Samurai Champloo 25 - "Evanescent Encounter (Part 2)"

Samurai Champloo's concluding three-parter, “Evanescent Encounter” has a lot of narrative work to do. On top of the task of bringing the series to a satisfying conclusion – a Herculean labour in any TV show, one that anime shows in particular have a habit of botching – it also needs to bring together a story that has been disparate and episodic, ranging over a host of genres and tones, and make it seem like all one satisfying progression to a climactic moment. The search for the samurai that smells like sunflower has been until this point something of a quixotic dream, maybe even a joke, the thin framing device used to put these characters together. Now, it takes central stage, and we need to believe that the sunflower samurai has been essential to the series all along.

Once upon a time, this would not have been a problem. In the age of fully episodic TV, a finale could just be a regular episode with perhaps a bit more in the way of dramatic stakes. It didn't really have to tie together the entirety of what had come before. But in our day even episodic series like Samurai Champloo make pretensions to an ongoing narrative, a narrative that must ultimately be settled. So these episodes take great pains to assert that the seemingly rambling narrative has actually been a seamless whole. One-off characters from past adventures are mentioned, and we learn that there's been a hidden force guiding our characters' mission this whole time. I'm not sure that this is entirely successful, nor do I think it needs to be: fragmented narratives are not intrinsically worse than singular ones, and offer pleasures and possibilities that one continual story does not.

“Evanescent Encounter” succeeds as a finale in another way: by taking the series's usual ideas and amplifying them, turning the rhythms of an episode into a movie-length maxi-adventure. While there are plenty of atypical installments, your average episode of Samurai Champloo has a kind of pattern: the central trio roll into town, hungry and broke, get split up, run into a character with ambiguous allegiances, there's some swordfighting, and ultimately they're the few that get out alive. The conclusion escalates all of these trends to their highest points.

The first part of “Evanescent Encounter” mostly concerned itself with the first part of this plot. Fuu leaves the group, as she has on numerous times before, but this time it is treated more seriously: after a rare harmonious night by the fire, she leaves a heartfelt letter and dismisses her two alleged bodyguards. Fuu leaving, which would previously be a comic beat to set up the plot, is here allowed to be a genuinely emotional moment. It is not the comedic act of an impetuous girl but the proverbial sparrow leaving the nest, with Fuu finally deciding to confront her problems on her own. Similarly, we have more and more important guest characters with ambiguous allegiances, and they seem even stranger than the usual crop. There's a samurai more skillful than any seen before in the series, and a trio of assassins that . And then of course there's the sunflower samurai, who has achieved a colossal presence in the series despite having yet to appear.

The second episode in this trilogy opens with a recap, a rarity in Samurai Champloo. The recap is mostly functional, but contains some interesting choices. We get almost all of Fuu's letter, set to quiet and contemplative beats and shots of Mugen and Jin walking in a daze through the town. This suggests that the emotive impact of Fuu's departure and the perhaps-final splitting of the party is what is really important, instead of the more plotty developments that occurred in the first part. Fuu's letter gets so much weight in the short recap because it is what we are supposed to have taken away from the previous episode. The music, rather than psyching the viewer up for a climactic fight, reinforces the sense of ambivalence and maybe even loss to Champloo's conclusion.

The beat changes to something higher-paced when the episode proper starts, and with it the seemingly climactic swordfight between Mugen & Jin and Kagetogi Kariya, the shogun's hired man and hence the bearer of institutional power. Kariya draws his sword in slow motion, while Mugen rushes forward, apparently more in time with the music. In the past, Mugen's wild fighting style has made him appear a force of nature, as in the chilling final scene of “Misguided Miscreants”. Here, it makes him look sloppy and careless next to Kariya's delicate swordsmanship, and Mugen's wide swings come nowhere close to drawing blood.

Fight scenes, when done properly, are really character moments – the way in which a character fights reveals something about their personality, or at least their history. So Mugen fights in a way that is powerful but undisciplined, willing to chanllenge orthodoxy and make a ruckus – as he does in his assault on Kariya when he tries to use a barrel of beans as a weapon. But none of this works against Kariya. Reflecting his placid character, a personality that almost doesn't register, Kariya appears to momentarily become a ghost and take Mugen by suprise.

Jin battles Kariya one-on-one later in the episode, and doesn't fare much better. The fight is your classic samurai duel, which is to say that it's basically symmetrical, with swords flying fast but always meeting in the middle – until one doesn't. Jin's style and ethos are too close to Kariya, the avatar of authoritarian power. He is exceptionally good at following the laws of swordsmanship, but this will never succeed against the man who writes the laws.

We learn via flashbacks that Kariya previously wanted to enlist Jin's school of samurai as assassins, and ordered Jin's master to kill his prized pupil. Jin surpasses his master in a quick late-night scuffle, but the real father figure here is the man who controlled his master all along, and who represents the state-supported system of honour that Jin has been cast out of. This bit of backstory resolves the moral ambiguity that's been with Jin since we learned he killed his master, putting his actions in the best possible light. In that, it is simply convenient storytelling, but it also serves a greater purpose: establishing Kariya as the paternal force that Jin has to overcome in order to leave behind societal rules and truly be his own person.

It's worth noting that Mugen and Jin appear to have the most success when fighting Kariya two-on-one, although this is quickly abandoned as not suiting honour or ego. Mugen and Jin are foils for each other, reserved and classical matched against of outspoken and wild. This is also reflected in their fighting styles. Jin's classical kenjitsu is more beautiful, but it lacks the kinetic energy that Samurai Champloo finds in Mugen's style and the hip-hop music it samples. To stretch the metaphor a bit too far, Jin is the classical chanbara element of the series, and Mugen is its anachronistic remix side. Fuu is, I dunno, it's emotional core, or maybe the act of creation involved in bringing the two together.

This is why it's crucial for the series that Jin and Mugen never resolve their delayed battle. This is not just because it would kill off one of the main characters. For Samurai Champloo to ultimately make one man's style victorious to the other would deny the power, both aesthetic and philosophical, that Champloo finds in the other. The series's entire ethos is the merging of the modern and the traditional, of chaotic creativity and orderly aesthetics. Mugen and Jin began the series alone and in mortal peril, and when the party seems to finally have separated for good their existence is almost immediately threatened.

This is underlined by the cut to Fuu on her own. While Fuu has her own strengths, she is physically the weakest of the group, and as such is vulnerable to any two-bit shogunate thug she runs across on her own. It should be said here that Samurai Champloo does not have the most progressive gender politics. Fuu often plays the role of the damsel in distress, with her stubborn pride and rambunctious affect being the only form of resistance she can offer in a world of violence. She is often sexually imperilled, as in the multiple times she is trapped in a brothel, and there are undertones of that in this scene. Fuu isn't even touched by her opponent's blade before she falls to her knees. Her yukata rides up and Fuu has to hold the fabric so as not to expose her crotch, highlighting her sexual vulnerability.

Her assailant crouches down next to her and appears to molest her. As much as Fuu has been sexually threatened over the course of the series, this is the only scene where she is actually abused. Absent her protectors, Fuu's spiritual strengths offer little protection against the world of masculine violence she finds herself in. When trying to escape, we see her running as fast as she can through the grass, but her pursuer only has to speed-walk. In a world defined by the physical, Fuu simply doesn't have the right body [1].

So of course, Mugen has to go to the island and rescue Fuu. There's a brief exchange between him and Jin in which Mugen clearly wants to be the one to fight Kariya, but eventually agrees to accept the less glorious mission of rescuing Fuu from a less impressive group of baddies. This would appear to be callousness on both men's part, but the subtext of the scene suggests that this is a careful negotiation that involves an evaluation of the relationships between the trio.

Throughout most of Samurai Champloo there's been little romantic tension between the main trio, especially considering that in different hands the same premise would have instantly resulted in a love triangle. The central characters even correspond to the archetypes in a two-suitors romance: the wild but sexy Mugen, the dull but dependable Jin, and the woman stuck between them. Samurai Champloo takes these characters' flaws to extremes: instead of being a sexy outlaw Mugen's wildness makes him an unappealing brute, while Jin's devotion to the straight-and-narrow makes him frightening, and Fuu's desire to postpone the conflict between the two becomes petulance. In this way, Samurai Champloo chooses farce over romance.

But there have been glimmers of attraction between Fuu and Jin throughout, and a moonlight conversation between the two in “Evanescent Encounter Part 1” would seem to confirm a degree of affection. But Fuu ultimately ends their conversation with the ambiguous phrase “Because Mugen is... I'm sorry”. When Jin flashes back to the scene in Part 2, this is the only line he recalls. Jin seems to interpret this as Fuu refusing him in favour of her love for Mugen, but I think it's more likely that she recognizes that choosing one man to have an affair with would disrupt the essential unity of their trio[2]. This is akin to her refusal to allow Mugen and Jin to fight, postponing the inevitable choice that will collapse a dynamic trinity into an uncomfortable dyad. Jin sends Mugen after her, but perhaps it would be better if both ronin went together. In the end, their decision to separate ends up nearly killing all of them.

Fuu is kept captive in a ruined church, with a red cross the only undamaged thing in sight. This is as good a time as any to talk about the role Christianity plays in this plot. We learned in the last episode that the Sunflower Samurai was the leader of a group of reclusive and persecuted Christians. The struggle between Japanese Christians and the dominant culture has popped up in a number of episodes before, and is presented here as a fairly straightforward group of virtuous rebels.

It seems at first a little strange for a contemporary series to celebrate Christianity as a form of rebellion against the mainstream. But I don't think that it's the specific precepts and values of Christianity that Shinichiro Watanabe wants to praise. Rather, it's the presence of Christians in a predominantly Shinto society as a marker of cultural hybridity – the same hybridity that comes from, say, using hip-hop music in a samurai anime [3].

Samurai Champloo presents Edo Japan as a society on a doomed quest to enforce cultural purity. It sees the mixing and remixing of cultures as not just inevitable but ultimately beautiful. This is in evidence throughout the several episodes involving improbable encounters with foreigners (“Artistic Anarchy”, “Stranger Searching”, “Baseball Blues”). Samurai Champloo makes us aware of the shogunate's extensive and complicated attempts to regulate cultural exchange, and how the influence of Western society seeps through anyways. In “Evanescent Encounter”, this cultural warfare becomes literal violent combat.

Christianity is in itself not a force for hybridity and openness – the Old Testament in particular is obsessed with purity. In “Unholy Union” Samurai Champloo shows some skepticism to the religious impulse, while still portraying the Christians as more or less virtuous. But it also recognizes that even a conservative piece of culture can become revolutionary when it becomes hybridized, as in fact Japanese Christianity did during the Shimabara Rebellion. Similarly, the mostly flawed personalities of Mugen, Fuu, and Jin become something more – something disruptive – when they are put together.

Ultimately, these are really the values that Samurai Champloo celebrates – hybridity, openness, and rebellion against a hegemonic society. These values inform the show's style arguably more than they do the content of its stories. Champloo exults hybridity in both word and deed. It's possible to criticize this aesthetic politics as merely a neoliberal celebration of individual creativity, but I think that ignores that the series's protagonists never fare well on their own, and need each other in order to create a truly hybrid social unit. It's this kind of new, artificially-fashioned unit that Champloo tentatively suggests is truly heroic.

[1] I'd have to go back to check on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if the stories in which Fuu has the most power are the ones in which she is comically overweight.

[2] It's possible to take a pro-polyamory message out of this, as in this reading of the Hunger Games. If you're so inclined, that is.

[3]Japanese Christians play a similar role in Watanabe's series Kids on the Slope.

Attack on Titan 12: Wound -- The Battle for Trost (8)

Attack on Titan 12: Wound – The Battle for Trost (8)

So, this is the second of three Attack on Titan episodes about Eren lifting a rock.

That description is a little facetious, but not very. A lot of people have complained about the pacing of the series, and these problems crop up towards the end of the Battle for Trost arc more than perhaps any other. I'm not exactly sure why this bothers me so much – after all, Space Brothers has a similarly glacial pace, and I generally enjoy it as a way to chill out for 24 minutes a week.

But there's also no real aesthetic of urgency in Space Brothers, whereas there definitely is one in Attack on Titan. The best moments of the series are moments of total panic and confusion, where Titans have devastated the city and no hope is in sight. Attack on Titan sells the total despair and devastation of war better than almost anything else I've seen. But the flip side of that success is that the stalling techniques developed by long-running episodic series[1] are more egregious and seem like more of an affront to the visceral drama that the scenes of devastation promise.

Eren's resurrection as a superhuman has already undercut some of the grisly aesthetic of the early episodes, taking away the sense of consequence to the carnage by at first challenging and then reaffirming the central characters' invulnerability. When the colossal titan appeared behind Eren in the fourth episode, it was a dramatic jolt of immediacy: the narrative distance we expected to appear between the training arc and the next fight sequence was abridged abruptly, defamiliarizing the viewer from their genre expectations and establishing the uncompromising brutality of the setting. The later episodes in this arc make an opposite maneuver, stretching out the narrative distance we expect from such a seemingly simple task, and making Attack on Titan seem much more generic (in the non-pejorative sense) than it had before.

Still, what happens in this episode isn't total filler. The central drama, of Eren attempting to lift a boulder in order to seal the hole the Titans busted in a wall, is not as trivial as such a brief description makes it sound. I'm reminded of the famous Steve Ditko sequence in Amazing Spider-man, where Spider-man lifting a heavy metal object is transformed from a simple physical task to an expression of the human will.

Compare & contrast:

The labouring body has been aestheticized for political purposes by pretty much every ideology imaginable over the past century. Capitalists like Ditko used extreme physical labour to portray the individual claiming their own personal freedom. Communists romanticized the manual labourer as the source of revolutionary fervour. And fascists made the perfect labouring body an object of national desire through Olympia and other pieces of propaganda. Of course, most people who did (and do) manual labour would be surprised to discover that it was liberatory and noble instead of just painful and miserable.

Politically, Attack on Titan leans closest to fascism. Like many popular genre narratives, it adheres to Susan Sontag's ideas of fascist art in that it fixates on a single heroic individual, the need to obey him, and the idealizaiton of the body. But even moreso than your usual superhero narrative, Attack on Titan understands the role of the state and the role of the military in much the same way as fascist leaders in the 20^th century did, which is to say that the two should be basically coterminous, and that weak civilian leaders and soldiers who do not follow orders are responsible for societal weakness and must be purged. The series also demonstrates some of the fixations of fascist art and politics: the unfairness of borders (and with it the nobility of conquest) and the enemy as simultaneously subhuman and superhuman. Whatever its virtues may be, Attack on Titan is fascist in not just an abstract way but a way that is very specific to the history of fascism in the 20^th century, mimicking the self-justification of Japanese militarism and the aesthetics of the Nazi's Aryan idyll [2].

But Attack on Titan's use of the labouring body is distinctly different from what you would see in, say, the films of Nazi Germany. In Attack on Titan, the ideal labouring body is literally monstrous. Instead of becoming a shining example of Aryan masculinity, Eren can only achieve strength by turning into a dark, bestial figure. The colossal titan is the extreme end of this process: it is the most powerful creature in the show's universe thus far, and its muscles and inner organs are on full display, making it grotesquely embodied.  When Eren transforms into a titan, he is literally portrayed as on the border between humanity and monstrousity:

Eren's characterization also suggests that Attack on Titan feels uncomfortable with the actors and tropes that its right-wing ideology enshrines. Eren is, the anime tells us, everything that the remains of humanity needs in a leader: he is hard-nosed, incorruptible, willing to challenge the decadent complacency of his times even before the walls start falling, and completely merciless when it comes to the titans. His stated goal is to kill every last titan in the world – genocide, essentially. We're never given any reason to think that these qualities are not exactly what is required to face the titans. But at the same time, whenever Eren goes on a rant about how much he wants to kill all the titans, the anime is not shy about making him appear dangerously unhinged (and then later showing him how he is completely unprepared for combat). Mikasa's loyalty to Eren is both celebrated and made to seem more than a little insane.

This is not to say that Attack on Titan's fundamental queasiness about the actions of fascism make it progressive. I don't believe that it is, as some have argued, a deconstruction of the typical shounen narrative. It is still quite frequently didactic about the necessity of military vigilance and intolerance towards the enemy, and gives no sympathy to the straw-men characters who represent weak hearts and clouded minds. Moreover, the fundamental scenario it presents – fighting an enemy that actually is inhuman and actually is a threat to your existence – is one in which the precepts of militarism seem almost natural.

So what's going on here?  I'd like to think that this is a bit of natural humanity surfacing even within the strictures of reactionary ideology. But we also need to recognize that you can simultaneously recognize an act as having some kind of moral taint and still advocate it. Glenn Greenwald says this frequently about torture: those that advocate for it don't do so on the basis that torture is morally right, but rather that it is unpleasant but necessary to fight the greater evil. Advocating extreme measures (torture, fascism, turning into a giant monster) are thus less a sign of moral turpitude than a sign of toughness. Presenting these measures as morally ambiguous is not necessarily progressive, as it often rescues them from being clearly unacceptable.  In the beginning of "Wound", Dot Pixis remarks that he's willing to be labelled a murderer for ordering his men to distract the titans.  The way this is formulated, as Pixis ruining his reputation for the greater good, turns what could be seen as a barbaric act of brutal command into a heroic sacrifice.

But understanding Attack on Titan's unease with its own ideology helps to justify the structure of this episode. “Wound” is all about resolving Eren's indecision as to whether or not to become a monster in order to fight monsters (to use extremely tired language). But to have Eren mopily contemplating this decision, Hamlet-like, would go against not just his character but also the virtues that Attack on Titan holds dear. So instead hesitancy is dramatized by Eren losing control of his monstrous form. Titan-Eren lashes out at the humans he holds dear, and literally hurts himself, punching himself in the face while trying to get at Mikasa. His hands and face steam after the impact: not only is the damage self-inflicted, but it makes the tools he needs to use invisible beneath the smoke.

On the inside, Eren faces the dilemma through a dream of a picturesque familial life. In his semi-conscious stupor, he is allowed to face the questions that his much-praised determination and single-mindedness would normally not allow him to consider. The people he sees in this vision are all in some way associated with pain and dysfunction: his father was distant and possibly experimented on him, his mother was killed by the Titans, and Mikasa has turned into a jaded and obsessed warrior. But here, they are all part of an idyllic, personally functional family. Precisely for this reason, they can't really do anything: they are static, only passively beckoning Eren to them.

This is the temptation of accepting life within the walls and of trying to make the best of what you can. For political actors of any type, at least those who have the privilege to “not care about politics”, there is always the temptation to slide back into a passive life, espousing your radical opinions over dinner but never doing anything to implement them. The universality of this situation means that it cuts both ways: there are some people just focusing on their own lives who should undoubtedly be taking to the streets (myself perhaps included), while there are other political actors who you wish would have chosen the passive family life instead. And indeed, only a dogmatist could argue that family, friends, and hobbies are meaningless pursuits which only serve to distract people from the One True Cause.

But Attack on Titan is a dogmatic series that takes place in a dogmatic world. The humans of the series are constantly threatened by the titans' assault, so for them the domestic life that Eren envisions is never an option. Even if Eren decided to settle down instead of fighting, he could never attain that domestic idyll: the people involved are missing, dead, or irrevocably changed by their experience of war. We see people resort to cowardice every episode, but they have increasingly little space to run to: in such an environment, bravery becomes not a virtue but the only available option.

So why does “Wound”'s drama hinge on Eren making a false choice? When Armin stabs Eren and leads him back to consciousness [3], he does not try to convince Eren that the domestic idyll he sees is an illusion. Rather, he argues that Eren doesn't even really want that domestic idyll: he wants to go beyond the walls. Perhaps Eren could stay there forever in that Titan, living out a peaceful agrarian existence in his mind. Attack on Titan maintains that this would be a sin. By the end of the episode, Eren is reminded of his ambition to go beyond the walls, to conquer the territory as a sign of his human will.

This plot also suggests that Eren is not fully in control of himself or the forces he has unleashed. This is mirrored in a subplot about Jean's gear jamming down in the middle of battle. For as much clear aesthetic pleasure as Attack on Titan takes in the aerial assault gear, it seems to break an awful lot: we've already seen it happen twice, plus one instance of the gear running out of gas in mid-fight. Much like Eren's Titan transformation, the tools of war are unreliable and unsavoury, but in the Manichean drama of Attack on Titan they are the only tools that can be used.

By looking at the series's larger ideology, the seemingly uneventful “Wound” begins to seem more important. Eren has already made his decision to go beyond the walls and eradicate the Titans, but “Wound' tests his resolve by offering him a genuinely desirable alternative. Moreover, it reaffirms Attack on Titan's political commitments by confronting and ultimately appearing to resolve its discomfort with the tools of fascism. “Wound” is still perhaps a filler episode, but it is often filler episodes that give us the clearest glance at a show's central priorities and ideas.

[1]I've talked about this previously, but due to a mixture of budget and concerns about catching up with the source material, long-running shounen series like Naruto and Bleach have perfected the art of making a fight last ten episodes without actually animating two hundred minutes of action. Flurries of activity are paced out with flashback sequences, monologues, and commentary from minor characters standing on the sidelines. This episode uses a lot of these techniques in order to draw out what is not a lot of story material. Such techniques seem much more unnecessary in a limited-run series like Attack on Titan than in a weekly serial, of course.

[2] In an earlier episode it is revealed, almost as a sidebar, that all of the Asian population was wiped out by Titans, leaving the almost exclusively white world in which the series is set.

[3] You could probably do a whole thing with the homoerotic imagery of this scene, namely Armin penetrating Eren from behind, but I don't feel like it.

Samurai Flamenco 2: My Umbrella Is Missing

We're all familiar with the superhero genre, and the kind of ethical calculus that it's made cliche. Over and over again, in comics and in movies, we learn that with great power comes great responsibility, that we need to break the law in order to enforce justice, and that it is up to heroic individuals to make the world safe for the rest of us. This has become so generic that we no longer notice its odder elements: how superheroes violate law and order in order to uphold it, or how they are simultaneously a symbol of patriotic strength and national weakness.

Samurai Flamenco makes these contradictory elements of the superhero myth visible. The titular hero is obsessed with pursuing law – not the abstract Platonic ideal of law that most heroes hold themselves to, but obscure bylaws and regulations. It deals with the modern experience of law and governmentality, in which control appears not as a massive centralized god, good or evil, but through a thousand petty fiefdoms. The comedy stems from Samurai Flamenco (the character, not the series) mistaking the reality of law for the fantasy, and engaging in a quixotic quest to punish jaywalkers and litterers across Tokyo. This is goofy humour, but it wouldn't be funny if it didn't draw on deep and somewhat dark contradictions in our world.

The first episode of Samurai Flamenco established the outlandish premise of the series and focused on the collision of Hazama's idealism and reality. This collision occured in both the physical confrontation between Hazama and the wayward youths and the conversations between Hazama and the skeptical Goto. “My Umbrella is Missing” goes more into the ethos of Hazama's quest, taking it seriously in a way the first episode didn't.

The episode opens with a run-in between Flamenco and a middle-aged woman who takes her garbage out thirty-five minutes too early. Flamenco already has a prepared speech, which comes off as compensation: he proclaims that “They call me Samurai Flamenco”, as if he did not create the identity for himself, and insists that “I am not a suspicious character”. Instead of the hero meeting the call of danger, as Joseph Campbell would have it, in Samurai Flamenco the heroic persona comes first and then later searches for danger.

Having been confronted by an enforcer of minor laws, the woman goes to the police. This seemingly natural response shows how deeply engrained law has become in our psyche: the only response to its imposition is to turn to other forces of law. The police initially decline to pursue Flamenco, but their very act of calming resident fears turns them into another version of Flamenco: their chief business is attempting to suppress harmless acts. We then see Goto putting out his own garbage early, suggesting the kind of everyday hypocrisy that problematizes Goto's own claim to be an enforcer of the law.

This is what Samurai Flamenco draws its humour from: the essential meaninglessness, or at least fluidity, of the term “crime” or “criminal” in everyday life. We are all criminals, whether it be copying a file in the wrong way or driving at a steady 10 miles above the speed limit. In this way the system of law draws us all into its web, ensuring our daily interaction, visible or invisible, with the state. But despite the fact that we all break the law, we also have a kind of reverence for it, as seen in figures like the superhero. We believe in a platonic ideal of law and order that has little relation to the petty bureaucratic regime – and it is this gap between ideas and reality that Samurai Flamenco finds so hard to grasp.

This episode chooses a curious example of everyday crime: umbrella theft. I'm assuming that this is a Japanese cultural thing, as I've never heard North Americans describe taking someone else's umbrella on a rainy day as normal behavior. To us, it would appear to be a tremendous imposition on private property, even if the money value lost was negligible. Thus we have an episode in which all of the characters wonder why Hazama cares so much about stolen umbrellas, while the Western viewer wonders why they care so little. Ironically, this destabilizes the idea of law even more, making clear to a Western viewer that both the particularities of law and the social enforcement of it differ between societies. If even the abstract idea of Law is different in different places, then perhaps it does not exist at all.

At its root, the umbrella theft depicted in this episode is a version of the “tragedy of the commons”. This idea, so often repeated by the defenders of capitalism, is that private property is necessary in order to compel people to behave responsibly. As the usual example goes, if no one is the owner of a field used for grazing, no one will have motivation to maintain that field, and eventually the utopian idea of a common field will go to waste. Similarly, by ignoring the protections of private property, umbrella theft leaves well-meaning individuals to get caught in the rain, as with the sick child in the story Hazama tells.

Our superhero's origin story, in addition to being humorously mundane (the tragic death is instead a tragic flu), can also function as an origin story for capitalism. This episode stacks the deck by attaching a charm from Goto's absent girlfriend to his stolen umbrella. The umbrella is not just a device to keep dry, but stands in for a genuine human relationship. For Goto, the love of his long-distance girlfriend is conveyed entirely through objects, whether it be the charm or the cell phone on which she sends him text messages.

“My Umbrella is Missing” transforms the capitalist norms of private property into affective relationships [1]. The climax of the episode consists of Flamenco racing a train in order to recover Goto's umbrella. This reverses the imagery of popular quasi-anticapitalist narratives: we have human physicality against cold machinery and personal relations against an indifferent society, but the right to property [2] is identified with the heroic individual and romantic relationships, while the cold machine is identified with a kind of descent into communitarian anarchy. This kind of reverse Ludditism is not new, but was predominant in capitalist art during the Cold War, with the heroic entrepreneurs of Atlas Shrugged being perhaps Exhibit One.

Obviously Flamenco's quest is meant to be silly, but the musical cues and Goto's reactions in this episode suggest that there is a kind of nobility to it. It may be quixotic, but Quixote was after all fighting for moral values. The moment we are supposed to begin thinking that there is something to Flamenco's quest is not when he is standing up for collectively-determined bureaucratic rules such as garbage collection dates or noise ordinances, but when he is standing up for our right to our possessions. The umbrella plot suggests the possibility of a Samurai Flamenco that is fundamentally reactionary in the same way that most superhero narratives are.

But I think there's also a progressive, or at least disruptive, Samurai Flamenco, that has a habit of picking away at easy narratives. The deconstructionist bent of the show is on full display in the scene in which Hazama performs in a video for the idol group Mineral Miracle Muse (the name a parody of Morning Musume). We were first introduced to MMM in the ending credits, which initially seemed like the ED to an entirely different show. That show would be the cliche idol show that exists for little other purpose than to have cute girls acting moe. Credits sequences, like music videos, are more or less narrative-free images. Even in more or less realist shows, the credits often indulge in spectacle, with a prime example being in fact the opening credits of Samurai Flamenco, which depict Flamenco battling a giant robot.

The ending credits in the first episode present us with a spectacular image of idealized femininity. We don't understand why we're seeing the image, but at the same time the image itself is immediately comprehensible, thanks to the larger culture we're immersed in [3]. In the second episode, we see the creation of the image. Rather than existing in itself, the image is placed within the context of economic production. We get to see not just the cameras that shoot the idol singers, but the financial and professional forces that shaped the video.

Of course, the knowledge that music videos are produced instead of appearing out of the ether is hardly deconstructionist. The narratives of creation have themselves become vital images in our culture: the brilliant artist hard at work, the Behind the Music narrative arc. What's new in Samurai Flamenco is Hazama's total disengagement with the image he's part of.

Hazama seems to be on autopilot for most of his work as a model. He allows his pushy agent to construct his public image. Hazama is more concerned with another public image, that of his masked alter-ego. While speakers are playing MMM's upbeat pop music, Hazama is singing along in his head to a sentai hero's theme song. At first we don't hear either song, making the group's dancing appear hollow and disconnected. Then, we hear both songs at once. Both are commercial products contained within a spectacular image: the pop album and the action figure. But the juxtaposition makes both appear ridiculous and jarring. These pop-cultural images are very familiar to us, but Samurai Flamenco juxtaposes them in order to make us hear them anew, and recognize them for the empty spectacles that they are.

I haven't seen the rest of Samurai Flamenco, but I've heard from ripples across the Internet that it takes a rather darker turn in later episodes. This doesn't really surprise me. The first two episodes of the series are overtly comedic in tone, but the comedy is based on some pretty bleak ideas. It is not just that we will never live up to our dreams, or that our dreams are ultimately only empty images. It is that our dreams are ultimately just as sad and petty as the rest of our lives. Hazama risks everything to fight for truth and justice, and ends up harassing people about their recycling. American TV has recently been consumed by dramas about the question of means versus ends, or whether evil means justify a good end. Samurai Flamenco doesn't let that good end be – instead, it reveals law and morality to be an elaborate joke. The darkness is not what we do to reach our goals, but the goals themselves.

[1] Most advertisements do a similar thing, transforming a consumer object into an affective statement or the embodiment of a personal relationship.

[2]Technically speaking, an umbrella is a possession, not property in the typically Marxist sense. No communist is going to want to take away your umbrella. I'm arguing that in this narrative it serves as a symbol for genuine property, such as the land in the traditional “tragedy of the commons” story.

[3]For Western viewers not familiar with anime tropes or idol culture, this may instead be another cultural gap.

Fist of the North Star 103: A Challenge From the Devil! Fudo, Be the Demon for Those You Love!!

Okay, let's get this right out of the way: no episode of Fist of the North Star is as good as its title.  The amount of bold, over-the-top heroics suggested in sentence fragments and redundant exclamation marks is enough to set anyone's blood a-boiling, especially when screamed out by the hyperactive preview narrator.  The actual episodes usually pale in comparison, often seeming like the thirty seconds of awesome-looking moments from the trailer stuffed together with twenty minutes of stalling.  With next-episode previews affixed to just about every anime release, Fist of the North Star ends with that distinct soap opera kick: "that was terrible, and I need to find out what happens next."

I was exaggerating: the show's not terrible.  It's perhaps not the classic that certain spheres of anime fandom have built it up to be, but it has a certain charm that's mainly to due with the anarchic animation and larger-than-life characters and accompanying mythology.  It was also incredibly influential, which may make it a classic depending on your particular definition of the word.  Of course, not all influences are for the better.

Many of anime's distinctive stylistic traits were developed in the 60s and 70s as shortcuts to cut animation costs.  While some of these are reviled today (speedlines, anyone?), many have become cherished parts of the anime aesthetic.  Similarly, the shortcuts and narrative duct tape used by Fist of the North Star have become distinct traits of the shounen genre that it heavily influenced.  In particular I want to look at its economical way of portioning out story -- or, to be slightly more direct, its use of filler.

Shounen today is famous for its long battles that can stretch on for several episodes.  This episode's featured battle, between Raoh and Fudo, is only two episodes, as it isn't tremendously important and the standard of fight length had yet to be really established.  But whether two episodes or twelve, in most of these episodes there's remarkably little fighting going on.  In "A Challenge From the Devil!", for instance, the Raoh/Fudo fight doesn't' get started until three quarters of the way in.  In general in these episodes significant events happen at the start and the end of the episode.  This is not simply poor writing, but a factor of the format and economics of mass-market anime.  There's only so much manga to adapt, and said manga is usually incomplete when the anime adaptation starts.  So plot must be rationed, spread out amongst the constant grind of weekly episodes.

So what do you do when there's not enough plot to go around?  Flashbacks are one staple.  In this episode we have an extended flashback to Raoh's past encounter with Fudo, the only man to ever truly frighten him, as well as Fudo's eventual conversion into the gentle giant of the present.  This conversion was, of course, at the hands of Yuria, the idealized female figure who, as an object of desire, has driven this last arc.  Simply witnessing her kindness is enough to reform Fudo.  We're also reminded again that the young Yuria looked an awful lot like Lynn, furthering the idea that all of the significant female characters in the series (all 3 or 4 of them) are basically the same person.


(The perspective here is a great example of the grandiose overstatement inherent in Fist of the North Star's style, with characters like Fudo and Raoh being not only giants but also growing and shrinking at the whim of the animator.)

There's a kind of paradoxical nature to the recent flashbacks in this series.  On the one hand, any flashback establishes the primacy of the past as a way of understanding who the characters are today.  This logic works for both mythic (e. g. Fist of the North Star) and psychological (e.g. Lost) ideas of character.  When Fudo is forced to don his old battle armour again and become "the Ogre", it's the return of the repressed writ large and violent.  Kenshiro's new ability to channel the skills of his defeated foes also plays into this dynamic.

But at the same time these late-series flashbacks are a bit of a retcon.  Characters like Raoh and Fudo are ascribed motivations that have never been mentioned before but are suddenly all important.  At the same time as the in-story past is made more important, the past that we ourselves remember -- the past of the series -- has become less important and even cast as unreal compared to these characters' newly-established backgrounds.  This is the essential paradox surrounding retcons, both the obvious dimension-bending ones seen in superhero comics and the subtler ones seen elsewhere.

It is not that flashbacks are necessarily filler -- they can often reveal crucial information.  And in Fist of the North Star they reflect one of the main ideas of the series, a lost age of peace and prosperity ruined by degeneracy and complacency.  But they stop the narrative momentum of the series in its tracks, and interrupt the flow inherent to any good fight scene.  As the fights become talkier and more flashback-dominated, it becomes less of an action series and more of a series that uses fights as an inciting dramatic event but is basically not really interested in them.

Another key time-filling technique can be seen in this episode's interstitial action sequence with Kenshiro.  This is a familiar pattern for the fourth and final "part" of the series: while Raoh and the Goshashei have plot-relevant battles at the start and end of each episode, Kenshiro takes on minions in the middle.  These guys are basically the image of your average Fist of the North Star mook, a mixture of 80s countercultures that embody youth degeneracy.


There's a bit of a change to the formula of these battles, as at this point in the plot Kenshiro has been blinded and has to take on the bad guys without use of his sight.  This allows for moments of mortality, such as when the leader of the thugs in this episodes actually hits him.  But for the most part it's the usual exhibition of invulnerability and superman strength.  This was once, of course, the meat of most episodes, but now it seems as though Raoh has become the true protagonist (if not the hero) of the narrative, whereas Kenshiro is just a relic of the older story, a supporting character in his own show.

Of course, what fans deride as filler is not always a bad thing.  If we put prejudice in favour of serialized stories aside, the journey can be just as fulfilling as the destination.  There are great shows that are entirely episodic, and thus from a certain perspective all filler.  But at this point in Fist of the North Star we're just seeing conflicts and ideas we've seen many times before re-enacted again.  Worse yet, there is genuine plot advancement in the episode, which makes the redundant majority of its runtime even more aggravating.  So I would argue that the reliance on time-filling in what is, after all, not that complex a story is a flaw of Fist of the North Star.  But it would very quickly become a flaw of the genre.

Next week: "You haven't ignored the last of me!"

Haibane Renmei 10: Kuramori -- Haibane of Abandoned Factory -- Rakka's Job

Like a lot of anime series, Haibane Renmei takes a turn around the midpoint of its run, and (as with most other series that make this turn) it's towards a more dramatic and heavily serialized type of story.  This isn't always successful -- for example, Trigun was much better as a goofy episodic adventure series -- but when it's done well it not only makes the stories more consequential but disrupts the underpinnings of the lighter fare earlier on.  (Martian Successor Nadesico is a prime example of this although, as I'm discovering on my second watch-through it still has plenty of comedy episodes after the midway point.)  For Haibane Renmei, I especially welcomed this change, because the first half of the series is pretty soporific.

This change is instigated by the departure of Kuu, which brings into relief the strange metaphysical nature of the Haibane, and in turn provokes an existential crisis from Rakka.  In typical fantasy fashion, the rites of the Haibane are only exaggerated and literalized versions of human mortality -- we are here but for a short time, and then we have to leave, and it's impossible to know what happens next, if anything does.  Rakka has always seemed somewhat childlike, and her depression is akin to that first brush with mortality and the blind fear it brings.

Haibane Renmei is about supernatural beings that closely resemble angels, but only now does it touch on the subject matter of religion.  In addition to the question of mrotality, in the last few episodes we've learned that Haibane can be "sin-bound", unable to reach salvation because of an inborn curse.  How this actually works is a bit confusing -- in this episode the Communicator suggests that Reki can still fly over the wall despite being sin-bound -- but it's an obvious echo of the Christian notion of original sin.

Although by this point the story is basicall continuous, this episode still uses the series's signature tripartite structure.  The first part is an extended flashback to Reki's past.  We already know the broad strokes of her backstory -- that she was born sin-bound and went through a turbulent adolescence -- and this flashback doesn't really give us any new information.  What it does is shift our perspective.

Reki's process of hatching and being slowly brought up as a Haibane is parelelled darkly in Reki's story.  Whereas Rakka awakens surrounded by people, Reki hatches alone and covered in blood.


We then see Reki going through all of the stages Rakka did over the first seven episodes of the series -- meeting the other Haibane, being tested by the Communicator, and eventually witnessing someone leaving her -- but there's a darker inflection to each of these.  Whereas Rakka's process was marked by agreeable conformism and slice-of-life hijinx, Reki's is full of conflict[1].  This is most because she's easily identified as sin-bound, and thus stigmatized, but the meaning of the shift in perspective is more general than this.  It's a simple recognition that the cheerful narratives of growth that characterize most childhoods are not universal.  This is, I think, one of the more useful gestures fiction can make: sometimes, it's like they say, but sometimes it's like this instead.

It also highlights the darker side of the small world of Haibane Renmei, which has been subtly present the whole time.  Through no fault of her own, Reki is an outcast.  The mystical dictatorship and its unquestioned edicts make life easy and conflict-free for Rakka, but for Reki it sinks her life into incomprehensible suffering.  Even the two characters' names highlight their duality.  Despite being friends that care deeply for one another, they're also foils for each other.

The second part returns us to the present day[2], and is the most like what comes before.  Structurally, it acts as a bridge between one plot point (Rakka's sickness) and the next (her new duty as cleaner).  Thematically, it flows naturally out of the first part of the triptych.  Whereas the Reki we see there is a helpless victim, this Reki is not afraid to violently argue with the Communicator against the system and what she sees as injustice.  At the same time as this establishes continuity between the past and present (Reki's past leads her to act against a similar situation), it also establishes a potential discontinuity: if Reki has anything to say about it, the past won't be repeated, and Rakka will be saved.

Rakka is saved, in a manner of speaking.  Her fever clears up, but it's not clear what's responsible for this.  Given the way that Reki was talking about the wall-induced fever as a fatal affliction, this is an unlikely event, but the episode leaves it up in the air whether it was Reki's actions or blind luck that healed Rakka.  Or perhaps Reki's diagnosis was not as definitive as we thought it was.

For the most part what the middle stanza accomplishes is to flesh out the supporting characters.  The one who benefits most is Nemu, who up until now has been a benevolent matriarch-type, but is revealed to be... well, still a benevolent matriarch, but one who was at one point a bratty kid, and one whose benevolence leads to problems such as her own inability to communicate her feelings or, on a level that's more literal in-text and more metaphorical out of it, fly over the wall.  A couple of the Abandoned Factory Haibane show up, and they turn out not to be as tough as they look, although the rough-girl-shows-sensitive-side scene is one that's very familiar, especially to anime fans.  None of these characters are revealed to be much different than how we thought of them, but they do seem more real now.

The final third deals with Rakka's new job, ostensibly handed down as a punishment for her disobedience.  She is assigned to clean the inner walls of the temple, which is demeaning but also moves her closer to the central mysteries of the series.  There's been occasional emphasis on the Haibane's need for a job, with the idea of work as a neccessary way to define their identity, and this would seem to finally supply Rakka with such a job.

Interestingly, the outfit Rakka wears for this job heavily resembles that of the Communicator.  This would seem to foreshadow Rakka herself becoming a communicator or part of the system that's vaguely referred to as "the Renmei"[3].  I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this development -- it seems a little too neat -- but it does certainly give new important to the series's title.

In short, the end is coming into sight, and now that we're beginning to see the larger shape of the series we can see not just the future -- what it would take to complete this shape -- but how the past episodes fit into things as well.  This is perhaps not the best format for a serialized medium, as it leaves earlier installments incomplete and contextless, but Haibane Renmei manages it better than most "puzzle shows" by putting the emphasis on character motivations rather than mythology.  More than anything else, this is the episode where the central characters took a definite step into reality.

[1]Maybe it's just the drama-addict in me, but I can't help but feel like Reki's story would make for a more interesting series.

[2]To give you some idea of how much attention episode director Koji Yoshikawa pays to form, the flashback ends almost exactly one-third of the way through the episode's running time.  The next two parts are less tightly wound, and what I've identified as the third actually happens in the middle of the second.

[3]Of course, everyone else who cares has already seen the end of the series, so my speculation is uninteresting as well as useless.

Eureka Seven AO 15: War Head

Note: While I'm generally working off the official Funimation subs, I'm going to be using the original episode title, as Funi in their infinite wisdom has seen fit to replace the trippy musical reference episode titles (already in English, nonetheless) with rather generic ones, and I just can't abide by that.

"War Head" is predominated by the revelation from Eureka in the last episode that the Secrets which have thus far been the monster-of-the-week villains of Eureka Seven AO are in fact the planet's natural defense system from the alien scub coral.  This has everyone in a tizzy in this episode, and debating whether or not the theory is true.  Eureka offers up no real evidence (although we'll have some quickly) but seeing as how there's no real other explanation for why the Secrets do what they do, it's a compelling idea.

Taking a step back, though, this revelation hardly seems to matter.  No matter what the Secrets' motives or purpose is, they still cause mass damage and chaos, and their "cleansing" mechanism is responsible for massive nuclear explosions.  There have been a couple signs that the scub coral is less than benign, such as mentions of its health effects on the surrounding area, but they seem like much less of an immediate threat than the entities that would seek to erase them.  But everyone in the episode is taken up with the idea that, quoting Eureka, "the Secrets are not your enemy".

Revealing halfway through that the enemy which the heroes have been heroically crushing up until now is not the real enemy but in fact a potential ally is a fairly common storytelling technique for mecha anime.  The first time I saw this (I think it was Gundam SEED... hey, don't judge) I was blown away, but at this point it irks me more than anything.  The ubiquity of this twist probably stems from Japan's postwar pacifism, and the previously-described tension between abiding by those values and delivering an exciting action series.  This tension is usually born out of the best motives, even if by this point it's become de riguer, but I'm not so sure about the ultimate implications of this twist in Eureka Seven AO.

The original Eureka Seven was essentially a story about accepting the alien, as embodied in the relationship between the human Renton and the Coralian Eureka.  The series suggested that the scub coral were a new form of life, and that accepting difference was not just a nice thing to do but the key to progressing as a species.  The villains were characters who viewed the scub coral as enemies because of their foreignness.  In AO, we have a battle between two aliens, the Secrets and the scub coral, with humans frantically trying to intervene.  We can see this in the difference in design between the two -- the colourful, fluid outgrowth of the scub against the dark angularity of the Secrets.  They are not just opposites but atomic opposites, matter and antimatter, such that when they meet everything explodes.



If, as Eureka suggests, the Secrets are not the enemies, then the question arises: who is?  (There could simply be no enemy, but it would leave the following 11 episodes a little devoid of conflict.)  The most likely suspect is the government, which always seems to be the real enemy (and rightfully so), and AO has already made a couple jabs in this direction.  But if we accept that the Secrets were acting benevolently, doesn't that make the scub -- the alien -- a legitimate danger?  Aren't the Secrets acting on the same rationale as Dewey and the rest of the original series' villains?  Is this a counterpoint or a betrayal?

"War Head" poses these questions directly through the captured Secret subjected to questioning by the Japanese government.  Japan is a kind of ambivalent power in Eureka Seven AO, simultaneously acting as the regional bully to the now-independent Okinawa and being bullied in turn by the United States and the international organs (i. e. Generation Blue) it controls.  It has its own rogue agenda, which Ao (standing in for the series at large) can't agree with, but isn't comfortable with violently opposing either.  In this case, they're the first to jump on the possibility offered up by Eureka's words, quickly producing evidence to support her [1].

There is, then, at this point a certain ambiguity to accepting the Secrets as allies.  The Secret that Japan holds is the most human one we've seen yet, and is even identified as "human type", allowing for a level of anthropomorphic identification that would have been impossible with the more geometric Secrets.  But its design still suggests something jagged and hostile, essentially mechanical instead of living -- which is an interesting contrast to the mecha, which are anthropomorphized machines and which we can identify with much more.

But for all the sympathy for the devil, at the end of the day there's still fighting to be done.  After a fairly talky episode there's another Secret attack, and the piedpiper team feels as though they have no choice but to fight it.  This is, however, a battle where we no longer know what the stakes are.  And this would seem to lead to the downfall of the conventional action narrative -- instead of coming up with a cunning plan to defeat the Secret, Ao is crushed and hospitalized, without putting up much of a fight.

As evidenced by my previous entry on it, I'm currently re-watching Martian Successor Nadesico, and in its second half it poses a question similar to the one being considered here.  It's easy to acknowledge a change in the situation, but how do you change the way you narrate the world around you?  In particular, how do you change from a combative, warlike narrative to something more constructive?  This is a question that the characters have to face as well as the viewers. I've mentioned before that this shift of enemies is a common mid-series plot twist, but what separates the wheat from the chaff is whether this is just a changing of the gaurd, with a new ultimate evil to prove oneself against, or something more thoughtful.

The battle against the Secret does not go as planned.  Ao does his usual heroics, but instead of saving the day he's crushed and hospitalized.  The scene is shot effectively enough that, even though it's episode 15 of 26 and his name's in the title, I momentarily thought Ao might actually be dead.  Later, we learn that this kind of one-on-one combat is becoming outdated.  Generation Bleu has gathered the Quartz in their satellite and is clearly preparing for a massive winner-take-all battle.  The closest paralell would be the shift from the "heroic" wars of the 19th centuries to the industrial-scale carnage of World War I.  The old narratives, it appears, will not do us any good.

Still, despite both the work in the first half of the episodes to make the Secrets more ambiguous and my general misgivings about the series, when Nirvash is flying through the sky and that triumphant music starts playing, it's hard not to feel drawn into the battle.  Action scenes are propaganda at their finest, transfiguring violence into spiritual uplift.  And that's ultimately what makes transitions like this so difficult.  How can we create new narratives when the old narratives still seem like so much fun?

Next week: "That's a lot of flannel to be choking down, even for Bigfoot."

[1]I don't usually comment on things like this, but the speed with which the translation device was built and its perfect functionality stretches plausibility even for a very soft SF show like this one.

Haibane Renmei 3: Temple -- The Communicator -- Pancakes

There aren't very many shows that can be described as "supernatural slice-of-life", but Haibane Renmei thus far is among them.  Its first three episodes are dedicated to laying out the life of the angel-like Haibane in the quaint locale of Old Home.  These episodes (and possibly the rest of the series, for all I know) are consumed with the quotidian and the almost banal.  It's world-building, but of a different sort than we usually see.  We still know basically nothing about what the Haibane are, or the world around them, or the mysterious and fairly ominous figures that run their nice little city.  But we know how they pay for things, how they raise their children, and what each of their hobbies are.

It's useful to contrast this with something like Game of Thrones.  In that series we get broad exposition about far-flung corners of the world and significant moments in history -- we have a much better picture of the world at large.  But zoom in and things start getting fuzzy.  After two seasons of Game of Thrones I still have no idea how the average person in that world lives, or at least not as much of an idea as I do of the ordinary lives of the Haibane after three episodes [1].  Haibane Renmei's focus points to a more sociological idea of fantasy, which imagines societies in the ways favoured by leftist historians that denounce the "great man" figure and focus on broader social trends and common experience.

Of course, the main difference is that whereas leftist historians are extremely critical of these aspects of society, Old Home and the village around it are thus far pretty idyllic settings.  There's work to do, but it's all pretty pleasant work, like baking and teaching.  (It's also work that's traditionally gendered feminine, although I'm not sure about the larger significance of this.)  Everybody is friendly and the worst conflict is a little mischief or childish misbehaviour, as at the end of the episode when we find out that Hikari has been using the halo mold in her baking.  The art style supports this mood, being full of thin lines and soft colours, creating a pleasant, nonthreatening, and sometimes soporific effect.

As newly hatched, Haibane Renmei's protagonist Rakka needs the world explained to her, which makes her a convenient proxy for the audience.  It's an age-old device, but it works well here.  But even for an audience surrogate Rakka seems strangely passive, constantly out of it and a little inept.  At first this makes her seem like just another hapless moe heroine, I would argue that this actually stems from the divide between her physical body and mind and her lack of experience.  We're used to thinking of the mind as developing naturally with experience, to the extent that we often fail to distinguish between the growth of the two, but Rakka presents the question of whether we can imagine a set of developed mental faculties without any set of memory or experience, newly pushed into the world.  This isn't a purely academic question either, as it raises a lot of the issues surrounding the fluid memory we know in the real world.  Rakka's strange combination of passivity, childlike curiosity, and frustration could just as easily belong to an amnesiac or an Alzheimer's sufferer.

All of the series's episode titles are triptychs, but they don't represent a rigid seperation between acts as they would in, say, a traditoinal Saturday-morning cartoon.  Instead they suggest a gentle flow from one story to another.  "Temple -- The Communicator -- Pancakes" (the title, not the episode itself) brings together three different things: the vaguely religious connotations of the series, the mysterious and faintly ominous Communicators which suggest a deeper mythology, and the genial adventures in child-raising that Rakka undertakes in this episode.  These conjure up disparate moods and disparate objectives, but in the actual episode they all appear to be of one cloth, belonging to the series's natural rhythm.  It's a magic trick that Haibane Renmei isn't afraid to brag about.

Let's start with the first part.  Japan has a complicated relationship with Christianity, greeting it with the same mixture of distrust, fascination, and incomprehension as it does most of Western culture.  Anime offers a good window into this.  There are fairly few portrayals of actual Christian religious practice -- the recent Kids on the Slope is all that comes to mind.  Instead, Christian mythology is taken and taken apart into material for fantasy.  Whereas American Christian fantasy mostly takes the whole mythos part and parcel, usually adding in its own interpretations (even something as irreverent as Dogma basically maintains the whole schema), anime has no compunctions about abandoning most of it and grasping the parts it likes into a completely new framework.  This can be seen in the jumble of Christian symbols within Evangelion[2] or Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne.  To be fair, the mostly secular Japanese culture largely treats Shinto and other Eastern religions the same way.  Some have accused shows like Evangelion of not really understanding the symbols they use, but this suggests a certain reverence for the symbols' original meanings that is disrupted by their repurposing within a genre narrative.

And so we have the angels in Haibane Renmei, who have wings and halos and live in a church but have no apparent link to the role of the angels in Christian mythology.  Is the town they find themselves in Heaven?  That would explain the generally warm atmosphere and lack of conflict, but if so it also suggests that Heaven is a very restrictive place and one that can promise contentment but not happiness.  The haibane still go to work, raise children, and have minor spats with each other -- it's just a bit more pleasant than the world we live in.  Given our experience of our fellow humans this seems to be the only version of a broad afterlife I can imagine.  So maybe the Christian mythology in Haibane Renmei is more closely tied back to its origin than it first appears.

This brings us to Rakka's interaction with the titular Communicator, one of the stranged mask men that seem to govern the haibane.  His title is somewhat ironic -- he is the Communicator because no one else is allowed to speak in his presence, only replying with a movement of the wings to signal "yes" or "no".  At the same time he hides his face, preventing anyone from reading his expression and discerning identity or information he doesn't want to divulge.  In the realm of silence, he does appear to be a mighty communicator, but it is only because of the norms that subdue all creation.  A neat metaphor for the state, the church, and really any other institution.


Of course, thus far the Communicators are presented as fairly benevolent rulers -- they accept Rakka as one of their own without much in the way of trial.  But Rakka was already a haibane.  Through this process of confirmation, the Communicator subtly transmutes an article of fact into an article of government approval, creating an appearance of generosity and acceptance while really simply tugging her identity into its realm of control.  (One could make an analogy between this and gay rights if one was really determined.)  This fits in with the general politics of the town.  They leave charmed lives, at the expense of their own autonomy and freedom -- none of them can leave, and their lives are rigidly expressed in official books.  This trade-off isn't as dystopian as one might think -- after all, we make a less dramatic but similar deal everytime we pay taxes.  But there's still something eerie to the Communicators and their obscurity, and I hope that Haibane Renmei isn't naive enough to make this setting utopian all the way through.

Finally we come to the pancakes, which make up a surprising amount of this episode.  The plotline consists of Rakka trying to convince the Young Feathers to eat rice, despite her own personal distaste for it, and then bribing everyone with pancakes to do it.  The main take-away from this is that Rakka is still in many ways a child, unaccustomed to the world around her.  But I'm not sure it raises above the cute-girl-does-cute-things genre that's become so common recently.  The main issue is the apparent lack of conflict or stakes.  Even in an utopian society there's friction between people and personal weakness.  The absence of any such thing in Gile is as eerie as anything else.

Next week: "You do not want this guy on top of you hitting you in the head."

[1] If this blog ever becomes popular enough to spawn a drinking game, trashing Game of Thrones as an aside will definitely warrant a shot.

[2]Same thing for a gratuitous Evangelion reference.

Space Brothers 9: Individual Resolve

Because so many anime series are adapted from established franchises in other media (usually manga) with their own pacing and narrative divisions, you can often end up with awkward episodes which don't really work as story units in themselves.  (The same is often true of American shows adapted from non-TV media -- Game of Thrones, anyone?)  From all appearances, "Individual Resolve" would appear to be one of those episodes, with two main storylines seemingly glued together.  The only problem is that Space Brothers is an original story with no original manga to explain this strange structure.

This episode consists of two fairly discrete parts, both quiet and rather quotidian.  The first deals with the fallout, or lack thereof, from last episode's "cliffhanger", when Mutta discovered Hibito's will and came to the abrupt realization of his brother's mortality.  In the second, he reunites with his peers from the second exam and has another quasi-romantic encounter with Serika.  This structure has its benefits -- it's hard to imagine either story being interesting when expanded to 20 minutes, and we really should advance the plot after spending 3 episodes on Mutta waiting for test results.  The relaxed pace of Space Brothers can teeter on the edge of boredom, and perhaps splitting these stories up would send it careening off to one side.

At the same time, slowness is what makes the show distinct.  Its plot and dominant ideas seem lifted out of a vaguely educational shounen anime -- a long round of testing, striving to be the best, terse declarations, masculine bonding, masculine self-doubt, and uplifting music the whole way through.  But it also realizes the adult consequences of these tropes.  By making us feel the wait for the test results, the show realizes the time between excitements that most series gloss over (although it does manage to inject some excitement in Mutta's vacation.)  Similarly, the will is significant not just because it highlights Hibito's mortality, but also the practical considerations of mortality, the offensively mundane business of deciding who gets his stuff after he dies.

This leads once again to a clash between Mutta's idealism and the world around him.  Mutta is a bit of an overgrown child, still hopped up on his young self's idolization of astronauts (the frequent flashbacks to his childhood, where he seems fairly similar to his current self and Hibito doesn't, cement that more than anything), and this is what leads to the overreactions that make him such a great comedic character.  When no one else is disturbed by Hibito's will, Mutta is almost outraged at their lack of affect.


In a way Space Brothers is an adult coming-of-age story, although not as obvious a one as, say, Welcome to the NHK.  It contains two parallel narratives, one of which is a fairly idealistic story of achieving your dream through hard work, and the other being the slow realization of all the uncomfortable aspects of that dream.  Hibito's will prompts Mutta to study and realize the danger involved in being an astronaut, complicating his long-time dream.  It's a realization not just of his brother's mortality but his own.  This is all expressed nicely in the faintly beautiful[1] pre-credits sequence in which Mutta dreams that he and Hibito are in place of a trio of astronauts that died in a recent crash.

Really, this is something that Mutta should have realized earlier, probably before he made it so far into the application process for a dangerous job.  But it's only through the refracted lens of his brother that he can really deal with his own mortality.  This isn't really resolved in this episode, and to some extent it can't be resolved, in life or in fiction.  If we're being honest with ourselves, mortality is such a complete break with everything we know that it's hard to even conceive, let alone accept.  As to whether or not this will stay an issue throughout the series, we'll have to wait (although perhaps those who aren't as behind as me already know.)

Following this we have a neat little intermission, as Mutta goes out to see the International Space Station pass by.  It's an activity that, we learn, he's done since he's a child, suggesting that despite his newfound awareness of the dangers of his job there's still a continuity with his mythological view of space exploration.  (This view is something that the space program actively cultivates, right down to the names of the space shuttles.)  The ISS in particular is a direct symbol of the way in which space exploration likes to narrate itself, as an international co-operation for scientific progress.  Of course, the actual station is a bit of a disappointment from a science-fictional perspective, looking more like a satellite with room for some people inside.  Babylon-5 it ain't.

Later on we learn that all of the other astronaut applicants were watching the station as it passed over Japan.  Space exploration, then, is a shared cultural signifier that can unite people from disparate places -- everyone from Mutta to Mutta's distant love interest Serika to Hibito to even the astronaut in the space station itself are connected through this one streak of light through the sky.  At the same time it's also a subcultural signifier -- the process of watching it unites the applicants and sets them apart from the rest of the population, who neither know nor care about the space station passing.  This nicely fits space exploration's dual status in our culture, as both a broad popular mythology and something that only a few really care about nowadays.

This power to unite and divide is echoed by the party Mutta attends for their group of applicants.  They're all gathered in pursuit of a common goal, but only five of them have been selected to move to the next round.  The irony that Space Brothers hits upon, intentionally or not, is that while space exploration places so much importance and emphasis on co-operation and unity between nations and individuals, it's also a profoundly individualistic process -- not only are the applicants competing against each other, but the narratives of space make heroes out of individuals (almost always the astronauts) instead of the mass of people responsible for the mission.

Of course, this story is not out to really surprise you, so all three of the characters we actually knew during the second stage have passed on to the third.  Along with them are two nondescript characters who seem to be slightly villainous, commenting about Mutta getting through do to his brother's fame, which is a dastardly insult only enhanced by it being somewhat true.  (Things that seem well-earned from the perspective of the underdog hero who wins things the unorthodox way can seem patently unfair from the perspective of the hard-working, plain competitor.)

Mutta then stumbles across yet another cause for self-doubt, as he learns about the specific and well thought-out reasons for Serika and Makabe's interest in becoming an astronaut, which make his vague childhood dream seem rather silly in comparison.  This seems to be the pattern of the series: Mutta overcomes one source of self-doubt, and promptly stumbles across another.  There are tests and challenges, but Mutta's main quest is an internal one.

This could quickly become irritating, but the series manages to pull it off and make things consistently interesting.  Its best weapon is its humour, which is sometimes so dominant that it would seem accurate to classify the show as a comedy.  It can also produce wonder and inspiration from pretty sparse materials -- somehow the same piece of music that's been used in every episode still manages to stir up emotion within me.  The secret isn't in the script -- it's in all of the elements that surround it.  Space Brothers is an example of what all of the guys who don't get lavished attention on as auteurs in television -- the musicians, the episode directors, the producers -- can bring to the table in making something better than it should be.

Next week: "Pancakes!  Pancakes!  Pancakes!"

[1]Whenever space appears in the show, it looks exquisite and exactly like the glorious fronteir that Mutta no doubt imagines it to be.  We'll see if things stay this way when the characters go there for real.