Getting what's in your interest is the goal of negotiations. But defeating your opponent and temporarily gaining what you want will always come back to bite you in the long term.

What's best for you is giving both parties something in their interest.

Seikaisuru Kado (Kado: The Right Answer) spends its zeroth episode by introducing us to Kojiro Shindou, and his, well, deal. He's a negotiator, and he believes in negotiation being about finding a solution that works for all parties. As opposed to, of course, the idea that negotiation is power play, entirely about imposing as much of your will as you can on the other. He buys into principled negotiation, in other words.

He's tasked to handle buying out an old, outdated factory, for a princely sum. On the face of it, this deal appears to be good for everyone involved; the factory owner and workers get a great paycheck, and the government branch he's working for gets the plot of land it's looking for. A classic solution that works for all parties, right?

Kojiro doesn't think so. He instead listens to the factory owner and employees, who, while they can't exactly turn down the cash, would much rather be able to keep working. He notices an oddity on his side: the director who authorised this particular buy is an old friend of the factory owner's, and he's dug up a decades old authorisation to push it through. And he does his research, studying up himself on the particular physics of the metalworking process the factory uses, bringing in experts he can parley his network into finding.

In the end, he's able to incent the factory workers to find a lucrative new metalworking process, one that only their skill could have developed. This makes the factory extremely valuable, letting them turn down the offer to buy it... which is not a failure, because the director confides that he was just looking to give his old buddy some retirement money.

Everybody actually wins.

What happened here? Kojiro noticed that the original deal was, despite how lucrative it looked on the surface, the government imposing its will on this factory. The government didn't actually want to buy this long-forgotten plot of land, and the factory owners didn't actually want a retirement check. Kojiro was able to make sure both parties communicated what they actually wanted, and then unify both desires into a single plan.

So isn't it fascinating, then, that one of the first things the alien entity (that represents most of the show's actual plot) tells us is this:

I desire to establish communication of wills.

I desire to secure unification of wills.

What is a negotiator? Someone who is able to represent the interests of the parties at the table. They can be good or bad at their job, depending on how well they're able to understand the will of the people involved, and how well they can unify these wills into a coherent plan.

What is a government? Well, says Kado, look at what they actually do. They're people, collectively tasked with representing the interests of the people of one country. In Kado, Japan's, at least, is reasonably good at the job. They share information with and listen to the people, and they respond quickly with task forces and new authorisations of power. They are, then, generally able to understand the will of the people, and are reasonably capable of unifying these wills into a coherent plan.

But there's a problem, says Kado, when you step up a layer further. The United Nations collectively represents the interests of its member countries, not the people within them. The "will of the country" gets ossified, resistant to change or empathy, and so the room any principled negotiator needs, to understand and unify, gets lost.

And that takes us straight back to power plays. Military power, deployed against unlimited power.

The alien lays this down for us:

Over the last several days, I have observed the things called "countries" and learned.
They function well as a device for unifying the people's will. ...But they are out of control. Countries do not eat bread.

Countries do not have wills. The people within them do.

How do you communicate and unify the will of humanity?

(You don't ask the simple questions, do you?)

Scifi, of course, has been asking this question for a while. The two most popular answers are hiveminding, and building a governance AI that somehow represents the coherent will of humanity (extrapolated volition); which both technically answer the question but often feel like they miss the point, to modern day humans.

Extrapolated volition, in particular, is fascinating; because it draws the link between the question "what is the unified will of humanity" and, well, moral philosophy. Ethics. Our species' attempt to describe what is good and right.

It makes a sort of sense, ne? Once you start to ask the principled negotiation questions at the level of the entire species, instead of geographical boundaries or individual groups of people, territorial and resource disputes start to feel less important than the impulse to make sure we all get to keep living and loving and making.

Kado seems to be building up to proposing an answer here, as well. The alien has already expressed that one of its core values is "unocle", which the show has glossed with the metaphor of sharing the bread. Which is nice and convenient, because as it turns out, that also feels like a core component of human values. There's not much compromising that either humanity or the alien have to do to make sure those particular wills are unified.

So we try to solve that problem in the first half: how do we enact the unification of wills when all parties in principle agree that this is what should be done, in an ideal world? How do we step beyond the glitches and ossified structure inherent to humanity in order to work alongside each other (and an alien) for what is right?

And then...

A word that matches approximately 51%.

What do we do when the essentially-omnipotent god-being has values that don't coincide with ours?

Let's hope we come to the right answer.

flag (n).

A device used in motion picture and still photography to block light. It can be used to cast a shadow, provide negative fill, or protect the lens from a flare. Its usage is generally dictated by the director of photography, but the responsibility for placing them can vary by region, usually devolving to either the gaffer and electricians or the key grip and lighting grips.^[1]

Flag is...

Okay, no, screw it, I'm not even going to pretend to be pretending to be objective about this thing. I freakin' love Flag. It's one of the best concepts I have ever seen, and it executes on it incredibly competently. I think of it in the same breath as Princess Tutu, and those of you who know how much I adore Princess Tutu know that this is basically the highest praise I know how to give.

And the comparison is actually fairly apt, never mind that one's supposed to be a mahou shoujo and the other's supposed to be a mecha. Flag is a story about framing, the framing of photography and the framing of story, and it might as well have as its thesis that it isn't a coincidence that those are the same word.

Let's talk a bit about what Flag's about, shall we?

1. Flag is, nominally, two intertwining stories, about Shirasu, an embedded journalist in a military unit, and Akagi, an investigative reporter in a wartorn country. There's a lot being talked about, here, and it's basically the kind of things you would expect a show set in wartime to be about, about the power of symbols and the resilience of hope and the disconnect between those leading a war and those fighting it. You know. Stuff.

2. ...except Flag is presented through the literal cameras of Shirasu and Akagi. Almost every shot in the show is either a video or a photograph by one of the two, which throws into sharp relief the fact that, well, they're shooting it. Everything we see on screen, we know that someone (and who!) explicitly decided to record this, and not record other things - which means we have to keep in mind the underlying implicit biases of these two photographers. And there certainly is a difference - Shirasu and Akagi tend to focus on^[2] very different things, and thus presumably miss other things, in their search for the truth, or the story.

3. ...except Flag is presented as the rough cut of a documentary that someone (presumably Akagi, by the voiceover) is cutting together from the base footage. This emphasises that the truth and the story are different things, as even the choice of which shots to use out of all the shots the two characters take are in his hands. Along with the deliberate juxtaposition, the deliberate working of this footage into a narrative structure, and the strong agenda this layer of the show presents, you really have to be aware of what Akagi's doing and why he's doing in, in the putting together of this documentary, upto and including Akagi's commentary on Akagi. There's a real sense in which taking its position on the events it talks about at face value in it is missing out on the truth in favour of the story.

4. ...except Flag is presented as said rough cut of a documentary, pretty much metatextually. There are a few, consistent shots in the show that don't really make sense as part of the documentary - I'm thinking of the UI flashes of opening up the episodes in order on Akagi's computer. This is, then, the only point at which Flag, or Takahashi, can speak directly to us, without going through its layers and layers of people's framings of people's framings, and it's remarkably restrained for that. I read this as the show quietly reminding us that it exists too, that it's also framing our read of Akagi's documentary, that even the minimal invasion it has tried to do can't quite avoid making a story out of a truth. And thus, I think, Flag recovers the nature of truth from story, by, without any fuss, acknowledging that the fundamental duty of a storyteller is to lie, and that this is the process by which we see reality.

...

There's an incredible moment, right in the first episode of the show. First, we see Shirasu presenting Akagi some footage of the "HAVWC", the mecha of the show, and then the footage itself, set to fist-pumping, militaristic, jingoistic music - a hero video by any other name. Then, we see Shirasu being presented with the same video, and her reactions as she watches it. It's the same footage, but this time there's no music, just the mechanical, pneumatic hisses of the mech. And there's an extra bit, where the mech just shreds a jeep, for target practice, and this is intercut with Shirasu's gasps, and some of her photographs about the people and costs of the war. Shirasu then ends off the sequence with a line, "You know me, I'll make up my own mind."

This is the show laying out precisely what it's going to be about. Shirasu's reaction characterises her incredibly strongly - but it's clear that Akagi's editing in these photographs of hers to specifically suggest that that's what she's concerned about, and that he set the earlier instance of the footage to the militaristic music explicitly for the contrast. And Takahashi, by cheekily having such two sequences of repeated footage right after each other, is pointing out: this is the sort of thing I'm going to be doing. Watch out for how I'm going to play with the framing of everything, shot and phrase and cut and metatext, because these are the tools I will be using.

This is Flag, and this is the truth of story.

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.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

One day, when I was a kid, I got into one of the why?-loops with my dad that all kids get into. I don't even remember what it was about, but it must have gotten to the point of asking why some systemic issue, because this George Bernard Shaw quote is what my dad dug up to shut me up.

It made, well, quite a deep impression on me.

I grew up chasing that ideal. I've never wanted to be the kind of human who would shut out all thoughts of progress while trying to be reasonable; I've learnt to be completely happy in the role of the unreasonable idiot raging against the heavens, always, forevermore, if that's what's necessary. I am not one who is happy with satisficing, not on the big questions, anyway. Not on death, not on society, not on, well, us.

And Mawaru Penguindrum — and quite possibly Ikuhara in general — is all about satisficing.

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

The key word is, of course, fate. The concept of your life being stuck on one set of tracks, with a known, unchangeable destination. We humans set up survival strategies in the face of it, the things we have to do so that this knowledge does not burn us away.

Ringo sees fate as a friend, and so her strategy is to follow. She lives her life according to pre-planned plans, and grows as a result of the truly entropic nature of fate waylaying her. Her narrative closure is in "defying fate" via self-sacrifice.

Himari sees fate as an inevitability, and so her strategy is to eke out as much happiness as she can in between. She lives her life deliberately trying to never want anything, and grows by acknowledging that even given fate, she's allowed to want. Her narrative closure is in "defying fate" via self-sacrifice.

Shoma sees fate as a capricious god, and so his strategy is to never anger it. He lives his life in constant fear of loss of what minor happinesses he has managed to find for himself, and he grows by clawing himself right back up after everything is his fault, again. His narrative closure is in "defying fate" via self-sacrifice.

Kanba sees fate as an enemy, and so his strategy is to fight. He lives his life as a constant, delusional, rage against the heavens, and grows by realising he's lost sight of what he's fighting for. His narrative closure is in "defying fate" via self-sacrifice.

...wait, what?

Individually, these character arcs all work. Put alongside the lost children, the child broiler, and Sanetoshi, they sketch out the idea that we can still recover beauty and meaning from our lives even though they're on fixed tracks. And yet...

...when taken together, they feel unfair, to me.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

Any one who actively tries to change fate is portrayed as at least moderately villainous, as necessarily skewing towards villainous goals and methods. The parents are terrorists, Kanba becomes one, and Ringo is a creepy stalker. Tabuki and Yuri are villainous in as much as they try to pursue any goals in the world Momoka left them in, and it is when they accept their lot that they are redeemed. And the business of saving Himari, that thread of Kanba's and Shoma's that runs throughout the show, is portrayed as a tragic loss of the boys' agency.

There only way of trying to change fate that Penguindrum thinks is worthwhile, is in unplanned spontaneity, in feeling so strongly about something that you don't stop to plan or think about the consequences. This is Kanba's sharing of the apple, or Shoma's rescuing of Himari from the child broiler, or Momoka's breaking down of preconceptions, or Ringo's willingness to burn for Himari and the other three self-sacrificial stories at the finale. Penguindrum tells us that as soon as you start planning, you lose sight of what you planned for in the first place. As soon as you try to manage consequences, you'll be lost in them.

And because Penguindrum is exceedingly well told, and uses its symbols and elements to maximal fruition, this can't help but have consequences along its thematic lines. Technology (bombs, expensive new medicines, the fire of the gods) is to be feared, for they are tools by which the sin of planning rears itself. The beauty of saving one person is all we can hope for, and the extant societal problems must go unchecked. Even death—cessation, entropic loss—is now welcomed, called a beginning rather than an ending.

The concept of the fate transfer is an elegant little metaphor for the show's final opinion on the topic, I think. Your fate is still fixed; there's still some train tracks you're barrelling down - it's just that occasionally, if you're very strong and courageous and etc, you can switch tracks.

At a cost.

And come to love your new fate as much as you hated your old one.

The love of fair play is a spectator’s virtue, not a principal’s.

Don't get me wrong; I know exactly why it's done, and I absolutely respect the authorial intent behind it. The Lost Decade, the story of those who have given up and become completely disillusioned with the world - I fully defer to Ikuhara in his understanding of them. And I find the intent - of reconstructing hope in a world that's lost it - beautiful in its own way. It's just that...

...well...

...in order to do this, Ikuahara ends up caricaturing something that's dear to my heart, and so I cannot help but notice. And I'm inclined to think Murukami and Superfrog said it better, anyway.

In some real, strong, sense, Penguindrum is not for me. And this is definitely only and solely in message, for it fits my usual checkboxes extremely well (character focus ✓, thematic competence ✓, penguins ✓). I try hard to not judge media based on how much I agree with them, and I still think Penguindrum is a great show.

But it makes me, selfishly, sad, and if there's any place I can let that out it's here.

(Header quotes from George Bernard Shaw's John Tanner's Maxims for Revolutionaries.)

I have a riddle for you.

What are you fighting when you initiate a survival strategy, or, even better, a "longevity tactic"?

What are you defying when you drink koi blood, when you "live for a hundred years"?

What are you challenging when you steal the (ashes of the) fire of the gods?

What are you opposing when you think yourself the lamb of God, when you say you're taking onto yourself "the sins of the world", when you want to bring forth an apocalypse in order to save us all?

What are you confronting when you are willing to sacrifice yourself for another?

What is inexorable, implacable, unreasonable?

What is The Most Unjust?

...fate?

Doesn't quite fit, does it?

In Penguindrum, fate is entropy. Chaos. Disorder. The ultimate end of the universe, of the world, of us. Fate is death, the death of small things and the death of big things. Fate is the third sister, cutting your life short, always.

Fate is also the death of fairness, of our perspectives off the world. Fate is chaotic, messy, the best laid plans being led astray. It's certainly not the stable, consistent, predestined thing Ringo thinks it is, and almost the entire first third of the show is breaking that concept down for us.

And so fighting against fate, whether it succeeds or fails, is identified with order. With life. With plans. With saving others, or at least thinking you're saving others. With technology, even. With aspiration. With big gestures and big plans, with sacrificing yourself for another, with convincing yourself that gassing a subway station is a survival strategy.

And so our characters' approaches to fate start to seem weirdly symmetric. Ringo thinks she can invoke the inhuman, raging nothingness of fate by her plans, even as it coils and twists under her. Himari makes no effort to plan, accepts every single punch the world throws at her... but it doesn't save her from the punches being thrown.

Fate is capricious and chaotic, and it cares not for what you do.

Does this buy us much more than just going with the standard interpretation of fate? Kinda...

There's a strong Haruki Murukami link here. Murukami is the author of Superfrog saves Tokyo, a story written after and for the Kobe earthquake of '95. He also wrote [Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_(stories)), "journalistic literature" about the '95 Sarin subway gas attacks. These are both directly referenced by Penguindrum; and the show dives into that particular conversation.

Superfrog has as a major theme the instability of life, the shocking upheavals life thrusts upon us, upto and including national trauma. Its conclusion there is that we can accept that instability and grow beyond it, to realise the fragility of all our order but be satisfied nonetheless.

Underground concludes with a critique of the Japanese reaction to the sarin attacks, on the misguidedness of declaring that "evil bad guys" perpetrated the attacks and refusing to learn about the actual systemic problems that it represents. I get the sense that you could easily rephrase the central argument as Japan being oh-so-willing to call these attacks the work of fate, entropic, chaotic, and thus unfixable, un-reason-with-able, implacable.

Both of these books are part of Murukami's self-styled transition from "detachment" to "commitment", in which he notices his protagonists being more and more capable of addressing social issues like national trauma. He wrote a fascinating article in the NYTimes, which also reads to me as struggling with the role of the author "[in] an age when reality is insufficiently real".

But after a good deal of trial and error, I have a strong sense that I am finally getting it in story terms. Perhaps the solution begins from softly accepting chaos not as something that “should not be there,” to be rejected fundamentally in principle, but as something that “is there in actual fact.”

I may be too optimistic. But as a teller of stories, as a hopefully humble pilot of the mind and spirit, I cannot help but feel this way — that the world, too, after a good deal of trial and error, will surely grasp a new confidence that it is getting it, that the world will undoubtedly discover some clues that suggest a solution because, finally, both the world and story have already crossed the threshold of many centuries and passed many milestones to survive to the present day.

All of this feels to me very much like some sort of synthesis, of this dichotomy we've been talking about. It's acceptance, but not blind acceptance. It's aspiration, but not blind aspiration. It's not the fiat rejection of disorder by imposition, but it's not the passive acceptance of chaos, either. It's pulling value out of the valueless. It's acknowledging death, and sin, and injustice—acknowledging that they should not exist—but not allowing their existence to stop your personal light-in-the-murk.

It's fighting to save Himari, fighting to even save her without paying the price for it—but not letting the inevitably extracted cost turn that aspiration into failure.

I had occasion to watch Macross: Do You Remember Love for the first time with a couple of friends recently. (Let's call them Lara and Casey, for that is not their names.) It was a fascinating case study, because none of us had any Macross context or any nostalgia goggles on for 80s anime whatsoever. The following is a partly fictionalised but still morally true account of what happened :P

We started out by being incredibly cynical about the whole thing. We snarked about Minmay's first concert being this huge, about Major Focker and his major asshole, and about how ridiculously Borgy and we-have-no-emotions-y the Zentrans were. The "show us how kissing works!" scene was excellent snark fodder, and we'd heard it was the "greatest love story ever told", so when we realised that the races were gender segregated, we drew the obvious conclusion.

Casey: So it's the greatest in the sense of being a love story between two species. This is so stupid.
Everyone: [nods]

Then, about midway through, something happened. This was the Misa-playing-house-in-the-ruins-of-the-earth scene, and it suddenly hit me what the show was trying to do. I still think the time skip there was too sudden to give us proper context, but I suddenly got it—yes, the movie was treating these people like real people, affected by what they've seen and lived, trying desperately to make it right. And if the movie is allowing for that, we should extend this courtesy to the other characters, too.

Me: Oh...
Casey: What?
Me: [whispering] Normality.
Casey: Huh.
Lara: ...what.

I was onboard, now, if still moderately skeptical, but Lara most definitely was not. Casey was waffling between the two of us. Minmay returned, the stage confrontation happened (Casey: "Why would they even call the two of them onto the stage?" Lara: "There was no good way for that to have happened. There's no good ending to this story unless he dies."), Hikaru slapped her (Lara: "Apparently, bitches need to be slapped."), and...

And...

And, yea, Minmay sang the song that would save the world.

This jolted us out of it some. What. What. Okay, the movie had clearly been gunning for this, but still, what.

Lara: Seriously? Pop music saves the world?
Casey: This is kinda ridiculous.
Me: This is a bit ridiculous.
Casey: Bit, nothing. I was quite curious about what these apparently-so-important lyrics were, but it's seriously just a generic pop song. This is protoculture? This is what solves a centuries old war?
Me: It is incredibly cheesy. Very 80s, maybe? Are we just all so much more cynical now?
Lara: Even if we are, I'm sorry, generic pop does not qualify as culture.

But I, I think as the person still most positively inclined to the show, kept churning away at it. And then—

Me: Wait, hang on, this actually works. Proto culture, guys - if you were trying to awaken the latent memories of art and culture in a generations-distant species, what would you go for? The lowest common denominator -- the thing about the lowest common denominator is that it's common!
Lara: Uh...
Me: I've talked myself into this, guys. I like this arc, it's neat.
Lara: What.
Casey: I mean, I can see what it's going for... but I just don't think it's sustaining the story.
Lara: Yea. It is 'pop music can save the world', and that's still fundamentally silly.

I wasn't fully convinced yet, because I wasn't sure yet that the movie actually had this in mind. There's a subtle difference, as a writer, between having a cheesy pop song conclusion because you think cheesy pop songs resonate with the human spirit, and having a cheesy pop song conclusion because cheesy pop songs resonate with you - and the latter is easily easier and less interesting than the former.

And then. Misa and Minmay say goodbye with meaningful looks, and Misa says her line.

It was just an ordinary song, that was popular once, so long ago... Of course it was a love song.

And it clicks.

Everything clicks.

And I watch the rest of the movie with a fool grin on my face.

Me: No, seriously—this is exactly what it's doing! It is just a generic love song, and that's the entire point—because it's talking about how the human condition is oh so common, and so powerful, that it can apparently triumph over generations of genetic programming.
Casey: Hmmm.
Lara: I still can't buy pop music as the great cultural uniter, though. Maybe in the 80s that was true? Pop music has certainly simplified quite a bit since even then.
Casey: Unfortunately or not, it already is the great cultural uniter.
Me: Actually, forget the song, the song is not the point. The point is love, that fundamental primal marker of simple humanity, that one glorious reason we all can look at our fellow sentients and consider them fellows. This is what is so powerful, so beautiful, what the Zentrans are so eager to get for themselves. The song is asking them, and the movie is asking us, do you remember love?

So. Lara had just never managed to buy into the characters or the situation as anything more than narrative devices, into the climax as anything but a dumb silly oh-so-Japanese message. And I can't even say I blame her, because I really do get the sense that the movie loses some weight in the adaptation—the two timeskips in which we're supposed to assume the two relationships developed aren't even immediately obvious as timeskips, for one thing.

And it is ridiculously, unabashedly, unapologetically, cheesy. It has no truck with the kind of winking acknowledgement of its own flaws that's so in style these days. I can totally see how that could put you off the movie.

But, call me a sap if you will, but it got me. I can see what it's doing, how it's trying to do it, and why it's trying to do it. And it does it, as far as I'm concerned.

I remember love.

And that's the highest praise I can give it.

How do you even describe Princess Tutu? There are many answers: nonclassical-yet-supremely-classical magical girl show; a love letter to ballet; a character drama centering around feelings and willpower; a fairy tale about a duck, a prince, and a raven, a story about stories...

My answer: that last one. Definitely that last one. And yea, that's my bias speaking up; I found Tutu most fascinating when it was explicitly exploring the very conceit of a narrative within its narrative, tying everything together into neat little Escher loops. I ate all of that up; with the whole discussions in the story about the value and point and power and danger and tropes of stories, because it was using its own structure to make points about itself. This is exactly the kind of strange loop (technical term! :P) that hits the joyous part of my brain, and it happened in the field of narratives, hitting the analytical part, and the closest thing I have to genuine expertise here.

I absolutely, positively, adored this show. And—I adore lots of things, but this is more; my internal scoring metric has no room at the top end for Tutu. (ᴏᴠᴇʀғʟᴏᴡ ᴇʀʀᴏʀ). I think it's both basically completely perfect at what it does and highly ambitious and clever in what it attempts to do. This is so rare, and such a joy and a treat, and I want to go find every single person who has ever recommended Tutu and give you all a big bear hug.

Okay, okay. Let's stop squeeing unrestrainedly and actually dive into the show. Onwards!

Tutu is about stories. This is first hinted at when we're told straight away that Drosselmeyer, a character in the story, is the author of the story, and as we see him actively intervene to make the story go his way.

Drosselmeyer is magnificent. He is nothing more or less than the embodied preference for stories over not-stories. That's his manifest destiny; he's going to do what it takes to make there be a story; he is literally not stopped by amputation or death from continuing to write.

And — as Tutu takes great care to remind us and impress upon us, this is not necessarily a good thing, at least from the perspective of the characters. He reacts exactly as an author or critical viewer would—which means he gets happy when characters have to make hard choices, to suffer, and he gets annoyed when the story is progressing too easily. It means he plots, in both meanings of the word, and he puts into place devices—made of gears or ideas—to twist and turn the narrative towards maximum Story.

Now, tell me the best story that was ever told! Tell it to me with no regard for your lives!

Simply in being the character he is, Drosselmeyer tells us something very critical: that stories are important. He's a commitment and a guarantee, and a shout from the rooftops! that stories are important. He is all the work and nudging and pushing and devices and frames and stages (oh, just the fact that Swan Lake is the stage he's been saving up for so long—!), and he shows us that all of this is important and is for a highly important purpose: to create a story.

This didn't particularly need to be a meta-level statement—there are plenty of stories about storytellers and how important stories are—but Tutu is able to show us the process from the inside of the sausage factory, instead of just describing. And this works!

The show then makes explicit the disquieting thought that these people (yes, we're treating them as people; this is a story, why wouldn't we be?) are all puppets and characters, even if some of the puppets can see the strings.

Is this what the story has decided for me?

But then, why should this be disquieting? This is a story; of course they're just characters...

Tutu plays with this disconnect so much, that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was the fundamental idea the entire show was born out of.

So our characters are puppets with some ability to break away. But they still, most of the time, do what Drosselmeyer wants them to do anyway. Maybe they need some of his nudging or help, but the direction he's pushing the story is largely the direction the story goes.

Why?

Because, Tutu says, of our narrative roles. The major conflicts our characters have are around the question of who they're supposed to be—knowing your place in the story and the part you're supposed to play. This is tied to the concept of fate... having read the book you're supposed to be re-enacting and having met the author of your world is a pretty compelling argument that you have a fate! But I think the show's commenting by metaphor on the kind of narrative thinking endemic to humanity; who among us hasn't cast themselves as the heroes of their own stories?

Everyone is scared, of returning to their true selves. Because they're used to being given roles in stories.

In most fiction, characters don't think of themselves as characters in a story, because if they're too self-aware they could break the plot! This makes it such an incredible joy to watch Tutu's characters know that they're going along with these roles and go along with them anyway - because, in the end, they're people, and it's so much easier to just fit right into the role you're given.

And the really clever bit, here, is that breaking the plot, breaking free of the roles you're given, defying fate? This is identified with authorship. And as we've discussed, being an author is not necessarily a good thing; the author is compelled and constrained by the needs of the story. Fakir is too close to the story to write it easily, and Ahiru is too convinced of her inability to help to... well, help.

How do you end a story, instead of continuing to tell it? How do you free everyone—not from Drosselmeyer's control, but from the seductive whisper that this character is who you're supposed to be. (Is that the same thing?)

Drosselmeyer, of course, wants none of this; did you notice how his preferred ending was cyclically tragic? He wants the story to continue, because he wants there to be Story, and not not-story.

Fakir, in the end, has the experience that helps: he's already broken through one role. He knows what it took to lay down the sword for the pen: his confidence in his identity, his rock-solid core that wants to save the people he cares about. By example, then, he leads: Ahiru needs to lay down the role of doomed saviour. Rue needs to lay down the role of the villain, of the tragic princess who can never be loved. Mytho... Mytho needs to lay down the role of self-sacrificial lamb.

So how do we break away from the power of the story we think we're in? By rejecting the power it claims over who we are, and by building our identity from who we actually turn out to be.

And this is so much better for being a meta-level statement, because it gives us characters actively recognising the influence of stories upon them and then explicitly working to deny them. That message gets across so much stronger when they're fighting a narrative, and not just narrative thinking!

There are other ways Tutu's basic story structure does this bait-and-switch with us. At first, it pretends to be a mahou shoujo show (and it is, but this is really just the trappings of the story that Drosselmeyer is penning.) Then, it pretends to be a fairy tale (and it is, but this is really primarily the context for suspension of disbelief for the characters, though it serves that purpose for us the viewers as well.) It pretends to be a long series of references to classical stories (and it is, but that's really to re-emphasise to us how much the characters are playing roles in the context of narratives.)

The point of all this is that the story needs to work at every point through it. It needs to work as the story that Drosselmeyer is telling; it needs to work as it's spiraling out of his control, it needs to work as Fakir's retelling it, and it needs to all work in the outer story, the one in which Drosselmeyer is a character and we're getting a masterfully crafted story about denying your narrative roles written by Mizuo Shinonome.

Edel/Uzura possibly best exemplifies this. She starts off as a literal hand-of-author, pushing the plot along as Drosselmeyer decides, and that's fine at the start, in our fairy tale take on mahou shoujo. Then, she's the symbol of the story trying to break free from his grasp, and she eventually sacrifices herself and her purpose to give the story its first major derailing, to save Fakir.

When we get to Fakir's retelling, Edel has been transformed into Uzura, a puppet child with no heart but that which she learnt from Fakir and Ahiru. She's now essentially the hand of Fakir; with less puppetry, but more individual motivation (as befits the point the outer story has got to). But she's also the hand of Mizuo at this point; isn't it highly convenient that her childlike curiosity leads her to turn back Rue's narrative at just that point?

I had problems with Tutu, sure. There were definitely bits that didn't quiiite work, little niggling things that didn't quite track, and giant oak trees of author-swallowing. But I can't be bothered enough by them to affect my opinion.

Tutu is a show of ridiculous ambition, and it sticks the landing almost perfectly. It wants to tell us a story about stories, about fairy tales and reluctant authors and selflessness and sacrifice and people breaking free from what's expected of them. It wants to say something across this tapestry, about narratives and characters and people and puppet strings, and writing your own role. It wants to be, quite simply, a work of art that captures the complex structure in the author's head and communicates it to us as best as it can.

And it does.

Watashto issho ni odorimasho?