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typellblog · 6 months

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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.

#monogatari #kizumonogatari #araragi koyomi #kiss shot acerola orion heart under blade #shinobu oshino #hanekawa tsubasa #monogatariposting

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