#monogatariposting

[typellblog]

Hitagi End - An Analysis

Well, that’s it, folks. We’ve finally reached the end of the Monogatari series. It’s even right there in the arc title.

Hold on, I’m being told that there’s another whole season. What the fuck, I’ll be well into 2025 by the time I’m done with this.

But yeah, as usual with the naming scheme the second word seems to be the thing our title character has to confront - Hitagi is in active resistance against the End, and whether in the abstract form of the conclusion of the series itself, or the more literal threat of Sengoku Nadeko, there’s one common feature. Graduation.

One thing I remember vividly from Koimonogatari - from the first time I watched Koimonogatari, several years ago - is Kaiki’s offhand statement that Hitagi and Koyomi will probably break up in college. He says it so matter-of-factly, but it’s not something I ever considered, watching the rest of the series. I was fully immersed in the teenage perspective, convinced that nothing would ever end. It takes the perspective of a washed up older man to break the illusion, I suppose. You always hear the same complaint about romance manga - there should be more focus on after they’re already in a relationship. Getting together shouldn’t be the story’s end. 

One reason why it might be the story’s end is because as long as it ends there you can convince yourself it will last forever. Their relationship will never sink to the level of mundanity, of lovers’ quarrels - there will never be the possibility of being interested in someone else, finding someone else, being replaced. 

That is the kind of idealistic, indulgent, static ending that Sengoku Nadeko desires, and as a result is the kind of ending that Senjougahara Hitagi fights against. 

This is where I say something about Kaiki Deishuu. Something to make sense of what he’s doing in this story. He’s a man in search of an ending, I could say. Ever since the death of Gaen Tooe, he’s been looking for a way to move on. Perhaps this is why he tells Nadeko the same cause of death - the person you have a crush on died in a car accident. So mundane, so unexpected, so implausible. He thinks she will accept it. Does he?

He’s a man who’s already met his end, I could say. Such is the fate of the specialists. They’ve already graduated, already long since handled their personal agreements and disagreements. They’re stuck, now, bound to their own nature, their own rules. They appear only as supporting characters, never the protagonist. Well. I guess that’s a lie. 

In adopting narrators other than Koyomi, Second Season shifts the focus away from his obsession with helping and connecting to others. Koyomi’s interactions with and idealization of women results in a sense of distance - he struggles to see himself in them and their problems. How much of his attempts to cross that distance are really just attempts to help himself? 

This dynamic collapses when the female cast, facing their own issues, are made protagonists in their own right. They experience themselves as the Other, & Koyomi’s standard process of understanding the girl by first understanding the oddity becomes in these cases a process of self-exploration. 

And yet here we are, back to seeing a male protagonist confronted with the issues of women that he struggles to understand. 

I don’t mean to rag on men, exactly, I just think back to how there tends to be less distance between Koyomi and other men, how he’s more capable of seeing them as another version of himself, and I think that the best explanation for Kaiki’s presence here is that he’s filling in.

He himself thinks so, although it’s Oshino, and not Koyomi, that he considers. 

Regardless, the parallels to Koyomi are established firmly enough by the ending. Kaiki was poison to Hitagi but a surprising help to Nadeko, while Koyomi is the opposite. Put that way, their differences and similarities seem readily explicable. Koyomi saves people. He forgives the harm they do to him. It works for the prickly Hitagi, who needs a pillar of support, but not Nadeko, who needs to be told that she isn’t a victim.

Kaiki lies to people, but that doesn’t mean he’s trying to hurt them. Ononoki proposes a reading of his involvement with Hitagi where he had no ill intentions whatsoever. He didn’t try to free her from the crab simply because he didn’t think it would help her to regain what she had lost. He caused her parents’ divorce to keep her from under the thumb of her mother. He even swindled the cult, although more as an act of revenge than anything. Perhaps there was some impropriety in their relationship, perhaps he exploited her feelings for him, but our understanding of the events is vague enough to give him the benefit of the doubt if we really want.

Kaiki fails to help Hitagi, not (just?) because he’s trying to scam her, but because he’s fundamentally incapable of being honest with her. All his actions move around her and ignore her wishes.

When it comes to Nadeko, on the other hand . . . I mean, it doesn’t initially seem like he’s doing much better, does it. He has no luck with his manipulations, with currying favour, with bold untruths. In the end though, the way he helps Nadeko is a lie that they both know is a lie. Really, it’s more like telling her a story. 

And I’ve written before about how Nadeko needs stories.

Kaiki doesn’t tell her anything that another person couldn’t have. Koyomi, Hitagi, even Nadeko herself is probably aware of similar advice on some level. Don’t throw your life away pointlessly. If you want to do things, then you should do them. You can’t succeed unless you try. 

Kaiki’s talent is simply in recognising that Nadeko needs to hear it. Koyomi wouldn’t have thought to say it, because he doesn’t know why she became a snake god. She doesn’t want to tell him either. He’s stuck. 

But it’s not as if Kaiki has some unique insight into her psychology that lets him work this out. As he puts it, he’s not like Oshino. He didn’t ‘see through’ Nadeko, he just straight up ‘saw’ it. He broke into her room, twisted open the lock to her closet with a 10 yen coin and fucking looked. Her parents didn’t know what was in there, Koyomi didn’t know what was in there, Tsukihi didn’t know, Oshino didn’t know, even Hanekawa who heard about it from someone else and thought it might be an important detail couldn’t possibly know without opening the god damn closet.

This is where Kaiki’s habit of working around people becomes useful. Because more than anyone else, he recognises that Nadeko might be fine as a god, just as he thought Hitagi might be fine staying weightless two years ago. He’s not trying to save her. He’s not trying to do what’s best for her. He’s simply trying to scam her, with all the lack of respect for her personal belongings that implies. 

This establishes, perhaps, an important difference between Koyomi and Kaiki, but it also establishes a similarity. In dealing with oddities - in dealing with people - the key is getting to know them. 

This is something Koyomi struggles with, out of a fear of being too forward, a fear of hurting them, a lack of appreciation of his own value, as a kind of half-person, a fake person, that could only weigh others down. Kaiki embraces his nature as a fake and adopts only the most rational and most unscrupulous methods of approaching others.

The question, I suppose, is why? What does Kaiki get out of playing a character that informs all of his actions without explaining them? What does he get out of remaining unknowable even to himself, reacting with surprise to his own feelings and motivations? What does he get from acting without thought, tossing away caution, tossing away patience, and tossing away money in an attempt to toss away the past?

Kaiki values money for its endless acceptability, its exchange value. He doesn’t wish to have money, he wishes to use it, and in keeping with this philosophy, he considers nothing irreplaceable, not even himself. The person named Kaiki Deishuu is deliberately false, deliberately contradictory, and he’s long since given up on getting to the bottom of that particular well.

I begin to understand why he comes up, now, in relation to Nadeko, who is lost in a web of her own identity. 

Sengoku Nadeko is telling herself a story. She has to, in order to not hate herself. She is, and will continue to be, in love with Koyomi-oniichan. This isn’t something that motivates her actions in the conventional sense so much as a wall to keep out the world, to assert that she is normal. So why does she still hold onto it, in this situation where it has become so far beyond normal? 

Because she considers it part of herself. She is still playing the role of Sengoku Nadeko, and she can’t cast aside the most Nadeko piece of herself, the piece that she has spent the most time and effort showing off to other people. It would call her existence into question, make her look fake, make her feel empty. The sense of normalcy she’s trying to achieve is not in how other people see her, it’s in how she sees herself. She takes the pieces of herself that are left, the pieces of herself she’s been given, and pulls them together into a story that makes sense. To her, loving herself means never changing, never throwing parts of herself away, never identifying a problem in her own behaviour. 

She’s happy, Kaiki thinks. It feels a little different from the end of Otori, where Kuchinawa was still presented as a separate existence. He no longer pokes at Nadeko’s insecurities, at least not obviously. In recognising her own role in the whole affair, Nadeko is no longer worried about hurting others, of being seen as a victim, because she fully acknowledges herself as the one with all the power in her interactions. Godhood is an unusual role for her, but she seems happy to take it up, viewing her job as responding to the prayers of worshippers. It's a much simpler, more transactional view of social relations than she had to navigate as a human. She likes people who are nice to her and doesn't like people who aren't.

Ultimately, though, she's still playing a part, putting on a performance for Kaiki’s benefit. Her cutesy habits as a god are a far cry from the more genuine rage she expresses in the classroom in Otori. But then again, she doesn't have to worry about that, because she's not a human. She's no longer a part of society, with all the freedom that entails. An entirely negative freedom, of course. She doesn't have to do anything and thus there's nothing for her to do, besides play games with Kaiki and drink the alcohol she could only sneak sips of behind her dad’s back at home.

She’s happy, but does that matter?

Kaiki doesn’t think so. The other parallel established in the ending is between Nadeko and Hitagi. Compared to Nadeko as someone who never throws anything away, Hitagi is someone who rejects unnecessary things, rejects convenient narratives of victimisation, rejects divine assistance.

Nadeko is broken, thinks Kaiki. Like Hitagi’s mother. Like Hitagi almost was. And being broken has a specific meaning for him - it means no longer accurately recognising the value of the things you have. Nadeko overvalues the things that play an important role in her delusions and ignores everything else. In comparison, think back to Hitagi listing out everything she has to Koyomi back in Bakemonogatari. She has so little, but it’s all precious to her. Not only that, but she manages to offer it to another person. It’s only in recognising the value of herself and also someone else that they can form a mutually beneficial ‘exchange’, a real connection.

In Bakemonogatari, Hitagi’s self is framed as a series of external objects. You are the people around you. In Koimonogatari, Kaiki’s self is found in his money. Endlessly exchangeable, never unique, always mercenary. He offers himself up to Nadeko and gets nothing in return, because she fundamentally doesn’t value what he’s bringing her. Donating to a shrine at New Years’ is a sucker’s game, Kaiki thinks at the beginning of the novel, and he’s proven right enough.

For Kaiki, you could say that the money he spends is spent on himself, on presenting a certain image of himself. So what of the money he takes from others?

He accepts Hitagi’s woefully low payment for the job. He accepts it as a job, because if it’s not a job he’d have to start thinking about what his relationship to her is, if not client and employer. It would become unique, no longer exchangeable for any of the other half-dozen scams he’s running. 

He accepts Izuko’s 3 million severance fee. He accepts it and goes on working. It’s unlike him, Yotsugi says. He’s contradicting himself. The money isn’t being exchanged for anything, he’s just taking it. But isn’t that the job of a scammer? To get as much money for as little effort as possible? Then why does he keep doing the job? 

He’s acting unlike himself. Throughout the novel, he’s constantly pointing out new sides of himself. Phrases he’s said for the first time. Actions he’s never done before. After a certain point, I have to conclude he’s lying. Kaiki acts unlike himself in Koimonogatari because acting unlike himself, unlike the persona he deliberately acts as, is one of his most characteristic actions.

Being a specialist is about balance - or at least so we would assume from the actions of Oshino Meme. It’s about give-and-take. But Kaiki is a fake specialist, a conman. He should only want to take. It’s not a coincidence, then, that he keeps giving. 

I understood it on an intellectual level, but now I get it. I really fucking get it. He’s just, so, Araragi Koyomi. He’s so thoughtless and impulsive, so concerned with appearances, enamoured with his own edginess, stubborn, self-deprecating, cowardly, dense, inconsiderate, self-sacrificing, willful, proud of outsmarting children, reluctant to commit to anything, and most of all half-assed.

That is the characteristic trait of Araragi Koyomi as I understand it. He’s trapped between worlds, vampire and human, but doesn’t seem particularly inclined to choose one or the other. He doesn’t just look to the future, but the past too. In reaching towards what he wants, he’s immensely reluctant to give up what he already has. 

All the way back in Nekomonogatari Kuro, he characterises Hitagi and Suruga as different to him, more forward-looking, prefiguring Kaiki’s comments about Hitagi as someone willing to throw aside the most important things to her to get what she wants. 

It’s funny, because in doing so he also talks about Tsubasa as someone who’s the same, who also looks for solace in the past. Tsubasa, who in Nekomonogatari Shiro we come to understand will casually cast aside the past if it doesn’t suit her. 

She has a different perspective, you see. She thinks Koyomi is different from her. He’s ‘unshakable’, in her words, not concerned about losing his identity. Precisely because he keeps looking back, because he keeps confronting his past, he’s able to accept all of himself, unlike her. 

Despite Monogatari being a series about people changing, several times characters espouse the idea that you can’t change, not really.

The thing is that while change is obviously possible, what this idea cautions against is ignoring and forgetting about what you used to be like. Tsubasa can’t just make a new version of herself whenever things start getting difficult, she has to understand herself as a continuous person composed of everyone she’s ever been. 

The Rainy Devil teaches Suruga something similar, as regardless of the kind of person she wishes to become, the arm can’t fundamentally transform her. It simply shows that she was already the kind of person who could learn to run fast, already the kind of person who wanted to brutalize Hitagi’s new boyfriend. Koyomi’s idea that she’s somehow more forward-looking than him seems laughable when she feels as though Hitagi and her issues are something that she ran away from.

It’s a fundamentally half-assed application of Numachi Rouka’s methods - for running away from your problems to work you have to remain detached, and the devil’s grasping arm is evidence both of Suruga’s failure in that regard, but also of the attachment to life itself that Rouka lacked. No wonder it felt off when it suddenly disappeared in Hanamonogatari. 

At the same time, though, losing the arm is evidence of her change throughout that arc. Her running no longer isolates her, but instead can be seen as a way to connect with others. It’s no coincidence that’s how she ends up meeting Koyomi near the end. It’s his advice that gives her the confidence to get over the finish line, but the first step is abandoning everything and just running - not trying to beat anyone, not trying to hold back, with no particular goal or attachment to a wish. It’s the first time she really can since she started using the monkey’s paw.

Notably it’s Kaiki that offered her an alternative and advised her to just let Rouka have the parts. Kaiki, the one who seemed to be collecting them himself. Isn’t the concept of him possessing what is in a very real sense the remains of Gaen Tooe so fascinating? But it’s the yet-living Suruga that he calls her legacy. It’s hard to say if meeting her, in some way, helped him move on. 

Once again, we see a difference from Koyomi, who advises Suruga to act like herself and do what she wants. Kaiki tells Suruga to do what’s easy, what would cause less difficulties for her, in a similar way that he seems to understand Nadeko is much happier as a god and Hitagi wouldn’t have to confront her memories of her mother as long as she remains weightless.

By regaining her weight and her emotions, nothing will change, Oshino cautions Hitagi. She won’t suddenly make up with her mother. But it does allow her to move forward, to value her memories correctly, not allow her missing weight to weigh on her so much that she will never be able to become close to anyone else.

“She’s different now, more so than if she were a different person” Kaiki says, and it’s so easy to read him as relieved that she’s not stuck as she was when he fucked her up. That she’s still always in the moment where she truly fell in love for the first time. That she was able to remain the same person while still loving someone else. 

Tsubasa’s immense righteousness is subverted in Nekomonogatari, Suruga’s seeming single-mindedness is deconstructed in Hanamonogatari, and despite the effusive words of praise they both have for Koyomi Araragi it’s evident from his internal narration that he’s more pathetic and wavering than anyone else - and perhaps that’s how one ought to be, here. Never able to make a decision on what’s most important. Always most invested in whatever you’re doing right now, whatever person is right in front of you.

Hitagi is a character that we never see from the first person. Koyomi’s view of her as a titan striding headlong towards her goals is never really contradicted in the story, because despite her immensely evident vulnerability, she’s shown as making a more active effort to move on than anyone. 

The shadow of her past relationship with Kaiki hangs over Koimonogatari like a specter.

In Nisemonogatari it’s mentioned that her animus towards Kaiki probably comes from the fact she wasn’t able to hate him in the past. While she was still under the influence of the crab, her emotions regarding her mother were dampened. Kaiki’s acts of splitting her family up likely wasn’t something she was capable of expressing her resentment for at the time. 

If you think of that hatred as a final remaining regret, her kidnapping of Koyomi and confronting of Kaiki in Nisemonogatari the expression of such, then it makes sense that Nisemonogatari also marks the start of her mellowing out, never again reaching the heights of violence she demonstrates at the beginning of that novel. 

An interesting thing about Kaiki’s role there, looking back, is that he’s clearly aiming for that outcome. As soon as Hitagi confronts him, he leaves. He tells her to stop worrying about the past, about the fact that she once had a relationship with him, because he’s thoroughly uninterested in her as she is now. He provokes her into affirming her current self and relationship with Koyomi. And he says that the man who tried to violate her died in a car accident. 

Is he lying? Is it just a coincidence, that he goes with the same manner of death as Gaen Tooe, the same line he feeds to Sengoku Nadeko? 

Either way, the purpose of the line becomes a little clearer. He’s trying to get her, both of them, to move on. To understand that the people who seemed so important to you are mundane, the events that shaped your lives don’t mean anything in the big picture, and your past is just that. It’s over. It’s the end. 

He almost embodies the concept, in Koimonogatari. We see from his perspective and he is indeed far less ominous, far less portentous, far less important, than he seems from the third person. 

He’s also really bad at it. Despite his exhortations to ignore the past, he himself clearly still cares a lot about Hitagi. She as well can’t quite avoid falling back into old patterns of banter, admiration, reliance. 

And his ideology isn’t enough for Nadeko. He can’t just deny what she’s clinging onto now, he needs to give her something new. They called Osamu Tezuka a God, she says, hesitantly forming a bridge between her current self and the future she wants to inhabit. Telling herself a convenient story that patches it all up. 

It results in an oddly ambiguous message. Nisio loves his tricks, revealing something the narrator was mistaken about at the very end, but when Hitagi says she never loved him and hangs up it’s hard to tell which one of them came out ahead in that little back and forth. Maybe Kaiki, the eternal washout, was so enamoured of his own unique subjectivity he never considered the schoolgirl he was scamming wasn’t so enamoured of him. 

Who am I kidding, it doesn’t feel that way at all. Her rejection of the idea that she ever liked him was unconvincing in Nisemonogatari and it’s unconvincing here. And the novel frankly endorses that wilful self-denial. Perhaps it’s important to always act like you’ve fallen in love for the first time. Perhaps it’s important to believe that you’ll never break up with your boyfriend. 

In this seeming endorsement of Kaiki’s ideology, I have to wonder what kind of End Hitagi is even fighting against. 

Nadeko asserts that a single failure is the End, it’s Nadekover, she has no choice but to kill everyone and then herself. In resisting her, Hitagi asserts her right to change, to move on, to love Koyomi even after her life was destroyed by Kaiki. 

On the other hand, Kaiki asserts that failure means nothing, he doesn’t care about anything that has ever happened, after this he’ll just move on and start another moneymaking scheme, same as the last. Hitagi also resists this. She must, if she is to believe her relationship with Koyomi matters in the first place. Her denial that she ever liked Kaiki ends up an odd sort of validation for their relationship. If she did crush on him, that would be important to her, therefore it didn’t happen.

It perfectly mirrors Kaiki’s refusal to admit he ever cared about her. It puts the lie to his whole persona, but, like, it’s supposed to be a lie anyway, I think. They’re both lying to each other and themselves all the time, so much so that they fail to understand even the most straightforward exchanges between them. It’s fine, honestly. They don’t need to be true to each other as long as they’re true to themselves.

One thing that I never really mentioned is the other way you could take this arc title. Hitagi End as in the end of Second Season - the end of the series as a whole, potentially, if you take Nisio’s afterwords seriously (he doesn’t, as evidenced by the several previous times he’s pulled this exact gag). 

Astute fans of the anime airing watch order will note that placing Hanamonogatari, an arc set well in the future, before this one robs it a little of that sense of finality. Nadeko is not so much of a threat, knowing our protagonists survive. This is of course the twist, the lie, the joke of this arc. Life goes on, almost interminably so. The idea that graduation would be the End for Hitagi and Koyomi is as ridiculous as the idea that making some mistakes at fourteen would be the End of Nadeko. 

Even Kaiki’s attempt to escape the narrative, put a pin in the whole thing by killing himself off, is neatly and instantly subverted by remembering his presence in Hana. It’s not supposed to be a reveal, exactly, that this man is a liar. It’s just there, from the first page to the last. 

After Ononoki cautions Kaiki that he’s acting unlike himself, before he goes to talk to Nadeko for the final time, she spends a bit of time telling him what Kagenui’s been up to. Sounded like she was the same as ever, he thinks. I think of this, amongst all his attempts to dramatize his own life, differentiate himself from himself, craft his own ending. His life keeps going on, and Kagenui’s still marching to the beat of her own drum, same as ever. 

Happy New Year!

[superchat]

Hiii your recent monogatariposting reminded me I have some figures and thought you might appreciate them. Tbh the shinobu is my favorite

im sorry for not replying for so long, these are rlly great tho. i want an ougi fig some day, a kaiki would nice too...

[primiera]

assuming the scott pilgrim monogatariposting is because they're both works about 'guys' who need to be forcefemmed not because it would fix them but because it would make whatever's wrong with them hotter

[toskarin]

meme: if two guys were on the moon...

araragi: what about it

meme: oh, I was just thinking.

[hard cut to later in the day, meme now laying awkwardly in a completely different chair, but araragi remains unmoved]

meme: hm... if two guys were on the moon, they'd be astronauts, wouldn't they?

araragi: I suppose so. they'd have a kinship, wouldn't they?

[shot from outside the building]

meme: wouldn't it be unforgivable if one killed the other with a rock?

[shot returns to inside the building, the camera is now inexplicably focused on meme's hands as they fold across his lap]

araragi: of course.

meme: I don't think so, but maybe you could have a point. it's not easy to be an astronaut, after all. sometimes you have to make split decisions like that. can we be so quick to judge one for sins that might not be their fault? maybe we can...

[cut to power lines]

[cut to the moments before a bird is hit by a car]

[title card]

[typellblog]

Nadeko Medusa - An Analysis

Otorimonogatari begins in media res, with the emphasis on the inevitability of this ending solidifying it as a kind of tragedy. Why am I here, Nadeko asks. Why me? Why was this so inevitable?

What did the rest of the cast do that allowed for their problems to be solved, that allowed for Koyomi to help them instead of becoming enemies?

In truth we’re well off the rails - Nadeko doesn’t even have the typical specialist appearance that so consistently helps in every other arc. The one that unravels the mysteries is the serpent, Kuchinawa, who turns out to be none other than Nadeko herself. 

In other words the specialist role is filled by Nadeko, the protagonist role is filled by Nadeko, the victim role is filled by Nadeko, even the oddity afflicting her - all Nadeko. It’s an entirely solipsistic, fabricated story.

As a result, Koyomi’s involvement becomes singularly unhelpful. I don’t know if people really do just go ahead and save themselves, but at the very least they have to try to let others save them. There’s a particular poison about Nadeko that makes Koyomi’s usual modus operandi, seen from the outside, particularly useless. We see in his interactions with her throughout the arc that he suspects she is the victim of an oddity despite her denials - Nadeko thinks she is lying to him, but Koyomi’s guesses are already completely off from the perspective of Nadeko herself being the snake. He doesn’t think of her as someone capable of manipulating and deceiving, as someone capable of being the instigator of her own incident. 

Koyomi’s partial immortality is a representation of his self-sacrificing nature, him lowering his ‘intensity as a human’ in order to better approach others. But the more he lowers his guard around Nadeko the worse it gets, her poison stopping him from healing. 

Poison is a topic that comes up in the previous arc, the motto of Gaen Tooe, Kanbaru Suruga’s mother. “If you can’t be medicine, then be poison, otherwise you’re just plain old water.” What she means by poison is also ambiguous. It does bring to mind the antagonist of that arc (if you can even call her that) Numachi Rouka. Rouka, a girl that Koyomi couldn’t save, couldn’t even meet. Nadeko and Rouka have one main similarity - a tendency to run away from their problems & avoid getting to know other people. 

When something is asked of her Nadeko’s typical response is to do nothing, neither refuse or accept but simply wait until they give up, papering the interaction over with various ‘sorry’s or ‘anyway’s to avoid addressing the main topic. Nadeko is barely aware of what she herself is doing throughout much of the arc, avoiding thinking about the problems instead of doing anything to address them - like asking for help. After she snaps in the classroom, she leaves - after eating the talisman in Koyomi’s house, she runs away - no destination in mind besides getting away from the questions and expectations placed on her by society. 

Nadeko’s depression and anxiety, just like Rouka before her, alienate her from life itself - embracing inhuman death in the form of becoming an oddity. 

One of the things about oddities is that they don’t appear to ordinary people. Hachikuji calls it the ‘backstage’ in Nisemonogatari. They’re cut off from the ordinary operations of the world itself, only visible to those with supernatural connections or their own chosen victims. 

And Nadeko, by the end of Otorimonogatari, is quite firmly an oddity, a creature that can’t be approached for no reason. 

Koyomi saw the Lost Cow because he was lost. In encountering the Curse Cat he was, in fact, cursed. He has no business with the god of a dead shrine. No doors to unlock, no prayers to grant, no story to tell.

The narrative no longer sees him as trying to help a friend, but rather trying to forcibly involve himself with an oddity, in the same way as he wrestled the jagirinawa in Nadeko Snake. Don’t mistake the person you’re trying to save, Suruga tells him then. Nadeko is no longer the person he’s trying to save, now. 

This leads me to believe the point where it’s officially Nadekover is when she takes the talisman, fuses with Kuchinawa, loses her last reason to be attached to the narrative of herself as a human. The framing of the novel presents it as an inevitable ending because it’s narrated from the perspective of a Nadeko who’s already reached that ending. For her, looking back, there’s no changing the sequence of events that led her there. The idea that everything happening to her is inevitable and beyond her control is a neat excuse for her, but it’s not true. 

Okay, but seriously, how did we get here?

Nadeko constantly interprets events in a way that makes her feel guilty, like she did something wrong. Her fundamental view of the world revolves around “victimisers and victims” (i.e. people who hurt others and people who are hurt).

She would rather see herself as a bystander, as someone who doesn’t interact with others in either way. She finds the idea of human interaction, human touch, to be uncomfortable. However, people tend to see her as a victim, leading to an increasing worry about having a victim complex, thinking of it as ‘tricking’ others into seeing her as a victim, which becomes, in the extreme, victimising them in itself. 

She dissociates as a coping mechanism, seeing what she does and what is done to her as if it was happening to someone else. “Nadeko” did it, not her. “Nadeko” is how other people see her. An important part of Nadeko’s image is her bangs, which help craft an image of her in others’ minds, by obscuring her eyes and how she truly feels. This serves a kind of contradictory purpose, as while it’s implied Nadeko chose the bangs to deflect from her cuteness (even wearing baggy and unfeminine clothing as much as possible to avoid emphasising her cuteness) the bangs still result in people seeing her as cute. They can’t see the real her, and substitute their own assumptions onto her.

While this has some upsides for Nadeko, as it allows her to retain a blameless image, it also results in a lack of an identity. Nadeko knows who “Nadeko” is, but not who she is. She doesn’t truly identify with any of the things she does, so they’re attributed to “Nadeko”, not her. When others compliment her for being cute, she doesn’t feel as though she is being complimented. She doesn’t feel cute. She feels like she’s tricking people into thinking she’s cute. This constructed Nadeko allows her to feel like a bystander, the very thing she desires to soothe her guilt, but the more she feels as though she’s deliberately constructing it the more guilt she feels over the ‘deception’. 

Tsukihi is a kind of anti-Nadeko. Someone motivated with a strong sense of identity. Someone who’s direct to a fault and uncomplicatedly happy when people find her cute. Someone who doesn’t ascribe to Nadeko’s victimiser/victim dichotomy, because she believes in a third role, the hero. Someone who can touch others without making them uncomfortable, put in effort that doesn’t just help themself. 

Nadeko fears and loves her in equal measure. Fears her, because her attention is one of the few things capable of breaking through Nadeko’s shield of indifference. Loves her, because she’s exactly the kind of person Nadeko wants to be but thinks she never could. 

Trying to deal with Tsukihi reveals some of the contradictions inherent to Nadeko’s attitude. She acts passively, in a way that encourages people to be sympathetic, but then professes to be upset by getting that sympathy. Tsukihi, on the other hand, gives Nadeko just as much sympathy as she thinks Nadeko deserves, and Nadeko craves more nonetheless. In some ways she does still want to ‘look cute’ to others and relies on the acceptance that comes along with it. She’s stuck in a weird Catch-22 where she cant get closer to or further away from other people without resenting herself even more. 

It’s suggested that Nadeko’s crush on Koyomi is originally sourced from Tsukihi. It makes sense that Nadeko would pick Koyomi as a more conventional target for her affections, thinking the closest she could get to Tsukihi was a kind of sister-in-law relationship. 

Koyomi is someone that she supposedly feels love for, but is that coming from “Nadeko” or herself? The problem is that it’s not love exactly, it’s just another kind of shield that performs a similar role to her bangs. It gives her an excuse for why she isn’t interested in romance. It allows her to present as ‘normal’ to others, but of course that perception of normality belongs to “Nadeko”, not to her. Even Koyomi himself can’t get through to her. She doesn’t want him to understand her, to break down the barriers between them, she wants to keep him away with the bangs, to look cute to him just as she does to everyone else. She doesn’t actually want Koyomi, she just wants to remain in a constant state of wanting him, an unobtainable dream.

Cracks start emerging because of Hitagi’s presence, and that’s what has Nadeko praying for divine intervention. Hitagi makes the story of her loving Koyomi more trouble than it’s worth. It introduces jealousy, the business of dealing with his lovers. The real way to keep it stable isn’t even to kill Hitagi, it’s to kill him, affix him in the heavens as an unchanging star that will never grow any further or any closer. 

It’s tempting to see this particular purpose as the reason why Kuchinawa, as an oddity, descends upon Nadeko. But Nadeko herself doesn’t want to think about it. It’s not like Tsubasa, who after casting away her memories & emotions is genuinely unaware of them. Nadeko feels guilty about her curses towards Hitagi, wants to look cute by not mentioning them. The role that Kuchinawa fills isn’t to get Nadeko on a beeline to the talisman - he works much more indirectly.

First, and most obviously, Kuchinawa is a bully. He speaks rudely and directly where Nadeko is quiet and demure. This isn’t a shift in alignment, Kuchinawa isn’t ‘bad girl’ Nadeko - he just says what she’s been thinking this whole time and doesn’t want to admit to. His comments when he goes into school with her all question the ‘point’ of what she’s doing. From one view it’s an ancient god questioning new concepts, from another it’s Nadeko finally allowing herself to question things that she’s had to quietly accept this whole time. The intrusive thoughts stop her from concentrating and eventually lead to her snapping and fully channeling Kuchinawa to talk to the rest of the class. Again, while we could see this as Kuchinawa’s “influence”, it makes much more sense that Nadeko herself can no longer hold her feelings back. 

After all, another role that Kuchinawa’s directness performs is allowing Nadeko to poke at her own insecurities and contradictions. Kuchinawa is the voice in her head pointing out all the things that Nadeko has done wrong, ensuring the sources of her guilt are never far from her mind. There’s an odd kind of comfort to it, though - unlike the criticisms of other people, Kuchinawa never expects anything from her in response. He is amused by Nadeko’s deceptions, not resentful. He sees everyone in the world as a victimiser, as a liar. Everyone lives while deceiving themselves and others. It’s only natural. Therefore there’s nothing Nadeko can do about it. No way of her remaining a bystander.

Ultimately what I think Kuchinawa represents is Nadeko’s creative impulse turned towards escapism. He allows her to construct a story, present her life in a way she can accept, participate in a narrative she chooses. Her love for Koyomi is a story she’s been telling for a while, one that allows her to paper over the cracks in her life and give her the strength to continue. Now cracks start emerging in that story, and to paper them over she reaches for a paper-thin talisman. 

The question arises of why Kuchinawa (why Nadeko) even needed it in the first place. Clearly it plays a role in feeding Nadeko’s fantasies, granting Kuchinawa the supernatural power he needs to become real. But despite being billed as capable of granting any wish, it can’t actually make the story of her love for Koyomi real. It can’t make him love her. Because she doesn’t want him to in the first place. 

No, the talisman’s powers are limited. It can’t truly turn back time, or erase her mistakes at school, because she doesn’t believe her actions could ever be changed. It’s been over from the start, Nadeko says. There’s only one way it could ever end for her, only one type of person she could ever be, only one choice she could ever make. 

Every other Monogatari character has had multiple choices. Take Koyomi, who was prompted to kill the monster entirely, and instead made it one with him. Suruga, who was encouraged by Rouka to leave her alone and just live a normal life, and instead came back to play a final game. Tsubasa could have just let the oddities in her mind go burn off her stress and pretend it had nothing to do with her, but instead decided to let them back inside.

Let alone two options, though, Nadeko fails to see even one. What she ends up pursuing is neither of the two options, but instead the bad end, as if Koyomi had remained a vampire with Kiss-Shot.

She refuses to face reality. That’s what Tsukihi says - “telling someone to dream is like telling them to face reality.” It feels a bit contradictory but it fits into a theme that’s been consistent over the last few arcs. Seeing a dream is like having an end goal to work towards. Ougi says in Mayoi Jiangshi that it’s better to not achieve your dreams, because they’ll be inevitably disappointing. Koyomi says in Suruga Devil that wishing for something in itself is fine, it’s a destructive focus on the end result that’s the issue with the Monkey’s Paw. Tsukihi says she would support Nadeko if she was really trying to date Koyomi, but she’s not. She can’t face the reality of Koyomi having a girlfriend, of Koyomi being out of reach for her. What she’s doing is acting as though she’s in a different reality where that’s not true. 

It’s a fitting followup that when Nadeko snaps, acting her most Tsukihi-like, it’s to tell the rest of her class to face reality. As a result of Kaiki’s charms the class has started acting, in her words, “just like Nadeko”. Because lots of people’s secret feelings about each other were revealed, they no longer trust each other, assuming everyone around them are trying to trick each other, trying to act cute, to the point where they’ve given up on trying to make close relationships. Given up on the year, the class, entirely. Because they think they have no choice. 

Nadeko tells them to face reality, to accept that the world and the people around you aren’t as pretty as the stories we tell about them. To pursue a dream where everyone makes up in the end. To ‘rewrite’ the memory of that class with their own effort. It’s a vision of a Nadeko who does try to address her issues, as embodied by the class and the effects of Kaiki’s talismans. It’s what Otorimonogatari really should have been about, if Nadeko didn’t go ahead and make up another story on her own. A fantastical decoy of a story that has her running out of the classroom and never seeing the result of her efforts. 

Kaiki’s talismans, if we remember, were fake, their effects not genuinely manifested for anyone but Nadeko, who bought into the story, went as far as to research her own methods of breaking the curse, and ended up making it worse. It’s not as if she was at fault for what happened, it’s not as if she did it on purpose, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it happened according to her desires. It let her reconnect with Koyomi, didn’t it? 

Nadeko is the type of person who can take something false and through her creative impulse, chuunibyou, escapist fantasies, whatever you want to call it, make it into reality. It’s just that she’s unconsciously biased in a destructive direction, one that results in either her being hurt or her hurting others. 

This culminates in her consuming the talisman and becoming a god. The story she’s actually trying to make real isn’t the world where she’s an eternal victim, Koyomi constantly looking out for her. It’s the story where she’s an eternal victimizer, a serpent god with sharp fangs. 

Due to her new heat vision, her hair isn’t an inconvenience to her any longer, just to others. It pushes them away actively instead of just concealing her. You could say the hundreds of snakes move independently of her will, but in another view they are her will itself, animal instinct embodied. They’re only uncontrollable in the sense that she can’t control her own violent impulses. It’s easier for her to get rid of people than deal with them directly, and this confirms her view of herself as fundamentally selfish. She can’t be like Tsukihi.

In a complete inversion from the ethos she espouses to her class, Nadeko says she’s someone who likes people only if they’re kind to her, and can’t like anyone who dislikes her.  It’s a story where in becoming an oddity she no longer has to deal directly with the human world, no longer has to be concerned with what’s going on with her classroom or her parents. 

But that, she says, is “Nadeko”, not me. At the end of it all what she’s doing is still a performance for the benefit of others. She still can’t tell what she really wants, really is. She still gets by with the excuse that she’s a bystander and there’s someone else doing all that stuff. The phone call at the end makes her dissociation clear, I think. If she really wanted to kill Hitagi and Koyomi and Shinobu, would something so simple really stop her? If she actually hated and was jealous of Hitagi, would she calmly listen to her? Does she really have to thank her for her advice? The way she reminds herself that people who are kind to Nadeko are good people sounds like she’s trying to convince herself. 

Becoming the serpent god is in line with how Nadeko sees herself, but it’s not what she actually wants. She doesn’t really want an “I”, she tells Kuchinawa as they discuss her lack of self. She just can’t bear existing without one. She says it from the start of the book. She doesn't actually want to defeat Koyomi and reign victorious over the shrine. Nadeko’s way out of this whole mess was for him to kill her. 

I get it, Nadeko, I really do. Living is just so tiring, after all.

[typellblog]

Yotsugi Doll - An Analysis

We begin our march into the Final Season with an arc that feels both inscrutable and incredibly straightforward at the same time. Take the name, for example - typically the titular oddity is the one affecting our arc character, but in this case Yotsugi herself is the doll. 

In terms of comparable naming conventions, I would bring up Tsukihi Phoenix and Mayoi Snail - both characters implicated in this arc, one by her presence and the other by her very notable lack thereof. 

Hachikuji Mayoi is not the one afflicted by an oddity, I wrote back near the start of this project, but I think recently it’s become evident that this isn’t quite true. She was afflicted by the Snail - the role of the Snail that she was forced to play.

Looking at it that way there’s a question of how voluntary Yotsugi’s dollness, her emotionlessness, her lack of personality and ease of influence by others is meant to be. We know that she doesn’t actually lack emotions, she’s just incapable of expressing them, which is an important distinction. At the same time, she’s empty enough to fill and be filled by the roles of others, as a specialist’s shikigami & supernatural proxy. 

Tsukihi is a character in a similar boat, so far as the core of her nature lacks stability and seeks it out from others. Is she, too, afflicted by the phoenix? She certainly doesn’t embrace the role of an oddity, unless we’re to say that her role is acting exactly like a human. Instead, she takes up the role of an Araragi, a Fire Sister, and in her deliberate attempt to become one etc etc we all know the quote.

That being said, there’s a question of how her life is impacted by the phoenix. Koyomi is certainly worried, in this book. In the scene where they get in the bath together her extremely short-term thinking is demonstrated in numerous ways as she fails to conserve conditioner, easily forgets what she was talking about upon being splashed with water, and of course proceeds with the whole plan heedless of the consequences of Karen’s inevitable return. 

Tsukihi is stuck in the present, neither looking back to the past or looking forward to the future, and there’s no better representation of such than her frequent hairstyle changes. It’s the regenerative power of the phoenix that lets it grow so easily, allowing her to ignore consequences and return to the same, default state.

Koyomi is the opposite, his hair growth also evidence of his vampiric abilities, but in the sense that he keeps it long to hide the marks on his neck. He puts off cutting it over and over again, saying he’ll do it ‘after exams’. We might say that in opposition to Tsukihi his hair is evidence of him being stuck in the past, unwilling or unable to move on from the effects of his vampirism. 

Both of them, though, need to move into the future, Koyomi thinks. But by the end of the bath scene, we’re getting the sense that Tsukihi already is. She hasn’t cut her hair in a while, she says, because she has a ‘wish’ she wants granted.

If Tsukihi is capable of developing as a person even despite the nature of the phoenix, then we might question whether Yotsugi is not also capable of change, becoming more human-like. 

But is that true? Right at the beginning of the story, we’re treated to Shinobu and Koyomi discussing Yotsugi’s position. Shinobu says that while Yotsugi is an oddity, she’s an oddity whose role is imitating humans. Not to be or become one, Shinobu clarifies, but to be with them, to blend in alongside them. In that sense, she exists the way she does for the benefit of humans. She was created by them, serves as their shikigami, and acts similarly enough to them that you could almost believe she was one. She just isn’t quite there, her convenience located in the fact that you don’t actually have to treat her in the same way you’d treat a person, when it comes down to it. 

This convenience, this privileging of the human perspective, is fundamental to oddities in general. They exist in the forms that they do because those forms are the most sensical to humans. The animals they draw their appearance from, the puns that make up their names, their sources in old myth -  all are symbols that allow people to observe them, speak of them, and tell stories of them. 

After all, in a sense they cannot exist without these stories. Koyomi, who has been telling them all this time, knows this better than anyone. The oddities are found in the gaps between reality and his narration. I don’t say that to suggest there’s some objective reality where they don’t exist, though. How could there be any objective version of the narrative when the whole series is fictional?

Regardless, in-universe there’s a shared common sense where oddities don’t exist and all the events of the story have a reasonable (or simply unknown) explanation. Koyomi and his friends have their narratives coloured by a different perspective, and the series takes care to not present this as them uncovering some kind of concealed truth, but merely stepping ‘backstage’ and looking at things in a different way. 

A deeply human way, perhaps. The temptation to see animals, inanimate objects (and of course, especially, dolls) as possessing feelings or intentions is extremely common. An oddity, Shinobu says, is a ‘deep attachment’, a strong feeling, and I can’t help but think of Nadeko here, whose attachment to Kaiki’s charms was so deep that to her they became a snake constricting her entire body. 

Her knee-jerk rejection of others’ affection, the shame of being perceived, the inability to speak up about her pain, these feelings coalesced into a form, a name, a word that made sense to her. She tells herself a story about snakes, so later, when she can no longer maintain a pretense of loving Koyomi, what form would her hatred towards both herself and the world take but a white snake hiding in her shoebox? She tells herself a story about snakes because it’s more convenient for her, makes things a little easier to bear if it’s not her fault. 

Hitagi’s attachment is to her mother, and she conceptualises it as a weight around her neck, so of course when she casts it aside it suits her purposes to tell a story where it was taken away from her by someone else.

Mayoi’s attachment is to life itself, and as a young child from a broken home, of course she conceptualises it as something she’s only allowed to have if permitted by an authority figure, so she makes it a plausible excuse. She’s just going to her mother’s house. She’ll be back as soon as she’s done. 

Suruga’s attached to her own attachments, things she could have been good at if she tried, things she could have had if she tried, people she could have saved if she just tried. She conceptualises them as still attached to her, a reminder that everything’s her fault, for wishing or not wishing or not wishing enough. 

Tsubasa, despite everything, remained attached to herself, to her own identity and ability to lead a normal life. She conceptualises herself as a cat and as a tiger, and it’s only by telling their stories that she’s finally able to tell her own.

Koyomi was so thoroughly unattached to anything that he told the story of his own death. He no longer wanted to be a human, no longer felt like one, and he conceptualised that as a being with sharp fangs and a thirst for blood. Then he saw that being, really saw it for the first time, and in all his infinite selfishness decided he’d rather that she was human. He was attached to Shinobu, so he told a story where she was small and moe and a big fan of doughnuts. And she was attached to him, so she told a story where-

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. 

Ononoki Yotsugi was born without memories of her past life. Zero attachments. So people are free to attach whatever they want to her. She’s a bit like a lego piece. Hell, her limbs are even detachable. Rearrange them as you like. Turn her upside down and check what colour her panties are. She exists entirely for your convenience. 

Yotsugi is a difficult character, for me, because I still don’t really know what she wants, how she feels, why she’s attached to the people she is. This arc doesn’t get into it much, either. Yotsugi’s dollness isn’t explored as a personal struggle. Rather, I think the question being asked is how different from her the other characters really are.

If Yotsugi is forced into the role of a doll then the whole cast of this tale is in a similar boat, ‘finagling [their] way through life’ as she puts it, trying to be ‘right and proper’ at their assigned role.  

That being said, what it means for an oddity like Mayoi to be ‘right and proper’ (according to the darkness, according to Ougi) is made evident enough, but what exactly are the roles of the characters in this “Possession Tale”, and how do they differ from them in reality?

Tadatsuru is easily the most confusing here, a character we’re first introduced to here, who (we’re told) seems to materialise just as he’s needed by the plot. I, myself, don’t quite see the need for him, the thing that makes him a perfect opponent for Koyomi, apart from in the fairly shallow sense that his being a specialist confronts Koyomi with his newfound vampiric condition. 

Ironically, despite appearing as an antagonist, Tadatsuru does actually provide some clarity on the situation in exactly the way you might expect from a specialist. Koyomi’s vampire problem is only the first layer of the mystery here. The second layer, and one that won’t be fully peeled off until much later, is the fact that these events were orchestrated in their entirety. 

I suppose in that sense he also highlights how many of the people precious to Koyomi are oddities, or oddity-adjacent. Perhaps, building from Kagenui’s assault on Tsukihi in Nise, we’re supposed to consider whether Koyomi is really in the right for protecting these people. That’s kind of nonsensical though, we already know he’s right, and in any case Tadatsuru isn’t particularly invested in morality in the same way Koyomi is. 

He has, we’re told, no ‘ideology’, but rather ‘enmity’ and an ‘aesthetic sense’, an appreciation for the beauty of undead abominations that leads to him working in a related trade, much like how an artist might work as a collector or curator. Who exactly he holds ‘enmity’ towards, then, is left rather vague, but to imagine it for a second, we might talk about someone like Koyomi, who’s at once both dead and alive. Who’s almost in the opposite trade to Tadatsuru, with how often we see him humanizing (‘twisting’, as Ougi puts it) immortal oddities. 

His issue with Koyomi isn’t moralistic, but it could very well be aesthetic, a complaint about how he ruined a vampire by turning her into a little girl, ruined a ghost by making her stick around past her time, ruined a phoenix by letting her believe she was his sister, and maybe even ruined a doll by making her want to be an actual person instead of just a facsimile of one. 

If this is his role, he doesn’t embrace it. He lets himself be killed, expressing regret for the changes that have already occurred in Yotsugi rather than trying to keep her the same.

He already lost the fight over her a while ago, it seems. 

Kagenui Yozoru is almost as confusing, a character who finally starts to get fleshed out in this book only to invite further questions as to her history and the history of all the specialists. She’s Yotsugi’s sister seemingly by Yotsugi’s choice rather than hers, and it’s that choice which drove a wedge between her and Tadatsuru. We’re told that the difference between them is his focus on the immortal dead, (because he appreciates them aesthetically) while her focus is on the immortal living (because she wants to kill them). 

It’s a little difficult to say which ones are which. Tsukihi, at least, is clearly in the alive category, and I’d argue Shinobu and Koyomi are too, but Yotsugi seems more on the side of the dead, which is presumably why Tadatsuru wanted her. On the other hand, if her human-like nature makes her a living oddity, then Kagenui’s conflicted feelings about it become more clear. 

If she’s a living immortal, then, much like Tsukihi, it would become part of Kagenui’s justice to destroy her. This might be the ‘lesson ten years in the making’ that she learns in Nisemonogatari, when Koyomi argues to her that a sister who isn’t related to you by birth is still a perfectly valid sister. 

We’ve seen a few takes on the role of a specialist now, and they all seem to come back to balancing the books in some way, returning things to their ‘right and proper’ state, even if they differ in interpretation of what that is. Kagenui’s attempts to resolve the contradiction of Tsukihi’s existence by force are mirrored here in her attitude towards Koyomi. You can’t be a human and a vampire. If you keep swapping back and forth I’ll just kill you. 

For all that this places her on the side of humanity, it also makes her a singularly inhuman character, at least from Koyomi’s perspective. She rarely varies her tone or expresses emotions, her most violent declarations given the same weight as her pleasantries. It’s reminiscent of how Tsubasa’s human persona is characterised, almost, with the aggressive normalcy, lack of strong preferences, failure to understand those weaker than her. ’The little things that make us human’, Koyomi thinks. 

He’s also wrong. She shows sympathy for Koyomi a few times, he just dismisses the possibility out of hand. He only gets it when she finally finishes unravelling Tadatsuru’s paper cranes that she expresses a little closeness to the guy, sounding ‘protective’ of his practice of folding all the cranes by hand. ‘She’s human after all.’

If her role as a specialist is to be an uncompromising wall between Koyomi and inhuman oddities, she’s already failed. She failed in Nise, and she fails now when she encourages Yotsugi’s friendship with Koyomi instead of letting this book end with them splitting apart permanently. 

Because that, of course, is the role that Yotsugi was supposed to be cast in, here. Koyomi himself cannot defeat Tadatsuru, because he cannot transform into a vampire. He’s human. Yotsugi, on the other hand, is an oddity. Killing humans isn’t unusual for her. It’s right and proper. What isn’t right and proper is her friendship with Koyomi, his treating her as someone he can treat to icecream instead of a convenient object for disposing of his enemies. 

Is that really how it works, though? As Yotsugi points out, there’s nothing particularly ‘right and proper’ about being undead. Her whole existence is thoroughly unnatural. The contradiction of an oddity made in the shape of a human is that she must necessarily stand on both sides. Being able to treat her as a tool of murder would be convenient to Koyomi in one sense, but I think far more convenient for him is her ability to act like she isn’t one. To let him forget the inherent danger of oddities, because in his mind he’d much rather they just be little girls. 

This is something he’s gone through before, with Shinobu and with Mayoi, and I suppose I’m starting to see why these three get grouped together so often. I mean, really he puts every girl he meets on a similar pedestal, but these three full-blooded oddities are unique in the amount of direct influence he’s capable of exerting on their nature. 

Shinobu is of course the root of it all. Koyomi was punished severely for his initial misapprehension of Kiss-Shot as weak and harmless, but his resolution to the situation made her weak and harmless in reality. In a horrific violation of her agency, Koyomi forced Shinobu to conform to his image. The gravity with which he treats this, though, is precisely the issue - his perception of Shinobu as a victim, his victim, is what leads him to neglect her feelings and their relationship through most of Bakemonogatari. He thinks he has no right to ask anything of her.

We see a similar thing going on with Mayoi, in Kabukimonogatari, as he takes on the mission of ‘saving’ her by removing himself from her life, only questioning whether Mayoi herself prefers her current state at the very end.

There’s a part of Koyomi that wants to see Yotsugi as human, that finds it more convenient, but I think there’s another part that views himself as self-indulgent. That wants to enforce a harsher line between humans and oddities. Not because he despises oddities, but precisely because he finds them too convenient. He doesn’t think he deserves to be able to get along so well with them, deserves to make use of them so easily. 

As Ougi puts it, he prefers it when things feel a little bit bad. Subconsciously, it just makes more sense to him that way. The story Koyomi Araragi has been trying to tell, his Bakemonogatari, is one where he suffers for his successes and nothing comes without a price. Where he gets his guts ripped out over and over again in a kind of ritual purification of his sins. One where nobody can help him and nobody can save anyone else, only themselves. 

It’s a bit of a breath of fresh air to realise he’s mostly gotten over it, by this point. 

He still feels on a subconscious level that he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with all this, that he’s in violation of natural law, that with all his activities lately he’s selfishly exploited his relationship to Shinobu. You know, like some kind of. Undead creature. That drinks blood. Like yeah dude, of course you’re going to get too used to transforming into a vampire if you conceptualise both vampires and yourself, in the act of transforming into one as fundamentally self-serving entities! Oddities are what you make of them!

Nonetheless, he acknowledges Kagenui when she says all of that is just self-satisfaction. He only thinks this way for his own convenience, to put the universe in a kind of order where its repeated assaults on him make logical sense. 

Ougi ends up being the one that embodies the universe’s viewpoint, congratulating him on his character development. Haven’t all his failures been learning opportunities? All of his suffering heading towards some noble goal? Now, he has once again been blessed by failure & an advanced warning to get his shit together in the form of his reflection not showing up in the mirror. The message is clear. Stop relying on Shinobu. Don’t be friends with Yotsugi. Oddities will ever betray you. They might be convenient, they might appear when and because they’re called for, to fulfill human desires and meet human expectations, but that doesn’t mean they’ll help. 

Koyomi of course says ‘I feel astonishingly unrepentant’ and ‘I would’ve done exactly the same thing’. Bad things happening to you are in fact bad, not good. We’ve been over this already. He starts out as thinking of Shinobu as a victim, but by the end of Bakemonogatari he’s accepted that she actually wants to help him, that accepting help doesn’t make him a bad person. Whether it’s Shinobu or Yotsugi or Mayoi, it’s been clear for a while now that whether they’re human or not has nothing to do with whether he considers them a friend. 

I think perhaps I was a bit hasty to assume there’s some kind of dichotomy between humans and oddities going on here. That we have to slot Yotsugi into one or the other, that she’s only worth considering a person if she’s secretly a human.

Bakemonogatari ends with Koyomi reflecting that there is darkness in the world, and things live in that darkness. That darkness lives in him! It’s his shadow! He can’t ignore it, can’t forget it, and he can’t make it go away. That’s just how Shinobu lives, but that doesn’t mean he can’t live alongside her. It doesn’t mean Yotsugi can’t live alongside humans, even if she isn’t going to become one. 

It’s a pluralistic view that I appreciate and maybe should have expected from a series marked by characters who consistently choose third paths between either abandoning their humanity or eliminating the inhuman entirely. 

Perhaps you’ll allow me to end on some hair-based reflections (or lack thereof). I mentioned how Tsukihi growing out her hair may be evidence of character development on her part, but Koyomi not cutting his was evidence he’s still stuck in the past. The trope of a character development haircut is of course common throughout this series, with Hitagi, Tsubasa, Suruga and Nadeko all showing the changes they’ve undergone through their hairstyle. Karen and Tsukihi are deliberate subversions of this, as they’re shown cutting their hair for no particular reason at all, remaining largely static characters. 

Koyomi is one of the few characters that doesn’t cut his hair over subsequent appearances, but I’m not so sure it’s evidence that he doesn’t change at all. The changes just build up so slowly we don’t really notice them, until we’re met with an absolute mop in Hanamonogatari’s peek at the future. It feels like an obvious rejection of the idea that anything about this arc was a wake-up call, the idea that something bad must happen to Koyomi, or to Tsukihi, to allow them to grow in the future.

As always, he makes his way through life kind of half-assedly. He himself, at least, never feels as though he’s gone through significant enough changes to become a different person. But in holding on so tightly to the past, the person that he is now becomes clearly evident. 

[typellblog]

Tsubasa Tiger - An Analysis

This is an arc about personal identity, which is fitting for the first book in the series narrated by someone other than our main character. Tsubasa’s halting attempts to discover herself feel almost in parallel to Nisio’s attempts to expand her internal world beyond that perceived by Koyomi.

It quickly becomes evident that Hanekawa Tsubasa does not know herself, the usual catchphrase of ‘I only know what I know’ recontextualised with the understanding that there are many things she does not know on purpose. This is what Izuko tells her, and note that for all her talk of Tsubasa knowing nothing, the specific facts that she focuses on - the tiger, Tsubasa’s feelings for Koyomi, the cram school burning down - are things that Tsubasa should know about. Izuko doesn’t stun her with information that would be impossible for Tsubasa to obtain, but rather things that it should be impossible for her to not know.

This absence is at the heart of this arc’s central oddity, the titular tiger. It’s rendered variously as the Tyrannical Tiger, Hystery Tiger, History Tiger, etc. I think the most immediately relevant things to draw on when talking about it are how it symbolises both the past and Tsubasa’s strong emotions. However, in her usual fashion, neither of these are immediately obvious in the tiger, which appears out of nowhere, rooted in no history, motivated by no emotion. It is singularly uninterested in these things, and that is precisely why it is useful to her. 

Its role is to burn the past. It is powered by her ‘dark’ emotions, but is not itself touched by them. Its habit of arson is found in her envy, the repressed desire for a home of her own leading her to destroy those of others. She also, in a more personal sense, envies the family. Her parents growing closer to one another. Hitagi and her father. The Araragi siblings and their mother. 

The reason, then, why she manages to stop herself from destroying their houses as well is because of the genuine intimacy and love that she manages to build with Hitagi and the Fire Sisters (as partially represented by the shower/bath scenes). She never manages to hate Hitagi for ‘taking’ Koyomi from her, because despite loving Koyomi she ends up a little bit in love with Hitagi too.

Over all three of Tsubasa’s arcs we’ve slowly been approaching the truth of the similarity between Koyomi and Tsubasa. The difference between them and Hitagi, or Kanbaru.

Tsubasa is someone that resists change, refuses to move forward. To some extent the backwards chronology of her first two arcs doesn’t matter because the conclusion is almost the same. Just don’t worry about it. Continue as normal.  This can seem a frighteningly noble thing, from Koyomi’s perspective. It is a frighteningly broken thing, to Tsubasa. 

Hitagi says she’s a ‘failure as a creature’. That she has no sense of danger, simply accepting everything as it comes. The concept of the ‘wild creature’ invoked here is obviously connected to how her oddities manifest as animals, holding the instincts and impulses that she rejects in herself.  She eats her food unseasoned, not because she prefers it that way, but because the difference in taste doesn’t matter to her. She approves of goodness to the exact same extent she approves of tediousness, of flavourlessness, of banality. In that sense, Hitagi questions, can even her love for Koyomi be considered real? Does she have a reason to prefer him in particular?

We’ve been told that she’s the ‘real deal’ in comparison to Koyomi’s fake, but what that turns out to mean is simply that Koyomi has a basic level of self-awareness. He knows how it looks to others, to be so self-sacrificing. It makes you stand out. Tsubasa fails to recognise this - how else would she still have the misconception that she’s been correctly acting as a ‘normal girl’?

Besides that one point, the two are remarkably similar. Their lack of self-regard drives them into service of others, all the while stubbornly refusing to reach out for help on their own. Koyomi fails again and again, repeating the same mistakes, accepting his old hypocrisies, and through it all, remaining himself. 

That’s why she loves him. Because he ‘confronts his own weakness’. Because when he saved Shinobu he was crying, and Tsubasa can’t remember the last time she herself cried. 

The second chapter ends with Tsubasa noting that she always gives thanks after a meal, for the plants and animals that have been killed ‘for my sake, of all creatures.’ Especially after spring break, she says. After encountering a vampire, after witnessing what it is to be a vampire, to devour someone else’s life for your own sake. But here I also think about the cat. An animal that died on the side of the road. A predator, whose energy drain selfishly takes from others. 

Just as Koyomi and Tsubasa are alike, so are their oddities. They both take the form of creatures that are capable of imposing on others, of asserting their own desires over those of others, and for that reason the both of them are deathly afraid of letting them out. They shrink back inside themselves, trying their best to avoid bumping into anyone else, to avoid cursing them with their touch. 

But where Koyomi, in his fumbling way, makes progress & reconciles with Shinobu, Tsubasa casts her cat aside. She loses the memories of its rampage after it leaves. This doesn’t seem strange at first. We assume this is how the oddity works. It is how it works! For Tsubasa. The cat isn’t the one removing her memories, she just went ahead and did that on her own. Like she does with everything. 

There’s a conversation between cat and vampire in this book. Shinobu brings up the tale of Napoleon sleeping in the bath & points out that two very abnormal things can combine to seem normal. Black Hanekawa is one such abnormal thing, an oddity, but going down this train of thought has Hanekawa wondering if she isn’t one herself, if her own ability to ignore inconveniences and tolerate the intolerable isn’t also something ambiguously supernatural. 

Episode says that she had an ‘overwhelming presence’ when he met her during spring break, that she almost seems normal now, having since cut off the cat from herself. Having cut off the tiger. It’s almost a contradiction. The more she relies on supernatural powers, the more normal she herself becomes. 

Perhaps the model student persona of Hanekawa Tsubasa was also a constructed identity, constructed for the purpose of protecting herself, just as Kuro was. 

After all, to a vampire’s eyes, there’s not much of a difference between human and oddity.

Again we have the oddity as a twisted reflection of its master. Shinobu sees everyone equally as food, while to Koyomi both humans and oddities are equally in need of his help. He saves Shinobu despite her monstrous nature, he saves Mayoi despite her being the cause of the incident. To him there’s no distinction, both Kuro and Tsubasa are Hanekawa. 

We are going to be seeing nightmares for the rest of our lives, he tells Tsubasa in Neko Kuro. You will never stop being that person. Because when it comes down to it, he doesn’t, and neither does she. 

It feels a little off. People can change, can’t they? People can always change. Does she really have to drag that cat, that tiger, around with her forever? In this book we get a more complete picture. What cannot change is the past. What happened, what you’ve done, that never goes away. You can become a different person as much as you like, as long as you never deny it. That the cat, the tiger, they were, are, both you. You can change as much as you like, but all of those changes, steps and missteps are still Hanekawa Tsubasa. 

Her mistake was pretending that the cat wasn’t her, pushing everything onto Kuro as though it had nothing to do with Tsubasa herself. 

As Gaen points out though, this is normal. Everyone goes through their life lying to themselves & each other to cope. Tsubasa isn’t special. What makes her special in this arc is accepting the oddities as part of herself, asking them to come home. Supposedly they’d disappear on their own. From both an oddity’s perspective, and a human perspective, that’s the preferable outcome. But just like Koyomi, Tsubasa doesn’t see this from an oddity’s perspective, or a human’s perspective. To her the cat and tiger have become family. 

The theme of this series, then, really hasn’t changed from the first arc, where a girl without her weight takes back her emotions. 

Hitagi and her own self-driven changes are vital to this arc, her affection for Tsubasa driving the girl to accept help freely given. Tsubasa still resists the idea of calling Koyomi, taking up his time, making her feelings known to him, and so both Hitagi and the Fire Sisters end up demonstrating the virtues of kindness freely given, what a family ‘should’ be like. This helps Tsubasa understand the character of her own family situation, one that she finally bluntly articulates as abuse. 

Both Tsubasa and Koyomi have that tendency, looking away from uncomfortable truths in order to maintain their way of life. Take, for example, the situation with Kanbaru, where he’s just a bit too charitable, doesn’t quite understand how much she wants him dead. He’s unable to solve the incident on his own, unable to realise the problem with getting himself killed to solve it, and in the end is only able to provide a justification for Hitagi and Kanbaru to meet. To buy time for her to get there. 

It’s an overstepping of bounds, a needless intervention, an unwanted favour. But it’s not pointless. 

It’s a classic Koyomi-narrated arc, in that way. He’s a bit slow to understand the mind of the ‘victim’, is unsuccessful in his attempts in intervention when compared to Oshino, the specialist, and Kanbaru has to just go ahead and save herself. 

Consider, now, the structure of Tsubasa Tiger. For once, our protagonist isn’t Koyomi. And yet, in a similar manner to Koyomi Vamp, we find the narrator herself to be the one afflicted by an oddity. 

She’s a bit slow to understand what’s going on in the mind of the victim, has the situation laid out for her by Izuko, the specialist, and in the end - 

Her attempts at intervention are unsuccessful. She can’t defeat the tiger on her own. She can only buy time. 

Just as Koyomi’s business with Kanbaru is an overstepping of bounds, a needless intervention, an unwanted favour, Tsubasa’s business with the tiger is ‘impossible, reckless and-’

Not futile. Never pointless. 

Isn’t the point of Koyomi in Suruga Monkey that without him risking himself, the two may never have come back together? That despite being unwanted, his selflessness is, in the end,  appreciated? 

The point of Tsubasa Tiger, then, is that people will come to help you if you call them. Koyomi demonstrates this in Nekomonogatari Kuro, with his text message trick. Here, in Shiro, Tsubasa returns the favour, finally reaching out to him by sending a picture, escaping the carefully constructed boundary of her school uniform, letting him know that she wants to stay in touch with him, that she doesn’t mind imposing on his time a little. 

One might question the role of Koyomi in this narrative, appearing at the end to save the day. Isn’t this arc supposed to be about Tsubasa? Doesn’t she have to resolve her own issues? Do we not all have to save ourselves?

That was never true, though. Koyomi’s appearance at the end is almost an afterthought. It’s Oshino’s final proposal in Koyomi Vamp. It’s Hitagi’s arrival in Suruga Monkey. It’s Shinobu’s emergence from the shadow in Tsubasa Cat. 

The protagonist role Tsubasa inherits from Koyomi is not the ability to solve incidents, it is the ability to help, to be there for someone. Just as Koyomi was able to face her feelings head on in Tsubasa Cat, willing to give up his life for her in Tsubasa Family, just how she was able to be a friend to Koyomi at his lowest point in Kizumonogatari - 

For the first time in a while, the one that Tsubasa Hanekawa tries to take care of is herself. 

And that's all for now. This arc is great. Gonna have to hurry up a bit if I want to finish this before the new season comes out . . .

[typellblog]

Suruga Devil - An Analysis

Something I’ve been thinking about is how even though Oshino disappeared six books ago, some way or another a specialist manages to crawl their way into every arc. Almost irregardless of the circumstances, these kids need someone to explain the problem to them. To bring them face to face with the truth they haven’t quite realised yet. 

In Hanamonogatari, though, advice might be the last thing that Kanbaru Suruga needs - despite, or perhaps because so many different people want to offer it to her. 

I’ll be riding my arc formula all the way from Bakemonogatari until the wheels fall off, so I think here I want to talk about the title again. 

Suruga Devil. Isn’t that odd? It almost sounds like we’re dealing with the exact same oddity as her first arc. Except there’s a different Devil-sama in this one, someone who has more devil parts than Suruga herself. Numachi Rouka is also an oddity, by virtue of being already dead, and by that logic Suruga must be the ‘victim’ of her haunting. 

The theory is floated here that all ghosts work similarly to Hachikuji. They hang around because of a certain regret, and people with a similar regret or issue are the only ones that can see them. What, then, is Rouka’s?

I think there’s something to be said for how obviously she wants to play basketball with Suruga again. 

Even in a series full of unreliable narrators Rouka is unique in that we don’t get to see her internal narration, just how she chooses to present her life story to Suruga. There are hints that she was spinning it a bit - Higasa mentions that ‘family issues’ Rouka hardly talked about also contributed to her suicide, not just the broken leg. 

Frankly I see in Rouka someone trying to put up a strong front to hide how severely something actually affected her. She refers to herself derisively as misfortunate, acknowledges the suffering that it caused her, but still tries to make herself seem distant from it, like it’s something she’s already dealt with. Like her misfortune-collecting has made her happy again. 

Her initial attitude is hostile, confrontational. She seems like she’s trying to upset Suruga, describing her own activities in a tone that makes it obvious how unapologetic she is about the scumminess of it all. She wants to feel powerful, in control of the situation, even if it means she has to come off as an asshole. 

In their final match Suruga leans into it, matching Rouka’s hostility and desire to compete with her rather than running away from it. I want to say it’s a way of paying her final respects.

Rouka says she didn’t feel like she ever suffered a clear loss in life. Her injury didn’t come from a dramatic final showdown. Losing her scholarship didn’t make it impossible to continue schooling. And her leg’s rehabilitation didn’t make it impossible for her to live on. But at the same time, all of these things ground her down until she didn’t know what to do. Rouka says you can run away from almost every problem, and she did. She ran away from school. She ran away from getting a job. And in the end, she ran away from life. 

Kaiki remarks to Suruga that she can’t run away from all her problems. In his case he makes it brutally literal, but in an emotional sense he’s not somebody Suruga can ignore either, this weird older dude that has a history with her mother. Koyomi and Hitagi apparently told her to run away as soon as she met him, but they must not have considered he might have no ill will towards Suruga, not do anything that justifies running away from him. 

When Rouka gets on top of Suruga and draws close enough to kiss, she could run. She knows she could run. She doesn’t. Did you want her to kiss you? Some things you can’t run away from, because deep down you don’t want to. Like the dark reverse side of a wish.

For Rouka, the Rainy Devil is a competitor. It actually does something to solve people’s problems, where her method allows these anxieties to work themselves out by having the people in question do nothing at all. Some things are only made worse by worrying about them - in the hands of the Rainy Devil these problems that may have worked themselves out over time instead get escalated into potentially life-destroying issues.  Rouka isn’t one to make use of the devil’s arm, Suruga thinks. She would simply run away from the problem, not rely on external means to solve it. She’s strong like that. Strong enough to pretend her problems don’t matter to her. 

Only to pretend, though. The phrase “It’s better to regret doing something than regret not doing it” comes up. Rouka is of course on the side of regretting not doing something. A third path between victory and defeat. It has its advantages, Suruga does acknowledge it. But it can’t resolve anything. Rouka’s problems still exist, she just isn’t facing them. What Suruga does is make Rouka confront her and in doing so symbolically confront everything. It gives her a clear reason for her loss. It lets her let go. 

I think the reason that Rouka is so confrontational with Suruga, so eager to play basketball again, is because she knew this on some level. She prefers to regret not doing something, but of course that means she still regrets not doing something. She still wants to do it, still wants to play a proper match and finish off their middle-school rivalry.

I wondered what Rouka’s specific regret was, as a ghost, and while that game is about as close as anything, it still feels like I’m missing the big picture. Rouka doesn’t just collect misfortune, she collects devil parts. The things that show up physically on your body to prove you made a wish. The things that remain so long as that wish isn’t granted. The physical manifestation of regret for a choice that still has Suruga checking the news every morning to make sure she didn’t do anything during the night without remembering. 

Hachikuji gets people lost because she is lost. Rouka frees people from the regret of doing something because she herself never did anything about the situation she found herself in. It’s why she’s so interested in hearing the stories, along with the devil parts. People who did something she could never do. People who failed and became even more unfortunate than her, thus proving her right. 

She takes the devil parts from people who don’t want them anymore. You can’t run away from something if you really do still want it, but Suruga is well over it at this point. Consider how Suruga deals with the devil’s continued presence in her life. Refusing to run out of fear that someone might be faster than her. She used the arm to pursue Hitagi to the point of destruction, but in equal measure refused to do so, and in doing so was unable to replicate Koyomi’s success. In that sense, when Kaiki says you can’t outrun everything, he’s telling her that it’s okay to lose. It’s okay to try, and then fail. It’s okay to just hand the arm over to Rouka and move on. 

Higasa remarks that Suruga seems too positive of a person to have heard the Devil-sama rumor - because that’s the type of person Suruga is seen as. Polite, enthusiastic, direct, a star athlete, a hard worker,  a rich kid, a goody two-shoes. The type of person who would take issue with Rouka’s methods. Rouka expects a fight, because in a lot of ways Suruga is Rouka’s opposite, someone who would slap her in the face upon hearing about what she’s doing. 

At the same time, Suruga is the type of person to immediately second-guess that reaction. She lets Rouka’s hand sit on her chest for an uncomfortable length of time (the symbolic gesture associated with taking her devil arm!) because she feels bad about hitting her. Of course she would. She straps her arm to the wall at night because she’s scared of hitting someone again.

In other words, contrary to expectation, she’s the exact type of person that would encounter Rouka. The correct type of person to hear the Devil-sama rumor. The type of person that’s still burdened by the regret of a wish that turned into an obsession. Exactly the type of problem that can be solved, will be solved, simply by doing nothing. 

I said I still wanted to talk about the arc formula, and here it raises an interesting question of where exactly the specialist comes in. Kaiki, of course, is prominent in this novel - but even though he helps, he hardly explains anything. He has a policy, Rouka tells us, of only sharing half his information. It’s a little like Oshino’s rule of balance, but even less helpful. He shies away from the spotlight out of what I imagine is self-preservation - running away from Koyomi and Hitagi in Karen Bee, blatantly subverting their expectations that he explain Karen’s oddity. He does it anyway, but it’s pointless. The fever disappears on its own. 

Where Meme’s balance is to make sure he doesn’t interfere too much in others’ problems, ensure his surprisingly impressive spiritual abilities don’t create further disturbances in the course of solving them, Kaiki’s balance is to make sure he always has another opportunity to mess with people in the future, to ensure his practical-minded refusal to believe in spirits entirely doesn’t end up biting him in the ass. 

Even so, we’ve come to expect someone to come and clear things up, explain that which our protagonist was too slow to grasp on their own, put a neat little tie on the end of things. Like Tooe Gaen, perhaps? Deceased but apparently no less of an authority on the supernatural. “The motivation for justice is envy of evil,” we’re told, explaining precisely what left Suruga so unsettled about Rouka. Rouka did what she could never do, just like Suruga did what Rouka couldn’t. 

It’s a nice enough explanation, putting things into the dualistic perspective that Tooe seems to prefer. “If you can’t be medicine, then be poison, otherwise you’re just plain old water.” It doesn’t matter if you help others or hurt others as long as you do something, act in accordance with your nature, don’t let yourself be bound by the restrictions of society or conscience. Those are the type of people she seems most interested in, and the type of person Suruga ought to become as a result of this arc - someone who acts, as opposed to the inactive Rouka. 

And yet neither her nor Rouka seem to fit into Tooe’s format. Rouka, despite being plain water, is still muddy. A swamp. That mud, composed of everyday misfortune, is nothing nearly so interesting as to be called poison. Suruga is even more confused. A flash-flood, capable of clearing up the dirt that Rouka collected?

Suruga didn’t envy Rouka because she was evil. The implication there is that Rouka took pleasure in shattering social boundaries that Suruga felt obligated to stick to. But Suruga has already experienced what it’s like to violently pursue one’s own wishes in disregard of the feelings of others. It’s not fun! Suruga is jealous of, if anything, Rouka’s coolness. Her ability to roll with the punches, accept what happened to her with a laugh, shamelessly use her misfortune and pitiability as weapons. 

And Rouka, despite how she presents herself, was quite clearly not evil. Her offered ‘help’ is for entirely self-centered motives, and yet she’s much more concerned with the lives of others than her own. She does act like she doesn’t care about the people asking her for help, but all the same she does redirect those with more serious issues to the correct services. She did say she genuinely wanted to help Hanadori Rouka, the girl she met with the left leg, which is surprising from the perspective of Suruga’s vague animosity towards her, but completely understandable if you just think of Rouka as a normal girl. 

Suruga is neither good nor evil, as Koyomi puts it at the end of the book. She didn’t do the right thing, or the wrong thing. Neither did Rouka. They simply couldn’t look away from one another. Looking away, like running away, is only something you can do if you don’t really want to look. Even if Suruga ran away Rouka would have kept haunting her. She had the qualifications for it. Similarly, I feel like Rouka simply couldn’t look away from people’s misfortune, from the devil parts. Oddities arise for a reason, people have to want them on some level, and perhaps that’s true from the oddity’s side as well.

Speaking of Koyomi, though, he’s the last to give advice. He encounters Suruga at her lowest point, where she doesn’t know what to do, and quite literally helps her get back on her feet. His specialist qualifications are a bit iffy, but this is a timeskip - he’s in college, he’s more or less overcome his coming of age stuff. The thing is, his advice is to ignore everyone’s advice. For Suruga to act like herself, act on her instincts. To do neither the right thing or the wrong thing. 

Ironically, characteristically, she takes the advice anyway.

She’s immediately less unsettled around Rouka, more confident in how she wants to play it. I think about her bluntly stating she’s an exhibitionist. It’s a pervy joke, something that’s been oddly absent in this book so far. One of the things we realise, looking at the world from Suruga’s benefit, is that her perversion, her exhibitionism, frankly even her queerness and interest in BL was much played up for the benefit of Koyomi. At the same time, though, I don’t think that makes it somehow false or an inaccurate representation of herself. She was able to be more overt with these things around Koyomi, because he was accepting of it, and that’s a largely positive thing. 

It’s not a coincidence that her meeting with Koyomi gives her the confidence to be more like that with Rouka, or that this line about exhibitionism actually ties into an important part of her character. You see, right after, Rouka says it must have been tough for her to conceal the devil’s arm. 

I think about the arm as representative of the stigma of queerness, as something that paints her desire for Hitagi as animal and violent (even as it’s capable of finding perfectly healthy expression on the flip side), as something that she has to conceal from others. Recall how in Suruga Monkey her being a lesbian is revealed right after the arm itself, and it’s her sexuality that Koyomi finds the more shocking. 

From that perspective, you could think about Rouka as helping the devil part bearers integrate into society by removing the outward signs of their queerness, their difference. She takes it all on herself, with her oddly dyed hair, baggy tracksuit, put-on limp. She takes it all on herself because she no longer needs to live in normal society. No longer can. 

It kind of explains more of Suruga’s hesitance to let Rouka go. It’s not like she wants to keep the arm. It’s not like it represents the truth of her sexuality in itself. She was gay before the arm and will be after. I think it moreso represents Tooe’s approach to identity and self-change. You can be whatever you want, but becoming is an inherently painful process.

We’d like to think that Tooe’s message was that you should learn to change yourself rather than relying on suspicious magical artifacts, but the fact that she exposed Suruga to that risk in the first place indicates she’s fine with danger as a teaching device. Fine with her daughter becoming poison. Maybe even fine with her killing someone.

In the end, all the arm does is give her an inferiority complex. Her admiration of Hitagi, her graceful running style, is built on the fact that Suruga herself doesn’t feel she can run like that. She’s faster, but also uglier, more desperate. Her admiration of Koyomi, his self-sacrificing nature, is built on her shame over not being able to help Hitagi more herself. She’s self-effacing, but also uglier, more jealous. 

Suruga is glad to lose the arm, but she still feels uneasy about Rouka getting it. About being saved by someone else. Aren’t people supposed to just go ahead and save themselves? In this one thing, at least, Rouka is a more helpful specialist than even Oshino Meme. 

On that topic, the last person to give Suruga advice is Rouka herself. At the end of their second meeting, Rouka tells her to live a normal life. Do all the things I couldn’t do. She’s a negative example, telling people to not end up like her. Just stay in the closet. This, too, will pass.

That, kinda sucks though. Integrate into society? Drop all visible signs of your queerness? Get a boyfriend? Rouka’s channeling old tragic yuri tropes for the last time she thinks they’ll ever meet. 

Is that really what Rouka thinks? Does she really envy Suruga’s potential to be normal? To get a job? Because the opposite is precisely what Suruga envies about her - Rouka’s ability to ignore social expectations. The thing is, after their final match, the advice changes again. Who cares about studying for exams? Just start playing basketball again. This is really the only thing I can imagine Rouka envying Suruga for. It’s the path where she gets to make use of her arm again. 

Saying that basketball is representative of Suruga’s queerness here is even more of a stretch than applying that to her arm, but there’s at least one important respect in which the analogy kinda works. 

The way she wins the game. 

Basketball is a game for more than one player. The phrasing is a little awkward - ideally it would read “Basketball is a game for two players” to make the comparison to romance even more explicit, but - that isn’t true, is it. So the fact that there are exactly two of them playing becomes a little more significant, I think. 

They have to combine their efforts to get the ball into the hoop. That’s a disingenuous way of putting it, when they’re on opposite sides, but it’s still true. Rouka, after all, couldn’t get it in alone. That wasn’t her aim in the first place. She was just trying not to lose. 

Suruga didn’t just let her lose decisively for the first time, she also let Rouka win. Rouka wasn’t passed to, much, when she used to play. This is the first time she realises that basketball can’t be played alone.

And, well, when you put it in that sense, basketball isn’t just representative of romance, it’s representative of life in general. When you look back on Rouka’s backstory, at this point, one thing stands out. She never relied on anyone else. She never had anyone to rely on. It’s so bad that she ends up in Suruga’s orbit. The anime opening portrays what it might be like if they had a closer relationship, but that’s something that had to be invented in retrospect, because they really didn’t talk much. They didn’t even properly play against each other much. But when it comes down to it, Rouka is drawn to Suruga’s family inheritance of the devil parts, Suruga’s family inheritance of an annoying conman uncle, and in the end, back to Suruga herself. 

Suruga’s not the only person who ever truly understood her, as you might expect from a school rivalry situation. Suruga is simply the only person in a position where it’s even possible to truly understand her. The only person that could have drawn that final dunk out of her. The only person who could remind Rouka that she really did enjoy basketball, enjoy life.

In doing so, it serves as a reminder to herself, as well. 

Thanks for reading, everyone! Call this the Pride Month special, even though I didn’t discuss the queer themes of this story as much as I would have liked. Next: Otori. Oh boy.

[typellblog]

Shinobu Time - An Analysis

This arc is difficult to talk about because it’s hard to extricate it from the context of Second Season more broadly and Mayoi Jiangshi more specifically - so much so that it’s really more focused on Mayoi than the titular Shinobu. But I don’t think this works unless we take them both, together, as telling the story of these two girls (and maybe some other characters as well).

In Mayoi Jiangshi, Koyomi and Shinobu are catapulted to 10 years in the past. It’s a result of his desire to save Mayoi, but being a considerate person, he thinks about what he can do for his other friends. Can he rescue Hitagi’s family from a cult? Can he give Tsubasa more stable living conditions? No, he can’t. These issues are too big, too complex, for him to solve as just a random high-schooler, regardless of how early he gets in on it. Much the same for Suruga, Nadeko, and anyone else he knows. Except for one Hachikuji Mayoi, whose single unlucky accident seems eminently correctable. 

It makes me think. What exactly is the difference between Mayoi and these other characters? I suppose it comes back to Meme’s old phrase - oddities arise for a reason. The circumstances that the other characters grew up in resulted in a condition where they almost had no choice but to call on oddities to help with their problems. 

You could say that Mayoi’s parents divorce is the reason for what happened to her, but there’s no particular reason why she had to be hit by a car, why she had to be unable to see her mother on Mother’s Day. After all, that wasn’t the effect of an oddity. It was the origin story of one. 

In a way, Mayoi’s situation feels fundamentally unfair. A character like Tsubasa, Nadeko, even Numachi Rouka - they become oddities because on some level, they want to be. That’s how they see themselves. It’s not good for them, but it does something, you can see why it happens. Hachikuji, though, isn’t a person that turned into an oddity. For all intents and purposes, she’s a supernatural entity from the start. Even as it causes her to suffer as a person does. 

The difference between Mayoi and other characters - this is also the topic of a discussion between Koyomi and Ononoki Yotsugi. Koyomi has continued to live, even after being made undead, while Ononoki was reborn, becoming a new person out of the corpse of the old. Mayoi does neither, simply remaining in place. The point of such continued existence is what Ononoki wants to know. She questions the meaning of her own life. Surely life arises because of a strong desire. Surely, these undead oddities persist for a reason. 

We might say that the reason for Ononoki is the desire of the people who raised her from the dead. We might say that for Koyomi, it’s his relationship with Shinobu. But thinking of it from this perspective, Hachikuji Mayoi’s reason for existing must be by far the simplest to answer.

After all, it’s a standard element for ghosts that they persist because of an unfulfilled regret. 

Of course Mayoi didn’t want to become an oddity, didn’t want to become the Lost Cow, but she did want to meet her mother again. She did want to persist after death. In this sense, her fate is really quite excessively merciful. Fair to the point of indulgence. There’s no reason for her being hit by a truck, but there’s a reason for her becoming an oddity. And there really is a good chance that fate could be averted by simply bringing her to her mother’s house on a day 10 years ago. 

The real question here is why she chooses to persist after she’s no longer lost. Ononoki wants to know if she’s happy with the current state of affairs. That’s something that Koyomi wants to know too, if there’s anything he can do for her, but he never asks. It’s the unspoken part of their relationship. 

I want to say that Mayoi Jiangshi, as a whole, is about speaking aloud these unspoken truths, but it applies much more heavily to Shinobu than it does to Mayoi. 

Shinobu would have destroyed the world had Koyomi not found her in Tsubasa Cat. This is left unspoken. Koyomi didn’t want to insensitively interrogate her motives during her silent period, knowing that he’d already imposed on her enough for a lifetime. Shinobu didn’t want to share, didn’t want to be seen as more petty and selfish than she already is. 

The destroyed world is a shock to both of them, but nothing more than that. It’s not a challenge, or a mystery to solve. The problem, and its solution, are both inevitable consequences of the kind of person that Shinobu is. She confronts herself, and in doing so, much that she would leave unspoken is said aloud. That she only needed to open her heart to Koyomi a little more. That she doesn’t know how she could have. It’s needless to say, it goes without saying, it was left unspoken until now, but a Shinobu who couldn’t connect with Koyomi - might as well be dead. 

The jiangshi, a form of zombie with a more solid feeling to them that calls to mind the concept of rigor mortis: being set in one’s state at the moment of death. The Shinobu of this world was dead for months, and yet unable to die. But Hachikuji Mayoi herself - not continuing to live, not being reborn, is she not a kind of jiangshi herself, persisting outside of her allotted time without any meaning or purpose?

This is a question Koyomi couldn’t bring himself to ask her, but he gets an answer by the end of the arc. He sees how much the Mayoi of the other timeline was changed thanks to his influence, and, returning to his own, he sees how his influence has also affected this Mayoi. How, because of him, she’s started enjoying being a ghost. Because of him, she wanted to stick around even after fulfilling her original goal.

A real apocalypse to Koyomi is the absence of other people, and that too is the true death of these undead oddities. Neither Mayoi nor Shinobu can live a worthwhile life, where they’re capable of changing and changing others in turn, without making a friend first.

However, in the pursuit of this goal, the two of them still have things left unaddressed - for Shinobu, in the past, and for Mayoi, in the future. Thus we move on to Shinobu Time. 

The ‘time’ in the title is oddly reminiscent of the time travel plot Shinobu just got involved in, and the similarities don’t stop there. In both, her carelessness leads to widespread loss of life, the loss of her human connections. In both, she has to leap far into the air to avoid the consequences of her actions. Time is the thing Shinobu possesses most abundantly, stretching her life both far backwards and infinitely forwards, and the more we learn about her the more we learn this is not a boon at all. 

We’re told that after enough time in one place, her nature as a vampire will draw negative energy to an area and cause masses of oddities to arrive, spelling destruction for the residents. I like to think of this as a smaller-scale reminder of the nature of vampirism - you cannot have mortal friends, they will inevitably perish with the passing of time. You, yourself have more time than you know what to do with, but it’s not a kind of time that can be shared. It can’t be used to build anything. 

Which is why the incident where she was worshiped as a god is so tragic. Why did she continue giving the people of the area rain even after the first accidental miracle? Why did she do nothing to dispel their impression of her as a divine being, even by accident? Why didn’t she leave as soon as she realized they had no legends of vampirism, as she muses later? I mean, she tries to play it off as being careless, arrogant, indifferent, but there are enough hints that we’re not seeing everything here. If anything, the question is why she wouldn’t want to stay in a place where people like her, and she can help them instead of hurting?

Time is the curse of vampires, and the darkness slips naturally into that role when it demands an actor. After enough time, enough indifference, people start disappearing. Because there’s no way a vampire can get away with having a positive relationship with humanity. 

It’s simply impossible. Shinobu was doomed from the start. Is what I want to say, because I like the tragedy of it, but in reality there is a very simple way out. Just become a god for real. Don’t tell me it’s impossible, this is Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade in her prime, it would have been as simple as willing it. As wanting it. As admitting it to herself. 

But she doesn’t, because the all-mighty vampire isn’t willing to admit that she needs something from other people that can’t be taken by force. She wants only that which can be given without her asking, and what isn’t given she watches go up in flames just out of her reach, not moving a finger. Is that not what caused the whole mess in Mayoi Jiangshi? It really puts into context, then, the opening scene of the Kizumonogatari movies, where she moves to drag Koyomi out of the sun. The desperation she must have felt, begging for help when she first meets him on the side of the road. 

Time is the curse of vampires, because it at once broadens your perspective and narrows it. We don’t hear this story before this arc, Shinobu feels no need to tell it, because she forgot. The whole incident made her feel bad, so she shoved it to the back of her mind, let the endless waves of time wash over it until it was gone, and carried on as she had been. Or so she claims, anyway. I think the way she treats Koyomi after the fate of her first kin tells a different story. 

Back to Mayoi, though. The tale told by Shinobu isn’t the only ‘time’ in this story, and the darkness slots neatly into the present day as well. Mayoi, also, is cursed by time. Eleven years of being lost and getting others lost is not time well spent. For Mayoi, too, as soon as her natural curse is dissipated, the darkness arrives to plug the gap. For Mayoi, too, there is a limit, an allotted amount of time that she can spend in the company of others. 

As Izuko puts it, they’re both liars. Shinobu lied by omission, failing to inform the villagers of her vampiric nature, posing as a god without genuinely fulfilling the role of one. Her crime was indifference, or a deliberate facade of such. She made no attempt to communicate with others, and as a result they never got to know her. Unspoken truths, left on the table forever. 

Mayoi, though - Koyomi denies quite flatly that she ever lied to him. He knows she doesn’t want to be a liar, doesn’t want to act rude to passers-by in order to put them off. So Izuko makes the accusation lying to herself. Making Mayoi herself the victim of the crime, because in doing her best to avoid causing trouble for others, she let herself suffer silently. She, too, has left truths unspoken, never clarifies the nature of her relationship with Koyomi, the nature of the gag routines they always do, the nature of her existence, what she really wants. 

Time can solve the vast majority of people’s problems, Numachi Rouka says in Hanamonogatari, and throughout Second Season we see characters put this advice into action by running away. Kanbaru’s aimless sprinting, Shinobu’s mighty vertical leaps, Nadeko’s deflection and looking aside - they’re all examples of people trying to avoid confronting their troubles. Trying to get lost. I’ll get lost with you forever, Koyomi says to Mayoi, and he’s not just talking about an unspecified location. He’s talking about losing his entire life, failing to confront the things & people he really ought to. 

Mayoi, on the contrary, doesn’t try to run away in the slightest. She doesn’t wait for the darkness to catch her, she goes out on her own terms and in her own time. In doing so she drops the shield of banter and irony she and Koyomi have used to make their relationship and feelings for each other ambiguous this whole time. He knows she’s been biting her tongue on purpose, but before now that was left as an unspoken truth. In a similar way, even Koyomi’s aggressive lecherousness towards her tells you something about their relationship. He does, in reality, experience desire for her, but exaggerates so much in the expression of it that it comes off as more of a gag than anything, which perversely becomes more comfortable for Mayoi. She can simply brush it off as a regular routine while continuing to scorn him as a lolicon.

An actual, genuine kiss is the exact opposite of his indiscriminate licking, and it comes along with an actual, genuine confession, albeit delivered in the past tense. Perhaps the only situation where she could have brought herself to say it. 

After all, unlike Shinobu, there’s no way out. Mayoi is doomed from the start, by nature of being already dead. Unlike a vampire, ghosts don’t truly continue living after death, can’t actually change, especially not into a god of all things, that would be ridiculous-

Dear reader, I have watched this series before. As much as it’s in my nature to over-dramatize the tragedy of this arc, it seems more fitting to leave it on a hopeful note. Because Hachikuji Mayoi, in her final moments, did stop lying to herself. She stopped trying so hard to remain a ghost, a being that can’t change, and instead reached for something new - an unfulfilled regret different from the one that originally extended her existence. 

I think in a fundamentally fair world it makes sense that would leave room for her to be saved. 

[typellblog]

Kizumonogatari - An Analysis

You could consider Bakemonogatari as a template of sorts for what a Monogatari arc ‘should’ look like. 

There’s Koyomi, our protagonist, and then there’s a girl, and the problem faced by her in the form of an oddity. There’s Koyomi’s fumbling attempts to help her, contrasted by Oshino Meme’s actually useful advice. Oddities appear for a reason. She’s not a victim, not exactly. Koyomi always figures it out a little too late, and in the end all he can do is watch as she just goes ahead and saves herself. 

Nonetheless, his presence is key. He’s the one who reaches out, who actually makes the attempt to help. Oshino would never solve such problems of his own volition, not when the situation is so neatly balanced with oddities that act according to their functions and people who conjured them out of their own wishes. Koyomi is the one that recognises people’s desire to be saved, even if they try to push him away at first. 

There are some quirks to this within the Bake arcs themselves, but when you line up Kizu next to them, the way it transforms this fundamental formula is like night and day.

Koyomi Vamp

For one thing, this time the one that encounters an oddity is Koyomi himself.

The encounter itself was random, but as Koyomi puts it, the following events were only made possible because it was him. There aren’t many humans that would give up their lives for a dying vampire.

He’s motivated, in part, by a sense of worthlessness. His own life is that little of a thing. He thinks he’s ruined it already, and hopes to do better in his next reincarnation. But the way he puts it is interesting. He’ll be someone glib, who dances around relationships, who doesn’t feel guilt, who doesn’t worry about things, who insists on getting his way and blames his problems on other people.

We see a contrast being developed between being a ‘good’ person and a happy one. To Koyomi his conscience, his attentiveness to others, his overthinking are all burdens. They’re the reason why he can’t easily form relationships.

Making friends would ‘lower his intensity as a human’. If having friends allows one to share in their happiness, he points out that we must also share in their unhappiness, take their suffering upon oneself in some way or another. Anything less would be shallow – at least to Koyomi, whose loner attitude conceals a shocking ability to dedicate himself to others.

This contradiction drives him to suicide.

It is, functionally speaking, suicide. He doesn’t express any suicidal ideation before meeting Kiss-Shot, things aren’t so bad for him that he’s actively considering ending it, but nonetheless when put in a situation that allows him to give up his life, he does so.

This is really what is being referred to when he calls it a ‘hellish’ summer break. Just purely looking at the events that took place, one might question whether it really deserves that title, especially compared to some of the experiences we see him go through in Bake. After all, he’s not in much real danger for most of it. The vampire hunters are scary, but not the most difficult opponents.

No, where the summer break of Kizumonogatari really earns the moniker of a ‘hell’ is in how Koyomi is so thoroughly isolated from humanity. Vampires walk at night, they exist within a different world, they aren’t treated as human, their very presence is a danger to humans, and into that situation is thrust Koyomi Araragi, who is already so hopeless about his ability to interact with others that he freely offered up all the blood in his body.Traditionally, though,  the question that vampirism asks about this situation is how do you feel about it? Isn’t it great not having to worry about stuff like that anymore? Being isolated from humanity is also a freedom from responsibility, restriction, limitation – as represented by the vampire’s supernatural abilities. But from beginning to end, Koyomi desires none of this. His goal of returning to being human doesn’t change.

Iron-blooded, hot-blooded, yet cold-blooded

This is where the three vampire hunters are interesting.

A sentence I never expected to type going into this, honestly.

Why, though? In theory they’re important antagonists to this arc. But as characters within the overall Monogatari series, they languish at the bottom of the faves tierlists.

No doubt being men doesn’t help. They’re not ‘arc characters’, their relationships with Koyomi never get developed in the same way those of female characters do. Men are reserved for antagonists almost entirely in this series, and if you’ll permit me to be a bit speculative I would argue that it’s because women represent an ‘other’ that he’s trying to connect to, while the men are alternative versions of himself.

Take Episode, for example. Like Koyomi, he’s trapped between two different worlds. He resents both humans and vampires, and that emotion is what motivates him to hunt. He’s hot-blooded, if you will. Hanekawa is hurt during their battle, and Koyomi’s emotional response almost brings him to the point of killing Episode.

On the other hand, we have Guillotine Cutter. Unlike the other two, he’s fully human. He’s also far more vicious and underhanded. Cold-blooded, if you will. To defeat him, Koyomi must become literally inhuman. Becoming a plant is something that he’s been thinking about for a while, long before he became a vampire. Koyomi wanted to become something inhuman, to be free from his social responsibilities, for a long time. But now that he’s a vampire it’s precisely his connections with people like Hanekawa that make him want to turn back. 

The progression where Koyomi becomes more vampire-like to defeat increasingly human opponents feels like it’s commenting on how the more vampiric he gets the more callous he becomes until you realise the exact opposite holds for the hunters.

Dramaturgy, the full-blooded vampire, is the most reasonable of the bunch. He offers a path forward for Koyomi, the opportunity to become like him. The fact that Koyomi turns him down regardless shows that this was never about how humane the opponent, nor how many parts vampire they were. ‘If you want to stay human, then you’re human,” Oshino says.  Iron blood flows in them all, and from the beginning to the end this was about nothing more than protecting Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade.

Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade

Koyomi says that Kiss-Shot is someone whose meaning changes based on the observer. To the vampire hunters, she is a monster that ought to be killed. To Koyomi, she is a victim that ought to be protected. To Oshino, she represents a disruption to the balance between humans and oddities. 

Probably the most important way in which Kiss-Shot's mercurial nature is demonstrated in Kizumonogatari is through the various physical forms she adopts, growing in apparent age as she regains her lost limbs.

It's easy to see her as a child, perhaps even in her adult form. She's whimsical, prone to sudden bursts of emotion. There's a lot of things she lacks experience in. Koyomi meeting her bleeding out on the street might have been the first time she ever feared for her life. It's explicitly stated that Koyomi giving up his life for her is the first time another person did something for her sake. And as a result her decision to spare his life and make him a thrall seems to be one of the few times she's ever cared for the life of another person. With that in mind, it’s not difficult to understand why Koyomi seeks to protect her. 

On the other hand, her disregard towards human life is not feigned. She asks Koyomi to come and give her his blood without really considering what his motivations might be for following such an order. Humans are essentially bugs to her - Meme's stealing of her heart is forgiven instantly. She doesn't hold a grudge, the only thing that matters is whether she has it back or not. Eating Guillotine Cutter was not a deliberate strategy to make Koyomi want to kill her, she simply did so as if it was the most natural thing in the world. With that in mind, it’s not difficult to understand why the vampire hunters seek to slay her. 

Kiss-Shot is in many ways set apart from the oddities of Bakemonogatari. They derive their existence from humans, appear when they’re called on. They exist for a reason, and in doing so form their own kind of uneasy balance with the afflicted person.  In comparison Kiss-Shot feels more real, affixed more firmly to the world, a character in her own right. With that in mind, it’s not difficult to understand why Oshino wants to balance her. 

In doing so, he forces her to latch on to Koyomi Araragi, to offer him a ‘solution’ for his problems in the same way as any other oddity, and to become dependent on him to achieve her goals.

Oshino successfully mediates between Koyomi, who wants to save her, and the vampire hunters, who want to kill her, through the simple fact that she herself has reached a perfect balancing point between these two goals. She wants Koyomi to rescue her from the vampire hunters so she can die on her own terms. 

I mentioned Koyomi's suicidality earlier, but this story is also driven by how it manifests for Kiss-Shot. She became bored. It's the most common killer of vampires. When she talks with Koyomi on the roof, she says she has nothing interesting to talk about. Her long life has simply consisted of running around and fighting vampire hunters. The fact she wants to talk to Koyomi at all is significant, here. Not about anything in particular. She just wants to chat to someone. 

For all the differences between them, Kiss-Shot, too, is driven to suicide by an inability to connect to those around her, even if she doesn't consciously recognise it as such.

With that in mind, it’s not difficult to understand why Koyomi forces her to live, at the very end.

Hanekawa Tsubasa

Last time, with Tsubasa Cat, one element of the openings that I didn't touch on was how they show Hanekawa in positions that seemed like she might be about to take her own life. High places, train tracks. I didn't bother bringing it up, because it was getting late and also it didn't really seem to feature outside the openings, but here in Kizu it becomes more apparent.

She says, directly, that she wouldn’t call someone a friend if she wasn’t ready to die for them. This is a lie, she's talking about Koyomi specifically, but at least in his case she does die for him, intervening in his fight with Episode and having her torso blown apart by his giant cross. She offers to let Koyomi drink her blood. She intervenes again when he's fighting Kiss-Shot, with seemingly little regard for her own life. Both Oshino and Koyomi can agree that it's honestly kinda creepy.

The motivations behind her behaviour can be distinguished from Koyomi and Kiss-Shot, but there is another similarity: lack of friends.

It's somewhat inconceivable, after spending so much time in Koyomi's perspective, given such an idealised picture of her, but it seems apparent that she struggles with a similar problem to his own. She might be on good terms with a lot of people, she certainly knows a lot of people, but how many of them really know her? There's a reason why she's always alone on her night-time walks. 

She says she wanted to meet a vampire. The idea of something beyond human, something that isn't limited in the same ways she is, is an exciting idea to her. According to Kuro, at least, it's a way of breaking her out of her ordinary everyday life.

The thing about Hanekawa, I am slowly beginning to grasp, is that just because she tries to act normal, that doesn’t mean she has normal reactions to things. Rather, she treats the situation she finds herself in as if its normal and acts accordingly, leading to lines such as ‘he only hit me once, it’s perfectly understandable’, or acceding to requests to see her panties with almost zero hesitation, or treating someone sucking your blood and killing you as a totally normal thing to let your friend do, even when she’s clearly motivated by some special consideration towards Koyomi.

It’s a facade that doesn’t just mask her true feelings, but twists them into something else. She says that she never lies, something which is obviously untrue, but in a sense she’s always convincing herself, on one level or another, that she genuinely believes the things she’s saying.

This interacts interestingly with the series’ approach to fanservice. So far it’s mostly been played straight - with Hachikuji it’s a gag, with Nadeko it feels gratuitous, and stuff like Hitagi undressing in front of Koyomi is just that - here’s her naked body, look at it if you want. There’s a reason why she does that, but it doesn’t really connect to any deeper themes, it’s just there.

With Hanekawa in Kizu it is again gratuitous, it is again used for comedy, it is again just there because Nisio just wanted to do it, but the way Hanekawa’s brain works adds an interesting level to it. She’s surprisingly unbothered by the first instance where the wind flips her skirt, going so far as to deliberately engage Koyomi in conversation afterwards.

By the time of the second main incident, we’ve developed the idea that Koyomi is ashamed by his lust for her. He tries to push her away on the grounds that he’s too dangerous to be friends with, and the bluffed request for her to show her panties again feels in line with this, somehow. He’s trying to prove to her that he isn’t really the sort of guy she should bother herself with. 

She nonetheless takes the request completely seriously. It’s not that she’s just that literal-minded, she clearly knows what’s going on in Koyomi’s head (better than he does, sometimes), this is just her general pattern of behaviour when responding to him. Rather than setting boundaries, she indicates that she doesn’t really have any. This successfully shocks him out of the idea that he actually presents a danger to her. When it comes down to it he’s not actually going to look at a girl’s panties after being so brazenly presented with them. He’s kind of a coward. 

Hanekawa, on the other hand, Koyomi considers cool, someone who can decide on a course of action and stick with it. She isn’t swayed by silly whims like he is. In one sense, it’s true, but it’s also a reflection of the way he idolizes her. Hanekawa herself states that it’s not self-sacrifice, but self-satisfaction. Her actions, in this novel, aren’t directed towards any particular sort of justice, a particular perspective on Kiss-Shot, like Koyomi, Oshino, and the vampire hunters are motivated by. She is more or less just trying to help Koyomi, to be liked by him, even if it requires her to do absolutely ridiculous things like let him grope her boobs. 

One line I want to emphasize from that scene is Hanekawa’s offhand remark that she was prepared to lose her virginity. It’s presented as a joke but I’m fairly sure she’s not lying! It doesn’t present a particular desire to have sex with Koyomi, just a sort of resignation to the fact that this is the inevitable consequence of letting him do whatever he wants with her. I’m not saying she’s not attracted to him at all - I mean, she does feel up his muscles a bit earlier - but her vision of how this relationship will progress seems to be entirely on Koyomi’s terms. Which proves to be a bit awkward for her when Hitagi enters the picture later, but I digress. 

Her reaction to Koyomi’s hilariously stupid reasoning for why he needs to cop a feel (so that he doesn’t get distracted by Kiss-Shot’s enormous breasts when fighting her) is that it was even stupider than she was expecting. Because she was expecting a stupid justification, and is preparing herself to accept it regardless!

He doesn’t end up going through with it, which is probably better for the both of them all things considered, but does once again establish Koyomi as a massive coward. 

In any case, I really think these fanservice scenes help establish Hanekawa as a character who is willing to objectify herself for the sake of approval from others. That’s not to say she’s easily influenced, but rather that the self-satisfaction that she’s chasing, the life she’s chosen, is one where she’s constantly required to sacrifice her self.

Self-sacrifice and self-satisfaction

Again, this contrast between being a good person and a ‘happy’ one. The hypothetical ‘truly’ self-sacrificing person would do so to satisfy the desires of others, not just their own.

What Koyomi did for Kiss-Shot may have been beautiful, he says, but it wasn’t right. He saw the situation in the way that was most convenient for him, only chose to help the person that looked like she needed saving and ignored the consequences to anyone else. 

As long as I was weak, Kiss-Shot says. As long as they’re weak, as long as they look like they’re suffering, Koyomi would save anyone. 

Like Hanekawa puts it, he just doesn’t like it when people die. Even though he wouldn’t mind that much if he did. 

Previously I've discussed how Hitagi's oddity led to, and in doing so came to represent, her isolation and inability to connect with others. Koyomi's vampirism does something similar. He talks a big game about how having friends might increase the burden on him, but isn't the thing he's most worried about here that he might become a burden on his friends, that they would give up too much for him, that his selfish, vampiric nature would influence him into draining them dry? 

Vampirism doesn’t represent a freedom from social connections, it makes you far more reliant on humans than you were already. Not in the sense of having a mutual relationship with them, but a one-way predator-prey dynamic. 

This is why Koyomi barely even considers Kiss-Shot responsible for her actions. It's only natural that she, as a vampire, would eat humans. It's necessary for her survival. She herself doesn't understand it to be evil, so the only one he can blame is himself for enabling her to do so. 

It's a dysfunctional relationship. He takes Kiss-Shot's burdens upon himself precisely because of his intensity as a human. She herself doesn't feel burdened by the deaths she causes at all. Because she's a vampire.

It's Hanekawa that saves him by saying that it would be running away from his responsibilities and that the only solution is for him to be the one to defeat Kiss-Shot. For him to die here would just be self-satisfaction, the sacrifice wouldn’t achieve anything. 

But look at how she approaches this.

She sees Koyomi's fear of becoming a danger to people around him and accepts it instantly. He can eat her, if he wants. It’s a similar thing to the fanservice scenes. Setting no boundaries, reminding Koyomi that he, in fact, isn’t that willing to hurt other people. 

Koyomi isn't put in the position of needing to understand Hanekawa, of desperately trying to connect with her. She's the one that insists on helping him. He's the one that tries to throw her off, act as though her kindness isn't needed.

To Koyomi, Hanekawa is the one doing an unwanted favour, one that he eventually realises is what saved his life. 

Because Koyomi, unlike the previous arcs, isn’t the one that has to help a person dealing with the oddity. The one dealing with the oddity is him. Hanekawa is the one who supports and reaches out to him. But she can’t solve the problem for him. She can’t make the decision.

In the end, all he can do is go ahead and save himself.

Kizumonogatari

Why do vampires even work like that, anyway? 

That thralls are made by default when sucking blood, and to avoid turning someone, the vampire can consume them entirely, makes sense. It allows for the drama of realising that Kiss-Shot deliberately kept Koyomi as a thrall. It also ensures that Kiss-Shot’s existence is, no way how you go about it, a crime. To feed she must kill, or else turn more people into vampires.

But the only way of turning back to a human - the way that Hanekawa could apparently find by looking it up in the library - is to feed from the one who turned you, and kill them. A symbolic act of defying their control. (In the same way that patting Kiss-Shot’s head is an important proof of subjugation?) 

Here, though, it’s presented as something that Kiss-Shot was planning to do to Koyomi, a technique of freeing one’s thrall that she gained the ability to use since her first died.

It all goes full circle. Being a vampire is about dying. For Koyomi, who was killed by Kiss-Shot to become one. For Kiss-Shot, who seeks to die in order to change him back. 

There’s a sense of balance to it. No doubt Oshino was pleased. Vampires are the Kings of Oddities, beings powerful enough that they don’t really have to follow the rules, but at the same time, they’re self-balancing. 90% of vampire deaths are by suicide. 

Oddities are, by nature, self-balancing. It’s why Oshino doesn’t go seeking them out of his own accord. Perhaps he can’t. He’s just an intermediary between here and there, after all. He has to be contacted by one side to start the process. There has to be some evidence of unhappiness, of a desire to change the situation. 

Koyomi is put in this position time and time again in Bakemonogatari, asking Oshino to intervene on the behalf of the people he encounters. 

Yet in Kizumonogatari, he is, from start to end, not on the side of any person. He’s on the side of the monsters. It’s on Kiss-Shot’s behalf that he begs Oshino to intervene, because a balance that forces one party to suffer alone is not a balance he can abide.

He can’t save Kiss-Shot. He can’t end her suffering. If anything, you can argue he made it worse. 

What he can do is take a portion of her burden on himself, literally lower his ‘intensity as a human’ by retaining some of his vampire traits, and keep her alive. He keeps traces of the wound she inflicted on him, in exchange for the wounds he inflicts on her lasting forever as well. “Damaged goods both, we sought out each other.” They each have a bit of themselves missing now, something they can only find in each other. 

It’s selfishness, unquestionably. He’s fine with that. He knows he’s doing something that will hurt her. He’s fine with that. 

That’s the difference. The fear of his own vampiric selfishness is gone now. For better or worse, from this point he’s okay with being a bit insistent in getting to know people, not afraid of possibly hurting them in an attempt to help. 

He’s persistent in pursuing Hitagi, not just because his vampire abilities allow him to recover from the wounds she inflicts, but because his experience as a vampire reminds him how low someone can be dragged by isolation, and how much someone stretching out a hand can help. 

Coming into Kizumonogatari it feels like Bakemonogatari’s vampiric inversion, but by the end it’s clearly more like a prototype, at least when it comes to Koyomi’s attitude. His first stumbling attempts at helping.

And that’s all for now. No funny anime pictures this time! It was a deliberate choice, I promise, not because I just forgot to take screenshots while rewatching the movies (oops . . . ). But, I mean, I barely touched on the adaptation in this essay anyway, preferring to work off the text of the novel where possible. Considering the level of artistry on display in the movies, they probably deserve their own post. Which I will not be making any time soon, because oh my god I want to get to Nise already. 

[typellblog]

Tsubasa Family - An Analysis

With this arc, we jump to an interesting point in the chronology - familiar in the sense that our narrator has already recounted its events, but nonetheless our first glimpse at his state in between his encounters with both Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade and Hitagi Senjougahara. Third in this trio of life-changing individuals is Hanekawa Tsubasa, and I think if this book has one single question to answer it’s why Koyomi isn’t dating her already.

Tsukihi and Koyomi’s talk about love brings this to the forefront of the narrative. Koyomi’s clear inexperience means he struggles to realise obvious signs of him having a crush on Hanekawa, and also allows Tsukihi to eventually convince him that he doesn’t and is just overly horny instead. It’s more convenient for him. He doesn’t really want to think about confessing because he thinks it would trouble Hanekawa, someone that he couldn’t possibly imagine being into him in return. 

I find myself coming back to the thing mentioned in the prologue, the essential similarity between Hanekawa Tsubasa and Araragi Koyomi. The difference between them and Hitagi or Kanbaru, who ‘live their lives facing forward’. To some extent it’s been obvious for a while - both of them putting others over themselves, choosing to act like a good person without really believing themselves to be one. The difference, then, is in Hanekawa’s strength of will, in being someone who can, at all times, in all situations, continue to do the right thing, despite not feeling any particular attachment to that process at all.

That’s one of the conclusions to this arc. The idea that the Sawari Neko didn’t take advantage of her pity, but rather rewarded her lack thereof, acting according to Hanekawa’s will instead of its own. Her desire to be ‘normal’ is the source of all irregularity in this incident. 

Koyomi is different. Koyomi can’t help but feeling for almost everyone he encounters. He’s careless, doesn’t always do the right thing, but despite it all will end up helping out anyone.

When Hanekawa saved him during the events of Kizumonogatari, she did it in the same way as she buried the cat. Calmly, coldly, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t pity him, she didn’t look down on him, she simply saw him as an equal. 

So we are told in this arc, but one thing left unmentioned is that Hanekawa was in love with him. 

And while that’s a story for another time, it’s also a story we’ve already seen. Tsubasa Cat. This whole time, she was building up stress from not being able to tell Koyomi her feelings, he was unable to notice because of his idealized view of her in which she’d hardly think that highly of him, and as a result, out bursts Black Hanekawa, here to settle things on her behalf. Koyomi couldn’t become her hero, so she made one herself.

Once again I find myself wondering about the chronology here. Tsubasa Cat ‘skips over’ this first incident - the central trick, that there was never a difference between Hanekawa and the cat, is elided, in favour of making Kuro more of her own character. Perhaps a result of being separated by Kokorowatari in this one? 

But precisely because of that, we have an original enough scenario awaiting us in this arc. One where Kuro fights a hundred exorcist battles against Oshino and beats him every time, with the knowledge she has from fusing with Hanekawa. One where she holds back, avoids killing him, because she’s one with Hanekawa and still feels like she owes him. One where Oshino couldn’t defeat her exactly because of the depth of that combination - it’s pointless to exorcise the cat if the human wants to do the exact same things. Oshino’s style is always to balance things out, resolve the deeper issues. But it seems like Hanekawa’s issues are beyond even his deft hand. 

Another of the things that Tsukihi and Koyomi discuss is the vibe people’s clothes can give off - regardless of whether you’re wearing black or white panties, a person’s true nature shines through. A chaste person will seem chaste even in provocative black panties, and vice versa for a lewd person wearing white. Their only mistake - confirmed when Koyomi gets a good look at what Hanekawa is wearing early on - is to think that a person’s nature can be only lewd, or only chaste. This is a realization he talks about in Tsubasa Cat. Good people aren’t always good because good things happened to them. Sometimes one’s circumstances are so bad they have no choice but to be good. It’s not black or white. Good people sometimes act badly, too. Hanekawa Tsubasa is both. At the same time. 

Look at her reaction, when Koyomi exposes her. He has her briefly talking without the cat puns, confirms she does at heart have the same impulse to help him. She ‘showed no signs of guilt’. There’s no disconnect. Is there anything more Hanekawa Tsubasa than ‘seeming oddly cheerful’ while standing in front of your crush wearing only your underwear? She acts normal even in the most abnormal situations. 

The point of the Sawari Neko’s tale in the first place is that the cat and its victim are one. A virtuous person buries a cat, starts acting weirdly, is presumed to have been possessed by a spirit, but turns out to have been just doing that on their own. Just because they’re superficially viewed as a virtuous person doesn’t mean they won’t act out. It can make it more likely, in some cases. 

The way Oshino puts it, ‘turning out to never be a cat at all’ would be the worst outcome, it would leave Hanekawa stuck like that, in cat mode, permanently. It’s why he’s so worried about not finding a cat in the grave that it was first buried in, and why Koyomi nonetheless finds that the cat is there when the incident is over. Oddities, after all, are a way of shifting responsibility, something that we blame when we can blame nothing else. Rather than reckon with the fact that Hanekawa simply had the desire to do those things all along, we find it easier to resolve things by saying a cat made her do it.

This isn’t just a convenient excuse for Koyomi, who doesn’t want to think badly of her. It isn’t just a convenient excuse for Oshino, who completely failed in his role as a specialist here. It is, perhaps most importantly, a convenient excuse for Hanekawa Tsubasa, who, despite being fully conscious the whole time, still pretends she’s bewitched by a cat. 

That’s what Koyomi shouts to her. You’re still you. Stop trying to pretend you’re something else. Stop pretending that you’re weak-willed enough to get bewitched by a cat. Stop acting like your human vulnerabilities work as an excuse to become something entirely inhuman. Your life sucks, it really does, but trying to work off stress by attacking people isn’t going to change it.

This whole Black Hanekawa thing doesn’t really work if she allows herself to consciously acknowledge she’s putting on an act, because then she would realise the conflict between it and her usual maxim of always doing the right thing. Perhaps that conflict is what results when Kokorowatari separates her from the cat and it lashes out at her psyche?

But for that moment, Hanekawa writhing on the floor, unsaved even at the cost of Koyomi’s life, there’s a further interpretation I want to advance here. Koyomi shouts at her. He’s a bit cruel, a bit unsympathetic. Some of it’s his true feelings, no doubt, but he’s also trying to make her angry, get her to attack him. It seems to work. “Just die.” She repeats it for over two pages - only to reveal that at the end she’s referring to herself. 

We talked about vampirism as a representation of Koyomi and Kiss-Shot’s suicidality during Kizu. We mentioned that Hanekawa dealt with similar issues, but not how her oddity plays into that. Because in Tsubasa Cat it really doesn’t. But here there’s a whole other layer to it. If Hanekawa isn’t freed from the cat’s control within 10 days, it will become permanent. There will be no choice but to kill her. 

Does Hanekawa know this? She is the cat. If we take that seriously for a moment-

“Farewell. Go have a happy life.” the cat says to Koyomi when she leaves after meeting him at school.

“I will disappear after I hunt another five hundred people.” I? Who’s I?

The pain after being struck by Kokorowatari - in Tsubasa Cat, Koyomi says that everyone that the cat attacked was for Hanekawa’s sake, even herself. Here he says the same, that it can’t just be the cat’s random whim, because it’s been consistently and completely on Hanekawa’s side this whole time. 

Because when she picked the cat’s dead body off the ground she didn’t pity it, didn’t feel sorry for it. But she is the cat. When Koyomi shouts “There isn’t anything sorry about us, is there!?” is he talking to the cat, attacking Hanekawa, or Hanekawa, picking the cat up from the side of the road?

The Sawari Neko. Meddlecat, curse cat, whatever you want to call it, the pun is in the verb sawaru - to touch. Touching her will drain you. It will curse you. Regardless of her will. Because the cat, because Hanekawa, doesn’t know about her own power. She doesn’t know everything. 

The way Oshino puts it, Hanekawa’s parents are her fault. She acted in such an abnormally perfect way that they were unable to face her. Frankly if you’ll allow me to insert my personal opinion for a moment I think this is fucking stupid. In the anime you can pretend it’s just how Oshino puts it, but in the novel the narration makes it clearer you’re supposed to take him somewhat seriously. Hanekawa really did curse the people around her, purely through proximity. She ruined the chances of them becoming a proper family.

For that reason, as the cat,  she pushes Koyomi away, saying he’ll be cursed on contact with her. However, it’s too late. He’s long since been bewitched by the cat. So much so that he wants to die of it. 

Is it such a stretch to imagine that Hanekawa might feel the same? Someone like me, who curses everyone I touch, I should just die.

Koyomi’s rant, then, takes on a different tone. He’s desperately begging her to accept her current life because he doesn’t want her to throw it away.

Go on, say ‘I only know what I know’ like you normally do, because there’s still so much in the world you have to learn about.

He says this while dying himself. The question we had at the start, why a relationship between them wouldn’t really work, beyond Hitagi’s interference, seems obvious to answer now. Both of them keep so much to themselves, take everything on themselves, save everyone but themselves. This is the only place their relationship, on its own, could ever end. A mutual suicide. 

It takes Shinobu’s intervention, just as it did in Tsubasa Cat, to save them both. That similarity makes the difference so much more obvious. He doesn’t ask for her aid out of an understanding of the value of his own life. From start to finish, he refuses to believe that Shinobu actually cares enough to save him.

We might ask, as we did with Tsubasa Cat, about the placement of this arc. It’s fundamentally kind of odd, the ordering of the rest of the series aside, to put the two like this, having to recap the start and end of this one to fully explain the other.

I can’t fully answer that question. But one thing I can say is that Bakemonogatari couldn’t possibly have ended with Tsubasa Family. 

And that's all for now. Hanekawa stocks are rising a lot for me this time round. I barely remember what happens in Neko Shiro so that should be fun.

[typellblog]

Mayoi Jiangshi - An Analysis

The commonly recurring scenario of a human becoming an oddity in Monogatari is inextricably linked with the theme of death. Just as oddities, when afflicting someone, tend to be symbolic of some mental ill, an oddity, when one becomes one, represent depersoning, the suffering of a stress or trauma so powerful that it can literally end your life. There’s not much risk of actual death in Monogatari, just the dehumanization entailed by a life ending and yet continuing on regardless.

Ononoki is the one that brings this up to begin with, drawing comparison between herself, Hachikuji, and Shinobu as undead oddities. Their deaths all have their unique quirks. For Ononoki, it seems to have left her somewhat rudderless, as she doesn’t have the memories of the corpse she was before becoming a tsukumogami. Effectively being ‘reborn’, she lacks the sense of purpose that should attend any oddity. On the other hand, Hachikuji’s purpose is quite strictly enforced, as the curse attached to her nature has her get people lost regardless of her own will. 

Or at least it was. Hachikuji’s oddity can’t be so easily diagnosed & compared to a real issue as some other characters’ problems. However, it’s easy to see that being brought home by Koyomi essentially gave her a new lease in life, her prior existence preventing her from forming bonds with others while in her current state she can meet friends whenever she wants. Still, it’s not exactly an enviable position, as she lacks a fixed existence or place to stay. If her connections with others allow her to live then we might say she only lives in the company of others.

Ononoki draws a sharp distinction between these cases and that of the vampire. Vampires don’t truly die, she claims. After being turned, they live on, undying. Shinobu echoes this later, pointing out the zombies they encounter are simply dead, while vampires transcend the concept entirely. 

I’d argue this rings a little hollow, after Kizumonogatari. After seeing the state this other world’s Kiss-Shot is reduced to. Vampires live alongside death, constantly fighting the boredom and loneliness that so regularly drives them to suicide. The start of a vampire’s life is death, for Koyomi, and the end of his vampirism would be death too, for Shinobu. 

Kiss-shot is truly mighty, renowned as the Oddity Slayer. The little deaths of a cat or snake or snail are just snacks to her. But she can’t manage her own, and in this alternate timeline she certainly can’t handle that of her master, Koyomi. 

This arc title is a little odd, given that it calls out Mayoi instead of Shinobu, the arc’s main focus character. But it’s not hard to see Shinobu in the other half, the oddity afflicting the Mayoi of the alternate timeline. 

Recall her original hypothesis? That she died, and after Kiss-Shot’s death, the vampires were reduced to mere zombies. Because, unlike Shinobu and Koyomi’s equal partnership, the uneven relationship between master and servant would result in all of her kin being reduced to purposeless thralls upon her death. 

That turned out to be untrue, but it might as well apply to Kiss-shot herself, who, as a result of her uneven relationship with Koyomi went mad after he died, destroyed the world, and with her purpose completely spent, could do nothing but live on. 

Ononoki asks what the point even is of the doll ghost vampire trio continuing to live. What desire raised them from the dead? What desire keeps Hachikuji around, instead of passing on? For Koyomi, at least, there’s a proper answer. He has Shinobu. The scars they gave each other will never heal, but that in itself is a form of comfort, something that the alternate timeline Kiss-shot doesn’t have. 

We know whose desire keeps Hachikuji around in the alternate timeline, at least. Koyomi thinks specifically about a world in which she can be saved, and - it doesn’t seem that great. Even at first, in the past, Koyomi and Shinobu feel alienated. They have no cash, nowhere to sleep, they’re essentially wandering ghosts themselves. In the future they’re again isolated, but this time by the utter lack of people.

I really like the moment when they land in the ruined future, at least in the novel. Koyomi comments on his idea of the apocalypse. To him, the relevant factors aren’t widespread destruction or natural disasters. The world is humanity itself, and a world without people is most certainly an apocalypse. He uses their names, in the novel. Hitagi. Hanekawa. Kanbaru, Nadeko, Oshino. His parents. His little sisters. Monogatari as portrayed in the anime is so frequently an empty world, missing all but the named characters, that I almost forget what it means for there to be nobody else in the Araragi house, when Koyomi and Shinobu sit and talk there. Nobody else ever again.

But the missing person that caused this in the first place is, of course, Hachikuji Mayoi. Life saved by their meddling, she never became a ghost and never met Koyomi Araragi. There are no merits in this plan for him. He throws away one of his few human connections in an attempt to make her happier. 

It really costs him, too. Calling for Shinobu against Black Hanekawa was a turning point, it’s the overarching message of Bakemonogatari itself, and as it turns out losing even one of the preceding arcs is enough to have him messing up at the end. 

People change one another. In unexpected or unnoticeable ways. The actions of others impact you just as yours impact them. The Koyomi Araragi who became friends with Hachikuji Mayoi, and the one that didn’t - they’re different enough, at least, to make a different decision. 

It’s something that always bugs me a little. Time travel sucks as a plot device. It can erase almost any problem, so stories where it’s possible, even in theory, often end up justifying the ‘value of tragedy’. We can’t go and stop Timmy’s mother from dying, because it’s cosmically important in some way! It’s a theme that can come off pretty badly if not approached well. 

In Monogatari, though, it’s very simple. It’s a parallel world. You can’t actually change your past. The future you create and the future you come from are just different. This doesn’t just work as a plot explanation, I like it thematically as well. Of course changing the past would create a different world. That’s the whole point! The parallel worlds device just spells it out more clearly. There is no point in trying to change the world through time travel if as soon as you change the world it becomes alien to you, the reason for which you altered it now meaningless. 

We can quibble. Koyomi’s changed world is an exaggerated example. Surely if we made a more well-planned trip, more subtle and effective changes, we could improve things a little without literally destroying the world. No doubt we could. But Koyomi doesn’t just want to make minor, non-disruptive changes. Who does? Our desire to go back to the past is borne of our desire to avert significant tragedy. To stop Hitagi’s parents from falling into a cult. To prevent Tsubasa from having to grow up in such an awful household. To save Hachikuji from being hit by a car. 

This inevitably results in significant changes to these peoples’ lives. Results in, as Koyomi accepts, him no longer knowing Hachikuji Mayoi. He loses not just her but part of himself as well. If he changed all of his friends’ lives with time travel there would almost be no point in him returning to the future afterwards. 

We don’t have to evaluate it from a purely selfish angle, either. The Koyomi who doesn’t become friends with Hachikuji is a different person, but what about the Hachikuji who never met Koyomi? Doesn’t she also lose something that might be important to her? Maybe not so important as being alive and having a good relationship with her parents, but there’s no real point in comparing, because to create a happier Hachikuji you would have to erase the current one. As much as the situation itself might suck, so long as Hachikuji wants to stick around as a ghost, there’s no point in trying to make it have never happened. 

The situation of Koyomi choosing not to have his vampirism cured is actually comparable, despite it not involving changing the past. The past, after all, still lives in his shadow, in the scars they dealt each other. If not for Shinobu he could return to humanity without worry and if not for Shinobu he would not need to. Between the two of them they somehow manage to bear the enormity of Kiss-Shot’s death and it’s fine.

Think about his rant at the end of Nekomonogatari Kuro.  We are going to be seeing nightmares for the rest of our lives, he tells Tsubasa. You’re going to be that person for the rest of your life! But, even so, we’re in no way pitiful, are we? 

So, there we go. Tragedy justified. A pair of idiots fuck shit up and return home empty-handed, but having Learnt A Lesson about how you can never change the past. Kind of depressing but not unexpected.

Except there’s a twist to this tale. 

Well, this whole tale is a twist, really. The titular ‘tilt’ could easily be referring to Shinobu and Koyomi changing the fate of this timeline with the small act of saving Hachikuji. But that in itself is what enables the final twist: a letter from Oshino Meme. 

Just like the absence of Hachikuji in Koyomi’s life has more wide-reaching consequences than you might think, the presence of Koyomi and Shinobu in the past had a greater effect on people than he expected. Far from being alien, isolated time travelers, their actions were noticed by plenty of people, to the point of forming an urban legend. 

Their timeline-hopping was reckless, it was impossible, but it wasn’t pointless. 

They may have created a different world, one where they no longer belong, but it doesn’t mean they can’t leave their own mark on it. Koyomi can still do something out of fondness for a person he knows, even if they don’t know him. He can still pat Kiss-shot on the head, despite everything. If the apocalypse is defined as the absence of humans, then this world isn’t entirely dead, entirely hostile.

After all, it would kind of suck if the only world where Hachikuji survives is one where the world is destroyed. A reductive view of this arc is that it concludes by saying Hachikuji’s death is good because it lets her meet Koyomi. Really, though, Koyomi’s desire to save the other Hachikuji’s world shows he doesn’t want the world to be destroyed because of her. He doesn’t want her death to be necessary. He doesn’t want her life to be pointless. If the world is people, then her life is important to this world. Just as much as ghost Hachikuji is important to his. 

It’s an age-old problem. Which to pick? You can’t have both. Koyomi chooses both the world and the girl. 

Really, he gets neither. The world is still in pretty rough shape, even without the zombies. They still can’t do anything besides end Kiss-shot’s life. And they have to return without really getting to know living Hachikuji. 

The cruelty of fate reasserts itself. There are no completely happy endings, regardless of what you do. The worst thing that ever happened to you still happened, has always happened, will never not have happened. 

At the same time, Koyomi does get both the world and the girl. He always had them, from the start. 

I’ll end by talking about the first chapter. It’s Ougi! Hi, Ougi. She’s here to give us some fun trivia that’s secretly about the themes of the book. 

For Ougi, green ‘go’ lights and red ‘stop’ lights invert their ordinary meanings. You’re more safe when cars are stopped than when they’re moving. When you get a green light to cross the road as a pedestrian, you’re only half-safe. After all, the red light stops the cars, but the green light urges you onto the road, into the path of potential danger still. You’re better off with both of them red while you’re left standing on the footpath. 

Ougi styles herself as someone who is necessary, the lone person putting up a warning sign, becoming her own sort of red light to keep people safe. (For example, two idiots who think it’s a good idea to do a spot of time travel). It’s better not to achieve your dreams, she says. They’ll inevitably be worse than you imagined them as. (For example, a world where Hachikuji Mayoi lives that is full of zombies for some reason). 

Becoming famous or successful leaves you with even more responsibilities and obligations to other people, and becoming someone who can ignore those people just makes you an asshole that nobody likes. (Do I even need to point out how this feels laser-targeted at Koyomi’s original philosophy of not making friends?)

At the end she somehow ties it back into the traffic lights. You shouldn’t try and act nice in order to be respected by other people, you should instead respect them. Them being. The traffic lights. I can’t help but think that Ougi herself is the traffic light here. “Mind the lights, because they won’t mind you.” i.e. Don’t get in my way, because I’m not pulling my punches. 

Koyomi has something of a retort, although typical of him he only comes up with it well after the actual interaction. 

Ougi isn’t a red light. She isn’t saying to stop. She’s merely advising caution, advising that you should beware the red lights. We have a word for that, already. It’s an orange light. (Perhaps she’s pulling her punches a little after all). 

Araragi Koyomi, expert line-straddler, once again sneaks in between the red and green to find an outcome that does put him in danger, that doesn’t really achieve his dreams, but nonetheless lets him continue down the road he’s currently on. 

A bit of a rough one, this time, but I feel like once I get used to this schedule it’ll be manageable.

[typellblog]

Tsubasa Cat - An Analysis

In an interesting move for a post theoretically about Hanekawa I am prompted rather unsubtly by the text to begin with Hitagi. Specifically, her first date with Araragi.

In the anime, this is the last TV episode, and all things considered it’s not an unreasonable place to finish. This story, to some extent, is not about Araragi, but about Araragi’s relationship with Hitagi. She is important to every other arc (besides, perhaps, Nadeko Snake, which is interesting in its own right, but I digress). 

What I like about this scene is how it’s mirrored – it starts with Hitagi’s stumbling attempts at asking Araragi on a date, and ends with her stumbling attempts at asking him for a kiss. During the torturous (to Araragi) car ride with Hitagi’s father, she talks about – as if at random – Araragi’s studies, Kanbaru, and her father. During the second half, when they’re alone, she makes it clear that this was a deliberate showcase of all of the things that she has – everything she can offer to Araragi as his girlfriend.

This transition is accomplished through the midpoint of Araragi’s conversation with her father, which begins awkwardly and then veers into the heartfelt – ‘take care of my daughter’ is at first uttered as a joke and then once again more seriously when the conversation ends.

It gives us another perspective on Hitagi, telling us that the only people she felt comfortable speaking her mind to were people she didn’t mind being hated by, and people who would never hate her. We see that Araragi started as the first and became the second. But just as Hitagi’s father underrates his importance to her, seeing himself as in the first rather than the second category, so does Araragi. He feels uncomfortable being given the credit for helping Hitagi open up to others. He wasn’t the one who did it, after all. She just went ahead and saved herself. It didn’t need to be him, specifically. Anyone could have been there for her.

As Hitagi’s father points out, however, that alone is enough. The simple fact that he was there for her is enough to earn her gratitude. There’s nothing wrong with that.

And it’s with that in mind that we move outside, to see the stars.

This is also one of the few things that Hitagi can give to Araragi. Not the stars themselves of course, not even the specific location outside the observatory, but rather the memory. It’s a memory of a time that her family was still together. A memory that was reclaimed from the Weight Crab in no small part thanks to Araragi himself.

When Araragi is asked in the car what he loves about her, he’s too nervous to answer. When he flips the question back on her, she answers smoothly, ironically. It’s a total defeat.

When Araragi is asked now, he answers easily. Everything. Everything that she’s shown him tonight, he accepts. When he asks her again in response, she gives the same answer, but in this context, we realise she was being dead serious earlier.

It’s the kind of response that fits Hitagi’s specific brand of brashness paired with vulnerability. It’s the kind of recontextualization that fits this series. And as an affirmation of their love for one another it’s an appropriate jumping-off point for what Araragi is about to go through in this arc.

But before we get to that, I want to note that the way this arc is reliant on previously established events that we haven’t actually read about yet is quite aberrant.

The difference positions Hanekawa differently from the other characters. She’s not someone that Araragi meets because of oddity problems, she’s someone he’s known for a while already. Unlike the other characters, she’s stable - doesn’t need fixing. Her oddity problem has already been resolved, and she slips comfortably into the role of supporting character from before she’s even introduced.

If Araragi’s developing relationship with Senjougahara is the throughline of Bakemonogatari, then his relationship with Hanekawa is its dark reflection. She appears in every arc, but never gets involved directly, never changes as a result. She tells him this. I never change. It’s a lie.

On a narrative level as well as a personal one Hanekawa is sidelined, ignored, taken for granted, and it is essentially this failure to address her that feeds the Sawari Neko.

It’s an interestingly contradictory oddity. As its name suggests, it ‘meddles’, doing things for the host that they in some way needed but didn’t have the desire to act on. It was triggered by the act of picking it up from the side of the road and giving it a proper burial. It could easily be ignored, but ignoring things like that is not in the nature of Hanekawa Tsubasa. She sweats the small stuff, she does things that are expected of anyone but nobody actually does, she projects the image of an ‘ordinary’ person, and in doing so comes off as more extraordinary than anyone else.

She goes out of her way to help the cat, and the cat goes out of its way to help her, because for all her kindness and compassion she doesn’t reserve any for herself.

The ability of the Sawari Neko is energy drain. It’s the inverse of her usually supportive nature, the selfish ability to take from others in order to make herself feel better.

Since we’ve mentioned how the oddity’s quirks informs Hanekawa’s own issues, let’s continue with the classics and talk about the characteristic Monogatari twist. You see, Araragi tells us, the typical twist with these cat monsters is the reveal that there was no cat monster. A virtuous woman acts strangely at night, becoming a harlot and wandering the streets. She must be possessed! Entrapped by a monster! No, she’s just doing that on her own. The idea that she couldn’t possibly want to do that is your own assumption – how well do you really know her?

This is a theme that has been explored in Bakemonogatari already, with the case of Kanbaru Suruga. She was afflicted by a devil, yes, but the devil only gave her the ability to achieve desires that she actually held. Hanekawa’s case is an expansion of this – the monster is in a very real sense part of Hanekawa herself. But we understand this already. There is no need to belabor the point that Tsubasa Hanekawa is, herself, gaining some benefit by the cat’s actions. This is how oddities work. They arise for a reason.

And thus, the twist of the previous cat incident, the one that we haven’t actually seen yet, is skipped over. Or rather, it is told to us directly. Hanekawa faces a terrible family situation. Her parents aren’t really her parents. Her overwhelming stress from this causes the cat to assault others, including those same parents. 

Instead of this, we get a new, more dramatic twist. The cause of the stress this time was not her parents, as Araragi assumes. It was her feelings towards him.

Stress is a curious thing. The word must come up a dozen times in these few episodes – I can still hear the drawl of Oshino’s voice as he pronounces the English loanword.

For my money, the most interesting portrayal of Hanekawa’s stress here is seen in the opening for this arc. Or should I say both openings? There’s a photo version as well as the more usual animated one this time.

I would say the theme here in the first one is ‘wandering’ – we’re given names of different countries for each shot of Hanekawa walking around. A reference to her plans to travel after graduation, I suppose. But the pictured locations aren’t actually different – all washed through the same grey filter, all seemingly Naoetsu rather than overseas. Hanekawa’s post-graduation plans are paralleled with her habit of walking around town on holidays to avoid her parents.

It’s another view of something that seems to Araragi quite impressive and unconventional. Perhaps she simply does not know where to go, would rather be anywhere but here. If her walks are a way of avoiding one source of stress, her parents, then her travel might be pegged as a way of avoiding the other – Araragi himself.

The fear of being trapped is heightened in the second rendition. Now we see her actually running from something, hands grasping to pull her back, strapped motionlessly to a set of train tracks.

The thing I’m most curious about, though, are the opening and ending shots of her standing on the bridge, long hair trailing to either side. Different versions of Hanekawa – the second is the cat – but the same solemn expression. It’s enough to make us doubt that they’re separate characters at all, and indeed that’s the point. We’re shown not just Kuro Hanekawa, but Kuro as Hanekawa.

Kuro Hanekawa is an interesting character.

She can’t lie because she’s too direct and unthinking to bother. Contrast regular Hanekawa’s assertion that she doesn’t lie – one that’s patently untrue. To her, keeping up appearances and responding in a way consistent with her ‘normal’ persona is more honest and upstanding than revealing her true feelings. To be reductive, if Kuro tells the truth because she’s to dumb to lie, the Hanekawa lies because she’s too smart, too socially conscious to be honest.

Kuro in her lack of regard for societal norms can be considered a manifestation of Hanekawa’s stress, but she doesn’t embody it. She, herself, is easily able to fess up to her master’s (note the reference to her as a different person) feelings. She is indifferent towards humans, not actively hostile. Her random energy drain attacks were done to relieve stress, but Araragi’s alternative method of Shinobu is also perfectly acceptable to her. Not only do their vibes and behaviour differ, but so are their personalities and priorities – the cat is functionally a different person.

In this light, the anime’s portrayal of their dialogue is interesting. During this scene he initially refuses to believe what the cat is saying, his idealized perception of Hanekawa preventing him from recognizing her hidden emotions. He mistakes her refusal to show any sort of outward jealousy for her incapability of doing so.

But look at how the ghostly presence of regular Hanekawa reaches out to Araragi along with Kuro’s words. See how Araragi gently addresses her rather than Kuro – Kuro as Hanekawa instead of either Kuro or Hanekawa. Later his perceptions shift, Kuro’s dialogue delivered through reused frames of Hanekawa talking to him in the classroom, Hanekawa’s mannerisms like the mysterious opaque glasses recontextualized in Kuro’s paws – Hanekawa as Kuro. It becomes clear that Kuro is merely giving voice to things that Hanekawa really does feel.

As such, he’s able to give a genuine answer, saying that he loves Hitagi. Kuro Hanekawa, for her part, is not particularly surprised or bothered, simply moving to her next step in the plan to relieve her master’s stress.

She tries to kill him.

Once again building on Kanbaru’s arc, Araragi is forced to seriously consider dying in order to solve the problem. Hanekawa is someone he owes a great debt to. Would it really be that bad? Yes!

Hitagi would kill Hanekawa. Here we have the same excuse as Kanbaru’s case. I don’t want to say it’s wrong, she absolutely would, but the point lies more in what it represents. Her feelings for him. Everything that he promised to give to her. It’s not actually an ideal resolution of the situation, even if we accept that his life is as cheap as he makes it out to be. Because something that cheap can only be traded for one person’s happiness. Everyone else who cares about him (including Hanekawa) would be worse off for it.

The real solution is to ask for help. This has been partially demonstrated already, on the hunt for Shinobu. Hanekawa rubs it in, with her little lie about vampire fascination. None of the girls he met him him because they were brainwashed, they agreed because they care about him. They are each people that Araragi has to one extent or another participated in saving. Oshino Meme says that people can only save themselves, but Araragi doesn’t share that opinion when it comes down to it.

He believes firmly that Hanekawa saved him. Just by being there, a person can drag you out of the deepest and darkest of depths. Araragi has done the same for several others. So, isn’t it alright to ask for help oneself? To not feel as though you’re being a burden on others, but can instead rely on them equally?

This is the realization he came to, the root behind Shinobu’s disappearance. Kuro Hanekawa says he was getting too used to oddities, too friendly with them, not respecting their power and legend enough. He was treating Shinobu as a child, hardly feeling as if he had the right to even speak to her. Thus, she disappeared, until he called her back. Until he relied on her.

She, the ur-example of the people he has been risking his life to help, as well as the source of his vampiric abilities that enable him to do so.

As of our current position in the story, we don’t know what caused their current relationship. But we do know that as an oddity capable of draining the life from others, even the selfish Meddlecat is handily outclassed by a vampire. And yet Shinobu willingly stops draining when requested. Araragi willingly gives her his own blood. If the cat is Hanekawa cut loose, free from social standards and bothersome human emotions, then what does being afflicted by a vampire mean to Araragi exactly?

Hanekawa ends this arc by falling asleep, returned once again to her regular state. But as she crosses the thin line between dreams and reality, she lets some unfiltered thoughts slip out.

You have to shape up. The impersonal framing of debts doesn’t represent Araragi’s true feelings. Just as ‘not wanting Hanekawa to exploit his debt to her’ wasn’t the real reason why he rejects her, ‘I care more about my debt to you than remaining friends’ is a really awkward way of him saying he just wants to help her. He struggles to admit this because, I think, of his belief he can’t really save anyone. He’s almost embarrassed to admit he’s trying.

In the end, though, he can’t take the same lackadaisical attitude as Oshino Meme. He can’t help but get involved in others’ personal issues, to put people’s wellbeing over the most effective way of resolving a situation, even if that person happens to be an oddity themselves.

However – is this really such a bad way of handling things? Araragi blurs the line between oddity and human, but he’s been getting half-decent at walking that tightrope lately. Knowing this, Oshino leaves town, trusting Araragi to handle both Shinobu’s disappearance and Hanekawa’s transformation.

Oshino himself – his lackadaisical attitude is ultimately just an attitude. His actions reveal a certain level of sympathy for Araragi’s priorities. His fees, his manipulations, his harsh words, all show a certain awkwardness on his part. He has an inability to be honest and act directly, one that balances out his true deep propensity for helping others.

Thus ends Bakemonogatari, a story about coming to terms with the monsters hidden in the darkness of the world. “For example, in my own shadow.” Araragi adds. Whatever being afflicted by a vampire means to him, it’s something he has to learn to live alongside with, not ignore.

Thus ends Bakemonogatari, but I’m looking forward to writing about the rest of the series very much as well. Took a stupid amount of time to muster up the mental energy for this one, but hopefully I can work a bit faster next time (I always say this and its never true lmao)

[typellblog]

Nisemonogatari - An Analysis

Being a siscon really did not help with this one.

With Kizu I could somewhat pretend that it was its own isolated arc despite the absurd length, but as the cast ever-expands it becomes more and more difficult to act as though I’m only writing about one character at a time here. 

Indeed, we even have mini-scenes for each of our previous heroines. These are deeply oriented around fanservice, albeit in a way that actually also contributes to the characterisation of everyone spotlighted here. (Not that I can say the same for those involving his sisters, later.)

Hitagi gets to indulge her most sadistic impulses in a way I don’t think we ever see again beyond this point, Kaiki serving as both catalyst for her kidnapping Koyomi and catalyst for her changing in a more substantial way in the future. 

The mystery of Hachikuji continuing to hang around is once again raised, along with ominous foreshadowing of what this might mean for her future. She starts to emerge as a surprisingly mature character, her gags more obviously deliberate, her advice surprisingly helpful.

Nadeko is given a chance to pursue her one-sided crush on Koyomi. Her techniques are childish but reveal a surprising amount of . . . cunning? Malice? Foreshadowing for her later arcs. In any case, Koyomi remains completely oblivious.

I think the most interesting part of Kanbaru’s scene here is an indication that she’s not as much of a pervert as she presents herself to Koyomi as, and indeed to Koyomi is the operative term here, because as we hear from Hanekawa when Koyomi tries doing impressions of his friends (great scene, shame it was cut in the anime), Koyomi might have quite a different impression of Kanbaru than others do. 

Speaking of Hanekawa, she’s the only one that seems to be actually folded into the main plot this time, but simultaneously she feels like she’s growing more distant. She doesn’t get a directly horny treatment like the other characters, instead focusing on a gag about giving Koyomi permission to touch her boobs, but if he ever uses it she’ll hate him forever. Notably it establishes a completely different dynamic to her totally accepting attitude in Kizumonogatari.

Her character growth is significant, putting aside the stereotypical class president look in favour of a more ‘normal’ one, arguably something she’s wanted to do for a while. She had a sort of . . . lack of self-awareness of her own abnormality, before. Her role here is as a positive role model, I guess, for the entire set of Araragi siblings. If they’re fakes, she’s the real deal. If they need to be aware of their own weakness and inferiority, she needs to become conscious of her own strength. 

This, of course, doesn’t really make sense until we take a proper look at our arc character.

Karen Bee

To be blunt I struggle to bring myself to like Karen. She feels fake to me. 

I find myself in a similar position to Koyomi in some ways, the mentions of his sisters peppered into the Kizumonogatari novel triggering my own weird sense of jealousy/inferiority.

In theory, I should like Karen. She resembles nobody more closely than Emiya Shirou, probably my favourite protagonist of all time. Although, to avoid the risk of derailing into another Fate/Stay Night essay, I’ll make a different comparison. Someone who himself gets compared to Emiya Shirou all the time. 

Koyomi Araragi.

How come I’m able to get invested into this guy’s story, his justice, his self-sacrificing nature, his stupid, corny, but sometimes really cool lines, and not do the same for his sister?

I think on one level the answer is simple - I’ve spent the past four books inhabiting his perspective. I don’t have any context, for Karen. Who is she trying to save, and why? What difficult decisions does she have to make along the way? The Fire Sisters’ escapades are treated as a gag, occasional mentions of them playing Russian roulette with the Mafia or getting into brawls with the police, but nothing solid. Karen’s trying to save the middle schoolers getting scammed by Kaiki, but I don’t care about them. I’m not given any reason to. 

That’s just a matter of perspective, though. I don’t find it a particularly convincing argument, when Koyomi tells her that her justice is fake because she only acts on the behalf of others. Is that desire itself not beautiful? If you saw the same people suffering that she did, would you not want to help them, too?

I haven’t been shown any of those people, though. So I don’t get it. 

But I’m wasting time with this. I can’t see these people, won’t see them, because I’m living in a different world from Karen. She’s still in middle school, and Koyomi is in high school. This is explicitly called out as being a point of change for him, one where he first began to close himself off to others on account of his self-worth evaporating as he realised the world was more difficult than he had thought. 

Karen and Tsukihi don’t have that, yet. They’re missing the key element that’s driven Koyomi’s whole character progression over these previous four books - the fact that he doesn’t have any friends. Lol. 

But I mean seriously, you see how the problems Koyomi is faced with operate on a completely different level than those the Fire Sisters try to deal with? They have an idea of a clear and simple evil, one that they’ll go to any ends to defeat. 

In comparison - Koyomi isn’t fighting villains. He tries to help the victims of oddities, but they can only save themselves, or so we’re told, making Koyomi seem useless when it comes to the big action scenes. What he struggles to overcome is his vision of himself as a burden, someone whose helpfulness is an unwanted favour and selfishness is a destructive, vampiric urge.

Karen and Tsukihi never once consider the possibility of themselves being burdens. They go off to help people heedless of the potentially destructive consequences (which inevitably seem to result). 

Karen’s ‘acting only on the behalf of others’ is fake to Koyomi because he’s already come to terms with his own selfishness. He couldn’t help Kiss-Shot, couldn’t do what she requested, because her request was to die, and he wanted her to live. The Fire Sisters haven’t yet been faced with such a difficult problem, haven’t yet been asked whether their self-sacrifice is really just self-satisfaction. Koyomi is scared of hurting people. All the time. He makes his decisions with that possibility in mind. That’s something he’s just had to accept. The Fire Sisters don’t seem to worry about that at all. 

When Koyomi tells Karen that before being right, she must be strong, we initially assume he’s talking about physical strength - the ability to defeat one’s enemies. But looking over Koyomi’s past actions, we’ve seen physical strength prove of little use to him time and time again. What he means is the strength of will to not falter in the face of opposition or difficult choices. He may not have been right, when he chose to keep Kiss-Shot alive. But at least he had the balls to do it.

Hanekawa points out he’s really criticising himself with this one. After all, there are plenty of times where he’s failed to show strength, like his struggle to let the second snake go in Nadeko’s case. He couldn’t commit to one course of action or another and risked getting the worst of both worlds. Hanekawa, in contrast, always commits to the bit, never giving away in the slightest that she had feelings for Koyomi after he started dating Hitagi. She’s almost too strong, that was her problem according to Oshino, and indeed in doing so she ended up hurting herself as much as she helped other people.

She has to be aware of her own strength, not act as though everything she’s doing is perfectly normal, hold off on dragging everyone with her directly to the right answer.

In the same way that Koyomi has to be aware of his own weakness, to know he can’t solve everything on his own, and not be afraid to ask for help. 

In the same way that Karen hasn’t quite internalized it, that evil and good aren’t always so obvious, that you need to be ready for getting your ass kicked, and maybe you should have asked a couple of people to come with you.

When Koyomi and Karen fight, he gets the shit beaten out of him, but he still clearly wins. Karen struggles to articulate her viewpoint when faced with an actual objection, and eventually gives in, reassured by Koyomi that he never thought what she was doing was wrong.

Hmmm. I notice that I haven’t discussed Karen’s associated oddity yet, the bee. Interestingly enough, it’s just not that important to her arc. It doesn’t influence her personality or behaviour at all, like many of the other characters’ oddities. It just makes her sick. 

Oshino’s old adage proves true to an extent - the bee does appear for a reason, in the sense that Koyomi says it's her own damn fault, for going up against Kaiki alone. She gets what she deserves! A bit harsh, perhaps. It’s also her own fault in the sense that her overactive imagination is part of what stimulates its effects so much - the bee is a fake oddity, clinging to a fake person, someone who plays make-believe in such a way that they’re susceptible to a fake disease. 

Obviously the fire association with the bee makes sense for her, especially in regard to how it becomes a fever, getting heated up because of justice leads to her pushing herself too hard and burning out. Blah blah blah whatever. The symbolism doesn’t interest me, because I think the far more important thing about the bee is that it’s not representative of a larger problem. Karen acts fairly similarly before and after being afflicted. She isn’t saved by anyone else, but you’d have to stretch to say she saved herself, either. Unlike Koyomi, she has friends. Unlike Hitagi, she doesn’t have difficulty reaching out to others. Unlike Kanbaru, she doesn’t have a hidden side to her, a wish that she can’t fulfill.

I said it already, but the Fire Sisters don’t have regrets. They don’t have any lingering trauma. They’re the ones causing problems for other people, supremely confident in their own righteousness. They may be fakes, but in a sense they’re a lot more real than the rest of the cast.

Tsukihi Phoenix

Well, at least that’s the case for Karen, whose outside image and inside personality are perfectly aligned. For Tsukihi, on the other hand, there’s a bit of a disjunction. 

Alright, I guess we’re doing Tsukihi too. I wasn’t exactly planning on both at once when I started this, but I suppose at this rate I have enough room.

What, I haven’t talked about Kaiki yet? God, who cares. What do you want me to say, here. He’s a fake that’s accepted his fakeness in the same way Koyomi asks of Karen. A withered branch to Koyomi’s sapling, the third stage in the Araragi evolutionary tree. I don’t quite get it, how exactly this man is supposed to be Koyomi taken to his logical extent. He’s evil, but in a very deliberate way. He’s not convinced of his own justice, has no interest in promoting his position. He almost feels like he’s playing a character. I’ll get back to him in later arcs, but for now I think the important thing to note is something I mentioned last time - as a male character, his role is more about mirroring Koyomi than being someone Koyomi ought to forge a connection with. As an adult specialist, his arc is complete, so to speak. There’s nothing in him to change or that needs changing.

He’s the polar opposite of the Fire Sisters in that way. They’re too young to have changed yet, not quite mired in the coming-of-age plotline that ensnares this story’s main characters. Kaiki isn’t an arc character, doesn’t need to be won over by Koyomi, but neither does Karen, really. 

Koyomi already has a deep enough relationship with his sisters - just look at their openings, the lyrics addressed to a vague listener that’s almost him but feels far too idealised, his image cropping up again and again in their visuals. In Platinum Disco, he overshadows Tsukihi from the background, closing his mouth over her and forcing her to dance headlessly. His influence over her is obvious, almost total. In Marshmallow Justice, he’s buffeted around by the currents of Karen’s flames, speaking to a more antagonistic relationship, her trying to insist on her righteousness to him.

This is an established, regular part of their dynamic. If anything, the biggest change to their relationship doesn’t happen in the arc where Karen is afflicted by an oddity, it’s the toothbrush scene at the start of Tsukihi Phoenix. (Which still baffles me in a lot of ways, but I really don’t want to get bogged down in it right now).

I said it already, but Karen’s oddity doesn’t really represent any deep-rooted psychological issues for her - it’s fake.

Unlike Karen, however, Tsukihi’s oddity is of immense significance to her. Not just in terms of its importance to this arc, but all the way down to its influence on her personality and behaviours. After all, Tsukihi herself is the oddity.

The Shide no Tori, an immortal oddity that adapts to its surroundings. It’s volatile, mercurial, constantly renewing itself. It’s also eternal. The core of the thing is that it has no core, no consistent personality, and as such must take cues from those around it. Tsukihi acts according to her whims, but in the end remains incredibly dependent on others, latching onto them to give her a purpose. 

Her justice is fake in the sense that it’s been picked up from Karen and Koyomi. It’s not at the core of her being. 

She doesn’t have the same drive for it that Karen does, and as such tends to follow her sister’s initiative.

But, similarly to Koyomi, she does have the ability to regenerate from fatal danger. Just as he would throw himself into danger to help his friends even without it, she’s said to have thrown herself off a building to help Karen without even knowing she has the ability.

In comparison to Koyomi’s selfish, half-assed vampirism, a healing ability that has him straddling life and death without really making progress in any fight, Tsukihi’s immortality is pure. Instant. Perfect. There are no consequences. 

There are no consequences. She doesn’t regret because she isn’t given anything to regret. Learning about the supernatural would threaten the Shide no Tori’s position as a normal human, so the memories of being killed are wiped from her mind when she wakes up.

Of course she would throw herself into danger to save someone else. She doesn’t really have a ‘self’ to value in the first place. Everything important to her comes from other people. Koyomi faces immense self-loathing for a similar reason. Tsukihi doesn’t seem to be bothered by it, though. Perhaps she can’t be.

She knows her sense of justice is a bit different from her siblings, and she considers the possibility of the Fire Sisters breaking up. The possibility of Karen changing when she reaches highschool, in the same way Koyomi did. The implication being that Tsukihi would not, floating from hobby to hobby without ever forming a permanent attachment to anyone, constantly reinventing herself like a phoenix rising from the flames. 

That’s the Shide no Tori. A clever fake that keeps itself from being noticed by imitating a normal human. Kaiki might say that a deliberate fake may have more value than the original, but even the deliberateness of it is carefully removed, not allowing the host awareness of anything related to their condition. 

In that sense she’s not any more or less human than her siblings. 

That is, I suppose, the main conflict of this arc. It’s centered on Tsukihi but doesn’t involve her - how can it, when her entire gimmick involves being unaware of what’s going on around her?

Koyomi is opposed by the exorcist sisters Ononoki and Kagenui. Just as Kaiki mirrors Koyomi, they mirror the Fire Sisters. The older, physically inclined, human. The younger, an oddity. And they claim to be defenders of justice.

This is the tricky part about justice, which Koyomi has been trying to impart to Karen. Most people think their actions are justified. Someone like Kaiki is an absurd exception. How can you insist on being right when your opponents also claim they’re on the side of justice? We’re not getting a good answer to that in this book. 

Perhaps I’m starting to understand a little how Koyomi is like Kaiki, here. Because he doesn’t claim to be on the side of justice. He never even tries. He gives up that battle before it starts. He’s not on the side of humans. He’s not on the side of oddities. Like the time with Kiss-Shot, he’s nothing more or less than on the side of the person he chooses to protect. 

Little sisters are more important than justice. A sentiment I can get behind.

In any case, there’s something a little bit off about Kagenui here. Part of her motivation is hoping to meet Oshino and in his absence she takes on a little of his role - viewing Koyomi as a human, rather than a monster. 

Something must have set her off, Koyomi thinks, when she starts talking about him forcing his ideals on others. He might be fine with leaving Tsukihi alone, but what would Karen think? His parents? Tsukihi herself? Wouldn’t she become a real problem if she was aware of her true nature as an oddity?

He responds by saying he’s allowed to force things on his family. Once again, he’s okay with being a bit selfish, a bit of a burden. Koyomi’s sisters aren’t like the other girls he meets throughout the series. He doesn’t need to win them over, doesn’t need to break down the barriers between them and come to a complete understanding - he already does understand them.

Tsukihi being an oddity prompts realizations on his part, but nothing he didn’t already know. He already understands and accepts the entirety of her, in the same way they do for him. So he doesn’t need to worry about forcing something that can’t ever be repaid on her. He’d accept the same for her. They would, all three of them, happily die for each other, and they know it.

Something must have set Kagenui off, talking about this topic, and it seems to relate to her relationship with Ononoki. Are they real sisters, or fakes? Wouldn’t it be a real problem if an immortal oddity was aware of her true nature and tried to practice justice regardless? Kagenui argues that Tsukihi would be cruel and arrogant in the pursuit of it, having been freed from the constraints of human reason. 

Koyomi thinks of the former Heart-Under-Blade, someone who was obscenely over-the-top and utterly inhuman. I think of Ononoki Yotsugi, quick to violence, quick to insults, saying she’d be fine if this entire world of fakes was destroyed.

Yep, Kagenui is definitely a bit off, here. Too concerned with matters we aren’t really privy to, at the moment. It’s like the fight with Karen all over again - Koyomi gets the shit kicked out of him, but in the end he’s still standing, and his opponent wavers a little. Finally learning “a lesson ten years in the making”. 

She talks about the inherent nature of humanity, the doctrine of innate evil. If we suppose that people are born evil, then any good act requires putting on a fake persona. Like Hanekawa and Koyomi talked about in Kizu, self-sacrifice vs self-satisfaction. They both think of themselves as faking it, only acting like they’re truly ‘good’, but according to Kagenui’s proposal, there’s no such thing as being truly good. The truest good is in trying to be good, a deliberate imitation. A fake that has more value than the original.

So, where does that leave us? One really has to wonder about Koyomi’s decision to not tell Tsukihi (or even Karen) anything about the supernatural. Another selfish decision, in the vein of what he did to Kiss-Shot. It’s in character, at least. 

I think it’s interesting how he describes it, after kissing her. There was a time where Koyomi was an only child. There was a time when he only had one sister. But for her entire life, there wasn’t a single moment where Tsukihi wasn’t the little sister of him and Karen. Nisemonogatari is about family, and family, for Tsukihi, is something that she can define herself in relation to. It’s a permanent attachment, created by the circumstances of her birth. Like a cuckoo, the Shide no Tori leaves its young in the nest of another family to prepare them for facing the world. Tsukihi isn’t ‘really’ from the Araragi family, in the same way that she doesn’t ‘really’ have a sense of justice like the other two. But in her deliberate attempt to adopt it- well, you know how it goes.

Koyomi doesn’t need to tell her about the supernatural, about the fact that she’s a phoenix, because in a meaningful sense she isn’t one. She’s his sister. She’s Karen’s sister. That’s good enough. 

Koyomi’s last lines are strangely poignant, contradicting the usual epilogue format by occurring before he’s woken by his sisters the next morning. “I got way more involved than usual, but there was no point in staying there forever. For now, I’ll go back to my room and change.”  I feel like it’s a comment on the blending of worlds that’s been going on here - he’s part of the backstage, as Hachikuji puts it. His sisters are at the front. He’s entering the adult world, while they’re still kids. There’s a sense that he shouldn’t get too involved in their incidents, and vice versa. 

A hopeful reading would be that like Koyomi, they’ll also change. In their own time, at their own pace, in their own way.

But that’s all for now. I managed to be somewhat normal about Tsukihi. Somehow. 

[mjlol52]

crying in the club over this one boys

Hitagi Crab - An Analysis

Let’s start with Oshino’s story about the boy who sold his shadow. It’s present in the anime only as text flashing on screen at the start of the episode, which feels like the kind of thing you do not when something is unimportant, but rather when it takes up too much space to fit in the anime adaptation.

I think it’s a good jumping-off point, though.

To summarize, the boy sells his shadow to a strange old woman for ten pieces of gold. This is already strange, raising the question of what value we place on something as unimportant yet natural as one’s shadow. Losing the shadow doesn’t inconvenience the boy in any way – the problem arises when he returns home and the townspeople find his lack of a shadow to be creepy. As Oshino puts it, what the boy sold wasn’t just his shadow, but “what ought to be”.

The shadow itself is nothing, the reflection of an absence.

The parallel to Senjougahara is clear. While her weightlessness inconveniences her directly in some ways, by far the biggest is the social consequences – or rather, what she does to ensure that there are no social consequences. In order to live a normal life with her condition she must ensure that nobody gets close enough to her – literally, physically close to her – in order to find out.

The school setting is interesting in this respect. There’s a certain mandated closeness between students, but an equally mandated distance, like the arrangement of seats in a classroom. Senjougahara isn’t bullied or shunned, but nor is she approached.

She didn’t simply lose her weight, she also lost her presence, becoming “ethereal”, like she isn’t there at all.

This, however, is a deliberately maintained act. She reads books during class as if “building walls around herself”. She uses stationery to fend Araragi off. She builds a shell around herself, like a crab, and then uses her claws to snip at anyone who gets close.

Let’s talk about misconceptions. This is a theme that’s present early on, when Senjougahara refers to herself as a tsundere, implying that her cold persona will be pulled back to reveal a loving attitude. (Araragi doubts this.)

Many things are revealed about her, in this story.

Take, for example, how long she spends changing, Araragi assuming that she’s showing off when in fact she genuinely isn’t that good with wearing clothes. She hides the surgery scar on her back by giving him the full frontal view.

Acting tough in the cram school, an environment that poses real danger to her. Being reluctant to trust Oshino after already being fooled five times.

At every turn, what Araragi takes to be rudeness or arrogance is bravado, trying to distract from and cover up old wounds.  

Perhaps his most significant misconception is that she’s already given up, “resigned herself” to a life of weightlessness. But why see five different con-men about it – why trust Araragi, despite being willing to cause significant injury in order to make him go away a minute ago? Part of it is witnessing his vampiric healing (and the self-sacrificial nature it represents), of course, but even so some part of her still wants to believe she can be cured. She only half-trusts Oshino, but put the other way around, that still means she’s giving him half of her trust.

Because – and this is the root of it all – Senjougahara wants to hold on to something.

Now is probably a good time to bring up oddities. It’s not particularly original to point out that they serve as physical manifestations of a person’s specific mental and emotional issues. Their very existence is questionable, a “trick of perspective”, the reflection of an absence. The important bit here is that their existence is also metaphorical, a sort of pun-as-narrative, as you can see with the Weight Crab’s name also being interpreted as ‘Emotion God’.

The Weight Crab does not only take away Senjougahara’s weight, but also her emotions, her memories, and crucially her ties to other people, snipping them up with its great big claws.

To link back to what we were talking about earlier, the reason why she distances herself from others isn’t really to hide her weightlessness. The deeper cause, the reason why the Weight Crab visited her in the first place, was to repress her trauma, to lighten her burden, to make it easier to go on without being bothered by her connections to others.

She lives a kind of ethereal half-life, untroubled by her poor relationship with her mother and the memories of nearly being raped, but equally troubled by her lack of feeling towards them, unable to properly move on.

All the bells and whistles that Oshino sets up - the priest outfit, the ritual site, the ‘purified clothing’ – exist simply to get her in the right mindset. He isn’t helping her; he helps her help herself. She is the one that must make a genuine request of the Weight Crab, to truly want to confront her own trauma.

She addresses Oshino more formally, more hesitantly than she does Araragi. I think she’s scared, a little bit. Scared that Oshino won’t want to help her. Scared that he will want to, and end up being another scammer.

But it’s interesting that she treats Araragi that casually in the first place, isn’t it? He’s someone who caught her without a second thought, someone who keeps running after her despite all her snipping. Someone that’s quick enough to respond to her biting humour, but not quite quick enough at picking up all the things she’s hiding beneath its surface.

She needed someone like Araragi to get her there in the first place. Oshino, for all his knowledge, wouldn’t have cared enough.

That’s part of why I find it such a moving line when she tells him that she can do it herself. Talking to Oshino, she means, but the same tone is also there when she begs Oshino to let her try and talk to the Weight Crab again. Despite everything, she really did want to hold onto those emotions, and was brave enough to try and reclaim them on her own.

At the end of this story, Araragi realises that Senjougahara might actually be a tsundere. What this means in practice is that despite how bluntly she is capable of delivering a vicious joke, she is equally capable of bluntly delivering a heartfelt thanks, shifting from irony to sincerity in an instant in a way that catches Araragi off-guard.

She’s more vulnerable than she first appears, but she’s also brave enough to confront that part of herself. Nothing will change, Oshino says, pointing out that her relationship with her mother will still be poor, her family will not come back together.

But it’s not as if everything will stay the same, either, she responds. In overcoming the crab, she also formed a new relationship with Araragi. The world keeps turning.

I am reminded of the imagery from her opening, staplers drawing lines across a grey cityscape. Slowly, surely, one step at a time, they create their own paths.

I don’t have an epilogue or a punchline (this time round, at least), but I’ll give a quick explanation of my plans here. Basically, I’m going to be reading the light novel version of each Monogatari arc followed immediately by the anime adaptation, and then writing up an essay on my thoughts for each one. This is sort of like what I’ve already done with Fate/Stay Night (and I’ll try to keep moving those posts over here while I’m doing this) so I’m sure this is going to end up increasing in scope and effort the longer I carry on.

Anyway, next time I’ll be writing about- well, I guess you already know, huh. That’s gonna take some getting used to.

[typellblog]

Nadeko Snake - An Analysis

This arc in the novel opens with Araragi meditating on how people change over time. This is not a surprising topic for Nisio to address here. What is surprising is that this opening sequence focuses on Sengoku Nadeko.

Sengoku Nadeko. A character who, in this arc, doesn’t seem to have changed in the six years since Araragi last saw her.

I mentioned last time that one of the cool things about Monogatari is how all of the characters have two sides (more, occasionally). Nadeko, in this arc, barely shows us her first side, let alone a second. It is tempting to skip over this and focus on the incredible character development she gets later. 

We could instead read this arc as largely about Araragi, and the choices that he is confronted with. His new friendship with Kanbaru raises questions about his commitment to Senjougahara. He’s a weak-willed person, Hanekawa says - not just in the sense that he’s easily seduced by a pretty girl, though. We are to understand this as commenting on his willingness to care about a person, to help them out even when it hurts him. Even with strangers. Even with people he’s never met before. 

Oshino questions him on much the same grounds. How are you going to deal with things when I’m gone? Araragi doesn’t just get involved in oddity incidents because he knows a specialist that can help out, he does so regardless. He doesn’t just put himself in danger because his vampire blood allows him to recover from injuries more easily, he would do that anyway. 

Even his nature as part-oddity that keeps him within the world of the supernatural and continues to expose him to dangerous events - that too is optional. He could simply stop caring for Shinobu.

But he can’t. He can’t ignore someone right in front of him that needs help. He’s not that type of person. 

This arc, then, is about asking him what person he would save, if he had to make a choice. In the climax, left with no other option, he physically rips the jagirinawa from Nadeko’s body. The snake spirit attacks him instead - and he can’t beat it. He continues to confront it despite taking heavy injuries, and Kanbaru has to intervene, saving his life by pushing him away and keeping him still. 

The reason why Araragi was so desperate to intervene was because if the snake left, it would return to the person that cursed Nadeko, likely causing their eventual death. It starts to become clear what Oshino meant by oddities being natural processes that shouldn’t be interfered with. Araragi’s attempts to save everyone involved will only backfire on him in the long run. Oshino’s role as a specialist is to balance things out, to address an oddity’s root causes rather than violently destroy them.

It’s why he hates treating those afflicted by an oddity as victims. It’s the reason for his catchphrase, “did something good happen?” He questions the idea that oddity-related incidents are misfortunate for those affected. In reality, oddities operate on a clear logic, they appear for a reason - often as a result of the secret desires or wishes of the affected person. This is why they are so effective as a storytelling tool. They are visual metaphors that are physically present within the story.

So, all that being said . . . what do the snakes reveal about Nadeko’s traumas, her secret desires, her internal world? In this arc, at least, the answer is very little.

We can talk about what is there. She finds the bruises from the snakes entwined around her to be shameful, causing her to cover up more when she dresses. They are, in fact, invisible - others wouldn’t be able to see the marks, let alone the snakes themselves, but there’s clearly more going on with Nadeko’s self-image than the snakes alone. We will not learn about it in this arc.

Furthermore, due to the snakes’ invisibility, she suffers in silence, lying about the pain they were causing to Araragi and Kanbaru. Again, it is not just the snakes causing this - Nadeko is terminally incapable of speaking up about her own suffering, causing her to pointlessly apologize rather than actually tell the truth. Again, this is not touched on much in this arc. 

Her method of attempting to resolve the problem alone is interesting. She kills a lot of snakes for a solution that doesn’t actually do anything. What does that crime, the willingness to hurt other living beings for her own sake, say about her? We don’t find out. 

Nadeko is, according to Oshino, purely a victim. There was no particular reason why she was attacked by the snake. She simply got unlucky. 

(Oshino, of course, never saw Nadeko in person, relying entirely on Araragi’s reporting in order to prescribe a solution to this issue. I can’t help but wonder how differently things would have gone if he had actually met her. Although, he was already trying to cut ties with Araragi and co. at this point, so even if he did catch a whiff of the larger issues that might crop up with her he may have done a half-assed job anyway.)

Wrapping back around to the original point here, some may say that Nadeko was poorly written here. That this arc was just bad, or at least flawed due to its lack of focus on the titular character. 

But my mind keeps coming back to Araragi’s opening monologue in the novel. How he describes the Nadeko of 6 years ago as a “reserved girl of few words who constantly looked down at the floor.” How her behavior in the present is almost exactly the same, despite her being described as having become “a unique someone that I could never forget.” I think it’s clear that Nisio already had some idea about how her later arcs would go.

This arc doesn’t strike me as bad writing, it strikes me as deliberate. The way that people change over time isn’t an isolated theme in this arc, it’s present as Araragi muses on the future of every main character. Hanekawa isn’t going to university. He himself is trying to get into the same one as Senjougahara. Senjougahara herself is changing from what she once was, shedding the trappings of her oddity affliction. Kanbaru will too, in a few years. He, on the other hand - is presented with the choice left to him by Oshino, in that respect.

It’s notable that this conversation with Kanbaru, in the anime, takes place in a specific location on the way to the shrine - a weird little covered pathway. This gets a lot of emphasis in the anime despite not even being mentioned in the novel’s description of the trip. There are some interesting lighting effects, mostly in the sudden transition from darkness to sunshine as they exit the tunnel. The reason why I mention it is because of Araragi’s conversation with Nadeko that takes place in the same location in the next episode, and once again touches on the theme of change over time, but from a different angle. 

Nadeko asks how much he remembers from back when she used to come over to play, and when he says ‘not much’, she’s visibly disappointed, to the point of causing Araragi to break out into a sweat. She says that those days were precious memories to her, and as they exit the tunnel and emerge into the light, she mentions that she was jealous of her friend for having an older brother. It’s an oddly unsettling face she makes, isn’t it?

It’s not just that Nadeko hasn’t changed, it’s that she’s trapped in the past. She still calls him Koyomi-Oniichan, something that he’s clearly surprised by. She still calls his sister Rara-chan, and upon hearing it he thinks about how Tsukihi has changed since then, now being known as part of the Fire Sisters. 

When Nadeko is invited into Araragi’s room, she mentions that it’s a different one, almost surprised. As if he would still be sharing a room with his younger sisters. As if it’s even normal to remember which room your friend’s brother was in six years ago.

There is clearly something very strange going on with Nadeko! But we don’t get to see inside it at all. Nisio’s usual last minute revelations center on the fact that there were two snakes, that both the classmate that Nadeko rejected and the friend who was actually in love with him cursed her. We might wonder what this says about Nadeko, for her to spark such resentment. We will continue to wonder. Araragi is an imperceptive narrator at the best of times. He even jokes that the person Nadeko is already in love with, who she turned down a confession for, would probably be him, were he in a rom-com.

However, one element of this story’s presentation that the narrator’s perspective doesn’t seem to influence is the anime’s opening. The anime adaptation does more generally seem to be aware of future developments than the novels and foreshadows them accordingly (for example, Hanekawa’s circumstances). 

But Renai Circulation is especially impressive in this regard. For one thing, she’s depicted as drawing manga here - and this is well before Koimonogatari was released even in novel form.

The way the final frames end on Nadeko’s knowing smile towards the audience definitely indicate there’s something up here, but I find the first few images most interesting - the way they’re initially static shots of her looking cute and then undergo a sharp change. She turns around in the first, moves her head to directly look at the viewer in the second, and in the third she snaps her pocky. 

I won’t pretend to have completely deciphered the visual language here, but suffice to say that Nadeko is oddly aware of the viewer’s perspective as this opening plays out, her stereotypically moe poses in the last 15 seconds being aimed directly towards the camera.

And speaking of which. She shows a lot of facial expressions here that she'd be too embarrassed to ever display in real life. What’s with that? What’s with . . . the hair colour? This is clearly a stylized version of Nadeko, one that I would argue is deliberately created to give off a cuter impression of her by none other than . . . Nadeko herself. I mean, she’s the one singing the lyrics, right?

If you go to the Youtube comments of any upload of Renai Circulation, you’ll be able to find several comments talking about the clash between the tone of the opening and the show, usually from people who saw the opening first because it was popular and watched Monogatari subsequently.

They can be surprisingly insightful, actually, like this one that points out purely based on the opening you would assume this is from a slice of life show where Nadeko is the main character. Because really, that’s the sort of character that Nadeko would most like to be, the kind of thing that her self-image is focused around. 

However, in this opening you can see the cracks already emerging. Take for example the repeated visual motif of her body being outlined by coloured shadows - and the way those shadows start to drift away from her actual body over time. The disjunction between image and reality starts to creep in.

That’s really the lesson of this arc to me - how hard you have to try to not notice there’s something going on with Nadeko. Despite that, we will have to wait a while to see the full consequences of this unfold, but nonetheless I still find the way she’s portrayed here fascinating. 

And there we go, the length of these is ballooning already . . . might be a Nadeko-specific effect though. If you couldn't tell already, she's my fave and I'm very normal about her!