KonoSuba: how is anime fandom like a succubus dream?

KonoSuba #9: for a small fee, a succubus will visit your dreams and give you relief

Episode nine of KonoSuba raises the question: what if you could pay a succubus to give you a wet dream, featuring the person(s), settings and deeds of your choice, with no worries about legality or morality, because after all it’s “only a dream”?

KonoSuba #1: How does it feel to get dragged away with the guy you treated like a total idiot?

Backtracking slightly: Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!, KonoSuba for short, is another entry in the ever popular “nerd gets trapped in a RPGesque fantasy world” anime genre and, like Grimgar, it’s a bit of a deconstruction. Unlike Grimgar though it does it not by amping up the reality of what it would be like to be dropped in a fantasy world where you have to kill to survive, but rather by taking the piss of the genre and RPGs in general. So our hero Kasuma is not all that likeable, mainly out for himself and stuck with the goddess that reincarnated him into this world, who he dragged down with him out of pure spite when she was slightly too amused about the dumb way he died. They’re joined by Megumin and Darknes, respectively a mage with a fantasy complex specialising in explosion magic who only has the stamina for one explosion a day and a masochistic paladin who sexually harasses her opponents by imagining the lewd and embarassing things they’ll do to her once they defeat her. KonoSuba has done very well in creating humour out of the characters’ own flaws: they get what they deserve, with everybody treated equally (un)fair. Nobody is perfect, nobody is the designated chewtoy and ultimately they’re stuck with and deserve each other.

KonoSuba #9: no worries about legality or morality in dreams

Most episodes are loosely dedicated to mocking one aspect or another of this subgenre and episode nine takes aim at the venerable element of fanservice and sexual wishfulfillment — not just common in this particular anime subgenre of course, but found everywhere. It does so in a typical KonoSuba way, by taking the idea of the succubus to its logical extreme and have them set up a business providing nice dreams to male adventurers to relief stress, for a small fee and some of their vitality. Kasuma being who he is, carefully examines the bait held before him for its legal and moral implications, all of which the succubus counters with that it doesn’t matter, it’s just a dream. Now is this just me or does this hint at some of the more questionable defenses of dodgy anime or manga? “It doesn’t matter, it’s not real”?

KonoSuba #9: of course Kazuma chooses dreams over reality

But if you thought that was a bit too on the nose, the next scene is worse. Kasuma returns home to find out the parents of one of his team mates have sent over a lot of high grade crabs and booze and the team’s having a party. He wants to join in, but comes to his senses when he remembers the warning the succubus had given him: don’t drink too much booze that you sleep too deep to dream. Yey as he looks at the happy faces of his friends, he considers giving up and join them — not. In the end, he rejects physical pleasure and companionship for the dubious comforts of a wet dream. If that isn’t direct commentary on a part of anime fandom that rejects the physical “3D” world in favour of “2D” fantasies, I don’t know what is.

KonoSuba #9: having your cake and eating it

But does it work? the problem with making fun of immature sexual fantasies is that the end product could look a lot like an immature sexual fantasy itself, the same way most anti-war movies can’t help but glamourise war at least a bit. And with all the jiggling butts and tits on display — ugly though the art is this episode — you can’t help but think KonoSuba wants to have its cake and eat it too. Once the plot moves to the inevitable confusion between dream and reality when Darkness walks in on Kazuma in the bath, any pretense at satire is lost in favour of bog standard fanservice. Especially since the series had a fair bit of fanservice in it already, if only by teasing about how Aqua doesn’t seem to favour wearing panties. In the end therefore this mocking doesn’t quite work, the show undermining its own argument. Yet being even willing to try and have this argument wins it points from me. KonoSuba is a show that caught me by surprise from the start and even this flawed attempt at social commentary confirms it’s one of the best shows this season.

Best mother in anime

Sachiko Fujinuma - From Boku Dake ga Inai Machi episode 1

Boku Dake ga Inai Machi is a taut psychological thriller, about Satoru Fujinuma, a failed mangaka, who travels back in time to his childhood to stop a serial killer, but that’s not what makes it special. It’s what happens in the very first episode, after the protagonist used his involuntary time traveling powers to stop an accident from happening, only to get injured in the process himself. As he goes home from the hospital to his dinky one bedroom apartment, he finds his mother, Sachiko Fujinuma, waiting for him, having rushed over to take care of him while he’s on the mend. That’s rare; usually in anime, even obsessed with high school settings as it is, parents rarely show up, being conveniently dead, too busy with work or just plain ignored to take much notice of their children’s adventures. But here we have a mother of an adult son, who not only comes over to care for him when he needs her, but who also helps him a few days later when his powers kick in once again and it is she who, by virtue of just paying attention at the right time, who actually prevents a child abduction. Which in turn gets Sachiko wondering about those serial killings because she is sure she recognised the would-be abductor. Which of course gets her murdered quickly, with her son as the main suspect.

From Boku Dake ga Inai Machi episode 1

Don’t worry: she gets better. Or rather, as said, Satoru’s despair catapults his mind back into time from 2006 to 1988, when he was eleven years old, to just before the original serial killings took place. He now has a chance to make good the mistake he made back then, when he could’ve saved his classmate Kayo Hinazuki from being murdered, if only he hadn’t left her alone when he saw her in the park on the night of her abduction. For Satoru, his inadvertant leap back into time means a chance for redemption, a chance not just to prevent his classmate’s murder, but that of his mother as well. If he can chance the past, he can change the present he left behind. if he can change the past.

From Boku Dake ga Inai Machi episode 4

Satoru of course tries and hide the truth from his mother, but Sachiko isn’t the type to stay fooled for long. She knows her son is up to something when he suddenly starts befriending Kayo and quietly supports him from the sidelines. A single mother, she works as a news announcer and she’s smart enough to guess some of what’s happening, to be there when Satoru needs her the most. Even as he thinks he has to solve the problem of keeping Kayo save from both her killer and her own abusive mother on his own, she’s there to help. Which you could argue is the central theme of Satoru’s own character growth over the course of the series so far: learning to rely on others, especially his mother, when his problems are too big to tackle on his own.

From Boku Dake ga Inai Machi episode 8

More so than Satoru, Sachiko is the heart of Boku Dake ga Inai Machi, with her presence felt throughout the series even in those episodes she’s barely present for. It comes out in the little things, like how she greets Satoru and friends when they bring Kayo back in episode eight. Or the fact she’d already bought pajamas for her beforehand. Or more mundanely, how she and Satoru act around each other in their day to day lives, something you don’t really notice much until it’s driven home when Kayo’s there to see the contrast with her own home life. Not that you need that contrast to know that thanks to her, Satoru will always have a home to return to, a place he can be safe in no matter what happens. That’s why her murder has to be put right or the world itself isn’t right.

Gatchaman Crowds

Sugane Tachibana is a bit of a stick in the mud

About two thirds of the way through watching the entire series of Gatchaman Crowds I started to realise that it was actually a classic Hegelian dialectic masquerading as a manic pixie dream girl rom-com, with the Gatchaman superhero team in the role of the dour salaryman shaken up out of their boring routine. In the grand tradition of Japanese superhero shows, the Gatchaman team is fighting a secret war against an alien menace, the MESS, computer generated LEGO blocks fond of abducting people, barely managing to keep the status quo. They’re super serious about following the rules for how superheroes should behave, none more so than this guy, Sugane Tachibana, who is the first to come into contact with our manic pixie dream girl.

Hajime Ichinose

Cast in that role we have Hajime Ichinose, the latest Gatchaman recruit, who of course goes to the same high school as Tachibana. Cheerful, energetic and much, much smarter than any of the Gatchaman first give her credit for, she blithely disregards all of the conventions that Tachibana and the others try to drill into her. It’s immense fun watching her stroll through the first two episodes, making contact with the MESS and revealing that the entire reason for the Gatchaman to exist was based on a misunderstanding, as the MESS apparantly never realised the people they abducted were sentient. Hajime gets them all back, leaving the team jobless, but not for long. There’s a new alien menace, Berg Katze, a renegade Gatchaman, who delights in murder & mayhem, wanting to see the Earth go up in flames as he manipulates a war of everybody against everybody, starting with the Gatchaman’s own Tachikawa City. But even this menace doesn’t cause hajime to change her outlook on life: she remains cheerful, optimistic and wanting to communicate, to understand Berg Katze.

Rui Ninomiya

Of course what would a rom-com be without a love rival? That’s the role of Rui Ninomiya, the genius behind the GALAX social network that Haijime is a huge fan and user of. Rui is perhaps best described as an internet utopian, with their GALAX network enabling its users to help each other through the gamification of altruism, people getting points for e.g. assisting with a traffic accident. Rui believes that the world is flawed and wants to “upgrade” it through GALAX; they don’t believe in leaders or heroes. Judging from their appearance, they’re genderqueer, with the subtitles refering to them with both male and female pronouns, which the show presents matter of factly without drawing attention to it; that’s just how Rui is.

Paipan is not a panda

Getting back to the Hegelian dialectic, we have the Gatchaman team, with Sugane Tachibana as their spokesman, providing the thesis: the world needs heroes to protect it from alien threats and other menaces. These heroes need to keep their identities secret to be able to operate, as well as keep their battles secret not to worry normal people. You need rules, you need to be serious, you need to realise this is a life and death struggle and act accordingly. Saving the world is serious bizniz.

Rui Ninomiya's philosophy in one billboard

GALAX and Rui Ninomiya then provided the antithesis: we don’t need heroes or leaders, normal people are capable of solving their own problems, even an existential threat like this, as long as you give them the tools and trust them to use them. Be flexible, be creative, have fun and problems will disappear almost of their own accord.

Hajime and her collage circle

The synthesis comes of course courtesy of Hajime Ichinose, who from the start has been able to mash up those two philosophies and transcedent them. In the second episode she takes Tachibana to her collage group’s meetup, where to his surprise he learns the mayor and fire chief are part of it, while in the same episode we also see her noting how well connected and near to each the city’s various power centres are. It’s a subtle foreshadowing of the role she plays in the second half of the series, at home both with the flexibilty and grassroots power of GALAX and using more traditional power structures. For her it is self evident that if the world needs heroes, they should be public and not ashamed to use their real names, but also that if you want to trust ordinary people with the power of GALAX, you have to give them that power, not try and establish a new elite with it.

That’s what I like about Gatchaman Crowds and Hajime especially, that seeing straight through hypocrisy or contradictions to the heart of the matter. In the end this is a optimistic show, celebrating the ability of people to come together and work for a common goal, seeing the good in both tradition and innovation. Hajime Ichinose is the embodiment of this clear eyed but optimistic vision.

Grief in Grimgar and Kanon

The death of Manato from Hai to Gensou no Grimgar #4

Hai to Gensou no Grimgar is the story of a party of (what we presume to be) amnesiac gamers trapped in a fantasty world and drafted in what’s essentially a race war against goblins and other monsters if they want to survive. And they’re not the ‘leet kind of gamers either, but rather the ones left over after all the capable people banded together and left them. inexperienced and incompetent at first, what keeps them together and alive is Manato, their leader and healer-priest. The heart and the soul of the team, he’s too good to be true and therefore keeps raising death flags for himself all through the first three episodes, particularly because he keeps going into the thick of battle and healing everybody the moment they get as much of a scratch. In episode four his flags come due, as the party attempts an ambush of a small group of goblins, they’re ambushed themselves instead. As they retreat Manato is shot in the back by a goblin archer, who deliberately aimed at a spot he can’t reach so he can’t heal himself, dying as the party reaches safety.

After the burial, from Hai to Gensou no Grimgar #5

In a matter of minutes the party has lost their leader and friend, something which doesn’t fully sink in until they bring his body to the temple he was a priest of and heard the head priest officially pronounce his death. Unlike the audience, they didn’t see it coming, couldn’t prepare for it and therefore their grief is raw and sudden. At first there’s anger and denial, a refusal to believe he really is dead and it is only after they were forced to cremate him (so he wouldn’t turn into a zombie), that anger makes way for a dull acceptance. The party is splintered, robbed off its heart, each of them alone and lonely and only capable of thinking of their own grief, something the opening scenes of episode five make painfully clear.

Shihoru grieving, from Hai to Gensou no Grimgar #5

Shared grief often brings people together, but it helps if you can prepare yourself. In Grimgar‘s case, the death of Manato instead worsens the already bad relationship between the two girls in the party and the three remaining guys. Things had been wrong for some time already, but with Manato as mediator the differences and mistrust were papered over. With him gone, the men retreat to the pub while the women are left on their own, with the silver haired Shihoru especially taking his death hard, having only opened up to him just before his death, leaving Yume having to deal with both their grief with no support from anybody else. For long stretches in the episode they even disappear, the narration following the boys to the pub instead.

Haruhiro and Yume grieving, from Hai to Gensou no Grimgar #5

What makes Manato’s death especially hard to deal with is that it was avoidable: the party got caught up in its own hubris, became careless, took one too many risks. Manato himself wasn’t free from blame either, as his successor, Mary, makes clear. Brought in by Haruhiro only a day after Manato’s death, she’s a very different sort of healer: disinclined to fight in the front or heal every little scratch, prefering to keep her distance and save her strengths, something that’s objectively the better strategy. But it doesn’t make the guilt everybody feels about getting him killed easier to bear, nor does Haruhiro’s unilateral decision to replace him lessen the distance between him, Moguzo and Ranta on one side and the girls, Yume and Shihoru on the other. It’s only when he runs into Yume at their bathing house and for the first time several episodes actually sits to talk with her, that they start to heal and get some of their mutual trust back.

Makoto is scared. From Kanon #9

Because his death was so unexpected, because of existing tensions, grief in Grimgar hits hard and sharp, leaving the characters barely able to deal with it. Compare this with Kanon (2006), which also deals with grief, but of a sort we’re more likely to encounter than that of Grimgar: anticapatory grief, of knowing a loved one, a family member is terminally ill and will be dead soon. Most of us are more likely to die of an illness than by goblin arrow after all; most of us will have experienced such a death in the family at least once by the time we’re adults. Episodes eight and nine of Kanon feature one of the best portrayals of this kind of grief I’v seen, even if the illness causing it is of a mystic nature.

Yuichi comforts. From Kanon #9

As you probably know if you’re into anime, Kanon is a Kyoto Animation adaptation of a Key visual novel, which together with several other of such adaptations they made their reputation as one of the best anime studios with. The story revolves around Yuichi Aizawa, coming back to town after seven years of absence to live with his cousin and aunt, running into various girls he used to be close to when he lived there before, having forgotten about them in the mean time, now rediscovering their relationships and solving their problems. One such girl is Makoto Sawatari, who attacks him for now reason one day as comes out of the supermarket and who he brings home when she collapses. Most of the interaction between her and Yuichi is fairly lighthearted and rather funny, until things get serious from episode seven onwards, as Makoto starts to forget how to be human. It turns out she’s a fox spirit who turned human out of a desire to be with Yuichi, knowning that her time would be limited.



In the next two episodes we see her regress more and more, with Yuichi abandoning school and everything else to be with her as much as possible, trying his hardest to make her happy in the few weeks or days they have left together, culminating in the “wedding” shown above. At the same time, as her condition worses, we sees his horizons narrow, as the time left to her turns from weeks into days into hours. It’s a familiar grief to me, having gone through much the same with Sandra, eleventh hour wedding and all, much more familiar than Grimgar‘s. Each in their own way succeeded in making me feel the reality of their grief without sinking into melodrama.

Cultural assumptions go both ways

A couple of days ago Frogkun wrote a post about how the anime adaptation of Little Women choose to portray black women, specifically their language and dialect, which, anime fandom being what it is, got him some pushback from more reactionary fans about it being too political and ideological. Which in turn led her to write a post on forcing one’s own cultural assumptions onto anime, which I found interesting:

At best, it comes across as lazy argumentation in context. At worst, the writer is guilty of exactly the same cultural elitism they’re supposed to be decrying. In their effort to delegitimatise viewpoints they disagree with on a personal level, they project their own cultural assumptions onto anime. The “Japanese culture”, as they choose to portray it, becomes a shield to deflect criticism of their favoured works. And sometimes, it works very well as a rhetorical strategy, because how can you argue that the “Japanese culture” has it backwards without sounding like a racist?

Anime fans are of course far from the first ones to use this sort of argument, a rightwing appropriation of leftist language twisted into an apologia; several of the more authoritarian regimes in Asia are found of using anti-colonialist language to dismiss human rights complaints. Closer to home, here in the Netherlands any foreign criticism of Zwarte Piet as being suspiciously similar to blackface is dismissed as not understanding the Dutch cultural context. It’s slightly less common to see people use this argument to defend a foreign culture to their own, but it’s not unknown either. A tempting trick to use, because if done right, it also means you yourself don’t have to defend your questionable tastes anymore and your opponent now has to defend themselves.

To counter this argument, what should be remembered is that it depends on two big lies, in this case 1) that whatever anime is being criticised can be thought of as a standin for “Japanese culture” as a whole and 2) that whatever is being criticised in anime as a whole is actually an accurate and trustworthy representation of Japanese cultural values, with “Japanese culture” as a monolithic bloc.

But what if some of the cultural assumptions and values seen in anime are not the natural outcome of deeply held cultural beliefs, but rather deliberately constructed in the same way that everything else in anime has been created by smart, intelligent, culturally savy people? Here I’m reminded of a post about Noragami published at Therefore it is last month, which talked about Noragami as “an updated, contemporary, “hipper” anime attempt for the youth that will inherit the country to preserve their cultural heritage”.

That is then, there are a lot of shared assumptions about what Japan is like as a country, what Japanese culture is and what normal, everyday Japanese life looks like (well, at least normal, everyday teenage Japanese life, but I digress) in anime. But that doesn’t mean that these shared assumptions are true or the whole truth. It might just as well be a constructed reality of an imagined, idealised Japan, something rooted in reality but with all the conflicting ideas and ideologies airbrushed out of it. Could it not be that anime creates the image of a Japan that’s more conservative than reality, as its creators’ desires and market forces collude to do so, or is holding hands really that lewd? In other words, the idea that anime is this passive receptacle of “Japanese culture” that could have foreign values imposed on it is far more offensive than actually judging it by your own (western) standards, as long as you realise that anime != Japanese culture and are careful in explaining where your own ignorance starts.