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.

The Lesser Beauty

When I was studying Japanese in the languages, literatures, and cultures department at UMass Amherst in the early 2010s, I became enamored of a now-obscure school of medieval Japanese Buddhism called Ji-shū, the Time School. Ji Buddhism was in most respects within the mainstream of Pure Land Buddhist thought, whose characteristic features include the belief that final enlightenment in the present world is no longer possible and the best course of action is to pray to a cosmic buddha called Amida for a rebirth in his Pure Land, a universe in which practicing the dharma is easier. Pure Land is the most widespread and popular type of Buddhism in Japan but has historically not been appealing to Western converts. Where Ji and its founding figure, an itinerant monk called Ippen Shōnin, parted company with mainstream Pure Land was in the belief that by invoking Amida’s name, a practice called the nenbutsu in Japanese, one effected a sort of spiritual time travel back to Amida’s own enlightenment, in which one then partook. The school’s name derives both from this belief and from the related practice of chanting the nenbutsu at particular times of day, somewhat similar to the set times for prayer in Islam.

I attempted to induce something similar to this recently, for secular reasons and involving my own past. On the way back from a road trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from my apartment in Upstate New York, my housemate and I passed through Bordentown, the New Jersey river town where I spent most of my adolescence after my mother and I relocated from rural Vermont. I have not lived in Bordentown for a decade and had not even been there for almost eight years; I had little idea of what to expect from returning, but I did expect—and want—for it to involve a powerful emotional and even numinous reaction. I went out of my way to elicit this reaction by putting on Riot!, a Paramore album from 2007 (an extremely influential year in my life), while approaching the Delaware River from the west on Interstate 276. It worked. The two hours or so that my housemate and I spent in Bordentown overawed me so much that now, two weeks later, I have found myself waking up and lying in bed for half an hour thinking about it, remembering.

I remember the routine I developed in that great year of 2007, when I was old enough to be a latchkey kid and my mother worked full-time at a legal services firm in Trenton. I would get off the bus after school, go into my house, drop off my backpack, then leave the house again and go to Boyd’s Drugstore. Turn right out the front door, northwest on Second; turn left, southwest on Railroad; kitty-corner across the intersection of Railroad and Farnsworth, a quick glance over my left shoulder at the new war memorial (the old war memorial being a statue of an eagle perched on a cannon in front of the post office at Prince and Walnut), and into Boyd’s. Buy a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice—the bottling plant was in Bordentown at that time, across from a retirement home for Divine Word Missionaries that now houses Bordentown’s city hall—and oftentimes also a small bag of sour Skittles and some pretzels. (I don’t like that this memory involves specific brands rather than generalizations like “sour candy,” but it does.) Then out of the drugstore, either across to the war memorial where I would sit for a few minutes eating my snacks or back home to sit around reading, posting on LiveJournal, or watching Avatar: The Last Airbender reruns until my mother got home two or three hours later. I only had this routine for about a year and a half but it made me feel, frankly, more normal than almost anything else I have ever done. More normal and yet more conservative; almost nobody has this kind of picture-perfect after-school bumming-around experience nowadays. All I was missing was friends who lived in walking distance, since I went to a private day school with an enormous catchment area.

From Boyd’s one could proceed to the northwestern end of Farnsworth, near which there was a beautiful old redbrick house with a gate into a garden that was always absolutely wild with wisteria. There would be a white cat sitting on the stoop; I wonder when the cat ever moved or went inside to eat or sleep or use the litter box. Now the wisteria is gone and the house seems to be abandoned; the upstairs windows are boarded up. I don’t know why, or what happened to the cat. At that end of town one could also descend from the bluffs to a wetland area with walking paths and somewhat dubious, murky creek water that I always wanted to try going swimming in but never did.

Or from my front door I could walk southwestward in an almost Euclidean straight line—or segment, rather—down Church Street, and end up at Christ Episcopal Church, a conservative Anglo-Catholic parish that I went to on Christmas Eve mostly for the aesthetics. Christmas Eve 2007 was when I suddenly started believing in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a belief that I developed before I developed a firm belief in God. Christ Church has a leafy, mossy graveyard like something out of This England; still to this day it does. I was an enormous Anglophile in those days and still have a distaste for the performative hatred of people and things English that characterizes a lot of what currently passes for American leftist rhetoric.

The subject of foreign cultures with which I became enamored during this period of my life brings us to the subject of the Jade Island, also known as the U-Turn Route 130 Chinese Restaurant—a New Jerseyite touch if there ever was one. The Jade Island served sushi too; it, along with a downtown Bordentown Japanese restaurant called Tsukasa, was where I fell in love with Japanese food, and the anime and manga fandom culture of those days was where I fell in love with Japanese writing. The first girl I sort-of-dated was heavily into that scene, and got me into it. The Jade Island is still there but has switched to an all-takeout model now—regrettably, since the interior used to be and still is gorgeous. When I went there with my housemate I sat reading a Japanese pulp sci-fi novel for old time’s sake while we waited for our order. It wasn’t quite the same, and not only because Otherside Picnic is a very different kind of story from Azumanga Daioh, or for that matter whatever Takahashi series my quasi-girlfriend had recommended in a particular week.

Old downtown business that are gone: App’s Hardware, which is understandable because I think there was some kind of sex scandal. Jester’s Café, which is understandable because of the pandemic but still must have been an axe blow very near Bordentown’s roots (the same roots that push up the crazy-paving brickways that will probably never change). Tsukasa, moved to a larger location outside of town and then closed there too, probably also because of the pandemic. The Beanwood Café, where I would sometimes go see live music with my best friend when she would visit me on our respective breaks from college. What’s still there? Under the Moon, for one, which I think is an Argentinian restaurant. Marcello’s. The Old Bookshop. Probably Thompson Street Halloweens. Possibly my childhood cat Pando’s drifting spirit, within that little white nineteenth-century house with its Doors-of-Durin ornamental living room pillars. Edna St. Vincent Millay would not have been resigned to all this; Christina Rossetti probably would have.

Am I? Perhaps. It depends on what the meaning of “resigned” is. In a way there’s nothing to which to be resigned to; the attempt to induce a Ji Buddhism-esque original enlightenment succeeded in the sense that I did feel catapulted back in time even though the current state of Bordentown has changed. Time, from a Christian theological or even theoretical-physical perspective, is less an arrow or a cycle than a particular entity, in its own way as concrete as objects in space, a dimension that from God’s perspective is just as firm and all-knowable as any of the three spatial dimensions but through which God, for reasons best known to Himself, only suffers us to move in one direction. St. Bonaventure and other medieval scholastics added to time and eternity the aevum, eviternity populated by eviternal beings like angels, demons, the saints, and the damned. This borderland or interstice between the temporal and the eternal, changeable in some ways and unchangeable in others—was I catapulted here by a Paramore album, the way we talk about high explosives blowing one to kingdom come? I don’t care. I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful that I believe it exists. In it is Bordentown the Eviternal City, always in my heart.

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!

Patriots in Control

A specter is haunting the American left, the specter of “America Bad” thinking—not “America Bad” in the sense that America is flawed and most Americans are not willing enough to recognize those flaws, but “America Bad” in the sense that we are both the villain and the main character of current world history, a sort of Walter White or Patrick Bateman of the international arena. This is the tendency that Jeane Kirkpatrick attributed to the “blame America first crowd”—unhelpfully, because Jeane Kirkpatrick did not actually know who was and wasn’t in the “blame America first crowd,” or, if she did, she pretended not to for the sake of the cheap seats.

The “blame America first crowd” that actually exists makes two basic mistakes. The first is in thinking in the first place that the United States is a uniquely malign influence in the world. It isn’t; indeed, America is an unusually benign global hegemon in most ways, although given the direly low bar set by previous hegemons, this is not much of an accomplishment. Ideally the recent practices of some of America’s so-called near peers like China’s treatment of its religious minorities or Russia’s high-on-its-own-supply ideology-poisoned unprovoked invasion of Ukraine would have disabused people of the idea that America is a uniquely abusive world power, and in many cases it has, but unfortunately, there are still plenty of people on the left who have had exactly the opposite reaction. One’s modus potens is another’s modus tollens, and some people are in fact so committed to “America Bad” thinking that they conclude that anything bad-seeming that America’s rivals are doing must be either misreported or not actually bad at all. One can sometimes see Pope Francis obviously and publicly struggling to suppress this line of thinking when he comments on the plight of Ukraine; “NATO is barking at Russia’s door” is an assumption about the situation that it is understandable for a Latin American Catholic prelate to make, given that region’s own history, and in the grand scheme of things the Pope is probably to be commended for resisting the temptation to go all the way down that rabbit hole. I can’t say the same for figures who are American, like Noam Chomsky and the ever-embarrassing Glenn Greenwald, suddenly adopting a naïve pacifism about Russia or even, as Chomsky did at one point, claiming that Donald Trump is “the one Western statesman” who actually wants peace. These people have completely reversed axiom and application, going from “my country is violating its own declared principles” to “violating one’s own declared principles is that which my country does, and if a country opposed to mine appears to be doing that, it must actually not be.”

The second mistake of the anti-American American left is to assume that a country—one’s own country—is reducible to the worst instincts of its political classes and the most broken aspects of its political institutions. American imperialism doesn’t make America bad for the same reason that your cousin from the poor side of town getting busted for drug dealing doesn’t make her bad; people aren’t reducible to the worst decision they’ve ever made and countries aren’t reducible to the worst features of their political cultures or military histories. Some might respond to this by pointing out that the United States’ domestic culture has obvious and universally known pathologies as well—the consumerism, the horrible diets, the hyperdivisive sociocultural politics, the obsession with large and terrifying cars and the built environment that caters to them, the increasing relegation of serious interest in religion and the divine to certain right-wing subcultures that most other Americans reasonably despise. Again, however, if most of us saw a family member or friend mishandling their household affairs in analogous ways, our natural reaction would be to pity them, not to hate them. (I say “our natural reaction,” not necessarily the reaction that we think is in keeping with our political commitments; plenty of American leftists today do also have a problem with jumping awfully quickly to interpersonal shunning of those with messy lives or bad ideas.)

A country is just its people, as a group of individuals and as a collective; this includes the abstractions that emerge out of any mass of people, such as social emotions and cultural practices. America is me, my family, and most (but not all) of my close friends; it is Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and the lion’s share of the people who love and hate them most; it is art forms like jazz and comic strips, holiday traditions like unedifying political arguments on Thanksgiving and presents (or Chinese food) on Christmas, and time-honored aspects of workingmen’s and workingwomen’s culture like filling out March Madness brackets at random, stealing small items from one’s workplace, and dying of black lung around the age of sixty. For a leftist to hate America yet claim to fight for the liberation of humanity is for a priest to love God and hate his parishioners, or for a “male feminist ally” to exploit and berate his own mother.

It is imperative, then, that a left-wing patriotism reemerge in the United States, both as a civic value—those who control American public life will always either be or make others perceive them to be those who love America best—and as a moral value—exaggerated contempt for something that is flawed, but is ours, is a flaw of character and virtue on our own part. Left-wing American patriotism should honor—but not revere; reverence for mere mortal men is something that American patriotism in general absolutely does have in excess—left-wing partisan or sectional figures such as Jones, Debs, and Guthrie. Perhaps in our more trollish, bullet-biting, or yes-chad moments we might even add in more ambivalent characters like Jimmy Hoffa. At the same time we should not abandon ecumenical American patriotic figures like Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts. Rather than rocketing back and forth between denigrating our national heroes as the lowest of the low and unduly praising them to the stars, we should seek to interpret their lives and actions in ways as compatible as possible both with our political and moral values and with historical facts. Whether or not the country deserves our love is not the issue. We deserve to let, or make, ourselves love it.

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.

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.

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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.