Year in Review: Sunshine & Kisses Drive to Origination, Shrine Maidens Lost Memories in Coded Euphoric Frontier
Running for your lives.
With style.
Year in Review: She’s Going the Distance, a Great Feat of Strength
Going to mention a list of 12 lists of 12 items each. So a nested list. All 144 items. Annotated for the most part. Don’t ask me why I use these pronouns the way I do…
A Case for Yumi Hoshino
I think one of the most important thing in Kimikiss is understanding why Kazuki and Kouichi are split in the anime adaptation.
But before we get to that, I want to talk about Yumi Hoshino in Kimikiss.
She was the pivotal character in Kouichi plot thread. If looking at Mao, Kouichi and Kazuki as co-leads, then Kai would mirror Yumi, and Asuka Sakino as well.
In that end, is it really selfless that Kai let Yumi do the things she does? One would say probably not, since Mao made it pretty clear what he is getting into (and out of). Still, Kai somewhat surprised her with his own version of kindness. He does have a stake in the relationship–his genuine affection for her.
One could say the same thing for Yumi. But why would people call Yumi selfless or saint-like? Considering her circumstances, if Yumi’s affection for Kouichi was genuine, she would learn to move on and let the two love birds flock to their preordained destiny. Love is not war, after all. Kouichi, nor the type of relationship she has with Kouichi, is not a thing to possess. Yumi recognizes that the relationship between them is not based on selfish gains–it’s a relationship with mutual gains that recognizes mutual interests that may be selfish and selfless at the same time.
In fact, this theme of giving up for the one you lovelike is really the jist of Kimikiss. Just don’t ask me what it actually tries to say about giving up…
You can make a table, fer crying out loud:
- Mao: Giving up Kouichi (which didn’t work, especially since Kouichi didn’t let her) because of Yumi and Kouichi’s present feelings for Yumi, and later on giving up on Kai because she knows she can’t keep him dangling.
- Yumi: Giving up on Kouichi, as in the ending, because she knew it wouldn’t work otherwise.
- Asuka: Giving up on Kazuki, going so far as to help him with Eriko, because she came to see how Kazuki sees Eriko.
- Eriko: Giving up on Kazuki, because she repeatedly hurts him and she is afraid of what might happen.
- Kai: Giving up on Mao because he knows she doesn’t return and can’t return his affection; rather supports her.
But what’s interesting is that people, in general, don’t see giving up in Kimikiss as equally selfless. It is probably a reasonable observation because love is both a selfish and selfless act.
The Good Book has it right: you can’t truly love others until you have learned how to love yourself. In their growing affection Kazuki and Kouichi both find their way, in romance and otherwise–one kicked butt in sports and the other wrote a successful film script. It’s through this interactive exercise where puppy love becomes a healthy exchange of transparent souls, rather than an destructive war between egos and insecure self-worths. People are affirmed not because of the labels of their relationships but by the affections of others. And Yumi recognized what she was a part of was something much more precious than her wavering boyfriend.
So I don’t think Yumi was selfless. She definitely had class, in spades, but at the same time she was just not your stereotypical maiden in love. Her emotions are in check and she made a good choice both for her and for him. She was no saint, either, and that’s the part I want to drive home. I believe no matter how the show spotlight each girl and boy, they are all doing the best they can because they all truly care for the object of their respective affections.
And it is that sense of care that elevates Kimikiss beyond a mere tango with romance and into a tale about growing up. How we are the same and how we are different.
Kind of like Honey and Clover.
So, why the split for Kazuki and Kouichi? I think you can get what I was going to say.
He’s Going the Distance
I blame my recent addiction to Rock Band in bringing back to my mindscape all these 90s recycled radio hits. And promptly stuck there until I master them at the appropriate difficulty (which is currently somewhere between medium and hard on the drums). Been tempted by the downloadables too. I hope they rotate in some Hootie & the Blowfish (although a Stone Temple Pilots is fine too I guess…or, lol, Cake)…
But these temporary distractions are just that. I’m not at all like Jeff Lawson on his fairly busy life. I got a ton of crap to do too but somehow I’m dedicated enough to squeeze anime in there. It’s as if my life has, somewhere down the road, been retooled to be a mean anime viewing and chewing machine. I’m not going to say I’m trying to make my life interesting; rather, I’m just doing what my fleshly desire is pulling me, in its eternal tension against the forces of good and what is proper.
In a season of lull it may very well be sensuality and its usual tricks pulling me to one crappy anime to another. But in the midst of nonsense fanservice I always trip over some nugget of worth. It’s like spotting a coin in the gutter. Or a gem in the rough. And that’s what keeps me watching anime all year long, year after year. It makes a lot of sense to me why the Japanese otaku subculture is so keen on the lolicon–that tension between what is good and what is better but worse. I’m just thankful that sometimes anime is not so pandering, and is rather mature without being mechanically dry. At times it can be refreshingly naive, or surprisingly cunning. There’s still 10% of the good stuff even if the other 90% sucks with a vengeance. And even so the vengeance (sometimes) comes with good action sequences and nice butts.
Contrary to popular belief, I believe people who do watch a lot of stuff don’t often get jaded. Critics do because it makes them more credible, I believe, and also as you accumulate experience it becomes easier to be critical. Being critical, however, doesn’t mean you have to look down at something or have an excuse to be harsh. Some people do get jaded after watching anime after a while, but I don’t really think these folks have really seen all that much. It is better attributed as another form of burnout.
One thing we all have to realize is that anime, historically, is young. Many people credit Astro Boy for being the first “anime” as we know it, but that’s barely 50 years old. Seeing just how many anime titles are being pumped out of Japan today we need to also realize there’s more anime on the air, on DVD, and on the internet now than ever before (and how few there were back in the days). If you are new to this fandom (in the past 5 years) then you need to know that the past 35-40 years worth of anime history has been compressed, filtered and condensed to a tee in the form of cultural history and knowledge. Yesterday’s best is still today’s classics, but last year’s crap is forgotten. As a result when we see today’s crap, we need to take the right perspective. Sometimes this means to revisit old shows.
But sometimes it means to leave them. Old shows are just that, old. New shows are not. It’s sitting there to be discovered. To appreciate the ongoing evolution and the dialog between the audience and the creator, we have to move on. I’m still haunted by the awesome dialog at the start of ef episode 6. Isn’t that the heart of the matter?
And too often we’re just haunted by mere burning memory, running in an empty arena, driven by the burning longing of something past but hoped for. Don’t fall into that trap. Take your anime as they come to you. Real burning passion is not a passing fad. Kamina died for not just you, but also those who have yet to come. Even for the passionless they can just enjoy anime as it is, and not as some kind of thing bigger than just the show and culture that surrounds it. Love your Evangelion-sized gravitas but don’t forget it’s not a serious business. Feelings are uncontrollable but actions are controllable.
He’s going the distance
He’s careless about speed
We’re not alone
Cuz we got all we need!
Omedetou Kazuki!
The Perils of Human Interrelatedness
Go give the springboard of this post a read if you had not yet the chance. I think I may just be parroting what Owen said there, but I think the subject deserves a very good scrub on its own. It’s hard to find a good beginning to tackle this multi-threaded concept, so I’ll start with the boring stuff that comes from my personal life. Or even more boring, classic English literature? Oh, also Longcat Post warning!
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
- Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)
The near-cliche “what’s in a name” comes from Shakespeare, but the last time I used the term was in a debate in regards to legalizing homosexual marriages. In the US, this is a debate that has been going on for some time. The state I live in is now the latest state to legalize it, although the local legislature decided to give gay “marriages” a different name.
But name is really at the stake here. Or rather, the representation of a social status. Quite frankly no one really care about names; but names and labels have practical significances and real-life ramifications. I am not a baptist I have been schooled in the way some American baptists [and look how I avoid that label, lolz] school their kids in regards to dating and, uh, I think the term is “courtship.” To be honest I’m not sure I get all of it, but the takeaway was some pretty practical and pragmatic things people don’t do because it can be difficult to talk about your relationship in the meta with someone you are infatuated with (puppy love). And of course, the teaching was a way to do these things.
One of the things I learned is to define the context and boundary of your relationship. Ever use the “it’s complicated” tag on Facebook? It’s good to know we can define our relationships that way in this day and, but that’s a copout. What’s nice is that the social networking smartasses at Facebook gave something that doesn’t have a label a label (and more to their credit, that they recognize the need for such a vague label; many others before it did not), so people can be comfortable about it. But what’s not nice is that this copout trivializes what’s truly important about a relationship–the relationship itself, and not the social status it gives.
The conservative Christian babble goes on to talk about how kids need this education because they just follow what they see on TV and do whatever that they like (which is true); and without properly defining and understanding the relationship, kids are vulnerable to emotional trauma as a result of poorly handled relationships they experienced from the past (which is also true). But I think the jury is still out on what the cure is for this kind of stuff, if there is one.
From way left field, when I was reading this book a year or two ago I ran across a similar thread in the context of providing a perspective for copyright industry/law reform. The point is human beings do things out of a wide variety of motivation. And it differs from person to person even if two people are doing the same thing. When two people take a vow of marriage, they may define marriage differently than the next couple who booked the same chapel the day later. And as I alluded above, homosexual marriage is not the same as heterosexual marriage by the accounts of many, as an example.
The same concept applies to labels like “boyfriend” or “friend” or “it’s complicated” or “Capulet.”
And which is why I’m 100% supporting Eriko’s experiment, although she’s doing it wrong. I’d expect a real genius to be more methodological about it. But anyways…
Right, Eriko jokes aside, back to anime romance. Honey & Clover is mind blowing in some ways. Granted, in the genre of josei romance drama, this is not at all unusual, but as anime, it’s rare. For those of us who follow TV anime closely we know shows like H&C is quite rare. Too often the breeds of josei shows take the more shoujo route and gets deep into introspection, and frankly the internal workings of a woman-to-be is like Latin to a penguin for many others–puzzling and incomprehensible. To contrast I thought Ai Yazawa’s Nana’s main strength (if not Ai Yazawa’s primary strength as a storyteller) is a balance between the introspectives and the external perspectives, so it was not a surprise that the show itself was a fun watch with a lot of fans. It was able to engage the audience in more levels than just the inner struggles and conflicts of a couple girls tied by fate.
I suspect one reason why most shoujo/josei anime take the introspective route for the same reason why shows like Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei works so well in this medium–because labels make good caricatures. When the whole scope of your dramatic tension rests on the intersection of social norm and personal goals, it’s hard to draw it out short of going on the Nice Boat. Indeed, Nana is filled with soap opera level trash drama, and that’s really what the Nice Boat was about, sans the violence.
Unlike those shows, Honey & Clover, to be specific, is a show about a bunch of strange people. I think that’s one thing we often forget when we watch this show, as strange people are dime a dozen in anime. What makes the strange an important factor in Hachikuro is how, actually, they live in a normal world. It’s no big deal to harbor a vampire when you are made of paper, right?
To pull it together some, a big part about Nana is about the two women (and the people around them) and how they relate to the web of people around them. It’s no surprise that this modern drama deals a lot with people’s self image and how it reflect on the people they relate with. The same is also true with Hachikuro and Kimikiss anime, but unlike the typical josei/shoujo variety, we’re spared with much of that introspection from the feminine perspective. Instead, we’re just seeing what people are doing, how they may be “fighting.” And in good shounen style, even commentators who give insights on others’ relationships and struggles. When we do introspect, it’s from a guy’s point of view. And that’s just a wonderful breath of fresh air for both genders.
Fact remains, romantic relationship can be complicated; and it’s those complicated ones that draws viewers and readers to your story as they appeal to real people with real relationships. Simple labels are helpful in real life but they rarely are precise or sufficient when things get complicated. (If you can even get two people to agree on how to define a label like that with workable precision…) In fact, the biggest charm of Hachikuro, for me, is how it totally destroys the common sensibility of putting labels on your relationships. Instead, Hachikuro focuses on relationships first and foremost; on the interdependence of people and the drama that arise as these interdependence change and evolve along with the characters themselves. People’s needs are met, and it is brutally honest about it while done with respect for modesty and good character; a sense of humbleness in spirit of how we are never more than the people who got us here in the first place. It’s the anti-Nice Boat.
That contrasts well Nana, I think, which is more of a common-place, self-centered “fight” between passion and pride. It appeals to the realist but one has to question the theme behind it all. It’s got the girl talk aspect down.
So where does Kimikiss land? It’s really a shounen romance, but why does it feel so different from your harems and the typical galge adaptations? Does it show its mainstream roots?
I don’t know for sure, but I guess at least two things:
Like Hachikuro, there is some degree of introspection. It’s less, but it’s split between the main cast–especially Mao. The involvement of Mao in the double-triangle that plots out the romance polygon in Kimikiss anime seems heavy at this point. Her struggles actually gets externalized a little more than what you’d expect if she’s going to be a major impetus in the latter part of the series as she faces off with Kouichi, so it’s expected to see Yumi take up some screen time and see the focus of the show swing away from her now. Basically, Kimikiss anime has a narrative progression not unlike Hachikuro in how the different plot threads resolve in a balance manner between boys and girls.
Second, to go back to the long ass nonsense in the first half of this post, we deal with labels in a way that eludes the bulk of anime and manga out there. What kind of relationship does Yumi have with Kouichi? Kouichi with Mao? Kazuki with Eriko? Mao with Kai? We are no longer concerned if they are going to “hook up” although Kimikiss clearly acknowledges this when Yumi and Kouichi was “affirmed.” It’s a weird compromise. Feelings and relationship first, labels second.
Well, it’s hard to say for sure at this point. I need more! And not just because so I can find out what happens; Kimikiss is this gem in the rough that has been charming its way on to the top of my mind’s stack. Only if it wasn’t just half an hour per episode. This is the kind of show that I can go for in the hour-long format.
