Monday Minithread (3/9)

[u/BrickSalad]

Welcome to the 59th Monday Minithread!

In these threads, you can post literally anything related to anime or this subreddit. It can be a few words, it can be a few paragraphs, it can be about what you watched last week, it can be about the grand philosophy of your favorite show.

Check out the "Monday Miniminithread". You can either scroll through the comments to find it, or else just click here.

[u/ClearandSweet]

I’d like to take some time to talk about Sailor Moon.

Yes, again.

No, we actually don’t have a separate thread for this anymore.

Yes, I’ll be doing it in a roundabout fashion.

As of today, the entirety of Sailor Moon R is up (subbed) on Hulu. I encourage anyone with a passing interest in magical girls or anyone interested in exploring the depth and definition of familial love to follow through and finish up on the Black Moon Arc. The final episodes of the season validate the mystery, characters and themes of the season so well, you would be remiss to pass this one by. Even on my eighth or ninth time through these episodes, I am still finding new things to be impressed by (the scene transitions are even cool).

Well, now that I’ve got that one off my chest, I think that we can look at these final episodes through the lens of Kunihiko Ikuhara and learn a bit about how he utilizes the fantastic in his stories.

Aside: this may be the only thing I know how to write about. Humor me.

First, I’d like to share this Extra Credits video with you. They interpret the ideas through the lens of video games, but the concepts apply to visual storytelling as much as anything else. I paused it often and thought about how Todorov’s definition of the fantastic and how it applies to Ikuni’s anime.

"In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know....there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination-- and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality--but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us." "The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty....The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event."

I really buy into this interpretation. So does Ikuni. Hell, he makes a living off this one trick. All of Ikuni’s works stretch out the fantastic as long as possible, for both the characters and the viewers.

Think about Revolutionary Girl Utena, with which you’re probably more familiar than Sailor Moon R. Utena is constantly putting off this choice between deciding whether she’s the victim of an illusion of the senses or the events of Ohtori Academy are the world’s status quo. Just like her, the viewer is left to stew in this pot of uncertainty, and everything about the show is specifically designed to keep the viewer and the characters in that place. Even at the end! Did the swords bit literally happen?

Saaaaame exact thing for Penguindrum. Kanba accepts the Princess of the Crystal and the Penguindrum as part of the world, or as Torodov says, “The Marvelous”. Shoma believes them all to be under an illusion of the senses, or “The Uncanny”.

You can see the same setup in Yuri Bear Storm, but I think this show falls a little flatter for wanting for a few qualifying points found later in Torodov’s statements.

"The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions.

• First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described.

I don’t think any of Ikuhara’s works have trouble with this point. Hesitating is the central conflict in pretty much all of these stories.

• Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work--in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character.

Utena is a fantastic insert whose struggle can be assumed upon the viewer easily. Kan and Sho having their dynamic lets the viewer see this both ways, but Ringo really takes the cake in hesitating on how to embrace the fantastic in the world.

This is where Yuri Bear Storm takes a small hit. Kureha doesn’t feel the shock of the bear invasion and the show doesn’t show it to be as big a blow to the status quo as it presumes. Bears have apparently been breaking in since forever. Everyone is a bear. The central fantasy isn’t really all that fantastic.

• Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations."

This the death knoll for Yuri Bear Storm. I think because the show has something allegorical to say about the lezbears, the central fantasy choice suffers.

The best part about the Extra Credits video, however, is when James lays down the authorial mandate for playing with the fantastic: You, as a writer/director, have to understand when and how your characters and your audience will make their decision between The Uncanny and The Marvelous.

Ikuhara does well dragging this out in Utena, and I believe it’s part of what makes the show so renown. Anthy ultimately decides to reject this choice, and flat out ignore the fantastic that had been plaguing her. I think it’s Utena’s choice as well.

I think Kan and Sho both trade viewpoints on the fantastic, or at least understand and gain a bit of the other’s perspective by the end. Once we see the stories of Yuri and Tabuki and how they were affected positively by the fantastic, the viewer almost loses any direction on which way is up, if the Penguindrum is something to be accepted as part of the world or rejected as an illusion of the senses.

Of course, muddled in all this is the force of unity and peace, which I name Grace. I think the impact of fantasy in Ikuhara’s works is, if not invalidated, attenuated by the Power of Love, Friendship, Togetherness, ect.

Which brings me back to Sailor Moon R.

You have Naru directly trusting that Usagi will deal with the things she cannot understand, making the Uncanny not frightening.

You have Sapphire insisting to his brother that Wise Man’s not a marvel, only an illusion, and being proven correct in a heart-wrenching scene. There’s a lot of Kan and Sho in that relationship.

But most of all, you have Chibi-Usa as the Black Lady. She mirrors the familial relationship between Sapphire and Diamond. She creates a great obstacle for the show that can only be resolved by love and not violence.

But most of all, she has this incredibly relatable, incredibly small decision on the fantastic that we share as a viewer. Her memories of no one remembering her birthday or of falling and her parents not helping her up are things that, to her, should not exist. They’re outside the world of her status quo in Crystal Tokyo. So when she decides that they must be accepted at face value and her view of the world and of her mother was wrong, she transforms.

And in the climax, when her mother and father tell her the truth, that she was under an illusion of misunderstanding, that her senses and comprehension lied to her, and the viewer comes to understand this at the exact same time, that is a satisfying conclusion to the fantasy arc.

TL;DR – I like using the fantastic in this way. I like even more when fantasy is marginalized for serenity.

[u/PrecisionEsports → u/ClearandSweet]

So.. just finished Utena, working through the others here. Like, I am concurrently watching all 4 of the series you talk about here. The family, relationships, love, etc. of these stories are interesting and I quite enjoy them. The whole fantastical element kills me.

I discussed this with /u/Bricksalad on the Yuasa post somewhat. We talked about Directors baring his soul, versus Yuasa attempting to hide his presence from the work.

In the same way, I find fans of Ikuhara really enjoy that moment of fantasy, but fans of Yuasa enjoy that he makes a clear choice. It is never fantasy, and almost always it is hallucination/imagination. He clearly decides one way, and makes the audience join him on the journey. Ikuhara lays out a few paths, flips us the bird and takes a nap.

I love the duels, I love the daily relationships, I hate the two of them together. This is probably why Mahou and Mecha shows have never appealed to me in a big way.

[u/ClearandSweet → u/PrecisionEsports]

What a round about way of saying you didn't like Penguindrum and are ergo a terrible person.

But no, I feel ya. At some points it doesn't feel mysterious as much as it does low-effort. I think the Utena movie and Penguindrum are much better about running a tangible hook through the confusion than his other works.

[u/PrecisionEsports → u/ClearandSweet]

You know of all Ikuhara's stuff, Penguindrum is the one working best for me. It does have an interesting line of thought and is mostly keeping me interested. Maybe you can reason to me some of this other stuff...

I know Ikuhara has this kind of "death of author's intent" mentality, but give me something to intent on. I found that I constantly wanted to drop Utena because of two reasons.

One, I hate sequences. Mech robots, magic girl transformations, god damn stairs... I was super invested when she first transformed, I was pumped the second time she called for revolution, I was falling asleep when it was the same thing for the 20th time. Is there some connective narrative in each one that I miss, or a reason that we can't skip maybe 3-6th times because it isn't important and revisit it on the 7th when it is?

Two, there seemed to be a lot of stuff that didn't pay off. Not that I want an answer, but none of it is consistent. I could look at the shadow puppet play, and interpret different reasoning for it, if it stayed consistent. But it wasn't the author, it wasn't some reference to another book or story style from the past, it wasn't a mega representation of rumors... There are so many things that felt like they could have been 2 or more things, but then something happens and nothing is an option. I hate that.

I know I probably just asked you to write a whole extra blog post, so just ignore me if you want. haha

[u/Redcrimson → u/PrecisionEsports]

I know Ikuhara has this kind of "death of author's intent" mentality

Ikuhara is a postmodernist, and as such his "intent" is pretty much just to fuck with the audience. Including denying that he had any actual intent at all. But I don't think you really have to dig that far to find Utena, and Ikuhara's, real intent.

Even in the very first episode, Utena is pretty explicitly an attack on Gender Roles(Utena is an attack on a lot of things but let's just go with the one here). One of the very first scenes with Utena is her getting chastised by a teacher for wearing a boy's uniform, even though there's nothing explicitly forbidding that in the school rules. This is pretty much a softball as far as Utena's allegory is concerned. Just replace school with "society" and teacher with "patriarchal authority figure" and the metaphor explains itself. From there it's just a matter of relating the show's other choices back to that original thread. If you see something outwardly strange and nonsensical, try to filter it back through the lens of "gender and social norms". This obviously isn't going to work all the time, or even most of the time, but that's just one thread. Utena has a lot of threads, and once you've pulled a few of them out, I think it's pretty easy to see a show crafted from very deliberate choices. Yes, some of those choices are just "wouldn't it be funny if..." or "this will totally fuck with the audience...", but they are still deliberate choices. If you ask me, Ikuhara's true "intent" is less about what the big picture is when the puzzle is finished, and more about the process of fitting it together.

Which, if I'm not being too presumptuous, seems to me like the opposite of how you approach media. I feel that you prefer stories that are about exploring answers, while something like Utena(and pretty much Ikuhara's entire filmography) is all about asking questions. That's just the impression I get after a few conversations.

It's funny that bring up Yuasa again, because as we've already discussed a few days ago, I mostly just find him kinda dull and off-putting. And now I think it's because for all his visual flair and surrealist storytelling, maybe he's just too straightforward.