Another Autoflorilegium

The foregoing is a collection of my further thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, and mostly from recent months. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.

On the Relationship between Religion and Politics

In grad school I watched the Scorsese adaptation of Silence. It was in a seminar on East Asian Christianity so we got some very good discussion out of it. My parents watched the movie on their own as well. Between the three of us, my parents and I came up with what my professor thought were two very good, very important observations: First, the persecutors seem just as strangely obsessed, from a modern liberal standpoint, with the martyrs’ religion as do the martyrs themselves; secondly, why does this sort of killing and dying for religious beliefs come across as more irrational than killing or dying for political or philosophical beliefs? It is not immediately obvious why it should, yet it does.

            It is, in fact, possible, I think, that the order here has been entirely reversed. The habit now is of viewing a political worldview—leftism, rightism, the “MAGA movement,” “common-good constitutionalism,” Posado-Catholicism, neo-Ikkō-ikki Pure Land communism—as a static mass, a single object. A set of beliefs is bundled together and given over as handsel to an adherent. Religion and morals, now downstream from politics, become individuated epiphenomena, to be filled and animated, or deadened, by the waters of the person’s oceanic political conviction. Yet from the beginning it was not so.

On Identifying the Least Unbearable Social Media Platform

Tumblr is the only usable one, mostly because the bulk of its unbelievably toxic early-to-mid-2010s user base bolted for Twitter about five years ago, but also because its algorithm doesn’t work and all its updates are done by frivolous twits; yes, these are selling points, or at least they ought to be. More generally, though, social media is bad for society and everyone should be able to acknowledge this in the same way that, for example, the Victorians knew that constant exposure to lead and arsenic was unhealthy, only they didn’t know exactly why or have viable alternatives yet. Don’t be fooled by the idea that banning TikTok will fix it, either, although it won’t hurt; teenagers getting zonked out on Osama bin Laden apologia and slickly repackaged Holocaust revisionism is socially and politically and culturally disastrous, and boomers getting their personalities so thoroughly replaced with hateful parafascist conspiracy slop that they believe it over their own loved ones is socially and politically and culturally disastrous as well. God have mercy upon us. Butlerian Jihad now!

On Soda, Tonic, or What You Will

I was very surprised by how ingrained the culture of free refills of non-water beverages is when I visited a friend in Indiana last year. I was especially confused that one wouldn’t just order the smallest size of something if the actual amount of it one gets is arbitrary no matter what. It’s indeed very stereotypically Middle American, despite certain affluent coastal liberals’ characteristically nasty and bigoted way of saying so.

On the Incumbent Governor of the Great State of New York

Kathy Hochul doesn’t really make sense if you're looking at her through the usual ideological-spectrum and blue-tribe-red-tribe lenses, but she makes perfect sense through the lens of being a creature of the New York Democratic machine, where it’s still the Clinton-Gingrich era and everybody with real ideological or moral commitments, of any kind, is a dumb Columbia sophomore who doesn’t know what’s good for them. In the House in the early 2010s this expressed itself as a mostly productive, collaborative, “bipartisan”-for-the-time voting record; in Albany in the mid-2020s it expresses itself as out-of-touch heavy-handedness and open alignment with property developers and people who think rural Upstate school districts somehow have too much money.

            I think a successful 2026 primary challenge is a possibility. James has about the same approvals as Hochul but much lower disapprovals, and could probably raise a lot of money through various #Resistance channels, especially if it’s another Trump midterm…

On LED Headlights

Let’s discuss. I’m sure we can all come up with a naïve argument that these things shouldn’t be street-legal; I know multiple people who no longer feel safe driving at night because of how blinding they are if you’re not in the car or truck or whatever that has them. So what gives? Is there some specific legal or regulatory reason why they have to be allowed, or is it just that nobody’s bothered to put through a rule against them because they tend to be popular with car buyers in our antisocial and fuck-you-I’ve-got-mine-oriented age?

On Evangelicalism in Latin America

Latin American Evangelicalism has very much been ratfucked into existence there by various Republican-led State Departments but, also, I have heard that it appeals because of its dissimilarity to Catholicism. I have heard, that is, that it’s able to present itself as less corrupt and hypocritical and less politically overconcerned. All of which is demonstrably untrue, but Evangelicalism has a certain Teflon quality to it when it comes to those particular charges, because it’s so decentralized—nowhere for the buck to stop—and because we as a civilization cannot have nice things. It should go without saying that I see the growth of this kind of Christianity as a serious, direct, and quite personal cultural and sectional threat as well, which affects my ability to think about it with any sympathy.

On the Collapse of the So-Called Liberal World Order

I do not like the way the current state of the world has caused me to think and feel. I will not say “made me” or “forced me,” but “caused me to” I think is true. I unironically say things like “heiwaboke,” I treat it as a red flag rather than a green one when someone says that they are into “peace activism,” and when I rewatched “The City on the Edge of Forever” recently I was not initially sure I would be able to see Edith Keeler with any charity. I hate all of these things about my current self, and I hate feeling like this. We live in a cruel and coarse time.

            I do need to wonder if people who were perhaps similar to me in the 1930s and 1940s felt the same—the bulk of the Catholic Worker movement, for example, who temporarily broke from it, or at least from its leadership, over Dorothy Day’s no-nuance opposition to getting involved in World War II even after Pearl Harbor. There are circumstantial reasons to look at her later writing and conclude that she perhaps realized afterwards that this had been a serious mistake, but it is a serious blot on her copybook. I wonder how disillusioned people like me felt.

            I do not like to feel disillusioned. One’s illusions are a precious thing, but one only realizes that after one realizes that they are illusions, and one only realizes that they are illusions after one no longer has them. There needs to be some route to gratitude for what one still has; I know that for some people there is one, but I suppose I spend so much time dreaming the kinds of dreams that I wish to dream.

On Gender

If you, like me and like Courtney Love, want to be the girl with the most cake, what is stopping you? Where is the rub? What is your trouble? What part of that target are you unable to hit? We often hear of girls who do not have the most case, or of people who acquire the most cake without being or becoming girls.

On Wedding Culture

My mother has long felt, and raised me to feel as well, that weddings as commonly done in this country are monuments to the couple's excessive self-regard and impositions on everyone else involved—but other Americans tend not to agree with us on this.

On Various Fictional Women

Nobody knows Cordelia Flyte’s story like I do (in the sense that it’s important to understanding her and Brideshead Revisited as a whole that she is 1. a wonderful, wise, compassionate person but also 2. a fascist).

            There should be more Tar-Míriel fanwork out there that’s emotionally and morally complex without using the Z draft or going we-all-know-what-early-2010s-fandom-figure-I’m-vaguing-about-here full King’s Men apologia.

            There’s a pervasive mischaracterization of Lottie Matthews as an outgoing popular party girl that seems to be based exclusively on the fact that Courtney Eaton is really, really, really hot. The hints of pre-crash Lottie that we have in the actual show suggest that she was a weird, introverted, studious girl who disliked popularity drama and probably listened to Hole.

            You know that headline that’s like “he’s gay, she’s a lesbian, and their thirty-three-year marriage will redefine how you think of love”? I never actually read the article that that was the headline for, and I suspect I would not necessarily like everything it had to say if I were to read it, but that is Makioka Yukiko, she of the Telephone Incident and the dancing-sushi bloodlust, and her eventual husband.

            Lila dissolving-margins-brains herself into realizing, or assuming, that sending the dolls did not have the intended psychological effect, so she escalates to sending blunter and blunter Mysterious Parcels until finally for an eightieth birthday present Lenù just gets a flash drive with an MP3 of “Good Luck, Babe!” on it. It still doesn’t work.

            As for Galadriel—it’s hard to know what’s left to say about Galadriel. What is there? She’s a great character. She’s a creep. Lothlórien is one of the most terrifying places in Middle-earth. Much of what I say about Tar-Míriel also applies to her, less because there’s any deficit of thinking and writing and art about Galadriel and more because she’s oddly inexhaustible for a character so well-understood (well-understood, that is, except by people who like the pig disgusting Amazon show).

On the Locked Tomb Books and the Carole Lombard Movie Nothing Sacred

Hazel Flagg walked so Cytherea the First could run.

On Anomie

On a day, I went to pick up an online order at Walmart. Simple, right? One would assume that it was simple because online orders and the picking-up thereof are how we’re supposed to do everything now, how we’re supposed to prefer it at any rate—it’s more “convenient,” a term, or rather a way of using a term, to which I will get back later.

Anyway, I had thought so, but there is A Process now, and it starts on An App and involves another person putting things into your car.

            I did not know that, so what I did was I went to the store, I walked in, I got directed further and further away from my car by multiple greeters who could tell that I was in the store and on foot and thus should, perhaps, have explained the Process to me and explained that one is meant not to do it outside of a fucking internal combustion engine, then, when I finally got out to the loading bays, I saw signage indicating that I’d done the whole Process wrong.

            So I shlepped back to my car—through, I should add, an unpleasantly warm, humid, drippy day—and, since I had budgeted “walk into a store and go to a customer service desk” time into my errands, not “wrestle with a fucking app and then wait for some sort of confirmation” time, I realized I had to go back again tonight and do the entire process over again on a separate trip. It really made me appreciate the previous week’s civilized, human-scaled, reasonable-expectations process of “run around to two libraries asking if either of them had kept a bookmark that I accidentally returned with my copy of an Elena Ferrante book, because I got the bookmark at a church in Italy that does not have an online presence and would not have been able to get another one until some time in 2025 or 2026.”

            If I had known about this in advance, I would have just walked in and bought the speaker the old-fashioned way. But the speaker was bought and paid for and, presumably, would be brought out to the loading zone when I finally figured out The Process, so oh well.

            In any case, I went  to the library to do something else and then, while there, realized that I had a badly frayed section in my pants, in an area where with that kind of thing it matters whether or not you are wearing underwear—which I wasn’t. Fortunately I did not have to do anything after that before I could go home and change. If I had had to I think I would have committed vehicular manslaughter.

            Attempt #2 to pick up the speaker worked, but was also aggravating as all hell. This is the world of everyone being confined to their cars all of the time because relentless anomie has been plugged to us all as “convenience”—and perhaps it is “convenient,” in a way, since people will simply believe anything that advertises itself as “convenient.” If something claims to be cheap and it isn’t, you can tell; if it claims to be fast and it isn’t, you can tell; if it claims, however, to be convenient and it isn’t, there is a temptation to assume that, since “convenience” is so vague, maybe it is more “convenient” on some difficult-to-measure level that you’re just too much of a luddite to see. More often than not this level is the level on which anomie sets in and people become obsessively unhappy with and afraid of one another. At the store, one shops. One goes out to the shops and meets people in the shops. Growing up I did in fact dislike that process very much, but that was just one case among many of people who were unhappy kids in the 1990s and 2000s not realizing how good we, in fact, had it.

On the Egotism of the Summer People

Warm-weather people are the morning people of weather.

Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: The unconscionable treatment and constant betrayal of people who live in the Gaza Strip; New Caledonia; Great Britain; the apparently extraordinarily bad movie Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage; the very good movie Marathon Man and the virtues and vices of the schools of acting that it features; my health; other people’s health; Pope Francis’s use of the quasi-reclaimed offensive Italian slang term frociaggine; what makes a good and a bad socialist realist propaganda poster.

The Princess with a Thousand Enemies

(This is (not) a music review.)

A new Taylor Swift album came out last month. This happens a lot, and people don’t shut up about it when it does. I am not going to shut up about it either.

The question isn’t whether the new album is good, exactly; that is never the point with these things, not when Swift is involved. She is a generational songwriting talent, and her musicianship is serviceable, but she is also prolific, with all that being prolific tends to imply for consistency. The Tortured Poets Department has a lot of pretty good songs on it (although they tend towards the “over-written”), a few standout ones, and one or two that are some of the most emotionally immature dreck you’ve ever heard in your life. The same, however, can be said about a lot of albums, by both Taylor Swift and other artists. What makes “TTPD” different? This question is more broadly social, cultural, and even economic and political in its way.

To understand Swift’s current cultural totipresence, we have to understand the tour. The Eras Tour, even in its attenuated movie form, is an almost premodernly ludic experience, a carnival in the original sense that included a sacral quality. I went to a showing of the movie last year in Saratoga Springs, a town I dislike for a lot of reasons, and at points it was like being at one of those Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showings, if Rocky Horror were monocultural rather than countercultural. I qualify it this way, and yet there is something oddly non-monocultural and non-mainstream about the serious Swift fandom. The showing I went to was full of teenaged girls yelling things like “FUCK SCOTT BORCHETTA” and “FUCK SCOTT SWIFT” and “FUCK SCOOTER BRAUN” and “FUCK KIM KARDASHIAN” and “FUCK JAKE GYLLENHAAL”—the Land of Swift has a princess with a thousand enemies—as well as an almost gematria-like occultic treatment of the numbers 5, 13, and, of course, 1,989. Almost everybody in the world has heard at least one or two Taylor Swift songs, and probably most Millennials and in particular most Millennial women have a decent generalized understanding of her career, but it is still distinctly specialized knowledge what the fuck half this stuff means. This sort of thing is why my housemate and I have an inside joke about a semi-near-future eternal recurrence of the rise of Constantine where the “sign” in which “Swiftie Constantine” conquers is a snake emoji, and instead of Arian Germanic tribes there’s a Canticle for Leibowitz-style Great Plains culture that thinks the house from “The Last Great American Dynasty” was in Rapid City.

Now there’s an extended Eras Tour movie on streaming, because Swift likes money, and also there’s the new album. A lot of the album is about Matty Healy, the extremely racist, sexist, and religiously bigoted front man of a shitty boy band whom Swift dated for about a month last year. “But, daddy, I love him!” Swift protests in one of the album’s set-piece songs—indeed, this is the title of said song—which is compelling in The Little Mermaid, where the line originates, but here seems almost intended to be a Trojan horse to make the old-school familialist understanding of marriage look good by comparison. Swift, like most people, has yet to learn the trick of keeping a gun by her brain’s pleasure receptors so that she can shoot them if they look at her funny.

Speaking of Swift’s neurology, the album release has unleashed not only the usual flood of strange sexism that is directed at her as a matter of course but also a dismaying variety of terrible attitudes about psychology, depression, madness. Basic moral and political observations about Swift—she is wealthy; she is hypocritical; her private jet use has caused a truly unconscionable amount of terrible Pollution—mushroom into a dogged insistence that she must not have real problems, that she must just be a whiner who is appropriating the aesthetic of real emotional and spiritual struggle. This is, of course, bullshit. Swift has publicly protested too much about her own sanity for at least a decade. The sorts of things that people have made fun of her for the most consistently over the years—mood swings; embarrassing self-reinventions; almost unbelievably short and intense relationships; an increasingly obvious inability to keep it in her pants—are themselves oftener than not warning signs of serious problems in someone’s inmost depths. Nobody accuses Lord Byron of having been a poser, even though the “lord” in his name does mean what it usually means and even though his behavior was at least as calculated to present a particular aesthetic as Swift’s is. I’m not sure I would call Byron a tortured poet, exactly, but that is because I am still not sure “tortured poet” is a real set phrase; were people saying this six months ago? It’s become difficult to remember.

Even with someone like, say, Charles Bukowski, the torture came at least much from ways in which he had it better than other people as from ways in which he had it worse; it’s impossible to honestly think about Bukowski’s virulent misogyny as something of which he was the real victim, although various dishonest defenders of his have certainly tried to. It’s possible that Taylor Swift’s problems are about as self-inflicted as Charles Bukowski’s were, or at least an argument to that effect can be made that isn’t transparently and cartoonishly sexist. Can an argument be made that her problems are more self-inflicted than his were? No, not really, and this argument cannot really be made about Byron or Dylan Thomas (name-dropped in a strange context in the album’s title track, which sounds like it might be about Phoebe Bridgers rather than Healy) or François Villon (a poet who was almost certainly literally tortured on more than one occasion) either.

Even Ursula K. Le Guin’s Gethen-cold writing on Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, which is so bad that it permanently altered my opinion of her even though I don’t like Hemingway either, does not go as far as some of the anti-Swiftian commentary on the princess’s supposed mental haleness does. In fairness, it cannot. “I’m not saying that Hemingway wasn’t really suicidally depressed; that he was is beyond denial. I’m just saying he was suicidally depressed because he was a bad person.” That at least is connected to the reality of suffering, which Le Guin, to her credit, never denied; denying that reality would have vitiated her artistic, intellectual, and moral project much more thoroughly than did any of the specific topics on which she tended towards hypocrisy or self-righteousness. Le Guin is better and more honest than, for example, “Taylor Swift will succumb to depression if not for her emotional support private jet,” a real remark that someone on the bird app made. (If he by some chance reads this and wants to be credited by name, or wants someone else quoted instead, he can feel free to email me—but if I were him I would, in this context, prefer to go nameless.)

So it’s not even that Taylor Swift is above criticism or necessarily a particularly admirable person. It’s that her releases, for whatever reason, have a way of attracting unhinged attacks and unduly savage criticism from people who have even worse understandings of what the world is really like than she has herself. Swift, like an Athenian philosopher or a “populist” political leader, is remarkably good at exposing holes in her detractors’ worldviews by existing. Sometimes she exposes holes in their moral standards too, as with the Le Guin-Hemingway comparison that I just made. Taylor Swift the gadfly is an important contributor to the public sphere in ways that hold good regardless of the output of Taylor Swift the singer-songwriter.

Public Figures with the Word “Courtney” in Their Names and Why They Are or Were Deep State Plants

• John Courtney Murray, theologian: Allegedly a Cold Warrior, in fact subordinated the Church to DEEP STATE THREE-LETTER-AGENCY WOKE COMMUNISM by doing (((religious liberty))) at Vatican II.

• Courtney Love, musician: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Hole is the Pontifical Gregorian University of kinderwhore grunge bands. Killed the revolutionary leaders Kurt Cobain and Kristen Pfaff and damaged US-Japan relations by creating the artistically questionable 2000s manga Princess Ai. But at least a lot of her actual music is very very good, which brings us to:

• Lou Courtney, musician: I have never really vibed with his particular kind of soul music, and he wrote for Chubby Checker, an obvious soft-power exercise if there ever was one.

• Courtney Eaton, actress: Was in Mad Max: Fury Road, which is feminazi propaganda against real American manhood. Stop the feminization of America!

• Kourtney Kardashian, Kardashian: Why does she spell it with a K? To make it seem like it’s a name in a language where /k/ is always spelled that way, OBVIOUSLY. This is a hyperforeignism to throw off suspicion. She’s a fed.

• Courtney Young, former President of the American Library Association: Was President of the American Library Association.

• Charles Courtney Curran, painter: No Impressionist could ever be a real MAGA patriot.

• Leonard Courtney, 1st Baron Courtney of Penwith: Victorian Liberal who supported Parliamentary reform and opposed the Empire. Need I say more?

An Autoflorilegium

The foregoing is a collection of my thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, over the past five or so years. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.

On Taylor Swift

As a Taylor Swift fan who cordially dislikes gridiron football (I think this combination of tastes is what in right-wing grievance lingo is called “cultural Marxism”), I hope the “synergy” in which she is for some reason to do with the NFL now loses its luster as soon as possible.

I haven’t been to any of the Eras Tour shows (I don't exactly make “Taylor Swift tickets” money as a museum archivist, and even if I did, I overstimulate easily), but I’ve seen a fair number of fan bootleg clips from them and it’s really an astounding spectacle. We’re talking a setlist that rivals your typical Springsteen concert, pyrotechnics that could seriously injure Swift if she gets sloppy with her choreography, lighting effects and stage design that seem precision-engineered to remind one at every moment that she is an overgrown theater kid with an unlimited budget and at least one unmedicated mood disorder—why be to do with football as well?

This is not apropos of the above (except in the ways that it is), but I have, as I’ve said, been spoiling to tell people off about this:

Substantively, strong-to-dispositive arguments can and should be made that Taylor Swift’s actual ouevre is a lot less monomaniacally obsessed with buttressing heteronormativity than her public image tends to suggest. This shows up in her choices of hypotexts, in her aesthetic and intellectual relationships with other artists, and in specific songs like (off the top of my head) “Wonderland,” “Seven,” and “Ivy.” This doesn’t mean that Taylor Swift the human person is gay or bisexual, but it’s at least a little bit likelier to mean that than it is to mean that Taylor Swift the cultural product (an ungainly generation-absorbing chimera better understood by drinking heavily while watching Millennium Actress than by experiencing or researching anything in the mind-independent physical world) is “queer.” She isn’t, and people aren’t really saying that she is. These are three separate Taylor Swifts. No one worth listening to is arguing that the one who’s to do with gridiron football now for some reason is gay.

What’s demoralizing about every time Gaylor (both in the narrow sense of speculation about Taylor Swift not being straight and in the broad sense of the LGBT side of Taylor Swift’s fandom) makes mainstream news is the hostility to which LGBT Swifties, especially lesbian Swifties, are subjected. It can get shockingly overt, to the point of making one wonder how much other homophobia is just barely repressed in our society rather than having actually been overcome, but it also shows up in coded forms. Foremost among these is the idea that Gaylor speculah (to use an old anime fandom word) is somehow more egregious and insulting than other kinds of invasive speculah about Taylor Swift’s affective life, an idea that only makes any sense at all if you do on some level think that saying that someone is gay or bisexual is derogatory. The bemusement with which LGBT people who like more-firmly-queer art and do not like Taylor Swift tend to react is a bit more understandable, but still depressing to see because of the no-true-Scotsman element and the apparent lack of awareness that millions of people like Taylor Swift and also like Jen Cloher and Rina Sawayama and Boygenius and Killing Eve and so on.

In conclusion, Gaylor is a land of contrasts.

On Sports

Speaking of football, but not of Taylor Swift, the legalization of sports gambling has made mainstream sports TV, ESPN and the like, damn near unwatchable for anyone who isn’t a gambler, and I know people with otherwise vigorously libertarian views on gambling and other (of what used to be called) “vice” issues who think it was a mistake from a sheer quality-of-life standpoint.

It seems like such a shame to see sports in terms of bets about outcomes anyway, and this fuels my aesthetic dislike for sabermetrics as well; obviously it “matters” who “wins,” but in other countries, Tunisia for instance, I have seen large celebrations of local soccer teams that did not even win, just because they played a good game—and I myself liked both the Red Sox and the Orioles better when they won less.

On the 2023 Writer’s Guild of America Strike

Not only does a television writers' strike not cause much harm, out-and-out automating cultural production does. Too, if human writers really can't produce anything better than whatever ChatGPT’s great-grandscion program spews out for Avengers Wars 69, then we’re already halfway down the road from Rossetti’s “Amor Mundi.”

The only current scripted American TV show that I’m actively following is Yellowjackets, which genuinely could not be written, at all, without human consideration. If subsequent seasons suck because of this then I’ll be upset, but not nearly as upset as I’ll be if the strike fails and in ten years nobody has anything to watch that’s better-written than a fin de millénaire car commercial.

Moreover there have by definition to be some things that aren’t automated in order for human society to not just be that one wojak comic of someone hooked into a Harry Potter-themed VR headset while on a morphine drip.

On the Remake of the Film Mean Girls and Its Discontents

For Regina George being on TikTok now, she doesn't default to saying “fucking kys” nearly as much as is realistic for a high school bully born in ~2006. I'm not sure I'd say this ruins the tone—Mean Girls isn't exactly Heathers or Jawbreaker to begin with—but the tone is noticeably different, especially given instances of outright bowdlerization when in the original they call people sluts or dykes. There’s also a failure to accurately reflect the huge differences between bullying twenty years ago and bullying today, even though everyone is on social media (i.e., again, Regina should always be telling people to kill themselves, probably from behind seven burner accounts). We're left with unnecessarily softened forms of bullying behaviors that were mostly extirpated from American schools over a decade ago, all being filmed for TikTok for some reason. Some of the songs are really fun, and there are interesting and considered acting choices being made, particularly by the women playing Regina and Janis. The woman playing Cady is a bit more questionable, but that's interesting in itself since it means that she comes off as genuinely offputting and difficult to understand from the perspective of the characters who have been socialized normally.

On Various Movies That I Watched in June 2019, Written at That Time and Largely Unedited

Tolkien (2019)

This is a paint-by-numbers biopic that at more than a few points actively bored me and that felt way longer than it actually was; I would not see it again, at least not in its entirety. It fudges the facts in ways that sometimes make its subject look worse rather than better than he actually was and its treatment of his religious background is perfunctory at best. However, it’s not completely fatuous, not compared to actively audience-insulting biopics like The Babe Ruth Story or that Lifetime movie about J.K. Rowling; it does dramatize some of the key moments of Tolkien’s early life pretty well, its lead actors (Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien and Lily Collins as his eventual wife Edith) more or less know what they’re doing, and the production designs are pretty. A few early scenes with Tolkien’s mother Mabel, who is often overlooked when people discuss his early influences, were especially welcome to me; I particularly liked one where she puts on a magic lantern show for him and his brother.

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

With this Studio Ghibli movie we have a “save the historic building” plotline wedded with surprising grace to what in other hands would probably have been a shockingly melodramatic emotional arc involving the female protagonist’s male love interest finding out his true parentage. It’s set in Japan in the early 1960s and when I watched it with my mother a lot of the material culture and even some of the songs felt familiar from her 1960s American childhood. These moments of recognition and nostalgia are common with Ghibli movies and I felt them too even though I was born in 1993. People say that Japan is a socially conservative country, and they’re right to say it, not because of “hot-button issues” but because much of the country looks basically as it does in this movie even now. The cute, fun-but-contemplative, jazzy soundtrack is a particular standout.

Suspiria (1977)

Midnight-movie stalwart Jessica Harper and her friend Stefania Casini go up against an evil coven at her posh European ballet school in this gore-soaked Italian horror classic directed by Anthony Bourdain’s father-in-law. A female friend of mine says that this movie looks the way a heavy period feels; its chief strength is its lurid cinematography, and Harper’s mega-ingenue balsa-wood acting style would go on to serve her well in the lesser-known Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel Shock Treatment. Harper is in her late twenties in this but looks maybe nineteen after wardrobe and makeup; her character is an interesting missing link between classic Gothic heroines like Mina Harker from Dracula and The Turn of the Screw’s nameless governess and more proactive but also more morally and (sometimes) sexually innocent “final girls” like the girl from Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Field of Dreams (1989)

It surprises me that there’s never been any kind of fad for this movie in Millennial social media circles. In so many ways it’s tailor-made for “Tumblr”-ish aesthetic tastes—it’s pervaded with American Gothic imagery with its unexplained disembodied voices and time-traveling baseball ghosts manifesting out of cornfields, Kevin Costner’s character is defined by proto-Chris Evans nonthreatening flannel-and-dad-jeans masculinity, it has an unsympathetic character being called a Nazi in public, it’s an unintentional eighties period piece in a way that people were all over two or three years ago, and on top of all this it’s a well-written and visually beautiful movie. It’s possible that the sports-driven premise and the fact that the movie is a Father’s Day staple and lots of people have awful relationships with their fathers put the social media scene off of it, but if so, I think that’s a shame.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is both a prequel and a sequel to the original Mamma Mia!, and that fact, which sounds at first like a gimmick, is in fact exactly what makes this otherwise insubstantial movie work and resonate at a surprisingly deep level. It would be ridiculous to say that this is a religious movie in the sense that The Song of Bernadette and Kundun are religious movies. What it is, however, is a movie that is at least occasionally able to look beyond its own boundaries to imagine an eternal world of total significance and utter joy. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a rigidly-enforced no-irony zone in which past, present, and future; sea, sand, sun, and sky; art and nature; “and we ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” are fused into a bright blue eternity whose beginning is in its end, through a riot of unselfconscious musical joy, in saecula saeculorum.

On the Battle of the Sexes

People who get set off by every little thing have always been with us. Thinking of it as a recent phenomenon specially linked to women or to feminism strikes me as confirmation bias.

On Bob Katter, Australian Politician

Every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a moose in Northern New England.

On Jim Jordan, US Congressman

A few ideas for unconventional Speaker candidates, given the GOP's demonstrated preference for abusive sports coaches:

Jerry Sandusky
Joe Paterno’s ghost
That Jim Foster guy from Northwestern’s baseball team
John Kreese from The Karate Kid
Ben Scott from Yellowjackets
Rex from Napoleon Dynamite
Eteri Tutberidze
Tonya Harding’s ex-husband
My high school gym teacher, from what I can remember

On Elena Ferrante

There’s apparently serious controversy among meridionalists about whether Ferrante is sufficiently critical of her namesake protagonist’s attitude at the end of L’amica geniale (the first book in the series that, in Italian, has the same title). As of this writing I have not finished the series and so I am keeping an open mind; I think how angry I am at Lenù right now is intentional on Ferrante’s part, but we’ll see how things evolve from here.

Galling, either way, that someone would make an active choice to ignore a real class conflict happening in real time in the same room as her in favor of listening to some guy bloviate about his trick of writing magazine articles about class conflict by regurgitating other articles and ISTAT papers. Plebs this, plebs that; Lila deserves better, especially since Lenù’s thoughts and feelings about Lila herself—we all have some idea what I mean by this; “dissolving margins”; “I had made a place for her in me”—are also so vague and self-evading, things she just won’t look straight at no matter how much mental drudgery she has to put into looking at other things instead.

Not that that is entirely her fault. Every time I think the teachers in L'amica geniale can’t get more classist, they come out with some horrifying shit like “Lila’s mental beauty all went to her tits and ass,” said directly to another teenage girl. It’s not even classism in the economic sense, since Lila is one of the wealthiest characters at this point, but that makes it all the more pernicious since, especially if you are the Smarted Gifted Kid Who’s Good at School, it’s more difficult to recognize it as classism rather than as a sound appraisal of the value of an education. It is to be mourned that Lenù eventually loses the ability to see through it.

I know that Ferrante is doing this for a reason and I know what that reason is, but every time Lenù’s narration refers derisively to the Neapolitan language as “dialect” my skin crawls. And that starts early on.

Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: the 1990s Children’s Book Series Animorphs; the 2006 Anime Simoun; the Locked Tomb Books; the Band Boygenius and Its Discontents; Most Matters Directly Involving Religion; Preservation; Touch-Aversion; the Egotism of the Summer People

Some Aphorisms

Massachusetts politics from the beginning has drunk deep of the belief that an objective moral law exists and that Massachusetts voters, perhaps only Massachusetts voters, can be trusted consistently to know what it is. It is only the contents of that moral law that, to the minds of the state’s body politic, have changed.

The problem with the open society is that you can’t get dirt on anybody.

If there’s one thing that I know boomers love, it’s free ziti.

Traditionalism is to tradition what a decapitated body is to a star athlete.

One should love God’s moral law in the way that one loves one’s most boring relative.

Just as the sun sets in the west, so the moral sets into the political.

In languages that have no gnomic aspect one cannot understand religion.

While I’m not sure whether or not I’m willing to fully subscribe to it, there is a robust public health and consumer safety argument for suplexing TikTok and similar algorithmed-to-hell-and-back short-form-video-oriented platforms into the fires of Orodruin whence they came, an argument that has nothing to do with what foreign dictatorships they do or don’t have servers in.

The Victorians were the last civilization to understand that human life is not actually very secure as a matter of course, which covers a multitude of their many other sins.

The modern tendency is to stress marriage’s exclusivity more than, and sometimes over against, its permanence. It is socially destabilizing and still morally imperfect, but not necessarily morally worse. What were once abuse victims’ (mostly women’s) problems become the community’s problems. Strong arguments can be made for that.

Moreover any situation that one is “allowed” to leave is going to look similar to this.

At least on the level of cultivating personal virtue, casual sex might actually be less immoral than plenty of what passes for normal heterosexual relationship behavior in the secular world. Casual sex is, whatever else can be said about it, at least a straightforward way of addressing a very common type of physical desire and frustration to which most (not all, but most) people can relate. With practices like hanging on in vague situationships with people one neither likes nor respects because of the perceived social censure that comes with singleness, or rebuilding one’s entire social circle from scratch every time one starts or ends a romantic relationship, other areas of life are implicated and it becomes very difficult to avoid the conclusion that an idol is being made of sexual practice itself, as long as that practice is dully heterosexual in character—and yet irreligious heterosexual people are at least as likely to behave this way as religious ones, to the point that I have known people who have left their childhood religions for the sectors of secular society that behave in this way! Received-wisdom heterosexual relationship behavior takes an axe to almost all the virtues, not despite but because of how socially normative it is.

The thing about Jesus the “moral philosopher” (Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?) is that he’s really not unique and he’s certainly not uniquely admirable. The “historical Jesus” is a self-aggrandizing and occasionally even violent apocalypticist who swings back and forth between preaching what was actually within the mainstream of Pharisee moral theology at the time and demanding that people abandon their families and economic obligations to follow him around listening to more of this. The “Christ of faith” is the only Jesus Who’s still a convincing moral exemplar once you dispense with the presupposition that you have to like the guy.

Even the southwestern tip of Connecticut really is New England at heart—its deep history, landscape, and lieux de memoire are all pure New England. It has not so much sold its birthright as had that birthright bought out by rich people who have thrown up tacky mansions all along the shoreline and raise their children to root for New York sports teams. One need only visit an old burying ground in Greenwich or Darien to understand this.

The American right from Reagan onwards, arguably from Goldwater onwards, has had one important point of similarity with fascism wisely expounded: it is not so much any form of “conservatism” as a Revolutionary Right ideology, which seeks not to preserve an existing or even restore a former social structure but to create a new type of society entirely. This society keeps nothing of substance from the past and owes nothing to the past other than as a wellspring and storehouse for its aesthetic imaginary. In the recent vicissitudes of the American right under its Tea Party, alt-right, and MAGA guises, we see this in the promiscuous cribbing of aesthetic signposts that in the past pointed to very different and often mutually hostile sectors of American society, not all of them reactionary at the time: Southern Redeemers and Neo-Confederates, “Main Street” small businessmen in the Northeast and Midwest, anti-authoritarian frontiersmen, many-relationed immigrant Catholics and religious Jews, blue-collar tough guys whose fathers or even whose younger selves were the “Resistance libs” of the Reagan years. The resulting historiography, or fantasia on themes from American historiography, is starkly nationalistic, but eclectic enough to have a certain crossover appeal to people disillusioned by or unwelcome in previous American nationalist spasms.

In the end, all non-absolute moral theories are the friend-enemy distinction in drag.

Added November 19, 2023: When one is parched beyond belief in a bone-dry airplane cabin and the drinks cart is ever-so-slowly inching closer, closer, closer—this too is a manifestation of the unsatisfactoriness of things. I have heard that in previous days it was not like this—but, then, almost nobody could afford it back then.

Must Art Be Good?

For much of the Early Modern period the French were, to most tastes, not at good at playwrighting as the English. This was not because France lacked talented people in its theaters and its literary culture; there were Racine, Molière, and Corneille, to name just a few. The problem was, rather, one of standards being set at the cultural level, especially at the level of the elite culture; French playwrights were still expected to adhere to certain “unities” that artificially constrained things like time and setting, whereas in English theater Shakespeare and most playwrights after him, as well as some before him, had exuberantly dispensed with the unities and with the absolutist, prescriptive attitude towards “good” narrative that they represented. Some playwrights, especially Molière, occasionally mocked the unities, but the fact that they had to be responded to in the first place constrained the dramatic tradition in the French language for well over a hundred years, even as the language and the Parisian literary class that spoke it exploded with creativity in other genres.

Today we can look back on the unities, laugh, and mourn what could have been in terms of French theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is easy, however, to get complacent about this. The truth is that current artistic production, too, has rules for good art, especially good narrative art, that seem objective to us most of the time but are in fact just as culture-bound as were the unities. It is not at all obvious across all times and places that The Lord of the Rings having non-naturalistic dialogue and character writing that progressively reveals static personalities to the reader are objective problems with the text. It has these “flaws” insofar as current readers often dislike books that are written this way. Tolkien's audience first and foremost was himself, and the fact that a large audience of other people like his writing as well was, for him, a happy accident. This is without even getting into more expressly political or ideological aspects of artistic taste like the idea that a story should seek to “represent” the experiences of an abstract intended reader. I asked my mother once what she thought of representation as a priority in narrative art and she said that, when she was growing up, she wanted to read about practically anyone other than lower-middle-class white Catholic girls from suburban New England, an experience of the world that she already knew more about than she cared to by virtue of her self-awareness. In that sense my mother was more “represented by” the characters in books by authors like Kipling and Hardy than by those in, for instance, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because her priorities as a reader were being represented and it isn't self-evident that every reader's priorities will include self-recognition. This is without even reaching the cases of those who might learn new things about themselves by encountering the apparent other in fiction, like religious converts, transgender people, and people inspired to learn a new language after reading or watching something in translation.

Some of these newer norms for “good art” are religious or religion-related in character. Yellowjackets, my favorite current television show and one that I think has the potential to be the most interesting mainstream American television show of the 2020s, is a survival horror story that treats the question of supernatural agency within the plot with a light (or, in less well-considered moments, muddied) touch. The effect is somewhat akin to that achieved in classic folk horror movies like The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. Are the characters having the severe psychological problems that they are because of literal, external supernatural agency, or is the darkness entirely located within them? We don’t know for sure, although there are suggestions that something genuinely spiritual or paranormal is occurring, but this does not stop certain viewers of the show from arguing for the sake of “realism” that the supernatural must be absent—as if people who believe in the supernatural never have psychological problems in real life. The effect of this is to imply that what someone who has supernatural or religious beliefs sees in her own experiences of the world is deficient and can never rise to the same significance as what someone with no such beliefs sees in the experiences of her “believer” peer; the idea that Yellowjackets is a show where the supernatural events aren’t actually occurring isn’t itself a prescriptive or exclusionary one, but the idea that it “should” be that type of show for “realism’s” sake certainly is. Never mind that in many other societies in the past it would be seen as unusual for this kind of story not to include supernatural forces. As Doris Bargen points out in A Woman’s Weapon, the well-known episode in Genji monogatari in which Lady Rokujō possesses Lady Aoi and causes her to die in childbirth reflects Genji’s origin in a society where attempting to possess people one disliked was simply what one did as a woman in certain types of social situations.

Sometimes the implied preference for secularity as a precondition for artistic merit affects entire genres. Most of us take it for granted that, put frankly, Christian contemporary music, especially of the sort that burgeoned in Evangelical and some Catholic spaces in the 1990s, sucks. Why? Is it because it is religiously motivated? So is half of Bach. Is it because the artists are mostly right-wing? So was Ian Curtis. Is it because they tend to have bad taste in other media? So do tons of secular pop stars. Is it because it prioritizes achieving effects other than maximum artistic and technical ambitiousness? In the age of poptimism, that usually does not matter. I think the issue is less any of this and more that this music has the “vibes” of being for a narrow religious interest—which, to be fair, it is; the genre, especially today, pillarizes itself from outside culture in a way that gives the impression that most Christian contemporary artists would rather not be considered “good” by secular critics. If there were a Natalie Merchant song from the same time period as Rebecca St. James’s rendition of “Be Thou My Vision,” even if it was a cover of a hymn (and there are Natalie Merchant songs that are!), where halfway through the track the lyrics cut out and a combination of reverb effects and hi-hat cymbals and helicopter sound effects from a bad Vietnam War movie started eating the melody alive, the secular music press would take that song dead seriously. St. James, however, probably does not want the secular music press to take her “Be Thou My Vision” dead seriously, because the foolishness of God is wiser than Pitchfork.

Readers will have noted a generally author-focused approach in this essay so far; this is because I think that the pop reception of Roland Barthes and the “death of the author” harms attempts to assess art as a process of communication between a creator, or creative community, and an audience. The pop-Barthesian reader is solipsistic and is unable to assess what she thinks makes art good or bad because she is unable to assess the social and cultural pressures on the creator or creative community. This is once again relevant to Yellowjackets, a show whose fandom tends to misattribute its flaws to the screenwriters even though most of them are demonstrably the fault of other people, such as network and production executives. It is also relevant to essentially anything that is read or watched in translation, because pop-Barthesianism puts forward John Dryden’s attempt in his translation of the Georgics “to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age” as the only kind of good or even conceptually apprehensible translation, for what amount to ideological reasons.[1] A translator cannot, instead, with Friedrich Schleiermacher, seek to build a conversation between two people, the (abstract structure of the) author and the (abstract structure of the) reader, unless she is willing to try to make the reader have a conversation with a corpse. Certainly it looks a bit morbid for a translator who takes the death of the author seriously to attempt to lead the reader towards the original author rather than vice versa, as was Schleiermacher’s own preference. Pop-Barthesianism’s extremely low understanding of “authorship” overthrows the tyranny of the author at the expense of imposing a tyranny of the reader that takes on overtones of cultural supremacism whenever the reader’s values are closer than the author’s to those values that are culturally dominant. (Barthes as a critic of the “dead white men” canon may or may not have believed that this was possible, but it obviously is.) Combine this with straightforward misunderstanding of what the artistic production process actually involves, as in the Yellowjackets example, and one gets the basic conditions for the infamously entitled reading style of modern media fandoms.

I do not mean to suggest that criticizing the quality of a piece of art or writing is always ungenerous or entitled on the part of an audience, only that it should be undertaken with some humility about what “quality” means, and what aspects of a work might come across as quasi-objectively good or bad to some generations of readers, or fans, but not others. I often see younger people recommending older anime series like Haibane-Renmei and the original Trigun with caveats about the sketchy art styles and choppy animation; I, conversely, can’t watch many newer anime series because they are so smooth and high-definition that they make me feel like I am swimming in a vat of motor oil. I can practically hear the rank-and-file animators breaking out into “The Red Flag” in my head. Arguing that a piece of art or writing or music “just isn’t good,” or for that matter that it “just is good,” is never as simple as one thinks it will be when the argument begins.

❦

[1] Dryden had, as we say nowadays, bad takes on the unities as well. In An Essay on Dramatick Poesie he accuses Shakespeare’s history plays of seeking “not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and receive her Images not onely much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life.” It’s not impossible to imagine him having the same problem with the supernatural elements of Yellowjackets, the dialogue in The Lord of the Rings, or the didacticism of Christian rock “if he had been born in America, and in this present Age.”

One Only Has to Use One’s Head

「少し頭を働かしなさいや」

―谷崎潤一郎　『細雪』

A few years ago I remember hearing about a movement in the publishing industry, particularly concerning books for younger readers, called “Own Voices.” Own Voices was based on the idea that writing that involves representational concerns—a term that here means concerns about how historically disadvantaged types of people are represented in the text—should, either generally exclusively, be by people who belong to the groups in question. Thus an LGBT author should be writing about LGBT characters, a black author about black characters, and so forth. Own Voices was roundly criticized, partly for forcing closeted authors of LGBT literature to come out or incur serious reputational harms, and is no longer in vogue. (Personally my criticism of Own Voices was somewhat different: it makes internally diverse ensemble casts of characters impossible. A thoroughly Own Voices literary scene would be one in which most books published in the West are still about straight white people and most that are not are set in homogeneous, pillarized communities. Even among socially aware stories of yore, you can’t have a Deep River that’s Own Voices for Indian people as well as for a religious minority in a country other than India, or an Across the Barricades that’s Own Voices for both Protestants and Catholics. I don’t read a lot of “issues novels,” and someone who does could probably come up with better examples.)

            But what about the actual literary and artistic merit of the kinds of books Own Voices was supposed to produce, and those against which it was supposed to be a reaction? That might be a different question than its effects on the industry or the culture. Indeed, I think it almost indisputably is; there is an awful lot of bad art and fiction out there written about disadvantaged or marginal populations by writers from privileged and mainstream ones. We could name minstrelsy, Old Mother Riley, and most depictions of women in pornographic literature written by and for straight men, just to name a few of the most infamous examples. I do not think, however, that this needs to be the case; rather it represents an abdication of imaginative faculties by writers writing characters about whom they have prejudiced or stereotyped ideas. The fact that this is not necessarily intentional—Moby-Dick is genuinely not supposed to seem as hostile to Polynesian people as it does, nor Heart of Darkness to Congolese people—goes some way towards explaining the appeal that a blunt-force solution like Own Voices had.

            Lately I’ve been getting deeply into a book series called Otherside Picnic, by a male Japanese author called Miyazawa Iori. (Miyazawa has alluded to some degree of gender dysphoria in at least one interview, but I am just about the last person to look too closely at something like this if the person in question does not want to emphasize it.) Otherside Picnic, a series in the “yuri” tradition of Japanese writing about women, begins as a loose adaptation of the 1970s Soviet science fiction novel Roadside Picnic before developing its own identity. This identity consists, in large part, in an intricate portrayal of the lives of two college-aged women, Sorawo and Toriko, as they explore a dangerous parallel universe and gradually fall in love. The series is good to the point that I almost hesitate to gush about it for fear of implausibility. Sorawo and Toriko are astonishing creations, both as individual characters and as a budding relationship. They have traumatic backgrounds that do not feel prurient and flaws that do not feel calculated for maximum relatability; Sorawo in particular is such an accomplished binge drinker that she is developing cirrhosis in her early twenties. The Otherside—dangerous, terrifying, and inhabited by folkloric monsters that it generates by actively reading Sorawo’s mind—nevertheless exerts a bizarre pull on the characters, a pull that the reader comes to feel as well and that works as a semi-allegorical commentary on several different aspects of LGBT life.

            Miyazawa has spoken several times at events in Japan about the writing process for Otherside Picnic. His comments on this are in some cases deeply bizarre, even when the subject matter is not. An extended and fairly conventional Eliotic point about objective correlatives, for example, might include phrases like “yuri of absence” and end with Miyazawa expressing an “Ash Wednesday”-esque desire to become a pile of bleached bones scattered in the desert. He has attained notoriety for this in some online spaces that are only peripherally aware of the series itself. If one reads the interviews in full, however, what emerges is someone very concerned with representational issues and committed to doing right by the types of people (i.e. gay people and in particular gay women) about whom he is writing. He lists off common pitfalls and outdated presentations, muses on the differences between Japanese and American gay fiction, and cites the 2010s NBC Hannibal series as an inspiration for deciding to write gay fiction himself. The quality of the series is clearly due to consideration, not happenstance.

            One point of frustration that I have with Otherside Picnic is that, as the title of this essay implies, much of what makes it such an astonishing achievement on the representational level consists in employing writing techniques that should be obvious but are not. Miyazawa’s stated principles for male writers approaching lesbian subjects, such as accounting for the fact that the characters have sexual desires and avoiding the temptation to insert oneself as a voyeuristic third party, should be defaults when it comes to romance writing, not accomplishments. Otherside Picnic would still be an extraordinarily good series for many other reasons in a world in which all the usual pitfalls were widely acknowledged. It would still work with genre in interesting and considered ways—the series is a romance, a science fiction story, a horror story, a comedy, and at points a campus novel or a technological thriller. The Otherside as a setting would still be a better extended metaphor for LGBT realization and LGBT community than any other I have seen in years (one is reminded at points of Fingersmith’s Briar Court). Sorawo and Toriko’s relationship would still be a touching exploration of how to build bonds with others after early experiences seeing people mostly as potential threats. Yet there is no good reason why the state of literature should be such that it impresses us when the leads in a love story openly want to have sex with each other, when a piece of fiction lacks an obvious preoccupation with the author’s own erotic tastes, or when these types of protagonists are old enough to drink. Otherside Picnic doing these things so well says wonderful things about Miyazawa Iori, but a fortiori says very bad things about many other writers.

            I think this can be extended to other representational questions too, not just ones relating to sexuality. Miss Saigon is not as jarringly racist a musical as it is because there’s some secret knowledge about Southeast Asian people that is missing; it is jarringly racist because basic principles of human psychology and social relationships aren’t being applied to the Southeast Asian characters. The 1950s Disney Peter Pan is not racist against Native Americans insofar as it does not provide an intimate portrait of real Blackfoot life; it is racist insofar as it presents the Blackfoot characters as grotesques whose skin color is the result of constant blushing and who only learn things by asking the white man “how?” To be sure, little is being done in lesbian fiction (or even in the yuri genre, which isn’t necessarily the same thing, although Otherside Picnic is both) that is anywhere near as offensive as these two examples. Even works of the past that were aggressively bad representationally, like 1950s pulp in the US or certain early-2000s anime and manga series in Japan, have their semi-ironic defenders. But that should not exculpate the other examples; indeed, the fact that more people take genuine offense to Miss Saigon and Peter Pan makes those cases even more galling.

Divine Right of the Girlboss Downline

When I was growing up in the late 2000s as what people call a “transfeminine” person, an identity that I would later start, and then stop, publicly claiming for reasons that I do not care to discuss, I watched an awful lot of bad anime. I watched plenty of good anime too, and as I wrote in my essay “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” I think a strong argument can be made that the medium, and especially its fandom, were better and healthier fifteen years ago than they are now. Even so, plenty of crap was being put out in the 2000s, some of which was uninteresting, stagey, quasipornographic schlock. There was plenty of stagey, quasipornographic schlock that was interesting, too—I still wholeheartedly enjoy Black Lagoon, and I’m told even Elfen Lied holds up if you watch it in the right frame of mind—but that is not what I want to discuss right now. What I want to discuss is a deliberately sedate, very conservative series, one that is shockingly long for how little happens in it and was shockingly popular for how niche one would expect its appeal to be. I speak of Maria-sama ga miteru, usually translated Maria Watches over Us, a hypnotically slow-paced and minute series about not-quite-lesbian not-quite-Catholic students at a posh girls’ high school. It aired in four seasons between 2004 and 2009, it adapted the first two-thirds or so of a serialized novel series with the same title that came out between 1998 and 2012, and I find little to say in its favor except that it commits to its offputting premise wholeheartedly and understands the characters and relationships that result exceptionally well.

            Maria-sama tells the story of Fukuzawa Yumi, a scholarship student at Lillian Girls’ Academy, a Catholic high school in a leafy suburb of Tokyo. Lillian has what is called the “sœur system,” an institutionalized mentorship organized into linear chains that take on romantic overtones sort of like the chain marriages in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. An older girl will offer a rosary necklace to an underclasswoman, and if the underclasswoman accepts she will become the older girl’s petite sœur (French for little sister). The maximum number of active members in a sœur lineage at any time is three, the number of years in the Japanese high school curriculum, but many alumnae maintain close friendships, and in a few cases more, with their former sœurs for their entire lives. The system has been going on for about a century—the school was founded in 1905 and the series appears to take place around or a hair before Y2K—and has implications for how Lillian is run since three sœur lines monopolize the Yamayurikai, a student government that appears to regulate most aspects of extracurricular life. In the first season of the show—the first few novels in the series—Yumi becomes the petite sœur of the beautiful, aloof, aristocratic, short-tempered Ogasawara Sachiko, who inducts her into the Yamayurikai. The series then develops Sachiko’s grande sœur (the phlegmatic Mizuno Yōko) and the members and associates of the other two Yamayurikai lineages. The overall structure is a bildungsroman in which Yumi learns to confidently wield social power within this system despite her relative humble class status and initially poor self-image.

            I generally take it on faith that other people find some or most elements of this premise offputting. I don’t, because it is a pitch-perfect throwback to a body of pop literature and ephemera that I have studied extensively and about which I am enthusiastic academically and professionally. This is the Japanese women’s and teen girls’ magazine and serialized novel literature of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, from roughly 1900 to 1960. Key figures in this milieu would include the artists Takehisa Yumeji and Nakahara Jun’ichi, the translator Muraoka Hanako (famous for her efforts to translate Anne of Green Gables into Japanese despite the wartime government’s denomination of it as “enemy literature”), and above all the writer Yoshiya Nobuko. Yoshiya, a more-or-less-out lesbian herself but one who attained wealth and fame by not shocking the establishment overmuch, specialized in writing about what in the West was called romantic friendship; much of her fiction about the subject is almost identical to Maria-sama in narrative focus, theme, and tone. (Stylistically Yoshiya was a bit bolder; she wrote in an excited way full of exclamation marks, Western loanwords, and nonstandard use of onomatopoeia and phonetic glossing, a style that most literary critics in Japan despised then and despise now. I have translated Yoshiya’s prose and she does not make it easy.)

            Anyone who has read George Orwell’s excellent essay “Boys’ Weeklies” should be able to imagine what this body of literature was like in a roughly accurate way. It had memorable but not particularly complex characters, an aesthetic and semiotic repertoire stressing stability and comfort, a preference for very sedate and low-stakes storytelling, and a tendency to provoke moral panic among the parents and grandparents of its readership whenever its messages seemed insufficiently oriented to social control. Part of what the Maria-sama series is interested in paying homage to is, thus, a defunct understanding of the world in which, as the Orwell essay puts it, “Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.” A quick overview of the main characters, and what their storylines seem to be intended to tell the audience, makes this clear.

            Each of the three Yamayurikai families gets a somewhat different set of plot emphases, although all of them ultimately support and comment on Yumi’s journey to maturity in one way or another. Yumi and Sachiko’s lineage, the Rosa chinensis lineage, gets plotlines dealing mostly with emotional self-regulation and, to an extent, class distinctions. The Rosa gigantea lineage, consisting of Satō Sei, Tōdō Shimako, and later in the series Nijō Noriko, is generally angstier and gets most of the storylines that deal with religion per se; the only point in the series at which Lillian’s Catholic identity is stressed over against other religions present in Japan is an episode that has Shimako and Noriko get outed as sharing an interest in Buddhism. (Shimako is from a Buddhist priestly family; Noriko has an autistic-seeming special interest in Buddhist statuary, an art form with which suburban and small-town Japan is positively teeming.) The Rosa foetida lineage, consisting of Torii Eriko, Hasekura Rei, and Shimazu Yoshino, live in a psychic universe somewhat closer to what most people probably think of as normal high school experience; they are concerned with sports, health problems, and learning how to delineate their sœur system commitments from other types of relationships. That the series treats all this as ultimately secondary compared to Yumi and Sachiko’s generally more refined and genteel worries is traditional for the genre and part of its generally conservative worldview.

            This brings us to one facet of Maria-sama ga miteru of which I took special note when I rewatched it with my roommate over the past year, which is the show’s peculiar political stance. It is—I am not going to mince words here—thoroughly extreme-right, but it represents the extreme right in a hypothetical world in which the center is the radical feminist commune from “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” This is reflected in its infamous (in some circles) paucity of actual lesbian relationships, although as I will discuss further on in this essay there are multiple major characters who do actually seem to be lesbians in the normal sense as well as in the sense of partaking in Lillian’s institutionalized situational sexuality. The fact that the situational sexuality is institutionalized is the main way in which the series touches on politics. It is not interested in usual Japanese rightist gripes like World War II apologia and support for the sexual double standard—quite the contrary; the narrative implicitly but quite strongly disfavors men, once they start actually showing up in the Maria-sama universe, which takes some time—but it is intensely interested in questions of political legitimacy. Its stance on those questions is close to unreconstructed divine-right royalism; the linear passage of membership in the Yamayurikai through the sœur system, which in this context operates much like the early Roman Emperors’ practice of adopting their intended successors, is presented as right, stable, morally and culturally appropriate, and more important than the wishes of the individual characters. Two plotlines have characters outside the three ruling sœur lines run for the Yamayurikai and get crushed; both characters are sympathetic but they are presented as having personal dysfunctions that impel them to run against the Leviathan’s chosen avatars. Shimako, the “insider” candidate in the first of these two plotlines, does not even want the position, but it is not up to her; she heads the body politic whether she likes it or not, and if she does not like it, she should not have accepted Sei’s rosary in the first place. All of which is to say that, in the show’s moral imagination, Lillian Girls’ Academy succeeds where the ancien régime failed, because it is small enough to enforce the succession through interpersonal relationships and because France had the misfortune of being ruled by people with cooties.

II.

One way in which Maria-sama “liberalizes” relative to its early-twentieth-century foremothers is in its diminished degree of interest in shunting its characters into adult heterosexual relationships. This is, to many tastes, damning with faint praise; I have close lesbian friends who find the series infuriating since it is indisputably beyond coy about the relationships between girls that it depicts. Even so, whereas quite a few of the stories in, for instance, the early Yoshiya anthology Hana monogatari end with girls getting up and “graduating” to heterosexuality (Yoshiya did not, of course, do this herself), or even focus to begin with on married adult women reminiscing on their girlhood loves, Maria-sama depicts those loves while they are happening and ends with most of them intact. To a somewhat lesser extent this is true even of the books, which cover more time and thus transition more of the characters into adult life but still show little interest in rushing to pair them up at the end. Yoshiya might have felt the need—or, to be fairer to her, might have been made to feel the need—to have Yumi meet a nice man and settle down at the end of the series, or in some kind of epilogue. Konno Oyuki, the woman who wrote the Maria-sama novels, does not do this.

            In fact, in one episode of the show’s fourth and final season, “The Sigh of the Red Rose,” Yumi has a remarkable conversation with Sachiko’s arranged fiancé Suguru, a gay man who does not love her. (The novels establish that Suguru is bisexual and simply happens not to love Sachiko in particular, but in the show he does seem to be gay.) The conversation is elliptical, and words like “gay” or “lesbian” are never used for Yumi herself, but Suguru makes it clear that he sees a commonality between Yumi and himself, a disposition towards love that they share and that many of the other characters seem on the surface to share but in fact do not. When she asks him what, ultimately, he is to her, he says that he is her dōshi, a word that means “comrade” in senses like brother in arms, kindred spirit, or extended family member. It does not take a quick spin through Psychopathia Sexualis to figure out what is happening here—although, conversely, the fact that the conversation is still allusive and euphemistic raises ultimately unanswered questions about how comfortable the series is with its own subject matter.

            The other example of overt homosexuality in this otherwise classically pseudo-gay series is better-known, comes earlier in the show, and raises that question even more dramatically and in a way that leaves even more unresolved because it is further removed from the core Yumi-Sachiko relationship. Sei, a major character in the first season who spends most of her time preparing for college and aggressively flirting with Yumi before becoming more peripheral once she graduates in the second season, gets called to the principal’s office for allegedly having written a pulpy novel called The Forest of Thorns. The Forest of Thorns is about a doomed lesbian affair at an all-girls’ Catholic high school that is obviously based on Lillian and writes in fervent, sometimes angry terms of the effect that one partner’s over-the-top piety had on the other when the former broke off the relationship. The teachers and principal suspect that Sei wrote this because the plot is very similar to an open-secret relationship that she had with a student named Shiori before meeting her eventual petite sœur Shimako. (Shiori is a common name for this type of character, for some reason; Revolutionary Girl Utena also has someone with that name who is dealing with internalized homophobia in a flaky, selfish, and destructive way.)

            It turns out that the actual author of The Forest of Thorns is someone else—an adult (indeed aging), very successful novelist who went to Lillian forty or fifty years prior and is still working through an experience there that was almost beat-for-the-beat the same as Sei’s experience with Shiori. This, again, raises questions about the sœur system and whether it masks significantly more dysfunctional homophobia-inflected dynamics between the girls at Lillian. The series, again, does not answer these questions. Instead the main effect of this storyline is to establish that Sei isn’t just a comedic slacker or a flippant sex pest but someone with actual reasons for her closeness to the much more sedate and thoughtful Shimako. They share an outsider status, Sei because she is gay in a more substantive sense than her schoolmates and Shimako because her father is a Buddhist priest and she knows little about Catholicism despite being interested in the religion. Sympathetic viewers might note that this is an affirming framing both of homosexuality and of interreligious contact, because Sei and Shimako are framed more approvingly than are the people who are suppressing or hassling them. Unsympathetic viewers, conversely, might note that representing Sei as a tragic eternal outsider is a treatment to which Shimako is not subjected; she is integrated into the Lillian community on mutually agreeable terms after a storyline in the second season dealing with her and Noriko’s shared Buddhist connections.

            What to make, then, of Maria-sama ga miteru’s enthusiastic reception at the time among audiences interested in lesbian anime, both in Japan and in the West? The simplest answer, at least as far as the West is concerned, is that lesbian anime of the 1990s and 2000s did not appeal to the same sorts of audiences as most other lesbian media; the anime fandom writ large already selected for weird, reticent, mildly asocial people who were often unlucky in love (I touch on this in “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” but it is not a primary concern of that essay), and people in that fandom who were interested in series with gay themes were no exception. As far as Japan is concerned, I think the throwback element goes some way towards explaining the appeal. An American TV series that deliberately aped the lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s would probably find a loyal audience pretty quickly as well.

III.

The Rosa foetida line—Eriko, Rei, and Yoshino—have storylines with perhaps a bit more distance from Maria-sama ga miteru’s political or sociosexual motifs. This is not because they are uninteresting characters, and indeed there is one exception to this: Eriko is the show’s only expressly heterosexual main character, who has a crush on an older man that is revealed early in the second season. (He handles it in a commendably age-appropriate way, especially for Japan, a country that has still not had a full-fledged #MeToo moment regarding adult-adolescent relationships.) She sees the sœur system in what is probably a significantly more “normal” way than the other Yamayurikai oligarchs do; to her it is a stylized and spiritualized mentorship system that is a fun part of her school’s culture but probably not one that will have much influence on her decisions as an adult. Other than this, the Rosa foetida mindset mostly revolves around less ideologized and less “sexy” but still very important subjects: Rei and Yoshino, who are cousins as well as sœurs, must learn to navigate and define different types of relationships, and Yoshino has health problems that for much of her life have given her peers an inaccurate understanding of her personality because they limit her physical activity level.

            The episodes early on that establish Yoshino and her issues are some of the funniest in the show. A strong argument can be made that, uniquely for Maria-sama episodes, they would be among the funnier episodes in plenty of higher-energy anime as well. Yoshino, apparently a shrinking violet who relies on the strong and sturdy kendo player Rei to protect her from the mean old world, is actually a violent or violent-adjacent spitfire who loves historical novels and gung-ho motivational proverbs. The only reason she does not publicly behave in ways that comport with this is that she has a heart condition, which turns out to be easily fixed via surgery. (I have a close family member who has been to the hospital in Japan; although it does not have health care that is comprehensively free at the point of use the way Britain does, it still isn’t expensive or difficult to navigate, and even if it were, almost all of these characters except for Yumi are filthy rich.) The other characters find out about this because the school newspaper, the Lillian Ledger, runs a series of personality quizzes and everyone assumes that Rei’s and Yoshino’s answers got flipped by mistake. The Lillian Ledger in Japanese is the Lillian Kawaraban, a name that implies that it is a rag but an old-school rag, since kawaraban is a term normally reserved for the fly-by-night block-printed broadsheets of the Edo period. Comedy gold on all counts. I know people who hate the series in general but still chuckle at these episodes.

            There’s some good intentional humor with Eriko too, in the episode that establishes that she is interested in men and has a crush on an older science teacher (at another school, not Lillian). She is an animal lover who often goes to the zoo to look at charismatic megafauna such as elephants, which is where she meets the man on whom she develops the crush. They fall to talking about the charismatic megafauna par excellence of Earth’s prehistory—dinosaurs, of course—and he compares her to Hypsilophodon, a comparison to which she responds with the immortal line “I have never been compared to a dinosaur before! I am very pleased!” This isn’t for the obvious reasons, such as Hypsilophodon being known for ferociousness or being “badass.” To the contrary, although older interpretations about the taxon have it as armored in much the same way as the Ankyolsaurus, Stegosaurus, or Triceratops, by the time that the Maria-sama books were being written newer studies had shown it to be a small, beaked, grazing, relatively docile biped. Someone like Yoshino would be flattered for the usual reasons by being compared to an Ankylosaur or a Stegosaur. Eriko is simply happy to see her interests shared and validated. It is cute and would be downright adorable were not the line itself, even in context, so silly-sounding.

            The Rosa foetida line, despite having plenty happening that is worth discussing, nevertheless interests me a little bit less than the other two Yamayurikai lineages. In part this is because the abbreviated third season, which consists of five direct-to-video episodes that are themselves longer than the other seasons’ thirteen half-hour television episodes apiece, is the show at its most narratively dynamic (relatively speaking) and has less focus on them than usual. Then again, the third season is itself less distinctive and less characteristic of this particular series, for the same reason. Things like a hectic school sports festival or a class trip to Italy (on which Shimako reconnects with the girl who ran against her in the first of the two political-legitimacy storylines, who is studying to be an opera singer) happen in plenty of other school-life anime. So I am, I will admit, giving the Rosa foetida girls short shrift because they happen to be out of focus when the series is at its most conventional. This is not their fault and I would want to have more to say about them if not for the circumstances in which I am writing this essay—right before Christmas, and with a great deal of other writing to get done.

            This essay is going to end up a good bit shorter than “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” was. This is both for the reasons that I just gave and because that essay attempted a series of personal reflections, and even some amount of materialist historical analysis, of an entire medium and its fan culture, whereas this one is about a particular, very atypical, and now relatively obscure series within that medium. I don’t think I would recommend Maria-sama to most people. I rewatched it with my housemate, someone who is uniquely predisposed towards it demographically (as a Catholic lesbian) and temperamentally (as a civil servant with that profession’s attendant tolerance for “boring” experiences), and even she and I could only take so much of it at a time and took about a year to get through the whole thing. Yet being able to “recommend” it is not, I think, really the point. Orwell would probably not have “recommended” most of the material he discusses in “Boys’ Weeklies” either (he quotes some of it within the essay itself and it is truly terrible, far worse stylistically than anything in Maria-sama or for that matter in the girls’ magazine culture contemporary to Orwell), but he still presents it as worth cultural and genre discussion. Maria-sama isn’t necessarily bad, just written in a deliberately dated-to-hyperconservative way; as Orwell might put it, it is the Magnet to schlockier late-2000s anime’s Wizard. Nothing in Maria-sama suggests sadism, direct appeal to viewers’ prurient tastes, or reactionary political concerns in the nationalistic way that is unfortunately so common in other anime. Lillian Girls’ Academy is the Chalet School of anime, minus the shilling for upper-middle-class heterosexual domesticity, and I for one think that one could do a lot worse than rule by the sœur system downline. Nec pluribus impar!

Repent at Leisure

With neither joy nor penitence

In these lethargic times, the one

And only laugh that still makes sense

Comes from a grinning skeleton.

—Paul Verlaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro

❦

Taylor Swift released an album last month, Midnights, her tenth (not counting the two rerecorded versions of earlier albums that she has made as part of an intellectual property battle). Taylor Swift album releases are major events in popular culture and have become major events in my own life as well, since I’m only liking her work more and more as she, like me, slowly passes out of early adulthood. The 2020 Folklore/Evermore diptych solidified me as a superfan for life—which can’t be said for everyone who loved those albums, because they hadn’t necessarily liked her earlier albums too, whereas I had—and I was excited about Midnights because I heard it was going to be in a confessional register and confession, penitence, regret, and admission are concepts that I think about a great deal. Sure enough, the album is packed full of lyrics dealing in shockingly overt terms with things Swift, or Swift’s narratorial voice, has done wrong in her life, ranging from emotionally manipulating her listening public, to infidelity in an intimate relationship, to liking money. (Strict theology would reverse the order of the first two in an ascending ranking of severity, although all three would be very bad.) Much of the album’s sound exists mostly as a distracting smokescreen to disguise the jaw-dropping candidness of what she is actually saying, as do some of the specific lyrical flourishes; at one point she cops to what I suspect is a dead-serious Baudelairean conviction that she is going to hell when she dies, but she frames it as part of a tongue-in-cheek du Maurier-esque narrative about an imaginary inheritance dispute.

This brief essay isn’t intended as an essay about Taylor Swift, although I could write about her for several pages at a time if I wanted to—as, I suspect, could most competent living writers who follow popular music. It’s intended as an essay about the public aspect of penitence, the part of a process of making amends where we actually tell other people what we did wrong. Sometimes this isn’t necessary—nobody needs to know about that one time you masturbated to dodgy early-2000s hentai, other than arguably a confessor or spiritual director, and even then the details are probably a bit too much. Oftentimes, however, a public and communal dimension to penitence should or even must exist, either because the immoral acts harmed a community or because the penitent needs some kind of green light from other people before accepting that the moral crisis that she precipitated has been resolved. I’ve often thought that the medieval Church’s transition from Mediterranean-style large public airings of grievances to Celtic-style private confessions was at best a mixed blessing. Part of the reason for this is probably cultural (as a product of a mixed Italian-American and American Jewish family background myself, I recognize my extended family very readily in Seinfeld’s famous Festivus episode), but I think there is a serious sociological and theological argument to be made for confession as a more public and collective act as well. God judges nations as well as people; surely the intermediate formations of human life—the parish, the town, the diocese, the county—should have some means of putting wrongs aright as well.

Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to know the difference between publicly admitting wrongdoing and oversharing about things in which nobody is interested. This can be true even when it comes to wrongdoing that did hurt other people in obvious and publicly noticeable ways. As an example I’ll share something about myself that does not make me look very good, just as “scheming….to make them love me” does not make Taylor Swift very good and running a company that “stinks” because he is someone who “couldn’t smooth a silk sheet if [he] had a hot date with a babe” did not make George Costanza’s boss look very good. I, in my teens and into my early twenties, had an exceptionally poor understanding of conversational boundaries, especially around subjects like sexual desire. While this at no point went beyond words, my struggles with verbal boundaries and understanding when I was testing them cost me several close friendships over the years. I finally realized and amended my behavior when this had happened enough unrelated times that it was no longer reasonable to deny that I was the person at fault. (“I’m the problem! It’s me!” Swift sings in one of the songs on the new album.) The reason I’m bringing this up is, again, by way of example—it’s been several years, thankfully, since this problem arose in my life, and I’ve either managed to repair or accepted the loss of my relationships with the friends with whom I had it in the past. That being the case, is my bringing it up out of nowhere in an essay like this an admirable spontaneous admission of wrongdoing and desire to reform, or is it unsettling oversharing and dredging up old news to fish for sympathy and attention? At least in my mind it’s clearly the former, which is why I am writing about it, but the reader does not have access to my innermost thoughts and thus can only take my word for that.

A higher-stakes public example might be the French Catholic prelate Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who earlier this month came forward as a sexual abuser without anybody having publicly accused him. Did Ricard have a genuine case of conscience, or was he trying to position himself as having a perverse sort of moral authority? Not even all of Ricard’s colleagues within the Catholic hierarchy seem confident that they can tell the difference, and Catholic bishops are not generally credited with a habit of second-guessing other Catholic bishops’ morals. At the very least Ricard’s approach leaves a somewhat better taste in my mouth than the retired Bishop of Albany Howard Hubbard asking to be laicized as a general application of a rule despite vociferously denying the allegations against him, even though Hubbard is probably setting a better precedent for the Catholic Church. Then again, might this itself be because I used to admire Hubbard very much and thus feel more betrayed and disillusioned by the strong possibility that he’s a sex criminal? It often happens that our motives for how we receive an attempt to atone for wrongdoing are as mysterious to ourselves as our motives for attempting to atone in the first place are to our fellows.

I don’t think that going back to collectively and communally “acknowledging and bewailing our manifold sins and wickednesses,” in the words of Thomas Cranmer, himself someone who did many horrible things in his life and had many horrible things done to him in turn, would actually solve those mysteries. It might diffuse them somewhat and make them easier to bear, in the same way that I am able to think about Cardinal Ricard and Bishop Hubbard more or less at my leisure but would feel much more call to dwell on and perseverate on equivalent conversations if people were having them with me in private. Even so, taking the process of working through wrongdoing and making it the public’s or the community’s business is not something to do or to advocate lightly. For long years rural areas in several Western European countries had a custom called rough music or charivari, in which people guilty of crimes against social and familial order, such as adultery or domestic violence, were shamed in loud public processions rather than being turned over to the courts. (The title of this essay comes from a proverb about bad marriages.) Even though the aesthetic of this practice appeals to me and even though there is a lot to recommend public shaming over against (say) sending people to prison for years, rough music was a form of lynch law at its core.

Yet not every public confession of wrongdoing or public airing of grievances must involve as stark and extreme an intervention in someone’s life as charivari. If a society does make penitence and atonement everybody’s business, it provides paths to actual reintegration in a web of moral actors that simply letting guilt gnaw at individuals in private does not. It is worth applying a renewed emphasis to this at least in liturgical penitential contexts, and I would argue in secular contexts as well. For that renewed emphasis to be workable in secular settings the practice of whipping up ideologized online hate mobs would probably need to have a stake driven through its heart first, but that is itself what people used to call a win-win.

This is where I would like to, by way of a pithy and topical envoi, say “if you’ve never told anyone to commit suicide for disagreeing with you about what fictional characters should have sex with each other, you’ve nothing to fear.” Unfortunately, this isn’t true—there is always a great deal to fear in this world, and especially a great deal to fear when it comes to confiding and being vulnerable around other people in their multitudes. I would submit, however, that letting that fear rule us, letting it induce constant defensiveness to the point of privatization of sin, has led us places that are even worse by far.

A Prose Poem Every Word of Which Is True

It's the witching hour on a July night, or morning. You're lying naked in bed with some type of splinter in your foot because you and your roommate both had a terrible day and nobody swept the kitchen floor. You had a terrible day because you had to authorize three thousand dollars for a car fix that might not even work; the mechanic is having a hard time explaining why not in terms that you can understand. The three thousand dollars are mostly your parents’ money, which is to say, your late grandparents’ money. They were with an oil supermajor and are thus also partly responsible for the fact that it is a muggy night even for July, yet still the least muggy night in days and days—and people still deny something is amiss here, because anecdotal evidence counts when it's cold out but not when it's hot out. You try to say a prayer for your grandparents in purgatory but for some reason what comes out is “Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam hatov v’ha’meitiv,” which is true but not helpful in the moment. You feel fat, and a bout of the gender dysphoria is setting in. A singer you like a lot did a theme song for a movie you were going to see, but now you don't think you'll bother because it turns out the author of the book on which it is based is wanted in connection with a murder case in the Republic of Zambia and has been for some time. Eventually at some point that you might or might not live to see history will consummate its triumph over time and we will, as they say, all look back on this and laugh. Do you know where your soul is? I do, saith the Lord.

Trahison des Mémoires

In my master’s thesis, which was written in late 2016 into early 2017 and was in the field of theology, I coined an expression called trahison des mémoires, “treason of memories.” It was a snowclone of trahison des clercs, the concept of disloyalty to the principles of serious thought by a society’s intellectual or cultured classes. With trahison des mémoires, my idea is that memory, especially publicly-held memory like the institutional memory of a country or a religion, can be twisted and weaponized in ways that do great harm to the people holding onto the memory. I was not so much interested in political or sociological harm—looking at cultural memory through that framework is old hat—as in emotional and interpersonal harm. In the thesis I introduced this concept as part of a discussion of (and I am both dating myself and outing myself as an irremediable dweeb here) the 2001 anime Noir, one of whose main characters is trying to piece together the circumstances of her parents’ murders.  When she finally does remember—or, in point of fact, when she finally is provided with other people’s memories concerning—the killings, she wishes she hadn’t.

            I was interested in looking at how early, or transgenerational, memories of cultural and religious practices can lead to mental states about as bad as those associated with watching one’s parents get whacked. I’m not convinced in retrospect that I had a ton to say about this; my thesis ended up much less systematic, more meandering, and frankly more postmodern than I went into it hoping it would. Even so, that is what I used the term to mean and, if I am allowed to toot my own horn on this, I do think that “treason of memories” captures certain things about this experience that more common terms like generational trauma or cultural baggage do not. It often really does feel very much like being betrayed, stabbed in the back, attacked in the dark, by something about one’s family or one’s culture that ought to be a font of strength and comfort.

            My family came to North America in the first decade or two of the twentieth century, mostly from either the Italian Mezzogiorno or an area of Eastern Europe that has variously been under Lithuanian, Polish, Austrian, Russian, or Nazi German sovereignty over its long and violent history. Some of the Eastern Europeans were Jews, others Gentiles; the exact genealogical admixture has never struck me as particularly important, mostly since it’s no longer possible to reconstruct. Neither, for that matter, has the question of whether the Gentiles were ethnically Polish or Lithuanian or Russian or Belarusian or whatever else; there is an anecdote from a pre-World War I British diplomat related in Bini Adamczak’s Relational Revolutions in which the diplomat, speaking to ordinary inhabitants of the part of Europe in question, runs through several wordings of a question about ethnic and national identity before finally being told that “all governments are a plague on the earth and it would be for the best if the Christian peasantry were left to attend to their affairs in peace.” Remove the word “Christian,” or add the phrase “or Jewish” after it, and you get the attitude towards nationalism that I’ve long assumed almost all of my ancestors on that side of my family held.

            Looking at my family history this way insulates me from the current treason of memories happening on an operatic scale in Ukraine and Russia. There are other treasons, however, with which it helps much less. There is a story that I often tell about my great-grandfather, a story that I heard myself from my elderly aunt. My great-grandfather’s name was either Paweł Turówski, Павел Туровский, פאולוס טוראָווסקי‎, or Paul Turowsky, depending on your thoughts on various Eastern European nationalisms. He spent most of his life in the Springfield, Massachusetts area following a short stint in the Canadian nickel mines after his flight from Europe. Pogroms had been involved, probably, given the timeline, those that followed the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. When my aunts, who are much older than my mother, were growing up just after World War II, they would visit their grandfather each Sunday after Mass and he would give them a nickel and a cup of chicken soup apiece—but he would always answer the door with a butcher knife in hand, before seeing to his satisfaction that it was just his granddaughters, and not the Cossacks come for him again.

            That butcher knife feels aimed through the dark at my own back whenever I try to take a sympathetic look at the sufferings of the Cossacks themselves, and, for that matter, whenever I try to think with compassion about the antisemitic views that my grandfather developed over the course of his own life. It is possible that these views were developed in opposition to his father, but also that his father instructed him in them himself as part of some twisted ploy at assimilating. In any case it made it easier for him to marry my grandmother, the descendant of long lines of Campanian peasantry and guttersnipes who passed down curiously bright copper-colored hair, difficulty moderating food intake, and a strong tendency to develop serious neuralgias in early adulthood. Once or twice I’ve pictured my grandfather and great-grandfather going at each other like Arthur and Mordred in the Rackham illustration of the Battle of Camlann, but then, there can’t have been too much resentment at the time of that wedding, because there were several bridesmaids from my grandfather’s side, that is the Eastern European side, of the family.

            I have a friend with whom I once had a serious fight over her observation that my grandfather “betrayed the Jewish people” by marrying my grandmother. I know enough about American Judaism and the difficulties it has had withstanding intermarriage and assimilation that I was not surprised by this opinion of hers, but I still objected to her saying it. I did not only object for the obvious moral reason that one simply does not say that sort of thing about a friend’s dead grandfather, but also for the factual reason that in reality the betrayal of the Jewish people had happened at least a generation earlier, maybe longer.

            (Lots of people seem to think that Judaism and Christianity, or even specifically Judaism and Catholicism, are either naturally allied and sister religions, or naturally inimical and opposed. People argue over which is true. Both are silly and wrong. The fact that many antisemitic ideas are theological nonsense even in very conservative Christian thought has not stopped them from influencing countless Christians, even Popes, even otherwise good Popes. Neither has persecution of Judaism by Christian governments always and in all places stopped Christians from being good neighbors to Jews, and learning from them. There would have been ways for my grandparents to have built a life together that did not involve this self-enmity and self-rejection on my grandfather’s part, and yet those paths were not taken.)

 ❦

Some of the most detailed stories I’ve ever heard about these people came in a specific conversation with my aunts and uncle three or four years ago when my mother and I visited them on Cape Cod. It was the most freewheeling conversation either I or my mother had ever had with some of the other people involved, in particular with my mother’s oldest sister. I learned that evening as the sun set pinkly behind Follins Pond about everything from the dubious paternity of my grandfather’s oldest sister— Paweł/ Павел/ פאולוס /Paul’s wife having, most likely, abruptly married him after being abandoned by the man who got her pregnant—to the crime family that used to and possibly still does control the Town of Agawam.

            What’s remarkable, looking back on this conversation, is that no point in it did I think holy shit, why is she telling us this? or anything of the kind. These conversations happen sometimes; people open up. It does not always feel like getting stabbed. There are similar reminiscing conversations that I have had with members of my family that did feel like getting stabbed; one such example is a conversation that I had with my mother years after the fact about a visit to a Buddhist temple on a trip to Japan in 2013. It was a visit that made a profound impression on me and that I have been meaning to write something cogent, insightful, and vital about ever since; my previous attempts to do so embarrassed me and I am not going to try to rectify that now in service to this particular point. (The very first thing I wrote about it, a long, typed-up diary entry headed “The Distance between the Devoted and the Devout,” has the advantages of freshness and of a title of which I’m still very proud.)

            The temple is Bōdai-ji, on top of a mountain whose name my best friend loosely translates Mount Doom, and the festival, which happens in the high summer, is called the Inako Taisai. At this festival blind spirit mediums or necromancers called itako set up booths in front of the temple in which they, actually or purportedly, contact the souls of the recently deceased, including miscarried or aborted fetuses. The practice is in probably-terminal decline due to diminished need for and interest in this sort of specialized life path for the blind. Supposedly the decline is also in part due to skepticism both from the Buddhist religious establishment—which of course has its own set of funerary practices, including, again, after miscarriage or abortion—and from secular Japanese people, but in 2013 it still seemed pretty packed.

            My reminiscing with my mother involved, among other things, her reminding me that our visit to the Inako Taisai, which I remember positively for a lot of reasons, also involved me getting overwhelmed by the crowds, or the summer heat, or both, and running off and irritating someone my mother was talking to, someone who had been looking forward to going to an Inako Taisai all her life. Me being who I am, I reacted to this conversation with a sense of deep shame, embarrassment, and even guilt—had I ruined something that this other woman had been looking forward to for decades? Probably not, especially since most older Japanese people tend to expect Westerners to behave in bizarre and jarring ways to begin with. Even so, it was apparently enough to give my mother herself mixed feelings about the excursion, which made my own very positive memories feel a little inappropriate, selfish, misguided. That sort of perseveration is elevated and exacerbated, I think, by the fact that the Inako Taisai is a well-known—in some circles—and well-attended event. Feeling as if I may have somehow damaged, in however minor a way, an established corpus of social, cultural, and religious memory, gives me the feeling of being betrayer as well as betrayed.

            Something feels melodramatic about looking at these kinds of memories as if they are knives in the dark, so let’s put them to bed as something more moderate, calmer, more contained. Homeopathic dilutions, maybe, of the kinds of violent memories that my grandparents and great-grandparents contended over with themselves and with one another. These memories have an undertone of violence to them only because they affected members of my family about whom I care deeply, or else because for an autistic person there is always an undertone of violence to any faux pas that one might conceivably be punished socially for having made. Add to that the guilt, for any morally reasonable person, of thinking of oneself as a victim in a low-stakes situation, and the Inako Taisai memory falls into place and becomes understandable at least to myself.

            So much for the 2013 Inako Taisai, which in spite of this qualm I do still think very well of as a ceremony and as a moment in my life. So much also for the family that ran my relatives’ childhood liquor store—note the wording—and latterly the Agawam School Board. What about working on these memories in a reparative way the way one can do a reparative reading of an old and, as they say, “problematic” book? I have already touched on this idea and want to make a more extended case for it.

            There are particular events in my childhood that I and other relatives remember different versions of, like the Agawam stories and the Inako Taisai story, but also remember in uniformly benign or positive ways, unlike the Inako Taisai story, of which memories are mixed, and the Agawam stories, which all concerned are just glad to have survived in more or less one piece. For example, I remember going to see the Lord of the Rings movies as a child with my mother and in one case my aunt when they were coming out; I remember the same about the Harry Potter movies. Both sets of memories are excellent; in my very early childhood I disliked both movie theaters and fantasy stories, but after a few years of the 2000s fantasy-action-adventure-blockbuster milieu I loved both. (The monocultural MCU juggernaut has ruined a lot of this sort of thing for me now, of course—another knife, another dark night, another spot on my back.) My mother also remembers both sets of movies very positively. Yet her Harry Potter-related memories are more salient and vivid for her than are her Lord of the Rings-related memories, whereas for me it’s the other way around. Part of the difference might be that several of the Harry Potter movies were released in theaters around her birthday, in late November.

            Remembering the salience of these movie watches differently from how my mother does is, of course, no kind of betrayal at all. I bring it up more to point out that the reparative potential in “misremembering” isn’t entirely disconnected from the way reminiscing already works for most people anyway. Who among us has not had many rounds of good-natured banter with friends and family about things like this? “No, no, it really happened like this.” Then someone else says “No, it happened like that; remember?” Then a third person says “Well that isn’t how I remember it.” These kinds of arguments actually reinforce our memories and reinforce our relationships. Just recently, in connection with getting my mother’s permission to write about the Inako Taisai episode, I had a conversation much like this with her. We agreed on the point I made above, that nobody going to something like this after wanting to for many years is going to let their time at it be ruined by an autistic foreign stranger having a meltdown because it’s hot out. So clearly the reparative quality of reminiscence can take the sting even out of the Dickinsonian “goblin bee” of trahison des mémoires. This actually does happen in Noir; the character I coined the term to describe is never happy about the fact that her parents were whacked, but she is able to engage in some sort of repair and atonement through having it out with the scumbag who ordered the hits and the brainwashed victim-perpetrator who executed them.

 ❦

Another memory of a debate over memories with my older relatives—a memory that might eventually come back and stab me itself, for all I know!—also comes to mind here. This is another utterly benign one, even benevolent in the sense that I look back on both the debate itself and the memory about which we had it fondly. My aunt and uncle and I discussed my very earliest memory, in which my uncle picks me up in his arms in his living room in a midcentury ranch house in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and spins me around while an old record player plays a big band tune. For some reason we all agreed that it was one of those record players that only plays one prerecorded song or program of music, and yet none of us agreed on what the song in the memory actually was. I remember it as “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the Benny Goodman piece that is probably a plurality of people’s first point of reference for big band music. My aunt remembers it as “Begin the Beguine,” a Cole Porter song, probably, in this kind of anecdote, being played by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. My uncle remembers it as “the Russian boat song,” by which he means a wartime Glenn Miller arrangement of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”

            Other memories like this might be relatively easy to resolve, but in this case my aunt, my uncle, and I all have good reason to have remembered best what song it was! My uncle owned the record player; my aunt, who is a little younger than my uncle, has the clearest memories of that period of time, 1995 or so, in general; I have the strongest emotions about the memory, since it is my earliest.

            Because we all had occasion to remember this memory the best, and yet all remembered it differently, the conversation actually shored up the bonds between us and reinforced, I believe, our importance to one another. In this way trahison des mémoires can be reversed so that the memory that is seemingly betraying one can in fact be a deep cover agent on one’s behalf. A public memory involving a national or intergenerational harm, like my great-grandfather’s memories of the pogroms, might be more difficult, or even impossible, to reverse in this way, and yet even in those cases I think that future generations can look back on their—on our—ancestors with a view to resolving and redeeming their experiences. Sometimes the best way to deal with betrayal is to meet it with a refusal to betray. “Trust, but verify,” as Ronald Reagan said, quoting, allegedly, a Russian proverb. Verifying, by implication, should not damage the trust overmuch. We can see that we have been stabbed and yet meet that violence with a decision to accept our memories and the purity of our feelings about them nonetheless. A knife that enters one’s back and stabs one through the heart can also, in different hands, be a tool that keeps a whole family or a whole society fed, safe, and warm.

Postscript

A few other, very specific knives thrown at my back in recent days, all of which had, in some way, a medicinal and consoling function: Florence and the Machine’s new album Dance Fever, which is named after early modern “dancing plagues,” which are in turn written about in similar terms to the nerve disease of which most of my female-line ancestors died. The too-pale lights of this year’s fireflies in unmowed grass in mid-June dusk. The Memory Alpha page for John Masefield. A whole cache of old yearbooks dredged up in my closet, showing the most 2000s fashion and graphic design choices imaginable, people I have not thought about in decades, and high school crushes of whom, in some cases, I still think as beautiful. A photograph of me as a child, in a Baltimore Orioles cap, draping myself over a railing with a smile on my face and the skyline of Manhattan in the near distance, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center jutting out over it all; the photograph is dated June 30, 2000.

Affronts to English Usage

This list is to be thought of in the context of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book (枕草子Makura no sōshi). Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists (La vertigine della lista) and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (“El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”) might also guide some readers to an understanding that this isn’t to be taken too literally, and yet, at the same time, is to be taken utterly seriously.

Affronts to English Usage

“Weary” for “wary”

“Based off of” for “based on”

“Per say” for “per se”

“Yay or nay” for “yea or nay”

“Ah natural” for “au naturel”

Influencer

Polycule

For You Page

“PFP” for “icon” or “avatar”

S3ggs, k!ll, unalive, et hoc genus omne (I am old enough to remember 1337, p0n0s, vag000, and h4xx0rz. Today’s equivalents cannot hold a candle.)

“Mass of the Ages”

Chief Knowledge Officer

Anti-choice, pro-abort, et hoc genus omne

Unprecedented, new normal, et hoc genus omne

Wokism, especially as a loanword in other languages

Racial reckoning

“A republic, not a democracy”

CRT

“Our boys in blue”

And, most egregiously of all, the fact that some random online writer, mostly self-published, thinks anybody else has reason to care about a list like this.

Takasawa Keiichi’s “Kimono”: An Artistic-Cultural Treatise from Occupied Japan

Cultural relations between the United States and Japan in the twentieth century are today best remembered for two periods of hostility. In the 1940s the countries were enemies in World War II, and in the 1980s the strong postwar cross-Pacific alliance was strained due to manufacturing and trade policies that in some ways prefigured today’s rivalry between the US and China. Although President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro were both personally and ideologically close, many Americans thought of Japanese people in insecure, envious, and hostile terms.

However, between these two periods, there was a flowering of American Japanophilia influenced partly by American servicemen’s experiences in Japan during the prolonged Allied occupation of the country. The 1950s saw the Japanese printmaker Wada Sanzō (whose “Greenhouse Workers” from his Occupations of Shōwa Japan series hangs in my parents’ living room) win an Academy Award for costume design and the actress and singer Umeki Miyoshi win one for Best Supporting Actress. Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder admired (what they knew of) Japanese Buddhism, and D.T. Suzuki became a more famous and respected figure stateside than in his home country. It was in the earliest days of this midcentury Japanophilia that Takasawa Keiichi wrote and illustrated Kimono: A Pictorial Story of the Kimono.

Kimono is a 40-page book printed on Japanese paper, featuring Takasawa’s drawings and photographs of women in traditional Japanese dress supplemented by his own commentary (or an English translation thereof). The publisher has the unsurprising name Japan Travel Bureau, and the book was printed in Occupied Japan in 1948. It retailed for ¥250, and, I would guess, has been out of print since the early 1950s or so.

  I ran across Kimono while searching for a Takasawa work to buy that lacked some of the questionable artistic qualities of much of his oeuvre. As a visual artist he is best known for a massive body of portraiture most of which focuses on the same rail-thin, wry-faced model, who is generally thought to have been his wife. Many of his paintings and drawings of this woman are sexually charged or even pornographic; a common Takasawa subject is his wife having sex with other women. The illustrations in Kimono, on the other hand, are generally of a sort that one would feel comfortable showing one’s grandmother: the women are fully dressed and attractively but not sexually posed. They also show a broader range of ages and attitudes than the model of Takasawa’s other work; one drawing is captioned “Miss Teen-Ager learns the intricate steps of the classical dance,” and the women’s facial expressions range from contented to annoyed (“I wonder if my obi is on straight!”). The drawings are well-executed and done in an appealing palette, a sort of subdued four-color of charcoal grey, indigo, deep red, and pale gold. The photographs in the book, on the other hand, often suffer from the over-luridness of midcentury color photography, in a way that reminds me a little of the contemporaneous Chiquita Banana commercials with Carmen Miranda.

  The book was intended to capture the kimono as a “symbol of Japanese women” for a Western audience, and contains very lucid and easy-to-follow descriptions of what different types of traditional Japanese womenswear are, what events or times of year one wears them for, and how they are made and sold. The only section that tripped me up was one discussing how properly to put on an obi (sash), an aspect of kimono-wearing that has stymied me in life as well as in art. If anyone can ever explain to me what exactly is meant by “Make a little fold at the end of the long end of the obi, tuck the other end of the obi into the bow, and fasten all these tightly together with the obi-dome which is also taken around in front of the obi and tied there,” that person will have my heart for life.

  Takasawa’s politics, which do make it into the book, are “reconciliatory” and focused on a revivification of Japanese society, including traditional arts and customs, after the traumatic war years. The implication is that he, like many other small-c conservative Japanese artists and writers, was unhappy with the war primarily because of the way it destroyed Japan’s Meiji- and Taishō-era civilian culture. This is a position shared with, among others, the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, whose family saga The Makioka Sisters was censored during the war for its focus on “the soft, effeminate, and grossly individualistic lives of women.” Something very similar, or at least similarly sexist, could well have been said about Kimono had Takasawa written it five years earlier.

Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles introduces to Japanese literature the somewhat self-conscious distinction between feminists and “woman-worshipers,” who idealize women but have no particular respect for their opinions or their values. Kimono outs Takasawa as a woman-worshiper of the old school, as if his later paintings of his wife weren’t enough. The copy accompanying his drawings idealizes women and states several very strong preferences about female dress and behavior as if those preferences are facts. One passage makes an absolute statement about the female love for changing one’s clothes that a butch lesbian or even a vowed religious sister of the period could and probably should have disabused him of immediately had he asked.

However, I don’t mean to suggest that Kimono is a uniquely misogynistic work; I don’t think it is. The premise itself, and Takasawa’s breadth of knowledge about women’s clothing, show an interest in women’s lives completely absent from truly woman-hating Japanese art of the period, such as Confessions of a Mask (a novel of whose misogynistic homoeroticism, or homoerotic misogyny, I was strongly reminded when I finally sat down and read American Psycho). It’s easy to imagine a version of Takasawa alive today as a sort of male Karolina Żebrowska or Safiya Nygaard, taking to YouTube and Instagram to share his interest in traditional womenswear with the world.

Kimono can be found used on Biblio and similar websites for roughly between $30 and $100. My copy was on the expensive end because several of its pages are signed by Takasawa (in an idiosyncratic format with “Keiichi” in kanji and “Takasawa” in roman letters). I would recommend the book to those interested in Japan’s presentation of itself to the West at this point in the country’s long history, provided they can put up with some of the author’s less-than-feminist sentiments and views.

Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?

One is a visionary who thinks in the long term about the future of the humanity but often stakes out incendiary or extreme-seeming positions on here-and-now issues that some argue damage the credibility of the overall cause. The other is a climate activist. Can you tell who said what?

1.       Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

2.       We have to tell it like it is. Because if there are no positive things to tell, then what should we do, should we spread false hope? We can’t do that, we have to tell the truth.

3.       I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived.

4.       Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most.

5.       It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?

6.       That is what we have to realize, that that is what we have to do right now. I’m not the one who’s saying these things. I’m not the one who we should be listening to. And I say that all the time.

7.       We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences.

8.       Only fools prefer the past!

9.       Almost everything is black and white.

10.     If everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame.

Answers: Leto, Thunberg, Leto, Leto, Leto, Thunberg, Thunberg, Leto, Thunberg, Thunberg

2. and 6. come from a Financial Times interview and a Democracy Now interview, both from 2019. 7., 9., and 10. come from a book called No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. 1., 3., 4., 5., and 8. come from God-Emperor of Dune.

Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa

It is never pleasant to have our old shrines desecrated, even when we have outgrown them.

—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

I.

The year is 2022, and anime is in decline.

I don’t think I know anybody my age who seriously denies this. Friends of mine who are in my age cohort—the ages of, let’s say, twenty-five to thirty-three, people who were in their late childhood or adolescence during the international anime and manga glut of the early to mid-2000s and who populated college anime clubs around the same years I did during the first three-quarters of the Obama administration—seem to be unanimous in the opinion that the medium and its fandom aren’t what they once were. Current high school and college students still entertain and enthrall themselves with My Hero Academia or whichever generation of Precure we’re currently on, and I don’t think the medium is dead or is no longer producing anything of value; each of the past three or four years has produced at least one series that I’ve enjoyed. Even so, there have been subtle but noticeable changes in both the content and the reception of anime over the second half of the 2010s and now into the 2020s, and many of those changes are making it difficult for people who’ve long been in media fandom to maintain interest in what’s currently coming out of Japan. In this essay I will seek to diagnose some of those changes.

First let me share my general impressions of what the medium and its fandom were like around 2007, when I was first becoming a fan. 1999-2007 are commonly accepted among fandom historians as the dates of the Western anime boom, in which brick-and-mortar bookstores had manga sections several aisles deep and the Western anime market was (according to Matt Clement’s Anime: A History) actually driving or partially driving Japanese production. “Animesque” Western cartoons came into vogue partway through this period, some (such as Avatar: The Last Airbender) becoming classics themselves, others (such as Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, which I had to be reminded existed) fading very quickly into obscurity. Spirited Away won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at one point, and basic cable stations like Cartoon Network had entire programming blocks of competently dubbed anime for teen and young-adult audiences. I came up at the tail end of this period; the first anime that I followed as it was airing was Code Geass R2, and I was probably part of the last wave of American teenagers to start using LiveJournal for fandom purposes before that website’s death spiral in 2009-2011.

At this time there was an accepted cursus honorum for inducting oneself into the anime canon before venturing forth into the badlands of cult classics and genre specialization. It differed a little for boys and girls, but I watched shows from both sets, probably because I was being introduced to anime by two girls with whom I was friends in high school. The first anime movies I watched were Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and one of the InuYasha movies (I had a hard time focusing on that one; I don’t remember why). The first full series I watched were Azumanga Daioh and Neon Genesis Evangelion. This was in the era of DVD box sets; for Azumanga Daioh I borrowed a friend’s DVDs and for Neon Genesis Evangelion I spent a couple weeks’ allowance. Once you saw some of these works that were in some sense representative of the medium, or at least representative of what other American teenagers were into, then you could venture forth into discovering new shows and favored genres and subgenres on your own. By late 2008 and early 2009 I was watching a lot of the “girls with guns” subgenre of action anime—Noir and its spiritual successors, Black Lagoon, and so forth—that had come out earlier in the 2000s. I also started watching a lot of anime with gay themes, especially shows with lesbian connotations that were less overtly sexual than a lot of what was being produced about gay men. And it was great for a while.

The problems with this fandom environment—and such problems did exist—mostly revolved around two core issues, gatekeeping and amorality. 4chan, a website that is now mostly known as a hotbed of far-right politics but in the late 2000s was an anime fandom standby, was in some ways the locus classicus for both of these issues with its culture of eviscerating “newfags” and “moralfags.” I experienced this more in Western science fiction and fantasy fandoms than in anime and manga fandom—for some reason I just had a thicker skin about, say, Fullmetal Alchemist than about Doctor Who—but I still noticed it. These problems became extremely relevant later as a highly pop-moralistic backlash against them began permeating fandom spaces around 2015.

The unsustainability of the Japanese foreign and trade policies that had led to the early-to-mid-2000s boom in the first place probably also contributed to the unsustainability of the fan culture that built up around Japanese products. As is well-known, the fundamentals of the Japanese economy were not sound, and a semi-deliberate national policy around pop culture exports did not have enough failsafe measures to survive the decline in faddish Western interest. The list of localization companies and fandom media organs that went defunct or had to merge with one another to stay afloat between 2008 and 2013—the peak years of my anime fandom participation—includes ADV Films; Newtype USA magazine; Shojo Beat magazine; the North American version of Shonen Jump magazine; Central Park Media; Bandai Visual USA (dissolved back into its Japanese parent company); and the original incarnation of Toonami. Perhaps oddly, I didn’t really notice this at the time; since I was just getting into the fandom, it didn’t really occur to me that its glory days were, in some wise, already behind it. I had the same experience with LiveJournal, which I had no idea was already a dying platform when I joined it.

This in some ways commonplace story is one that I tell by means of explaining what I think a vibrant and interesting anime fan community does look like. I’ve deliberately avoided passing comment on the actual content of the shows that were popular at that point, because I want to discuss content in the context of where—in my opinion—it all went wrong.

When I told a friend about the concept for this essay, he said it had “Boomer energy.” Despite my self-consciousness about this, I am not going to take any special efforts to make the essay seem value-neutral or judgment-free, because it is not; it would be insincere to avoid the impression of someone worried about premature middle age complaining about the tastes and interests of teenagers, because that is, in part, exactly what this essay is. What follows is an attempt to explain those fogeyish opinions and complaints and to and advocate for them based on historical and cultural facts.

II.

Having come of age in anime and manga fandom during what we might call a transitional period—the late 2000s and early 2010s, when the fandom wasn’t at its peak in the West anymore but was not yet in obvious enough decline for me to notice it at the time—I can’t approach this question exactly as somebody with clear memories of the fandom of the 1999-2007 period might approach it. The decline that was underway during my period of heaviest fandom involvement had material economic roots that I mentioned above, and it was secular in the sense of being a sustained long-term process that would have been difficult to reverse. The collapse, or transmogrification, of a medium and a fandom that I recognized and with which I felt comfortable into a medium and a fandom that I did not, felt more abrupt, and I would argue that it was more cultural and in some ways even ideological. The cultural and ideological shift of the mid-2010s may have had its historical genesis in the economic and material shift of the late 2000s; however, I do not have enough experience or knowledge of the latter event to feel confident saying for sure.

I count three major factors that, taken together, determine what kind of characteristics a medium fandom will have: What kind of content is being produced, how that content is being disseminated to its fans, and what the fandom’s culture and ideology (i.e. its “superstructure,” Marxistly) are like when the fans receive the content.

I’ll begin with the intermediate stage, how content is disseminated to its fans. Until the mid-2010s, the prevailing model for anime and manga localization was what we might call “fansub (or scanlation) first, license later (if at all).” That is, a title that was making waves in Japan would be informally translated—a process that was legal under Japanese law but of dubious legality under most Western copyright regimes—by a group of fansubbers (if it was an anime) or scanlators (a portmanteau of scanner and translator, if it was a print manga). This informal localization would then be made available online, through several avenues that were themselves of dubious legality; when I first entered the fandom, you still often saw anime episodes uploaded to YouTube in five- to ten-minute-long chunks that you had to watch in order. (Amazingly, one can still at the time of writing find certain old episodes of the extremely well-known Western cartoon The Simpsons on YouTube this way!) YouTube ceased to be usable for these purposes around 2010 as its user base and the culture surrounding it were formalized and professionalized, so the fandom moved to an archipelago of other sites with names like KissAnime, Mangafox, and so forth. Many of these sites still exist in diminished form. They had—still have—domain names out of places like Tonga and Christmas Island, and were only usable if one had both an ad blocker and a good antivirus program; fortunately, most fans did.

An official, indisputably legal localization would appear later if enough interest built up in the West—or sometimes if a Japanese studio or distributor wanted to shill something in the West to make it turn a profit, as happened with the infamously iconoclastic localization of the flop horror anime Ghost Stories in 2005. The push-pull of Japanese production with a Western audience in mind had its genesis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and by the 2000s it had created a system somewhat similar to the “usual channels” of parliamentary democracies. That is, Japanese creators, Western localizers, and prominent fandom figures had some degree of professional and even social familiarity with one another, and negotiated amongst themselves to bring most official localizations into existence. For example, a gay-themed anime called Simoun that was a personal favorite of mine for a long time—it’s now mostly forgotten—got an official American DVD release almost solely because a well-known fan personality saw the fansubs and brought it to the professional localizers’ attention.

The underlying economic process that made this social and cultural system possible was the buying and selling of DVDs. The system relied on the practice of accumulating physical home video sets of one’s favorite shows, because “fansub first, license later” was only economically viable for localization companies if the fandom had a collector mentality and an ethic of “rewatch value.” Western anime fandom as such had been intimately tied to the technology of home video from its inception; many fan communities had originated as AV clubs in the eighties and nineties. The almost totemic quality of DVD sets in “old” anime fandom—something analogous to the totemic quality of hardcover books among self-professed bookworms—can hardly be overstated. I still have complete DVD sets of at least half a dozen shows I’ve only ever watched once, despite the fact that my computer no longer has a drive to play them in, because you never know.

With the advent of online streaming services and their supplanting of physical audiovisual media culture starting around 2012, the economic incentives for professional localizers changed enormously. There was no longer any real reason to tolerate illegal or semi-legal fan treatment of Japanese material as a means of building up word of mouth about a property. So producers, distributors, and localizers began to build a “license first, fansub never” model, which relied on simulcasting via streaming services such as Crunchyroll and, eventually, Netflix. (I know I said I felt self-conscious about this essay’s boomery premise, but I have to say this: I feel a pang of genuine heartache whenever I see the words “A Netflix Original Anime” at the beginning of an episode of Carole & Tuesday, a show I otherwise love.) This had the effect of making the economics of anime fandom much more similar to the economics of first-run Western TV fandom—only first-run Western TV fandom was itself being transmogrified into something much more top-down and supply-side.

Moreover, because of other technological and social shifts that are part of the same zeitgeist as the rise of streaming services, such as various “pivots to video” and the increasing stranglehold of algorithmically-arranged social media platforms on our culture, attention spans in general seem a lot shorter these days. I once ran across someone who watched Haibane-Renmei, created a fan Instagram account for the show (of all platforms!), then abruptly decided barely a year later that they were no longer interested in the show or in anime in general. Someone doing that ten or fifteen years ago would have been called a filthy casual and told to get the hell out of Otakon, the way a cowboy might be told to get the hell out of Dodge.

III.

The first of the three factors I mentioned above is one I’m addressing second because it requires somewhat more extrapolation and interpretation as opposed to hard facts. The actual nature of anime being produced, and whether and why it’s changed, is difficult to assess from a vantage point stateside, and it’s been the better part of a decade since I actually spent time in Japan (although I’m in both internet and postal contact with people in Japan semi-regularly). Summer 2013, most of which I spent in Japan, could be taken as a transitional period in terms of many of the changes I am discussing, but even that requires some degree of eisegesis—what makes 2013 “more transitional” than 2014, or 2012?

What I do know is this. Although Western demand driving Japanese production was a phenomenon that created its fair share of cross-cultural problems and resentments, the relatively mukokuseki (“stateless”) characteristics of the shows being made in the 1990s and 2000s did mean that most of those shows avoided the worst excesses of Japanese political and artistic discourse. A show that was consciously being produced for an international audience would have to include internationally appropriate themes not only in the sense of “statelessness” around character designs and pop-cultural references, but also in the sense of avoiding preachy overconcern with domestic Japanese issues and, in particular, Japanese nationalism. This was how you could end up with a property like Code Geass that was obviously sympathetic to Japanese nationalism and anti-Americanism but that was still watchable as something other than a rightist screed because its themes were couched in abstracted terms about imperialism and self-determination.

Moreover, Western fantasies of Japan as some sort of “animeland” utopia (which Japanese politician Yuriko Koike has, hilariously, tried to make into a winning message in Japanese domestic politics) were always missing something essential about Japan itself. Japan, like every other country on the planet, has a “normie” supermajority in its population, and because it is also a conformist and collectivist society, people who are “weird” have diminished social capital relative to weird people in most Western countries. Continued passionate love for anime and manga into adulthood is seen as unusual in Japan—the arbitrary yet curiously widespread “age ghetto” for animation and comics is probably, if anything, weaker in Continental Europe than it is in Asia. Being an “otaku,” a word whose Japanese usage is clearly pejorative and comes from a formal and slightly archaic term for one’s own house, has for a long time actually been more broadly acceptable in North America and Western Europe than it is on anime’s home turf.

For both of these reasons, diminished demand for anime in the West could be argued to have actually sapped the medium’s vitality even in Japan itself. This is not because Westerners can judge Japanese art more sagely than Japanese people can—far from it!—but because the assortment of Japanese action-movie and romcom tropes one commonly sees replicated in your “typical” anime benefited from having to be used more judiciously to attract a worldwide audience. Somebody inclined to laissez-faire thinking might even see it as a competitiveness issue, in which 1990s and 2000s anime had to make a name for itself on a grander scale and over against a massive variety of rival cultural products.

In Japan in 2013, I noticed that a lot of the anime and manga being produced for what we might call domestic consumption was being microtargeted to maladjusted subcultural interests. The most benign such case, and possibly also the most familiar to Western audiences, was the inexorable advance of the toxic cult of “deconstruction,” in which an anime that treated its genre, its medium, and even its own fans with cynicism and contempt could actually attract a devoted audience due to the false perception that it was saying something profound. Good “deconstructive” anime have been produced—nineties masterpieces Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena being two such—but invariably the deconstruction in such shows is commenting on something external to the shows themselves: mental illness and antisocial behavior in Evangelion’s case, misogyny and homophobia in Utena’s. In 2011 a bombastic attack-from-within on the magical girl genre called Puella Magi Madoka Magica emerged, dominating fandom conversation in both Japan and the West despite its mere twelve-episode length. The delayed airing of its final two episodes due to that year’s earthquake and tsunami cemented the show’s instantly legendary status. Madoka itself did have interesting things to say, but for some reason that I cannot quite pinpoint, the series solidified a perception of edgy, grimdark subject matter and themes as both artistically superior and more profitable than sincerity and optimism. Very little has been produced in the magical girl genre since 2011 that isn’t somehow preoccupied with either replicating or refuting Madoka’s extraordinarily gloomy take on the genre’s key conceits, and much of what is being produced is therefore very difficult to watch.

If the Madoka phenomenon was a peptic ulcer, making “old” anime culture significantly more painful and annoying but not actually killing it, the Attack on Titan phenomenon was the bubonic plague, or possibly some sort of bioengineered supervirus thawed out from some IJA ice prison to maraud through modern Japan. I actually loved Attack on Titan initially, as did, I dare say, the vast majority of rank-and-file anime fans. Its 2013 first season, which was actually airing while I was in Japan that summer, is the most recent anime for which I’ve bothered to buy fandom merch. I still in spite of myself have genuinely wonderful memories of fiercely debating its twists and turns with my friends, and of becoming invested in its, at the time, wonderful female characters. It wasn’t until at least a year into its initial burst of cross-Pacific popularity that it became clear not only that its creator was aligned with the political far right but that the series itself was actually meant to communicate and advocate far-right views. The series recently ended, and won back some of its old fans by ending in an unexpectedly pensive, ambivalent, and self-reflective way, but by that point it was too late to save its general reputation as “a fascist anime.”

Japan as a whole has lurched to the political right over the past decade. This is true of many countries, but in Japan the effect has been particularly pronounced, producing repeated electoral landslides for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which despite the name is conservative and nationalist. A center-left government that briefly dethroned the long-dominant LDP in 2009 proved inept and rudderless and was itself turfed out in 2012, after which right-wing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe managed to entrench himself as the longest-serving premier in Japanese history.

The pluses (they do exist) and minuses of Abe’s time in power could be an entire essay of their own, but the policy area most relevant to anime and its fandom is his avowed nationalism, historical revisionism, and desire to rehabilitate the legacy of the Japanese Empire that was defeated in World War II. This is a winning issue for younger Japanese people, and in particular younger Japanese men, because young adults in Japan right now do not have much else to believe in; it hasn’t been a good economy into which to come of age for nearly thirty years, and the economic incentives of Japanese life make timely family formation for young adults all but impossible. Thus, the Abe years saw a boom in overtly right-wing anime.

Attack on Titan is an infamous example of a right-wing 2010s anime, as is a mecha show called Darling in the Franxx, which aired in 2018 and included an extended paean to heterosexual family formation, including via teenage sex. (Personally, I think the moral panic about teen pregnancy that characterized left-leaning Western fans’ reaction to Darling in the Franxx was also ridiculous, but it is still probably not something a mecha anime should be outright glorifying.) My personal favorite example of this cottage industry, though, is something called Gate: Thus the Japanese Self-Defense Force Fought There. This was a 2015 isekai anime based on a light novel series about the JSDF, Japan’s postwar “military,” launching an incursion through a wormhole into a high fantasy world. Gate actually had to have some of the web novels on which it was based edited for conventional publication to tone down some of the nationalism.

Another subcultural-pandering genre that’s become more and more popular lately is difficult to describe except by saying that it tends to be based on light novels and those light novels tend to have titles that go on for half a paragraph. Examples include No Matter How I Look At It, It’s You People’s Fault I’m Not Popular (I actually liked this one to an extent); Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?; Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie?; I Don’t Like You at All, Big Brother!; My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy; Lately, My Little Sister’s Been Acting a Bit Strange, But…; and Though Young People Recoil from Entering the Black Magic Industry, I Found Its Treatment of Employees Quite Good When I Entered It, and the President and Familiar are Cute Too so Everything is Awesome! Some inkling of the common themes and plot conceits of this type of series should be evident from the titles themselves.

I don’t mean to say that no overly cynical, politically questionable, or sex-fetishistic anime were being produced before 2011 or so. Obviously that would be an absurd claim. When I was coming up in anime fandom it was common to sarcastically recommend that people watch a show called Boku no Pico that was honest-to-goodness child pornography. (Since it’s animated, no actual children were harmed, and I don’t think anybody actually watched it—the suggestion that one do so was basically a form of hazing—but even so!) However, it does seem like shows that appeal to baser instincts—sexual, political, philosophical—have cornered the market in a way that wasn’t always the case, and I would attribute this to the perceived need to sell things to the harder core of Japan’s domestic otaku subculture. It’s not just me who says this; quotes floating around imputing hard forms of this claim to all-time great Hayao Miyazaki are usually falsely attributed, but he has made the claim in softer forms. In a television interview in 2014 Miyazaki said that most anime then in production was being made by creators who “don’t spend time watching real people” and “can’t stand looking at other humans.” I can think of no better way to describe a creative industry that would make a fantastic actress like Eri Kitamura voice a protagonist who’s motivated by proving that she’s not really related to her brother so that it’ll be legal for her to marry him.

IV. 

This brings us to the issue of reception and the cultural—and, yes, moral—strategies that anime fans have for watching anime and deciding what it means to them. Obviously the sort of material that I described in the above section does appeal to real audience desires; as early as 2000 Tamaki Saito could claim in his book Beautiful Fighting Girl that many anime fans were interested in the medium due to a psychosexual fascination with the types of female protagonists common at that time. (Think of Evangelion’s Rei and Asuka or Sailor Moon’s Inner and Outer Senshi.) However, there is also an intensely moralizing style of anime engagement, one that interacts with the fetishizing style in unexpected and sometimes counterintuitive ways.

A lot of this interaction has to do with a time-honored fan tradition called “shipping.” Most readers of this essay will be familiar with this concept, but some may not, so I’ll define it briefly. Shipping, short for relationshipping but these days invariably used on its own, is the practice or habit of favoring, rooting for, or creating fan content (such as fanfiction, fanart, etc.) for a romantic relationship between two characters in a work of fiction. A real-life equivalent of shipping is familiar to anyone who’s ever attempted to set up two acquaintances on a date; the fandom version will be, on some level, known to anyone who came away from Little Women wishing Jo had said yes to Laurie’s proposal, or who wanted Jerry and Elaine to stop sleeping around and get back together in Seinfeld. The pairing being shipped can have any level of textual support ranging from “completely nonexistent” to “they’ve been blissfully married since before the plot started,” and oftentimes a particular fan will have a preference for shipping straight, gay male, or lesbian pairings. (I mostly ship straight and lesbian pairings, but there are gay male pairings I like as well.)

For most of modern media fandom’s existence, it was understood that a fan’s shipping preferences had very little connection to what that fan actually wanted in a real romantic or sexual relationship. For example, there was never any question of whether a fan who favored ships between characters who were on hostile terms in the source text also favored relationships between people who hated one another in real life. An anime fan might enjoy Beatrice and Battler from Umineko: When They Cry, a pairing that has a sadomasochistic subtext, without desiring a sadomasochistic relationship for themselves; a fan might think that a three-way would solve some of the entanglements in Toradora! without condoning infidelity or even open relationships between real people.

For a few different reasons, fandom discussion in the first half of the 2010s gradually called these understandings into question. First of all, an important feature of traditional shipping culture was that it was mostly disconnected from questions of sexual morality. This made shipping spaces relatively convivial for people whose beliefs about real relationships might sharply differ—“your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay”—but it also meant that in many cases fans found themselves exposed to content to which they might have strong ethical or even religious objections. The overall ethical framework, such as it was, derived mostly from the “sex-positive” Western feminist consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, making it very difficult to get any moral criticism of consensual sexual behaviors (and sometimes even certain kinds of nonconsensual ones) taken seriously in fandom. This made life in fandom very difficult not only for people with strong religious beliefs about sexuality but also for partisans of the by-then-unfashionable “radical feminist” project of constructing a specifically feminist normative sexual morality. For whatever reason, in the early 2010s there was a convergence in interests between these two groups. A close friend of mine who’s narrated much of this history to me suspects that what happened was that a group of young people raised in conservative Protestant religious environments developed radical feminist opinions upon reaching adulthood, then set about putting those opinions in active opposition to prevailing fandom mores.

I don’t mean to over-idealize pre-2010s shipping mores, especially since they actually weren’t totally amoral but rather reflective of generically social-liberal views, which are not as value-neutral as they claim to be. Had I been asked at the time, I would have said that I was all for attempting to impose some moral parameters on the way media fandom, including anime fandom, approached shipping and fictive portrayals of sexuality. However, given what happened next, I would evidently not have been careful enough what I had wished for.

In 2014 or 2015, a subset of users of the microblogging website Tumblr.com whose own fannish interests mostly lay in newer lesbian-themed anime undertook an organized push to change the way their preferred series were discussed online. I noticed this at the time because it involved an, in my opinion, bizarrely disproportionate degree of hostility to the 2006 anime Simoun, mentioned above, which at the time was already fading into obscurity but was still a personal favorite of mine. According to the friend of mine mentioned a paragraph and a half ago, a lot of these people had specifically come from Madoka Magica fandom and were understandably upset about a then-recent sequel movie’s even darker and more cynical take on the show’s already-edgy subject matter. The culture of Tumblr—to which much of Western media fandom had migrated after the LiveJournal death spiral a few years before—encouraged, and in some corners of the site still encourages, taking an overtly political and thus in some sense overtly moral angle on almost any imaginable aesthetic question. The purpose of fiction is, as Marx might put it, not so much to describe the world as to change it; the purpose of changing the world through fiction is to vindicate the values and priorities of the post-materialist Millennial and Generation Z political left. Therefore the measuring rod for works of fiction became how hard they tried to represent, and how well they succeeded at representing, oppressed social groups in a positive way. It was into this overall structure of thought and set of standards for assessing media that the phenomenon of “anti-shipping” was finally introduced—first in lesbian anime fandom, then in anime fandom in general, finally in media fandom writ large.

“Anti-shipping” does not mean that one actually opposes all shipping; this would be next to impossible in media fandom as currently constituted, in which it is almost a dogmatized fact that the best reason to become invested in a book or series or movie is for its characters. It means, in effect, that one opposes the culture whose basics I describe several paragraphs above. To an extent this entails reasonable and normal moral positions (it’s true enough that well-adjusted people don’t usually want to read extensively about, say, incest). I don’t want to completely elide or discredit that point; in the days of “old fandom” much of the tone of fannish discussion of relationships and sex made me uncomfortable, and some corrective, at some point, was probably necessary. Those who knew me back in the early 2010s remember somebody who was in fact very rigidly moralistic in many ways. I was once challenged to write a piece of Doctor Who fanfiction using a common sex-related plot conceit that I strongly dislike and the only way I was able to make it convincing was to play it up for cosmic horror.

However, the anti-shipping mindset also entails a moral stridency that, much like similar moralizing styles elsewhere, often apophatically carries a prurient subtext. In other words, if someone looks at (to use an example I have in fact seen very recently) a relationship between two orphans who were raised in the same institutional setting and sees a case of sibling incest, that “someone” probably already had incest on the brain to begin with. So too with seeing a relationship between a twenty-three-year-old and a seventeen-year-old as not only legally dicey and probably exploitative but actually pedophilic in the same sense as if the twenty-three-year-old were molesting an elementary school student.

Some—admittedly mostly in the fandoms for Western cartoons rather than anime as such—apply this quality of moral analysis to previously uncontroversial forms of fanwork such as fanfiction about child characters as adults or ships between high school-aged characters played by adult actors. As well, many “antis” tend to see anybody who disagrees with them about these things as themselves suspect of an actual desire for pedophilic or incestuous sex in real life.

What happens when this lens is turned on anime, a medium with a long history of otaku-baiting raunchiness that comes from a culture with little in the way of a deeply ingrained theory of sexual morality? The answer is that many younger anime fans who have come up in an “anti”-dominated environment in the past five years don’t actually like anime as a medium at all. The idea of anime as an art form in conversation with itself seems to have evaporated. In its place we have, as I said above, a fandom culture more akin to that of Western first-run TV fandom, in which someone can happen to be a fan of a few shows-that-are-anime without knowing or caring much at all about the medium as a whole. Sometimes this even extends to whether or not one is actually a fan of the show in question. “I don’t watch My Hero Academia,” I saw one person with a My Hero Academia-themed Tumblr say recently. “I’m just here for Bakugou.” (Bakugou evidently is a specific character in My Hero Academia.) Evidently this person didn’t get the memo that being a Bakugou fan makes you an emotional abuse apologist.

V.

I don’t mean to moralize overmuch about the current state of the fandom or imply that my way of doing it in the 2008-2013 period is the way everybody has to keep doing it forever. I also don’t mean to suggest that there is no good material coming out of Japan anymore; in fact there is still plenty, despite the trends I have described. Carole & Tuesday, which I mentioned above, is a delightful show that fuses a mellow singer-songwriter sensibility with the two-fisted sci-fi setting of 90s classic Cowboy Bebop. Anime movies like Your Name and A Silent Voice still speak to audiences worldwide in much the same way that The Girl Who Leapt through Time and Summer Wars did in the late 2000s; Netflix distributed a movie of this type too, A Whisker Away, after its Japanese theatrical release got cancelled due to COVID-19. I’ve even liked the episodes of My Hero Academia that I’ve seen, although I evidently haven’t seen enough since I still barely know who Bakugou is. A friend of mine keeps trying to get me to watch Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and I’m confident that I’ll love it once I get around to it.

What I think has been lost is the sheer amount of high-quality content that was coming out of Japan in the 2000s; the “innocence” of anime fandom as it didn’t use to need to ask questions like whether a show was shilling right-wing nationalism (since even if the show was, it could usually be ignored); and the wild-west fandom culture that made anime fandom such a hot spot for heady cultural and aesthetic remixing. These features are in decline even among people who are nominally committed to preserving or honoring the way the fandom used to be. 4chan anons who were once apolitical and latterly became Ron Paul or Occupy Wall Street types have converged on the identitarian right along with the genres they follow. Nobody these days is as blasé about ungovernably amoral fan content as they used to be (and that, if nothing else, is almost certainly a good thing). People with discerning tastes have less to discern from, have become pickier and picker for all sorts of reasons, and often end up repudiating shows they once loved. Of course, some of this may be, simply, the fact that anime fans who were not grown up ten years ago are grown up now, and growing up is the first step on the inevitable road to bereavement.

A year or two ago I heard an interview with an academic of some sort, I think it might have been Jonathan Haidt, who said that after 2014 or so he had noticed a change among university undergraduates. New classes, he said, suddenly began to have next to no brute-facts, pre-ideological understanding of, interest in, or tolerance for the past beyond what they had personally experienced. This has not universally been my experience with younger people, but it is something I have noticed about some. It is something I have noticed in fandom not least of all spaces. Fortunately, “some” is not “all,” and there has not been a complete loss of memory. Plenty of people are still talking about—or, more often, being lectured to by people like me about—the fandom of the 2000s and early 2010s. Even though it is not where the fandom is right now, even though it is difficult to see how it could ever be where the fandom is again, it has not become a place that is never visited or never remembered.

Reading Narnia in My Late Twenties

A couple of years ago I reread the Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s fantasy novels by the British literary figure C.S. Lewis. The series was one that I devoured and greatly enjoyed as a preteen, although it was never as personally important to me as the work of Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien, and I became interested in seeing how it held up when I became aware of the sizeable, politically and intellectually fractious fandom that the books have online. Moreover, I’ve been reading a lot of Lewis’s non-Narnia writing over the past several years, mostly due to having fallen in with a number of people who greatly admired it when I was in graduate school.

The Narnia books are the only works that Lewis wrote for children; the rest of his literary output consists of academic writing on medieval and Renaissance literature, works of popular philosophy and theology of varying but mostly high quality, and a variety of science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories for adults, some of them excellent and some of them less so. Lewis had become an atheist in his youth and returned to the practice of Christianity in his early thirties, and much of his work assumes a culturally Anglican but philosophically skeptical audience. There is a lot to admire about his gentle, humane perspective and writing style; however, the man and the writing are far from perfect. Some of his work is gallingly sexist or racist; some is poorly-argued or about subject matter of dubious relevance or importance; some of his science fiction short stories in particular are much more amoral than the rest of his body of work. For the most part he is “to the left of” Tolkien politically and theologically, but he is still firmly right-of-center and he talks about current political and social issues a lot more than Tolkien does.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a cottage industry emerged, particularly in Britain, of criticizing the Narnia books on all sorts of grounds related to Lewis’s religious beliefs, political positions, and personal prejudices as expressed in the books’ writing style, thematic emphases, and plots. Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials series of young adult fantasy novels, emerged as a particularly fierce critic of the books’ Christian thematic content—one of the connecting threads of all seven novels is Aslan, the Great Lion, the creator of the Narnian world and a manifestation of Jesus Christ in a world populated by talking animals, as whose agent most of the protagonists act. I do not feel like addressing these criticisms in depth and checking their validity was not one of my reasons for rereading the books; however, I do acknowledge them and believe that some (but not all) of them are responding to genuine problems with the books and with Lewis’s worldview.

The Narnia books were published in one order but have a different internal chronology. I read them according to the internal chronology; this is apparently how Lewis preferred that they be read, but he did not have particularly strong feelings on the subject and many fans elect to ignore him. Personally I think that both orders have their strong points and weak points; first-time readers will better follow the overall narrative by reading the books in chronological order, but the order of publication carries on a more complete plotline for the first four books.

The first thing that struck me about the books is that their casual, conversational style is clearly intended for children—contrast the stark-yet-prolix style of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—but more literate children, or at least children more willing to consult a dictionary, than children’s authors today seem to assume exist. (I myself had to look up the word “apophthegm” and a slang use of the word “brick” that is dated now but might not have been at the time that the books were written.) The Magician’s Nephew, the book that I started with, involves human children from around the turn of the twentieth century being present at the Narnian world’s creation; travel between different universes was not the commonplace in science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s when the books were published that it is now, so Lewis spends some time explaining the concept in addition to showing instances of it. The setting’s earthly timeframe is introduced with observations like “schools were usually nastier than now. But meals were nicer.” Child readers are invited to imagine themselves in the days “when your grandfather was a child” via comparisons involving things with which they will be familiar.

The comparisons of various things in the stories to the British education system in particular persist throughout the books; one of the few good things Lewis has to say about the culture of Calormen, an Arabian Nightsistan-type country in the Narnian universe that figures prominently in two of the later books, is that “story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.” British educational culture in the 1940s, which was transitioning to more humane disciplinary methods and a more modern, science-oriented curriculum relative to the “nasty” schools of the 1890s and 1900s, also comes in for attack. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, which feature children transported to Narnia from around the end of or just slightly after World War II, involve a progressive boarding school called “Experiment House” with discipline so lax that it produces loathsome priggish brats at best and sadistic bullies at worst. Lewis’s depiction of Experiment House is part of a sustained satirical criticism of the social policies of the postwar Labour Party government, one in which he also ridicules as faddish the progressive convictions (vegetarianism, republicanism, pacifism, etc.) of one of the main characters’ parents and laments the decline and eventual demolition of a previously well-off character’s country house. One wonders what possible educational philosophy Lewis would have presented positively in the books. Perhaps he was simply mindful of his audience and aware that most children would rather not be in school than be there, unless they are abused or very lonely at home.

In addition to being better able to perceive the political content in Lewis’s depictions of the education system in the books now that I’ve done considerable time at every level of my own country’s education system myself, I’m also a lot more conscious of the books’ circumscription of sexuality. Obviously a children’s book series can’t and shouldn’t be sexually explicit, but it’s remarkable how little even implied sexuality figures into the lives of even the adult characters. This is something that Pullman criticized fiercely due to his inference of an attack on female sexuality in particular from the fact that one major character, Susan Pevensie, is absent in The Last Battle because she would rather focus on “nylons and lipstick and invitations” than on coming to Narnia’s aid in the world’s death throes. (Personally, I think that the idea that the only reason a twenty-one-year-old woman would be interested in looking put-together and getting invited to things is that she’s looking for sexual partners is itself profoundly sexist, although there are other things about Lewis’s decision to single out Susan in The Last Battle that I do take exception to.)

There is one notable exception to this feature of the books, also involving Susan. In The Horse and His Boy, which is the first (and less racist) of the two books to feature Calormen, Susan and her three siblings have been living in Narnia ruling it as kings and queens for fourteen years and have grown to adulthood there (which will subsequently be reversed when they finally return to England). Susan is contemplating a political marriage to Prince Rabadash, the eldest son and heir of the Tisroc (may he live forever!) of Calormen. At first, when Rabadash visits her in the capital of Narnia, she’s charmed and more than willing to go through with the marriage; however, when she visits him in the Calormene capital, she finds that at home he is a petty, capricious tyrant, and tries to call the marriage off. At this point Rabadash attempts to imprison her in Calormen and she and her brother Edmund have to escape via subterfuge. Rabadash then spends the rest of the book attempting to invade Narnia to abduct her. He insists that Susan is obliged to become his wife because he wants her to and because he perceives it as good for Narnia to be allied to Calormen; when discussing the fact that she sees things very differently, he calls Susan a “false jade.” Most readers will take this term to mean something like “liar” or “deceiver” but in fact it is an archaic euphemism for a prostitute—shades of self-ordained “nice guys” today who call women “sluts” and “whores” for not wanting to have sex with them. Rabadash, naturally, is resoundingly defeated by the book’s heroes and heroines. The Horse and His Boy’s perceptiveness about this particular type of male sexual mentality, to my mind, covers a multitude of the series’ sociopolitical sins.

I was surprised by how much I liked The Horse and His Boy in general. It is an atypical Narnia book in a number of different respects. A good friend of mine says it feels the most like a “typical fantasy novel” in that it is set entirely in the Narnian world, has relatively scanty religious content, and has protagonists who take their quest on themselves rather than having it handed down to them as a mission from God. It’s a story about freedom and slavery, and a story about knowing that the place where you are or the place where you are from is not really “home.” Our male protagonist Shasta is fleeing being sold into slavery by his cruel foster-father in Calormen; our female protagonist Aravis, a Calormene noblewoman, is fleeing a forced marriage to a powerful man several times her age. Through coincidence (which does not actually exist in Narnia and is instead the will of Aslan), both Shasta and Aravis have horses in their lives who are in fact Narnian Talking Horses enslaved in Calormen, and the four of them set out for freedom in Narnia together.

 ❦

The Horse and His Boy represents Narnia as Anglo to the point of overt cultural chauvinism against the generically Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Calormen, a representation that becomes explicitly racialized in the second book to feature Calormen, the series finale The Last Battle. However, the themes in this book resonated strongly with me, as someone who has had a hard time making a “home”—family and friends and gainful and meaningful work and a rich religious life—in any of the various places I have lived. Although I have never been enslaved, I have definitely felt unfree in other ways and believe that there is something inimical to true freedom in the society in which I live. Calormen is, of course, a symbol appropriately overt and unmistakable for young readers—slavery and rigid hierarchies in general pervade every element of the empire’s society. “For in [the Calormene capital] Tashbaan there is only one traffic regulation,” says Lewis, “which is that everyone who is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is more important; unless you want a cut from a whip or a punch from the butt end of a spear.” Even a generally sympathetic Calormene character at one point casually threatens to beat her slaves to death, and Shasta is not initially appalled by the idea of his foster-father selling him into slavery because for all he knows his buyer might be less abusive. C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to a fan that The Horse and His Boy is about “the calling and conversion of the heathen”; I prefer Lewis’s still-living stepson Douglas Gresham’s belief that it is about the experience of longing and the desire to be Someplace Else.

The Last Battle involves a Calormene invasion of Narnia under the aegis of a Narnian Talking Ape who sets up a phony Aslan to encourage Narnian collaboration with the invaders. The heresy that ultimately leads to the end of the Narnian world is the idea that Aslan and the Calormene god Tash are the same being. Many people have a difficult time understanding the book’s interfaith stance, largely because Lewis was writing before today’s main positions on interfaith issues were fully developed. Muslim readers have seen something sinister in the book’s depiction of Tash and Aslan as not only separate but antithetical; since Calormene society is generically “Middle Eastern,” could this not be taken as an allegorical repudiation of the idea (accepted in most circles but rejected by many Evangelicals and some very conservative Catholics) that the Abrahamic religions are worshipping the same God? But the Calormenes are not monotheists, and Tash has no real symbolic affinities with Allah; he’s described as a monstrous four-armed vulture-man, more akin to something out of pre-Abrahamic Semitic paganism or the Rigvedic pantheon than to the bodiless, appearance-less deity that Muslims confess. A devout worshipper of Tash is invited into Aslan’s paradise at the end of the book, because he sincerely and with a good heart sought the divine. But the book has absolutely nothing good to say about the worship of Tash as a religion, only about this particular devotee as an individual. The conventional interfaith stance that the book is closest to is probably inclusivism, which holds that members of religions other than that of the inclusivist can be saved, but not saved because their own religions are in themselves true. In online forums and social media sites there is much misunderstanding among Narnia fans of what exactly inclusivism entails and how it is different from other interfaith stances.

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The actual theology of the Narnia series is a little offbeat in general, and generates controversy even among conservative Christians who share most of Lewis’s sociopolitical hobbyhorses. Tolkien nominally disliked the books because of their magpieish mishmash of different real-world mythologies (as opposed to Tolkien’s attempt at self-consistency with his primarily Norse and Celtic influences), but I have read articles suggesting that he objected to their implied theology too. Some Evangelicals today object to the inclusivism in The Last Battle, which tends not to bother mainline Protestants or Catholics. Some Catholics object to the books’ fundamental premise that Jesus might take a nature other than humanity upon Himself in another world, which tends not to bother Protestants. Some mainline Protestants object to the gutless caricatures of philosophical liberalism in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, which tends not to bother Evangelicals or Catholics.

If I were asked to list three main theological concepts or premises present in The Chronicles of Narnia, here is what I would list:

1.      An integral, organic connection between humanity and the natural world. Humans, when present in Narnia, rule over the various Talking Beasts and mythological creatures as kings and queens, but there is nevertheless a certain ontological equality between human and Talking Beast nature, and indeed between Aslan the Great Lion and Jesus the Son of Man. Talking Beasts can and in some cases do lose the ability to speak and reason and revert to being normal animals; at the beginning of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, certain normal animals are chosen to become the first Talking Beasts. This is also implicit in the books’ inclusion of Classical figures such as Bacchus, Silenus, and various nymphs and dryads; the “natural” paganisms of Classical Antiquity coexist with and operate under the umbrella of the “supernatural” truths of Christianity.

2.      An emphasis on truth and reality. The Last Battle features a heavenly “real” version of Narnia in its final chapters, the phony Aslan is set up against the true Aslan, and the name of the Calormene who sought to serve Tash honestly and righteously is Emeth, Hebrew for “truth.” The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has “real water” that obviates the need for any other sustenance and enables its drinkers to look directly into the rising sun. In The Silver Chair Aslan is “The Real Lion.” Lewis wasn’t an empiricist and the series’ quasi-Platonism doesn’t have much of what people today would understand to be evidence to support it, but the books have no room or patience for postmodernity, relativism, or irony.

3.      A portrayal of God as a partner, protector, and friend before He is a father or king. Lewis would of course never deny the majesty or transcendence of God, but Aslan is primarily someone to be friendly with rather than someone to obey. The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy are to a certain extent exceptions to this since the characters are less personally close to Aslan than the extended Pevensie family and friends who are the protagonists of the other five books.

Of course, there are numerous other theological ideas present and asserted within the books. The first core concept that I mention here is itself part of a wider celebration and affirmation of the goodness of creation and the real comforts of the world that extends throughout Lewis’s body of work. Michael Moorcock called Lewis and Tolkien’s writings “Epic Pooh” that had a lulling and complacency-inducing effect on the reader; this may have some merit, but Lewis genuinely believed that there was much about the world worth celebrating rather than simply buckling under and submitting to. He doesn’t see the world “sacramentally” in the way that a Catholic like Tolkien would—Lewis likes Pilgrim’s Progress too much for that, and there doesn’t even seem to be any equivalent to the Eucharist in Narnia—but he doesn’t have the occasional Protestant distaste for the phenomenal world either. In The Four Loves, not one of his best nonfiction writings, he speaks highly of St. Francis’s denomination of his body as “brother donkey,” because donkeys are next to impossible either to hate or to revere.

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The first-published and best-known Narnia novels are The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, about which I have not said much, less because they do not interest me and more because they will already be so familiar to most people with any interest in the series. They got pretty good movie adaptations in the late 2000s; they’re the only books to feature the “original” core human cast of the four Pevensie siblings (although each Pevensie has at least one further appearance). The movie adaptations have led to some odd interpretations of the characters among the series’ fans. Most notably, Susan, who in the books is a pragmatic and convention-minded person of average intelligence and slightly above-average drive, in the movies stays pragmatic but is also more book-smart and willful than Lewis wrote her. I do not want to pass judgment on whether the Narnia fandom’s adoption of Susan’s movie characterization has made most fans too inclined or not inclined enough to see the sexism in The Last Battle’s treatment of her. It certainly makes her relatively passive behavior in The Horse and His Boy (not appearing at the climactic battle nor interacting with Rabadash when he is finally punished for his misdeeds) harder to take into account.

There is a great deal more to be said about the Narnia books but these are the main impressions that come to mind at the time that I am writing this. In particular, there were several moments in The Horse and His Boy and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in particular that were deeply meaningful to me as I read them but that I don’t really wish to discuss at any length in an essay like this. The two that come to mind right now are Aslan’s declaration of his steadfast presence in main male protagonist Shasta’s life in the former book and Lucy Pevensie’s ships-in-the-night instant feeling of kinship with a “fish-herdess” in an underwater kingdom in the latter. Maybe someday I will be more willing to address my feelings about these scenes logically and discursively. In that case I will have taken a great step towards fully understanding my own feelings on this touchstone series in the history of children’s fantasy literature.