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animebw · 6 years ago

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Binge-Watching: Penguindrum, Episodes 22-24

At long last, we reach the end. In which the train of destiny takes a different track then I was expecting, sharing is caring, and family comes together at last.

Train of Destiny

I’m not gonna lie, there’s a large part of me that’s relieved to finally be done with Penguindrum. Writing about this show has been exhausting on multiple levels, and not the rewarding kind of exhaustion that comes from stuff like Gintama that gives me so much good to work with that I feel like I want to work my fingers to the bone to express how much I love it. This is the kind of exhaustion that comes from having no real idea how to approach a work, yet needing to find a way to do so regardless. It’s taken a lot of my mental energy to reach the end, forcing myself to sit through more and more scenes that I’m not quite sure how to process yet have to find a way to talk about regardless. Penguindrum has been an interesting ride, but it hasn’t been a fun one, even with the newly found clarity of its final long stretch. And I sincerely apologize for any of that frustration that came through in my analysis. I do this blog because, above all else, I enjoy writing about silly Japanese cartoons, and I don’t want that to ever stop being the case. My hope is now that I’ve finished with Penguindrum, I can finally leave it behind and move on to more rewarding prospects in the future. Because I never want this blog to feel like a chore, either for you or me.

Cool? Cool. Now let’s wrap this shindig up, because the finale left us with a lot to mull over.

In retrospect, my interpretation of the show’s views on fate were a little skewed. Penguindrum isn’t a show about rejecting fate wholesale; it’s a show about making your own fate, which carries different connotations with it. Sanetoshi and Penguinforce are the voices in the story that want to outright reject fate, up to destroying the world to remove its influence. They see all the seemingly inescapable evil in the world and conclude that the only option is to tear it down and hope something better pops up in its place. As an increasingly corrupt Kanba lays out at one point, ”This world will never give us the fruits of reward. That’s why we have to change the world.” He doesn’t see any way for himself to find happiness in this unjust world, and he knows there are many people who feel the same as him, so why should this world still stand? Why should a world that causes this much pain be allowed to continue standing? And Sanetoshi’s rhetoric takes that idea a step closer to full Evangelion territory, saying that as long as people are trapped inside the boxes called “self”, they can never experience true happiness. In their minds, the destiny dictated by this world is a destiny that prevents happiness. It’s a fate that dooms too many to darkness, so it must be fought and destroyed, no matter how many casualties that quest leaves in its wake. The few are worthy sacrifices for the many. It’s an understandable, even sympathetic outlook.

But the entire point of this finale is proving it wrong.

To Be Seen

Because what Penguindrum posits in the end is that even in a world as broken and uncertain as this one, you are not bound by the fate you’re set with. You can reshape it, evolve it, change it to forge your own destiny. All you need to do so.. is to be seen. Like the countless children lost in the Child Boiler who were seen, who were given a kind hand to pull them out of the darkness and into the light. As Tabuki realizes in a moment of understanding before his death, he and Yuri were only two of countless lost children throughout the world, two children who only needed one simple thing; to hear someone tell them, “I love you.” That’s the power of being seen, of knowing that there is someone out there who believes you’re worthy of being seen. It’s a truth that Himari knows very well; as she relates in a truly touching flashback, after being lost for so long, she was able to cry for joy because she realized, at long last, that she’d become the kind of child others would look for when she was lost. It’s in seeing each other, just like in Evangelion, that these lost souls are able to find the strength to keep their weary legs moving, to shake off the pains that try and bind them down. And with Kanba lost just as deeply as she once was, she knows that the only way to bring him back from the darkness is for someone to see him, just as she was seen all those years ago.

But there’s another level to that understanding as well. It’s not just about being seen and letting yourself be cared about; it’s about sharing that caring in turn. Where so many of the characters have run into trouble over the course of the show is that they only go so far as to recognize that people see value in them, but they get stuck on that point and assume that the correct answer must then be to completely destroy themselves trying to please others. They assume they have to take on all the burdens themselves because they don’t believe themselves worthy of letting others carry their own burdens for them. Yuri, Tabuki, Ringo, Sho, and especially Kanba in this final chapter; their mistakes were all the same. The way Kanba talks about saving Himari, it’s clear he doesn’t think he deserves to be her equal, like he hasn’t done enough to warrant her trust and love. He puts his entire reason for existing in someone else, and as a result, he can’t stand on his own. But love, truly worthwhile love, is not to be given completely. It is to be shared, like the first ever Fruit of Destiny in the metaphorical flashback to Sho and Kanba’s lost childhoods. There they are, stuck in the boxes of self Sanetoshi warned about, starving from lack of connection. But the instant Kanba finds the fruit of destiny in his cell, he doesn’t hesitate to split it in half and share it across their divide. His destiny is not the one the world laid out for him; he chooses to share it with the person he wants to share it with. Share the love, share the pain, share, as Himari puts it, the “series of small punishments” that make up life.

Because in the end... they’re each other’s family.

And that’s all they ever needed to be.

Family

Which brings me to by far the most powerful sequence of the entire show: the climax, set in the spinning, surreal wreckage of Momoka’s once lively dimensional chamber. It’s a world suspended in time and space, quiet and dead as if preserved in crystaline amber. Himari walks down the usual staircase, walks down to Kanba waiting down below. The glass shards hovering in the air tear her clothes just as usual, cutting into her. But she keeps walking, through stories and retellings and moments shared between the three of them, moments of love and happiness and joy even in the face of all their pain. Because the family they formed was never fated to happen. They chose to make it happen, in a million little moments, in a million little expressions of love, day in and day out. And that choice makes that bond truer than anything they left behind. And Kanba’s emotions run forth in shards of penguin-tinted blood, gasping with sorrow and sadness as the pain of losing Himari flows through him yet again. But this time, she’s here to try his tears, to turn the ache of his bright red blood into the brighter red of the fruits of destiny, the symbols of the bond they share. They share it. They share the burden, they share the punishment, they share the burden of living in a world that never makes life easy.

They share it... because they’re family.

And that’s the only destiny that ever mattered.

There’s a lot more I could say about the particulars of how this finale plays out. About the reveal that Momoka’s soul is, indeed, the power behind the crazy hats. How the surreal imagery jets jacked up to 11. About the uplifting, if melancholy, coda that sees the world restored and love stronger than ever before. But considering how exhausting writing about this show has been, I think it’s only fair to end it on a wholly positive note. Penguindrum, above all else, is a story of the power of family, but not family determined outside your control. It’s the story of the families we choose for yourselves, how we buck destiny to find our own that speaks to who we want to be. It’s a story about lost children being found again, and the importance of letting yourself be seen and seeing those who are fading from view. So if nothing else, let it be said that at long last, I am able to see Penguindrum.

Odds and Ends

-Well, hello, Double H. Nice to officially meet you.

-”One day I noticed: I hate this world.” And again, Sanetoshi’s speaking right at the audience. I see you, pal.

-In retrospect, I feel the tiny penguins don’t add much to the narrative. They’re just imitating what’s already happening in the scene, duplicating the emotions without adding to them.

My god, this has been an ordeal. Well, expect my closing thoughts in a bit, as well as what show will take its place.

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #penguindrum #mawaru penguindrum #kunihiko ikuhara

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animebw · 6 years ago

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Binge-Watching: Penguindrum, Episodes 19-21

In which we get literally All The Answers(tm), revealing what this show has been trying to say all along.

Penguinforce

We have clarity. Praise god, ring the bells, and sacrifice your fattest calf, we have clarity. With Penguindrum officially heading into its final stretch, it’s finally ready to buckle down and start tying together the chaotic whirlwind of plot and theme that’s been roiling in its bowels pretty much from the word go. My consistent frustration with this show is that it’s always played agonizingly coy about what it’s actually trying to say, but I’ve always gotten the sense that was kind of the point. This is a story where we’re not supposed to know where we’re going right from the outset; this is a story where we figure out the road map through the process of traveling down the road. And now that we’re finally reaching the end of that road, we’re able to piece together a picture of where we’ve been going from the start. At long last, we’ve got some actual tangible answers to some of the show’s longest running mysteries, and those answers cast a more definite light on what Penguindrum has been saying all this time. The result? A series of escalating descents into darkness that lays this show’s heart bare for all the world to see.

First and most importantly, we find out more about the organization that Sho and Kanba’s parents ran. It was called Penguinforce, and judging from what we see of it in flashback, this was the group that pioneered the imagery and symbolism that the Crazy Hat now uses, such as teh “survival tactic” jargon. This suggests that there’s a direct connection between this terrorist group and Sanetoshi’s ultimate goal, and wouldn’t you know it, it turns out Sanetoshi was once part of Penguinforce. But here’s where things get weird; not only was Sanetoshi part of the same group as Kanba’s parents, he... died. He died in the same incident that took Momoka’s life, and it’s implied that whatever actions Momoka took in that moment- whatever weird bulshit powers her diary has- are the reason that particular attack went so screwy. So not only is Sanetoshi still trying to carry out Pengnuinforce’s ultimate goal (more on that in a sec), he’s trying to do so from beyond the grave, even going so far as to call himself a ghost. And he’s not the only one; it turns out that the Takamura’s father has been dead for a long time, yet we distinctively see him (and his presumably also dead wife) interacting with Kanba in the present, as Kanba becomes more and more involved with Penguinforce’s dealings for the sake of getting the money necessary to save Himari’s life. Whether he died in the same incident as Sanetoshi or not remains to be seen, but it’s clear that whatever Momoka did to change the course of fate really rent the fabric of reality something fierce. And now, since the older generation is no longer alive to carry out their goals, they’re trying to manipulate their children, as represented by Kanba, into doing it for them. Literally trying to force their family’s burden into their shoulders, trying to force their “destiny” onto a gaggle of kids who have no direct connection to said destiny other than bonds of family.

There are two main takeaways from all the information that gets revealed over the course of these episodes. First, a lot of the answers to these bizarre mysteries are actually a lot more mundane than first appearances would lead to believe. It’s just that the trippiness of the presentation made them seem to otherworldly, perhaps because that’s how they seemed to the characters at first. Second, what reveals still trend into magic bullshit territory emphasize that this entire show is far more connected than it seemed. It’s just just a handful of random coincidental bonds, every piece of Penguindrum’s puzzle is tied to each other. It’s all part of the same chaotic stew of twisted fate and snarls of destiny. And with those remarkable connections now firmly established, the show can step up to the plate and lay out the entire damn point behind this cavalcade of madness. So what is Penguindrum? What, in the end, is it trying to say? What is it trying to be? To answer that question, we have to look at the one remaining mystery these episodes reveal; the intentions behind Penguinforce’s existence in the first place, what they were even trying to accomplish at all. And from that, the answer becomes instantly clear.

Put simply, Penguindrum is a show about how we define family.

Family Found

Yes, that was always an undercurrent running throughout the show, but the information revealed here makes it clear that this, above all else, is what Penguindrum’s trying to explore. Penguinforce is dedicated to reshaping the world, much like Sanetoshi’s hinted at ever since his first appearance, but to what end? As it turns out, the explicit reasoning for why the world’s destiny needs to be re-written is that as is, too many children are getting left behind. Like the show’s opening monologue itself said, some people are lucky enough to be born into good circumstances with good families, but not everyone has that chance. Plenty of kids are born into broken homes, or tossed out and forgotten, or abandoned by their blood relatives and left to wander the streets. They’re left to vanish into the oblivion of society’s eye, disappearing from public view and fading away into nonexistence. And that idea is literalized through the metaphor of the Child Broiler, a bizarre extradimensional warehouse where lose children are collected to literally be shredded into paper scraps, erased from existence just as definitely as they’ve been erased from the public eye. Our world might not have a literal Child Boiler, but the void it represents is there all the same. They’re the children who the world chooses not to see, the children who get left behind and abandoned until they might as well have never even existed at all.

And that concept of choice has become incredibly central to the show’s conception of family and fate. Like I said in earlier posts, Penguindrum dedicates a lot of time to exploring how the bonds chosen for us by blood and the bonds we choose for ourselves aren’t necessarily the same thing. And one last piece of evidence makes that theme abundantly clear: Kanba, Sho and Himari aren’t even blood relatives either. Only Sho is the biological son of the heads of Penguinforce; Kanba and Himari were adopted. Their entire family was built around the idea of choice, of choosing people they wanted to share their lives with, not by blood, but by connection. And it’s that choice, the show posits, that will save children from our own Child Boiler. It’s the choice to see them, to reach out and pull them out of obscurity, to make them part of our families, to choose a family not through the blood that runs in common veins, but through the hope that runs in common hearts. Himari was lost before Sho found her, an abandoned kid living on the streets with no hope of ever returning. She was prepared to be sent to the Child Boiler and erased from existence with no one every knowing she was there. But Sho chose to see her. Sho chose to reach out to her. Sho chose to say, “I want to share my life with you. Not because we’re fated to be together, but because I want to be with you.” And I’m not gonna lie, the flashback sequence where we see them come together was really goddamn sweet. They even did the goddamn Attack on Titan scarf thing, as if they knew my weak points.

That’s the world that Sanetoshi and Penguinforce are fighting for. They want to shift reality to a plane where every child can be seen, where every lost soul no longer has to feel bound by bonds they never chose, where they can choose for themselves the bonds they wish to carry on. They wish for a world where family and love are freed from the notion of having to exist where they aren’t needed. For all their villainy and willingness to tread dark paths in pursuit of that end, it’s a surprisingly noble goal. We’ve seen the price of assumed love too many times over the course of this show. We’ve been made well aware of the consequences of stripping away the choice of who you choose to share your heart with. If we can break away from that world, find a place where everyone has the chance to be seen... then I’m all for making that happen.

But it’s not going to be easy.

Family Lost

Because just as it’s true that no one deserved to feel bound by choices outside their control, it’s also true that far too many people take those bonds as gospel, unable to picture a world where family and love doesn’t define where you stand. Sho feels that because he’s the only biological son of the Pengnuinforce heads, he’s the only one who deserves to be punished for their actions, casting himself in direct relation to their crimes despite having nothing to do with them. Kanba, meanwhile, directly inserts himself into the darkness of the family he chose, going all in on the idea of saving his chosen life even at the cost of being devoured by his unchosen one. It’s also revealed that Masako has been his biological sister all this time, and she’s been trying to drag Kanba back to what she thinks is his “rightful” family. To that end, she’s furious at Himari’s presence in his life, blaming her for usurping her role without authority as the sister he fights for, thinking that a chosen family could never be more important than a “real” family chosen by fate. She talks about Himari “returning what she stole from her,” as if love is something that can be taken from its rightful place, as if there’s a ground-zero assumed baseline of love that just naturally exists between certain people that must be protected. And Himari in turn feels like she’s slipping away from these bonds she’s formed with Sho and Kanba, afraid that the stress from their unchosen families is undoing the bonds they chose with each other. And when all these secrets and lies finally start spilling out, it blows apart the life they’ve formed with each other, scattering them to their own individual traumas once more.

We end this session on the most downer note possible. Himari, Sho and Kanba have separated, each trapped by their own hang-ups about the family they think they’re “supposed” to believe in instead of the family they actually do. But Himari isn’t giving up. She’s determined to pull them all back together, to pull them out of their pain, even at the risk of her own increasingly fragile well-being. She doesn’t believe that their bonds are false because they weren’t fated, and she’s determined to make the rest of them see that too. The stage is set for the climax, for Pengnuinforce’s plans to be set into motion and rewrite the fabric of the universe at last. How will it all turn out? We’ll have to wait and see. Let’s hope Pengnuindrum can stick the landing.

Odds and Ends

-”We’ll start by acting like family. And at some point, we’ll become real family.” Yeah, not surprised that didn’t work out.

-Yay, she got her sweaters out! You go, girl!

-I was not expecting a forehead-off today, yet here we are.

-”How is it?” aksjdhasdkjl she’s so into this

-”Dude, you just put ‘em in a bag and massaged them.” lol

-I’m guessing the Fruit of Destiny represents real human connection, which can only be gotten by two people going at each other, not away. I think.

-”I think turning to ice through kissing is more fun.” So damned if you run away from connection, damned if you seek cheap, false connections. Got it.

-”This policy had been disobeyed recently” FUCK YOU A PICTURE TELLS A THOUSAND WORDS HUH

One more session to go. See you next time for the epic conclusion of Penguindrum!

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #penguindrum #mawaru penguindrum #kunihiko ikuhara

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