Reclaiming 'Problematic' in Kill la Kill: A Guide to Not Losing Your Way
Hey yall. This is going to be a discussion about fanservice, about the form and purpose of media, and about letting the oft-derided word 'problematic' mean something again. I'm going to try to do this without using many of the words that shut down thought and turn us into screaming howler monkeys. (If being a screaming howler monkey actually sounds pretty rad to you, here you go: "feminism", "patriarchy", "pandering", “objectification”, and "deconstruction". We cool? Cool.)
That said, I'll be cheating slightly - when I use the word "fanservice", I pretty much explicitly mean "a sexualised presentation of some character". I'm not going to restrict it to sexualisation that is out of line with the show's goals, because I want to talk about a few cases where that's not the case and I'm not sure I particularly agree with that distinction anyway.
I'm going to be drawing from the 2013 show Kill la Kill a series of examples to discuss some particular, yes, problematic, elements of storytelling and narrative construction that are endemic in modern media in general and anime specifically. Kill la Kill makes for an excellent test case, because it's not just completely laden with this stuff to the point of parody, because it actually has a moderately rich story and reasonably constructed characters, but yet it indulges so heavily. It also happens to be central to a lot of discussions that are going on right now as we speak, that I think have mistaken and misinformed viewpoints within them - so if I can help move the discussion forward a bit, that'd be great.
(Plus, Kill la Kill also tries to address the thing in the show itself, which makes it more fun for me than trying to talk about independently-bouncing Gainax boobs :P)
Why do I feel the need to do this? Rest assured, I'm not here to destroy your fun. I just think that we, as a culture, have a long way to go before we can claim to exemplify certain basic fairness principles that would seem to underpin any decent society, and that this really shouldn't be controversial.
This doesn't mean we can't enjoy fun stuff, but it does mean not only listening to the part of your brain that thinks fun things are fun.
Spoilers for Kill la Kill, obviously, but also occasional mild spoilers for the 2004 OVA Re: Cutie Honey and probably by extension the larger Cutie Honey franchise. Nothing that’ll ruin the show for you, promise.
Part 0: Media in Context, and Why This Matters
Let's get one thing out of the way to begin with: this discussion is not going to be on Kill la Kill's terms.
That would have been a discussion in words like "consistency" and "coherency" and "internal structure", where we would try to talk about what made the show tick in terms of its story and structure alone. It would have still talked about the ass shots, but only in order to discuss what they're doing in the story, and how they're impacting interpretation.
It would very much ignore - or even consider irrelevant, following the New Criticism of the middle 20th century - any reader response or writer intention, including societal context and "moralistic bias". Fanservice is merely a tool used by the show, and like every other element of the writer's toolbox, the only reasonable way to engage with it is in terms of how the internal writing is improved by or suffers for it.
Right?
Or maybe even the writing doesn't matter, all that matters is how well the story executes on visceral experience. (We call this "fun"!) Maybe it's totally missing the point and irrelevant to the goals of the show to even attempt to engage with it on any more detailed terms than that.
Yea, no. Stories cannot help but be about something. It's true! Everything the character or character-like facsimiles in the story do says something about how they perceive the world, and everything the story or story-like facsimile does about them says something about how the hypothetical author perceives those characters. When there appears to be nothing the story is saying, that just means that you don't know what it is yet, probably because the story has been muddled or doing contradictory things - but a badly presented message is still a message.
And a major thing we've figured out since then is that the societal and cultural context of this message really does matter. This is basically critical to any form of literary theory that wants to talk about the societal significance and impact of media - and if you think our media culture is primarily the culture of white anglo-saxon men, and you think this is important[1] and want to discuss this, your theory of literary criticism needs to at least allow societal and cultural context to be a part of the discussion!
By disallowing conversations about context or about meaning, we miss that stories are written in context. Stories are us as a society talking to each other, which of course emphasises the obvious point that authors live in society too. "Moralistic bias" may be a bias in interpreting this, but bias is always a part of human communication, and we should be able to talk about all of this as part of the current conversation.
This is all that the word "problematic" means - and a significant goal of this essay is to point in a general direction of thoughts and thought processes and say "That. That's what we're talking about." It's shorthand for thinking that media plays a significant role in our society, and that there are important discussions to be had when you start talking about context and meaning. In the context of a specific show, it's shorthand for an entire conversation about how said context and meaning makes some elements of the show cause problems in reality.
So let's have that conversation.
Part 1: The Male Gaze
There's an old trope that men are normatively lustful perverts and women are normatively cerebral prudes. (TvTropes calls it "All Women Are Prudes", though I'm not super happy with their ontology here.) The word "normatively" is doing a lot of work here - this includes the value judgments of sex being associated with villainy for women and similar connotations.
This is actually not as old a trope as it seems, and much of its cultural impact dates from Victorian times. It's been challenged a lot since then, however, and these days... it's not a dead idea, by any means, but it's certainly going out of fashion. (Which is great!)
But it still underlies and informs much of how we think. And, while any sort of stereotyping obviously doesn't help us see others as full humans, this is an actively regressive stereotype that we really should have been able to get beyond years ago.
Now, if you know what the male gaze is, you've been shaking your head for a few paragraphs now. "But Sohum," you're saying, "The male gaze isn't really about reinforcing gender stereotypes. It's about positioning the camera - the very voice through which the media speaks to us - as a strongly heterosexual male. The point is less about sexuality and more about simple disempowerment and the bias of where agency lies - the camera lingering over a woman's curves not only tells us that the audience is supposed to empathise with the male observer over the female observed, but also that the female's value here is in the observation. That's what makes the male gaze problematic!"
And you're right! And that would have been enough of a point in and of itself; enough of a reason to declare this part of the show problematic. While it's not completely fair to the show to leave it at that, as most major characters of the show are female, and their deals have little to nothing to do with gender stereotypes in the abstract, it's still true to a degree. Most characters are female, but the camera is still male, and that's still doing some odd things to the show.
But that's not all thats going on here, and Kill la Kill is doing something kinda interesting with the gaze:
There's a strong sense in which the action of the show is clearly a performance, in-world as well as out. The show's been framing Ryuuko's battles as a show being put on for Honnouji Academy from the very start, with spectators, stadium seating, classic hot-blooded shounen performance aspects, and the skimpy outfits explicitly called out as drawing the male gaze in show. She's leered at, both by us and by the other students, and this parallel is explicitly part of the show's discourse - most obviously in episode three.
(Oh, we are going to get to episode three. twitch Patience, Sohum.)
By the time we get to the Naturals Election arc, we've become incredibly explicit about how this whole thing is a performance. The battles are placed on a stage, people gather around television shops to watch it, and even the block text of their attack names shows up as part of the world.
So what's going on here? The explicit presentation of the show as a performance would seem to suggest some sort of an identification between us and those who are watching. This would, then, tie into the episode 3 message - we leer at Ryuuko when she's embarrassed by all of this, but not when she's not; the show emphasising the virtue of non-embarrassment. It's even consistent with Junketsu - students clap, embarassed, at Satsuki, instead of leering. She's too much in ownership of herself, says the show, for you/the students to be gazing at her.
But... even though the students and populace have stopped leering at them, the camera continues to exhibit male gaze, on both Ryuuko and Satsuki in their respective -ketsus.
Huh.
This is super especially interesting, because by now we've also got plenty of scenes where the male members of the elite four are theoretically sexualised. But there is definitely no gaze of any sort on them. (Sensei gets the camera to linger over his particular curves, but that's not in the show's metaphor of performance; it's a slightly different thing I'll talk about in the next section.) They're presented as just naked~ish males, as thoroughly unsexy to the camera and to the audience.
Come to think of it, have you noticed how the background Honnouji student is by default male...
So, this very clearly tells us that, to the degree that the performance is the show, the episode 3 embarrassment/acceptance thing is a sham. People will still leer at you, Ryuuko, they'll just be less obvious about it.
That is, the show isn't doing some super-clever thing with regards to how it presents the performative aspects of the show, at least when it comes to fanservice. If the show genuinely believed that message, genuinely was trying to make a point about Accepting This Shit Being Virtuous, I would have absolutely expected it to stop focusing on Ryuuko's curves after episode three; that would have been the way to drive home the point of the power of her choice, there. (Even if that "choice" is dictated and driven forth by the author constructing his world such as to make it necessary; this argument is just another version of forgetting that media is written in context. Let's not pretend that the world necessitating something makes it okay that the characters do said thing; the authors had full control over their world as well.)
Conversely, if the show was trying to tell us how hypocritical that message is, if it was making some sort of satirical point about the tendency of mahou shoujo to sexualise their characters, I would have expected the show and characters to continue to leer at her after said episode in explicit rejection of the message - that's how it would have driven home that message, by forcing us to acknowledge that Ryuuko's choice made not a lick of difference to her situation.
Either one of those would have told us that the show is at least trying to discuss something, though we may not agree with the message. It would have been reason to believe that there is actual rationale behind these storytelling choices. But as is, though, there is a genuine disconnect, here. In the most likely read, the show is allowing Doylist reasons (i.e., that the fanservice and the stripperifficness will make the show sell x% more blurays) to override actual narrative structure decisions about any actual point it may have wanted to make. This makes the argument, and thus any implied value to the construction, incoherent and incoherently presented.
And, in addition to the male gaze, we get our regressive-as-fuck gender stereotypes of sexuality. No one gazes at the men, either implicitly through the camera or explicitly through our in-show standins. Mako's exultation of sexuality is specifically an exultation of female sexuality. We even get the normativity aspects of the trope - Ryuuko and Satsuki's "enlightened" view is to put up with their sexuality, whereas Sensei manages to actually own it.
Woops, I skipped forward a bit. Well, let's let that lead into—
Part 2: Ownership and Power
"Equal opportunity fanservice."
Such an innocent little phrase! It speaks of hope, and pride, and our courageous leap from the depths of barbaricism that we had heretofore been mired in!
Oh god yeah right. Like my grandma always said, it's not the getting nekkid that counts, it's the narrative intent and the degree to which the show actualises this with an economy of presentational choices that resonate with the given theme!
Let's begin with a simple question: why is fanservice problematic?
Obviously, this is a trick question. All fanservice is not problematic, and that which is doesn't generally seem to admit to any one single answer to the question anyway. You could hold forth on the multiple answers (it stereotypes audiences, it stereotypes perspectives, it contributes to a lack of perspectives in media, it contributes to a certain sameness of narrative construction, it allows characters to exist for no story reason...), but they only seem to be related in the most generic terms.
So let's tackle this from a slightly different angle: What aspects of fanservice can make it problematic?
To answer that question, we have to look at both examples and counterexamples. What cases are there where there exist fanservice, but this fanservice isn't problematic? I can think of two relevant ones, for this discussion:
Firstly, Cutie Honey. (I watched this franchise through the three-episode OVA Re: Cutie Honey, so all commentary here is from that retelling.)
Cutie Honey was constructed by Go Nagai, the father of modern fanservice. I'm told his lineage descends basically directly to Kill la Kill, and I somewhat suspect episode three is in some way trying to grab for Ryuuko what Honey embodied.
(Breathe, Sohum. You'll get to talk about episode three very soon.)
The show contains quite a bit of fanservice of the eponymous Honey, from the now-trope of her clothing disappearing as she loses power, to Honey simply being portrayed as a teasing, sexual woman who takes joy in her appearance.
And while Cutie Honey isn't the most progressive of shows (Honey and Natsuko are still closer to Strong Female Characters than Strong Characters who happen to be female), much of this fanservice seem to me to be a lot less problematic. Why?
I'd say it's because Honey is completely in control of this[2]. She owns her body and the effect it has, and is all too happy to use it as one of the tools in her arsenal. This is emphasised pretty much everywhere in the show, through direction and device, and its function is to place Honey in the position of power with respect to her fanservice both in and out of the narrative.
And this is true in the other direction, as well. When the show isn't trying to talk about Honey's particular form of power here, it's surprisingly tame and reluctant to linger on Honey's person. Even when she's naked for the purposes of the plot (which she is a lot).
In short: the fanservice is used for and only for a purpose. When the show talks about her sexiness, it's in the context of her owning it, which tells us that she's the agent here even when she's in the "passive" role of being-looked-upon. You can't accuse Cutie Honey of causing us to empathise with a male cameraman over Honey - because the camera is pretty explicitly controlled by Honey for her own purposes.
The second instance where fanservice is not problematic is, funnily enough, from Kill la Kill itself. It's the man with a plan, the sensei of the hairspray, Mr. Nudist Beach himself, Aikuro Mikisugi!
Sensei's stripping is played for laughs in Kill la Kill, and his audience of one, Ryuuko, thinks he's creepy. But to the remainder of his audience - us - he is in complete and utter control of this display. Sensei's stripshows are incredibly obviously an act he puts on to obfuscate and frustrate Ryuuko, and the show is obliging him in displaying this.
Again, what makes this nonproblematic is that he's in complete and utter control of this. It doesn't take power away from him like traditional fanservice would—in fact, it'd be a character disservice and just a weird storytelling choice to not show the audience the power he has here.
And all of this is completely unlike what Ryuuko endures.
Ryuuko starts off the show by being symbolically raped. I'm not even going to get into the discussion about whether rape is in our current society ever appropriate for comedy. What I care about is this: this is representative, essentially, of the show's attitude to Ryuuko.
The other rape allusions and general male gaze tell a consistent story here: Ryuuko's sexualisation here is at the hands of others. The uniform-rape scene by itself makes it possible to read the show-long(-so-far) fanservicey outfit as her acquiescing to the wrong side of a power dynamic, and the additional allusions don't help matters.
Ryuuko is forced into Senketsu, into these situations, and into Gazes. Her fanservice is constructed to rob her of her power, even as the show pretends it isn’t.
This is highly problematic, and the exact opposite of “equal opportunity” anything.
Part 3: The Glorification of Acquiescence
(or: Fuck Episode Three.)
Satsuki: You have all this power at your disposal, and this is all you can do with it, Matoi?! If that's all you can do, you're nothing but a mindless lump of flesh squeezed into that Godrobe!
Ryuuko: Then what does that make you?!
Satsuki: Something entirely different! I've already mastered the art of wearing my Godrobe! Of wearing Junketsu!
Senketsu: This is bad, Ryuuko. At this rate, you'll pass out from blood loss in five minutes.
Ryuuko: Is that all you ever talk about? Stop drinking so much blood, then!
Senketsu: I cannot be worn by you unless I drink your blood. When you wear me and I am put on by you, that is when the power manifests. But you have yet to put me on.
Ryuuko: I'm wearing you right now! You're drinking my blood and I'm dying of embarrassment! What more do you want from me?!
Satsuki: How pathetic. The Godrobe saved you from passing out due to blood loss? But in a dormant Godrobe, you might as well be naked.
Ryuuko: I'm not sure how I feel about someone in that exhibitionist getup making fun of me.
Satsuki: Exhibitionist? Nonsense! This is the form in which a Godrobe is able to unleash the most power! The fact that society's values shame you only shows how small-time you are! If it means fulfilling my ambitions, I, Kiryuuin Satsuki, will show neither shame nor hesitation, even if I should bare my breasts for all the world to see! My actions are utterly pure!
Mako: Get naked, Ryuuko! I can say beyond a doubt that you are not inferior to Lady Satsuki! Your boobs are bigger than hers! I saw them! "That Ryuuko, she's got a great rack!" My whole family was talking about them! So don't be embarrassed! Just rip it off and get naked!
Satsuki: Get... naked? What foolishness is this?! Just look at the nonsense your weakness has led to! You have disappointed me utterly, Matoi!
Ryuuko: It ain't nonsense! It ain't nonsense at all! I finally understand. I need to get naked. Putting on a Godrobe like you means for us to become one! It means for you to become my skin! That's what it means to master wearing you! Isn't that right, Senketsu?!
Senketsu: Yes! That's exactly right!
Ryuuko: I feel it! This is the real you, Senketsu!
Senketsu: This is our power. Mine and yours.
Ryuuko: The reason you were drinking so much blood is because I was rejecting you out of embarrassment! The more my heart was closed, the more you yearned for a blood connection! That's what happened, right?!
Senketsu: As you are now, the blood I just drank is more than sufficient! You are wearing me, and I have been put on by you!
This is all, to put it mildly, utter horseshit.
…
What, you want more?
Look, I get acting on pure practicality. There’s too much that’s shitty about the world for us to even survive as proper human agents if we got up in arms about every single thing that needs fixin’. Fine.
But even then, even as you pick and choose your battles to fight, even as you acquiesce to a pile of crap that no one has time to shovel away —
—(even as young women grow up, today, being told by every source they can think to ask that their bodies are what measure their worth, that they are and have to be the beautiful people, and will be stared at for the rest of their life by half the people they meet)—
—even then, the proper response is “This is a thing that matters, but I am not able to spend enough resources fixing it.”
It is not to smear this shit over yourself and call it gold.
Exploitation is not empowerment. Exploitation is not empowerment. Exploitation is not empowerment.
There is no better verb to describe what Ryuuko does in episode three than “acquiescing”. She clearly starts out highly, extremely, uncomfortable with the exhibitionism. She does not want to put her body on display for either the students of Honnouji or us at home. It’s more than awkward, it’s horrible, to have this uniform which forced itself upon her insisting on flaunting her for the world.
Then Satsuki says her little paean to practicality, Mako tells her to get naked, and Ryuuko is now and forevermore completely okay with being flaunted. People will stare at her, and this is okay, because she just has to wear this stripperific outfit for her plan. Nothing can be done about that. Nope.
And then the show goes and presents this as Ryuuko owning her sexuality.
No. Sorry. Just because you ticked the Cutie Honey boxes—
- ☑ female protagonist
- ☑ stripperific outfit
- ☑ she flaunts her sexuality
- ☑ people stare at her
- ☑ she doesn’t care
—doesn’t mean that Ryuuko’s portrayal is anything like Honey’s.
The key difference is this: it wasn’t her choice to begin with, and she is not playing an active role in said flaunting. She’s not owning her sexuality, she’s putting up with it. She’s not an agent here, as far as her body’s concerned. There is nothing in Ryuuko’s person, nothing we see her say or do, which aligns with this trait the show is claiming she has, “owns her own sexuality”.
You could argue that this is just what puberty is like, that you put up with your body’s changing and aren’t an agent on what it decides to do. But if this is the intended reading, then Kill la Kill has been an exceedingly cursory exploration on the topic. Ryuuko went from do-not-want to yep-is-cool in the space of about a minute.
And the thundering silence on developing this theme, this reaction of Ryuuko, is the biggest broken promise I have ever encountered in any narrative. The development it is getting is in the larger wheelhouse of “knowing and acknowledging yourself”, which is nice and all, but it doesn’t address this particular issue.
Everything the character does says something about how they perceive the world, and everything the story does about them says something about how the hypothetical author perceives those characters.
So this episode says that Ryuuko is incredibly easily convinced to acquiesce to the expectation that her body is for flaunting, and that the hypothetical author thinks that being like Ryuuko is virtuous, will unlock the latent power within you, empowering.
(As a special case of knowing-yourself-is-empowering, fine.)
Still, I hope that message is not intended. Even when the base practical benefit Ryuuko’s supposed to be getting is undermined by the camera continuing to stare at her ass every chance it gets? I hope it’s accidental, an unnoticed outgrowth of the Personal Identity stuff they seem to be doing.
In any case, this episode is not an intelligent addressing of fanservice, and its argument is cursory, defeatist, and ugly.
Part ω: Final Thoughts
Yea, we ended on a down note. Sorry, for what it’s worth.
Despite what it might look like, I honestly don’t not like Kill la Kill. I’m just putting everything about it that bugs me in one place, here, so it looks like a wall of negativity - but I think it’s a pretty fun show that might have some ambitions but has some fairly serious problems as of right now. I’m probably going to end up scoring it around Baccano! and below Redline.
And I don’t think you’re a horrible person or anything if you like Kill la Kill. I think you should not buy its stuff / support it, and buy LWA(2) if you want to support Trigger, and I think that any recommendations of the show need to come with serious caveats, but yea.
Mostly, though, I just want our culture as anime watchers to be able to move beyond this stage that we’re in. Where we don’t try to make Watsonian excuses for Doylist decisions, made to sell Blurays. Where we acknowledge that things can be problematic, that all this has a wider impact than just our own little twenty minutes per week. Where we actively decide that we want to do what we can to change our media culture from this morass, one bit at a time.
Oh hey, look. Thematic closure.
I’ll see yall on the subs.
I'm going to assume I don't need to justify the basic premise that this is an important thing to be talking about, but in short: media and story belong to humanity, and we've recently figured out that "humanity" is a much larger group than we thought it was~ ↩︎
I don't mean to imply that having characters own it in-world is the only way to have nonproblematic fanservice. It's just easier, because there's an incredibly easy identification of the camera with the usually theoretical in-world watcher. The point is closer to "for the character's own purposes", where the emphasis is on the character as a element of a story. Fanservice could very well be at odds with what the character wants, but still play a part of the character's arc. ↩︎
