Seitokai no Ichizon: Mafuyu’s Brofist Double-Tap All-Clear
After the latest episode of Seitokai no Ichizon, I have a hard time shaking off the feeling that an anime like this couldn’t possibly be as funny as it was. While just how funny Seitokai no Ichizon is to you is not my business, somehow it was able to find my humor buttons and played them like a champ. Well, great, but why do I estimate it being of a lesser caliber?
Because it’s a show about a truckload of tropes?
I think when we get too hung up on the meta elements and all that trope shuffling, it’s a risky thing to do in that even in the act of understanding characterization. What distinguishes a mere verbal description of a character from a compilation of oft-seen tropes that also describes the same character? For example, is it really a problem simply because the character has sex appeal and uses it to manipulate people? Is it really a problem when a character likes certain types of girls, he proceeds to try to befriend as many of them as he could? I mean, when I think about the flattest characters (not that way) in the show, Mafuyu, I think back to the scenes in the anime which focused on them. I don’t think about the tropes she represents.
When I think about the scenes revolving around Mafuyu in particular, aren’t they all just a huge, Dilbert-esqe joke? Out of the five in the student council, only Mafuyu is the outright otaku in the group. It’s quite amusing that she both perpetrates the stereotype in exaggerated quantities and also behaves as the straight (wo)man. I mean, sure, that is why it’s funny.
There are other reasons why Seitokai no Ichizon is funny. One total side note is the way the show is paced and how each scene, each line, is framed. It’s a good contrast with Lucky Star, which takes things slowly; versus a more realistic but frantic, girlish even, pace of moving the script forward (eg., Kurenai). Seitokai no Ichizon takes the latter route. I mention Lucky Star because both are, well, 4koma in aspiration. Or I should say, one is actually a 4koma manga and the other is a writing that attempts to achieve the same comedy dynamics found in the usual four-panel style. When we ground up the original material to regurgitate it into an animated experience, well, I guess it’s fair game to compare them.
[Side note #2: character chemistry mapping: Mafuyu->Konata, Kurimu->Kagami/Tsukasa, Chizuru->Miyuki.]
Back to Mafuyu. Beyond what is already said, being both normal and bizarre, she out-meta’d me last episode by describing herself as a cliché, and it’s the kind of cliché act that she’d do, too, to describe herself as a cliché. And it’s not just any cliché, but the kind of cliché you expect her to say she is; which is not the character trope she really belongs to, yet it sort of fits. But that’s not all–what was funny was not only that what she said was true (in that Dilbert, truer than life sense), not only because she described her own 2D-animu-girl nature accurately via the video game RPG character notion, but because I got the joke.
It is an anticlimactic way of saying “well, maybe this show isn’t so funny after all.” That is, if your peers are those who aren’t like you, as in, a serious anime fanboy. But to give it credit, Seitokai no Ichizon was able to communicate some difficult things, across the cultural and language gaps, to someone like me. There’s nothing moe about it.
[Side note #3: I have to mention this pretty awesome reference, but that’s besides the point. What isn’t besides the point is knowing they’re going to Odaiba tomorrow and they’ve mentioned bleep about you know what.]
In most anime, victory posing scenes are jokes; in Seitokai no Ichizon, it’s like the anti-joke. In as much as the almost unfitting moments of sublime, sentimental, victory-posing can be funny, I think they are a sort of safe harbor in Seitokai no Ichizon. It’s like, at the end, these bags of clichés are still representations of human beings like you and me; though we may call ourselves names, we are beyond these simple labels of race, sex, religion or creed. There’s a limit to how much we can laugh at ourselves after all. (…And it’s ok to even laugh at that!) If anything, Seitokai no Ichizon is the kind of show that asks us to ask why things are the way they are. Maybe that’s a tall bill to ask of its viewers, but I think it is as original as postmodern animated entertainment can be.
Then again, perhaps this is all void until the Seizon monster makes a Manabi Straight stab!
Mafuyu and Konata may be into the same thing but they act TOTALLY different.
And yea, I totally agree on your thoughts on the ending pose. XD