum Press

Rebecca Harbison

Morgan Hay

Robert Hedley

Bennett Still weirded out seeing his name printed in Kickstarter rewards Jackson

Thomas Keyton

Laura Kinnaman

Robin Kuebler

Peter LaPrade

Colin Maclaughlin

Joseph McIntosh

Melanie Nazelrod

Artur Nowrot

Cana Lynn Peirce

Ashgill Phyre

Percysowner

Chris Reaves

Paul Ryan

Michael Simpson

Frezno

Captain Uzair

Amy Weiler

Finally, I want to thank you, the reader, for buying this book, or borrowing it from a friend or library that bought it. If, on the other hand, you have stolen or pirated it, you receive no thanks, as you are a scoundrel and a cad. If you seek redemption for your heinous crime, however, it is possible: simply go to your local library or bookstore and request that they stock this book. All shall then be forgiven.

Note on Japanese Names and Titles

Generally speaking, I have followed the official translation of whichever anime I am discussing in terms of character names, episode titles, and the like, with a few exceptions:

1. For consistency, all Japanese names, both of fictional characters and real people, are presented with personal name first, followed by family name. This is the reverse of Japanese practice; however, it is the order used in the licensed English-language release of most of the series discussed in this book.

2. Where the translators have chosen to translate a character’s name literally from Japanese to English, I have stuck with using the Japanese name (e.g., I refer to Ahiru and Neko-sensei rather than Duck and Mr. Cat when discussing Princess Tutu).

3. Long episode and series titles are given in full at first reference in a chapter, and shortened thereafter, e.g. Revolutionary Girl Utena at first reference, Utena at later references.

4.As its English title varies between releases, I have stuck with the original Japanese title of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni in the text; however, in endnote citations I use the title as it appears on the DVD in question, so that interested readers can more easily find it.

5.All episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion have two titles, a Japanese title displayed near the beginning of the episode and an English title displayed after the commercial break. On first reference I use both the English translation of the Japanese title and the English title, even when those are the same; on later references I use only the English title. (So the first two episodes would be Angel Attack/Angel Attack and Unfamiliar Ceiling/The Beast on first reference, and Angel Attack and The Beast thereafter.)

6.There are multiple ways to divide the Revolutionary Girl Utena arcs. In the text, I use the Student Council Saga (episodes 1-13), the Black Rose Saga (episodes 14-24), and the Car Saga (episodes 25-39) because those are the divisions that make sense for my analysis and the names I am familiar with. However, the DVD box sets use Student Council Saga (episodes 1-12), Black Rose Saga (episodes 13-24), and Apocalypse Saga (episodes 25-39), so this is how the episodes are broken up in endnote citations, so that interested readers can more easily find them. For similar reasons, I refer to the Utena film as Adolescence of Utena in the text, but Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie in endnote citations.

Weaving a Story

We’re all stories in the end.

—Steven Moffat(7)

Chapter 1 | Once Upon a Time: Narrative Traps in Revolutionary Girl Utena and Princess Tutu

You must live your story.

—Michael Ende(8)

Once upon a time.

Revolutionary Girl Utena and Princess Tutu both open their first episodes with these same words. Both series immediately open in a realm of fairytales and storybooks, with art that evokes pencil drawings on faintly yellowed paper. It is a safe, familiar, comfortable space, built of familiar childhood narratives. This is a space in which characters rarely have names; instead Utena gives its characters as the princess, her dead parents, and the handsome prince, while Tutu gives us a dead man (a storyteller), another handsome prince, and a monstrous raven.

Unnamed, these characters have no identity; at once they are everyone and no one. Every girl is a princess, every boy a prince, every imagined terror that lurks in the dark a raven. These are not stories devoid of pain or darkness: both open with death, the man in Tutu and the princess’ parents in Utena, with the former culminating in violent conflict between prince and raven ending in the prince’s sacrifice, while the latter begins with the princess’ grief. At the same time, as is typical for fairy tales, the dark is held at arm’s length; the indistinct universality of the characters renders them too vague for us to fully empathize with them. They are ciphers, and their feelings are therefore just words.

The emotions and identities of these characters cannot escape their stories, and so, almost immediately, the characters attempt to do so themselves. This is outright stated in Tutu: the prince and the raven, tiring of their eternal battle, which can never end because the storyteller describing it has died, decide to escape from their story into the real world.(9) The escape is marginally subtler in Utena, but still a rejection of the story in which the character is placed: after a description of the princess’ meeting with the prince, in which he gifted her a ring and told her they would meet again, with the implications of an engagement, So impressed was she by him that the princess vowed to become a prince herself one day.(10)

Both shows then suggest that this departure from the rules of fairytale existence, this attempt to defy their role in the narrative, may be more difficult than the characters expect. Utena is the more straightforward of the two, as the childlike voice of the narrator ends this introduction with But was that really such a good idea? Tutu, on the other hand, takes the opportunity to introduce its villain: ‘This is great!’ said the old man who was supposed to have died. Where Utena questions the wisdom of the princess defying her role in the story, Tutu questions whether the prince and the raven have actually succeeded in doing so.

Initially, Utena seems to be maintaining the depiction of the fairy-tale narrative as a safe space, while Tutu shows it to be an inescapable trap. Over the course of their respective runs, however, they both reverse themselves, and thereby converge to the position that fairy-tale narratives are a seductive, dangerous, but ultimately escapable trap. One might, then, be tempted to say that both answer the question asked by Utena’s narrator, [Is escaping the narrative] really such a good idea? with a resounding Yes.

They do not.

Early in the first episode of Utena, a teacher confronts Utena about her choice to wear (a variant of) the boys’ uniform on the grounds that she’s a girl. In other words, the teacher thinks the story Utena tells about herself—that she is a heroic prince who rescues princesses—is problematic because it contradicts how girls should be, which is to say that it contradicts the teacher’s own narrative about girls, which she seeks to impose on Utena.

This is mirrored by a scene later in the episode, when Wakaba is baffled by Utena’s declaration that she is a prince and a girl, that she rejects the need to choose between the two narratives. Unstated is that they are, after all, narratives—which is to say, not physical facts—and therefore under no requirement to be consistent within themselves, let alone each other.

The entire story of the first two duels can be viewed as an attempt by others to impose a narrative on Utena against her will. Specifically, the members of the student council make assumptions about Utena—that she is a Duelist who, like them, wants to claim Anthy in order to gain the power to revolutionize the world—but Utena neither knows nor cares about this. She wants to fight, not as a duelist seeking to claim Anthy, but as a prince, protecting and avenging first Wakaba and then Anthy from Saionji’s mistreatment.(11)

As the show demonstrates, narratives can be empowering. Utena’s story of herself as prince gives her the strength to fight her way through many duels, while Anthy possesses great power so long as she remains within the defined role of the Rose Bride. But they can also be deluding and imprisoning, as we see in the first duel with Miki.(12)

Miki and Kozue both tell stories of their childhood. Miki remembers himself and his sister as twin prodigies, who played beautifully as long as they were together. But he abandoned his sister by ducking out of an important performance, and in turn she abandoned him, refusing to play piano ever again. Now he pursues the shining thing, the inspiration he lost when his sister ceased playing with him—and through Anthy presenting herself as that shining thing, playing into his story, she and Touga are able to manipulate him into dueling Utena.

Crucially, Kozue remembers events differently, as she recounts at the end of the two-parter: she wasn’t a prodigy at all, but rather riding entirely on her brother’s coattails. When he left her to play alone, she didn’t freeze up, she simply couldn’t play: he never needed her at all. Note that it’s irrelevant whether this or Miki’s story is true—they are both equally true, since they are both about fictional characters and therefore false. But even setting that aside, what shapes the characters’ behavior is not what happened, but rather the stories they tell themselves.

Throughout the Student Council arc, which comprises the first 13 episodes of the show, Anthy manipulates characters into dueling by being just close enough to a key figure in their personal story that they overwrite her entirely with that figure.(13) For Utena, she plays the victim of Saionji’s misogynistic cruelty, and so becomes a substitute Wakaba to be protected from him.(14) For Miki, she plays the piano piece he associates with his youth, and so he sees her as a substitute Kozue.(15) For Juri, at a key moment she says the same thing Shiori once did;(16) for Saionji she plays at being the loving, accepting companion he wanted Touga to be;(17) and for Touga she is the pawn in the game he imagines himself playing—a game which involves similarly inserting himself into Utena’s narrative as the prince.(18)

And then there’s Nanami, whose narrative is perhaps the most tragic of all.(19) Nanami is caught between two narratives, the beloved little sister and the cruel, domineering mean girl. These twin poles comprise one of many versions of the Madonna/whore complex presented in the series: the innocent naïf who clings to her masculine guide and protector, Touga, or the wicked, cruel woman who controls men through her sexuality—note that Tsuwabuki’s crush on her becomes a means by which she can treat him as a servant.(20)

However, the little sister/mean girl version of the Madonna/whore complex is a particularly childlike version, which is to say both are relatively innocent. Though she uses her dual role to wield great power over the school—for example, using her closeness to Touga as a carrot to draw in her trio of minions, while also using her power to exclude them from the school’s popular crowd as a stick to keep them in line(21)—it also makes her deeply vulnerable. First, she is entirely dependent on Touga: as the little sister her identity is defined by her relationship to him, and as the mean girl she has given no one any other reason to like or care about her, so when she temporarily loses her connection to him, she becomes completely isolated.(22) At the same time, her innocence gives her no tools by which to deal with the adult world, and descends into confusion and despair when she witness the incestuous sexual relationship between Anthy and Akio, even coming to wonder if her possessiveness of her brother is rooted in similar feelings, which she regards as disgusting.(23)

This tension, between the Madonna and the whore, the innocent and the experienced, is found throughout the series. The Black Rose Saga depicts Ohtori Academy as a place where time stands still, or more accurately, where it cycles endlessly; it is a place where no one grows up.(24) The bulk of the cast are trapped at various stages of adolescence, and as is common for adolescents, they are both in a hurry to accumulate experience and grow up (with Tsuwabuki as only the most obvious of many examples)(25) and desperate to hold on to the safety of innocence and childhood (Nanami recoils from her first full encounter with the sexual; Miki seeks to retreat to the garden of his childhood).(26)

Akio ruthlessly exploits the desire to grow up. A man at least in his 20s,(27) he uses the glamour of adult things—a fancy convertible, gifts, access to money—to seduce Utena, who is 14. Seduce is a weak word, however; Akio is a rapist, a predator who preys on children. Utena’s behavior in their sex scene is disturbing—she chatters nervously before the act, then passively lies there, talking about what she might make for lunch tomorrow.(28) This is an emotional detachment from unbearable reality, Utena retreating into a comfortable, familiar narrative of daily routine to escape from an overwhelming experience for which she wasn’t ready.

Utena is far from the only character to take a drive with Akio, and the series can at least be read as implying that the other characters are similarly victimized. The scenes in his car throughout the latter parts of the series are heavily sexualized sequences in which Akio offers experience in religiously significant language, saying he will show the riders the End of the World.(29) If, as seems likely, we read End of the World in the sense of the ends of the Earth, i.e., its spatial limits rather than temporal conclusion, and recall Akio’s self-description as the Morning Star,(30) this becomes a clear parallel to Satan showing Jesus the world as part of his temptation.(31) These orgiastic sequences generally involve Touga and Akio sitting shirtless in the front seat, while both a main character and a closely associated supporting character sit in the backseat. The backseat of a car functions as a metonym for both first sexual experiences and date-rape, so it is unsurprising that in each of these sequences the supporting character acts with varying degrees of sexual aggression toward the main character, who responds with corresponding discomfort. Shortly thereafter in their duel with Utena, the supporting character will generally draw a soul sword from the heart of the main character, an image of penetration stated to require a deep personal bond, reinforcing the sexual connotations.

These sequences offer a particularly adolescent vision of adulthood as consisting of a fast red convertible, the freedom to go anywhere in the world, and sex. Akio offers all three as a temptation, which is to say he proffers the narrative that doing these things is equivalent to achieving adulthood. Upon accepting his narrative—or, in the case of Juri, being forced into it(32)—the characters fall under Akio’s control, and can be wielded against Utena in the Dueling Arena game.

This is not to say that growing up is inherently a bad thing—Nanami demonstrates the dangers of excessive innocence. Instead, Utena depicts allowing oneself to be too bound up within a narrative as the problem, particularly when the narrative is imposed or manipulated by others. Which point brings us to Princess Tutu and the villainous Drosselmeyer, whose very existence consists of the manipulation and imposition of narratives on others—the device controlling the stories of Gold Crown Town is the only thing keeping him alive and the realm in which he dwells.(33) The latter half of the series comes to explicitly be the story of the main characters rebelling against their narratives and seizing control of their own endings, but from the start this theme is hinted at, as with Edel’s repeated declaration, Happiness to those who accept their fate. Glory to those who defy it.

Each of the characters is presented by Drosselmeyer as having a fate laid out for them: Ahiru’s is to become Princess Tutu, fall in love with the prince, and disappear at the moment she confesses her love. Mytho’s is to be the prince, trapped in an eternal cycle of shattering his heart to imprison the Raven, having his heart restored by Tutu, battling the Raven, and shattering his heart once more. Rue is Princess Kraehe, Tutu’s dark mirror, the Raven’s minion that tempts and corrupts the prince, only to have her wickedness repaid with tragedy. Lastly, Fakir is the knight, the prince’s protector who dies horribly in an attempt to save him.

Drosselmeyer, however, is as bound by fate as they are, his consciousness maintained by a permanently mechanical, clockwork structure. As he comes to realize by the series’ end, he too is just a character in someone else’s story;(34) doubly so, as he is not only a character in Princess Tutu, but The Nutcracker as well. Insofar as Princess Tutu is Drosselmeyer’s story, it is bracketed by The Nutcracker—both the first and last episode take their titles and significant portions of their music from the ballet.(35) However, Drosselmeyer’s role as the villainous manipulator of the story comes more from the original short story upon which the ballet is based, E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse Prince.

In the story, Drosselmeier, the godfather of main character Marie (Clara in the ballet), is the teller of the tale-within-a-tale about how the Nutcracker was cursed, changed from a handsome prince to an ugly creature.(36) A deeply ambiguous figure, on the one hand he initially appears giving gifts and tells Marie the story of how the Nutcracker was transformed from a good and handsome prince to the ugly creature he is now; on the other, the gift he gives is inalterable clockwork, rejected by the children in favor of toys they can play with as they choose, and he frequently mocks Marie and rejects her magical experiences as mere dreams. Most interestingly, both in terms of his ambiguity and his Princess Tutu namesake, he seizes control of the clock and summons the Mouse Prince and his armies, who are only repelled by the bravery of the Nutcracker.

When Marie falls ill, Drosselmeier comes to tell her stories, another seemingly kindly act. However, he inserts himself into the story as a character, where he comes across as subtly villainous—a standard fairy-tale wicked uncle who gets himself into trouble when he’s unable to help Princess Pirlipat, and sacrifices his nephew to get himself out. Once Marie actually enters the Nutcracker’s world, he dismisses Drosselmeier with contempt, saying that her powers of creation are greater than his.

Drosselmeyer, like Drosselmeier, is ultimately a pathetic figure, a storyteller who lacks imagination. For Drosselmeyer, this is expressed as an obsession with tragedy; he presents his characters with scenarios he cannot imagine a solution to, and