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glassandmetal · 20 days ago

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Drama Queen and a Dissection of Fascist Thinking, Framing, and Language

If you're at all plugged into the anime sphere, you know what's going on. If you don't, Drama Queen is a manga made by Kuraku Ichikawa, and made its debut in Weekly Shonen Jump on December 1st of this year. Kuraku Ichikawa's past works have been drama-action oneshots, none of which I believe are particularly relevant to the discussion of today. What is relevant is that with one chapter released and eight days of time to ferment, Drama Queen has been embroiled in drama, with the common talk being that it's a blatantly xenophobic, anti-immigration screed that at times seems to almost perfectly trace common alt-right arguments and talking points.

Sickened, but curious, I decided to read the one chapter released thus far. The following is not only a window into what's going on, for those who are equally sickened but curious, as well as my analysis and thoughts on the same.

The backstory for Drama Queen is that, nine years ago, a meteorite was hurtling towards Earth, spelling destruction for the planet and all of its inhabitants. They were saved by the intervention of a species of unnamed aliens, who kind of look like humanoid puffballs with goofy face trunks. The two coexist, but there's an underlying tension from the very beginning. A male alien/female human couple walk the street, as we see advertisements for high-rise apartments available only to aliens, hourly parking where aliens don't have to pay, an alien baseball MVP on a big screen in the public square. As the alien points up, our first main character, Nomamoto, stands behind, bleeding from the nose.

Out of the gate, we obviously see that the aliens are given a preferential treatment, but I want to focus on the nosebleed. The implication is obviously that Nomamoto was just elbowed in the face, and she's going to begin yelling about it, but the panel looks like this.

It's not impossible that she was elbowed in the face, but I wanted to draw attention to a few things. No impact sound is drawn implying that contact was made. The angle between where Nomamoto is standing and where the alien's arm is positions feels off. And in the panel after showing Nomamoto's bloodied nose, she's shown standing quite a distance away from the couple, that implies only a moment or two passed between "contact" and confrontation.

This isn't immediately relevant, and in the grand scheme of things, whether or not the alien actually did elbow her is irrelevant. But this is our first suggestion that Nomamoto might not be the most reliable narrator. It's not out of the pale that she was either bleeding from the nose already and decided to pick a fight, or deliberately walked into him so she could start one. In discussions on this manga, I've seen multiple people say this is their first impression of what happened. But I digress.

Nomamoto points out that the alien just elbowed her, only for the alien to ask "who are you" and then accuse Nomamoto of making false accusations. As Nomamoto demands an apology, the human woman apologizes on behalf of her "partner", only for Nomamoto to storm off angrily, wishing death upon aliens for being rude, and cursing out the woman for calling her boyfriend her "partner". A bizarre, almost out of place gripe. #wokeness, am I right?

Nomamoto notes that she's grateful the aliens destroyed the meteor, but also notes that the aliens "clearly" look down upon humans. "But I'd probably be in trouble if I said that", she says to herself. She passes by posters for "New Universe Week", a celebration held to "remember our love and gratitude for that day". On the television, a newscaster proudly reports that the alien population in Japan has exceeded 17 million, with 60,000 in Senno city alone. They interview people who are grateful for the aliens, glad that they're alive today, or that space travel is now easily affordable, as Nomamoto wonders when she last ate meat. Her paychecks are abysmal, but she can't fall into self-pity. Can't be miserable, stay positive.

Nomamoto's job sucks. A factory job with the aforementioned miserable paychecks. The AC isn't on, with her boss using some sort of "cooling spray" on himself. Despite being her boss, he barely speaks Japanese, with his text bubbles rendered as random scribbles that vaguely resemble kanji, but are in fact more gibberish than anything else. Nomamoto's boss is screaming at her, and her nose has recently been bloodied, implying he struck her. Nomamoto even asks why he always hits her, but we once again do not see the impact (and if it's hot, which the lack of AC corroborates, it could just be a heat nosebleed). As is to throw Nomamoto's reliability further into question, her coworkers note that Nomamoto is frequently in trouble with the boss, she's always scowling, and even they don't like her.

The first time we see an alien actually hit someone on-screen is when the boss accidentally elbows a man behind him. Said man turns around, demands an apology, and when faced with the unintelligible speech, ask how he can be the boss when he can't even speak the country's planet's language. The man also notes that the working conditions are garbage, he won't turn the AC on, and nobody else complains as the boss makes money off of everyone else's backs. This man is Kitami, and he will become very important soon. He and Nomamoto get acquainted, and Kitami, before leaving, notes that it would have been a big deal if Kitami hit his boss back, because the higher-ups are all aliens, and "society is on their side".

At home, Nomamoto summarizes her shitty living situation, which I'd like to make another aside for. She's 17 years old, cut ties with her parents for reasons unknown, and doesn't want to come crawling back to them. Her full time job returns a payslip of roughly $1,000, and she feels like she can't find another job because she has no skills to speak of. Nomamoto lives a financially insecure life with nobody else to fall back upon. She's isolated, but not just by her poor economic status. But by the fact that something isn't right about all of this. Nomamoto wonders, how could anyone else work for chump change for a smile on her face? Are they happy, working themselves to the bone for an alien boss? Sure, the aliens saved humanity, but something doesn't feel right. And she hates it. It's not like she's supposed to feel this way. "But I'd probably be in trouble if I said that", she says to herself. "I wish they'd all just disappear".

In this moment, Nomamoto translates her economic anxieties into racial scorn. She doesn't explicitly say it, but does suggest that, if the aliens didn't come down to Earth, her lot in life would be better. That it's their fault that she's poor, and miserable, and alone. She even projects that fear and hatred onto other people. She's a madwoman, because she's the only one who can see the truth that's in front of her face. That everyone else either can't see, or will punish her for naming it. And by framing herself preemptively as a victim, a martyr who would be hung on the cross for saying what she truly feels, she pushes herself further into isolation.

And to wrap this aside up in a bow, Nomamoto brings her own introspective journey to a close. Acknowledging that she's not supposed to feel this way, she declares "misery is for the weak" and decides to watch dog videos to take her mind off of things. This close to "the truth", and she shies away with a thought-terminating cliche, and some mindless entertainment. The blue pill that prevents you from waking up, the goyslop meant to distract you and keep you complacent.

At a nearby beach, Nomamoto and Kitami meet up to do some fishing. It's not very eventful. What's important is the conversation after they accidentally lose the tiny morsel they managed to catch. Spaceships dot the sky, trailing by constantly. They're constantly visible in any shot of the skyline, and Kitami notes that they're reflected even in the ocean. The world's changed in a few short years, and the ocean he used to know and love, where he'd play with his family, is no more. Modernity may bring wonders (as mentioned before, trips to the moon are routine and very accessible now), but they've taken the past away from this man.

Bringing up his family directs the conversation towards that, and Kitami drops his first bombshell of the night. His tragic past is that HIS WHOLE FAMILY WAS KILLED BY ALIENS. As he relates the story, they were celebrating his sister's high school graduation when an alien car came flying in reverse. "I'm sure he was a drunk driver" Kitami says, as though he doesn't know all the details. But according to him, the police didn't try looking for the culprit, probably too afraid it'd turn into an interplanetary incident. In one fell swoop, we not only see why Kitami hates aliens, but we also, rather blatantly, reference reports of "migrant crime waves". When I read this, the first thing I thought of were the "rapefugees" craze, or constant news cycles about Muslim migrants killing children and the police not arresting them due to "cultural differences", because as we know, police love NOT arresting brown people. For a more contemporary example, you might have thought of "they're eating the cats and dogs".

But that isn't the only bombshell Kitami drops in this conversation. He asks Nomamoto if she thinks any of this is weird either. How it seems convenient for the aliens. He then openly speculates, what if there was no meteor in the first place? The aliens have access to technology well above that of humanity, so isn't it possible the whole thing was staged? Kitami has no evidence that this is the case. He just asks questions and posits an idea. But in this moment, we see the birth of a conspiracy theory. With no proof that the aliens are intentionally malicious, Kitami invents the proof, and the free-floating, directionless hatred that Nomamoto feels can now be given justification.

Kitami calls what the aliens are doing a "soft invasion". A nonviolent effective takeover of the planet Earth. And I'd like to digress her for a second to point out some disparate elements and weave them into a more coherent thought.

The first thing we see is an alien with a human girlfriend, walking around town with her hanging off of his arm. I don't personally read the earring as any sort of explicit racial coding, because I don't think the aliens represent anything other than a vague concept of a "foreign other", but you do you.

News reporters happily announcing that the Japanese population is increasingly becoming composed of aliens.

The cover featuring Nomamoto surrounding by the phallic trunks, even appearing to jerk one of them off, suggestive of an interracial gangbang of sorts.

The meteorite with an alien trunk, expelling spermlike spaceships...

...Which trail along the sky and the ocean, as though the aliens were figuratively raping the very planet and filling it with their seed? It hasn't been said outright, but the implications and the visual storytelling all evoke the idea of the Great Replacement. A "soft invasion" where through immigration and miscegenation, the native population of the country (or planet) will be supplanted by another race. A racist conspiracy theory that tends to go hand-in-hand with another racist conspiracy, that said Great Replacement is being orchestrated by some nefarious group (usually the Jews, most conspiracy theories go back to antisemitism if you give it enough time). In this case, the aliens fake a meteorite, so they can become heroes to humanity, so they can cow them through love and gratitude into not objecting to the destruction of the planet and the replacement of their demographics, so says Kitami.

Kitami follows up his thoughts by saying that it's all rotten, the world can go to filth for all he cares, and he wishes the aliens would all just disappear. Nomamoto says the same, and that she'd always felt that way. The two spend the rest of the day talking trash, building alien heads out of sand and kicking them into dust, punctuating each kick with a personal grievance and a "drop dead".

"This is so much fun. Who knew it was so much fun," Nomamoto says to herself, "being miserable?". This entire time, Nomamoto has held back her hatred towards the alien with a kick to herself. Stay positive, don't pity yourself, misery is for the weak, etc. Her attempts at not giving into hatred and staying positive were her taking the blue pill. Once she had a serious talk with Kitami, someone more in touch with his own hatred, he talked her into taking not just the red pill, but the black pill as well. Feel miserable. Feel hopeless. It's not just that your life is bad, the whole world is going to shit as well. It's unfixable. And you know who to blame and who to hate now.

The next day (another bloody nose implied to be caused by physical abuse, another suspicious omission of us actually seeing it), Nomamoto is fired. Her boss accidentally set himself on fire, while according to her coworkers, she just sat there and watched him burn to death. She feels bad that she got fired, but felt no guilt whatsoever upon seeing her boss die. Kitami calls her phone, having looked up her address online, and brings the dead body of a different alien inside. Kitami claims that the alien turned around and accidentally hit him in the face, giving him a bloody nose. Kitami beat him to death in rage. "Killing people is fundamentally wrong. Only I don't see this thing as a person", dehumanizing the man he murdered in cold blood.

After discussing how to hide the body, Nomamoto suggests eating the alien, citing how her boss' burnt body smelled like grilled squid. They eat the entire body, bones and all. Nomamoto loves the taste, but Kitami hates it. He does decide, however, that they have a perfect system set up.

(Also the aliens are strong enough to fake a meteor catastrophe and take over the country, but are dumb enough to set themselves on fire by sheer accident, and weak enough that two random people, with enough determination and cunning, could weed them all out by killing and eating enough of them.)

Before I continue on to the conclusion, I do want to address a pervasive reading of this manga I've seen thus far. From what we've seen, the aliens are the dominant power in society. They get preferential treatment, are effectively worshiped, protected, and live in luxury. Meanwhile, our antiheroes are decidedly working class, and suffering in poverty. And Kitami's plan of using Nomamoto as a human garbage disposal would entail her, in a sense, literally eating the rich. However, I don't buy the idea that this is *actually* about capitalism, or at least, not exclusively. Even if I were to adopt that reading, and it isn't entirely incompatible, it wouldn't shake off the racial overtones and tropes previously invoked. Attention is drawn to the cultural differences between humans and aliens repeatedly. They're drawn in an incongruous art style, obviously out of place in this world. "If you live in my country, speak my language" is not a proletarian criticism towards the bourgeois. The class power the aliens wield is not what is bad about them. It's simply a tool they wield, and they are bad, and they do not belong here.

Another read I've seen is that this isn't an anti-immigration screed, it's anti-colonization. The aliens are a technologically advanced culture who take over a less advanced one, framing themselves as saviors while making the native population second-class citizens and living in luxury off of the fruits of their labor. Taken at face value, this is an accurate description of the events of the backstory (at least according to Kitami's read of things). However, I hesitate to say this one is a good read either. As above, even if it's an anti-colonial screed, it's one that still heavily indulged in malicious, baseless conspiracy theory and an explicitly racial animosity. And as above, it's not uncommon for the language of colonization and decolonialism to be appropriated by the alt-right or equivalent figures. But more to the point, colonization is about dominance and subjugation, not integration. Aliens may be privileged, but Nomamoto's boss isn't where the rot stops and ends. The aliens are baseball stars, and they're dating Japanese women (colonial regimes have famously been kind towards interracial couples, of course of course). As it stands, this is currently the "white genocide" version of colonization, where nobody dies but there's DEI, more people of a different race than you, and you have this vague feeling that life would be better for you if they weren't here anymore.

It should also be noted that, if we're going to draw parallels to real life, Japan doesn't have a colonization problem, and has in fact been a colonial power itself in the past, in addition to having pervasive issues regarding xenophobia, anti-immigration sentiment, and all around just being a conservative hell country.

So I think I've demonstrated the idea that Drama Queen is absolutely dripping with a certain alt-right language and framing (inb4 someone tells me Japan doesn't have an alt-right and my American mind cannot comprehend their mystical nuanced, superior Nippon politics folded 1,000 times or something). Boiling it down to barest essence, this is a story about a teenager with no money, no power, and no place in the world who hates her shitty life and is harboring a free-floating grievance towards a group of foreigners who, at best, are frequently rude and catered to, at worst are directly responsible for her misery. After various attempts to ignore this feeling about what feels right to her, and to ignore how bad her life is, she meets a man who feels the same way, but he knows he hates them. He endears her with a sob story about how he was wronged by the foreigners, and then weaves a conspiracy theory about how they tricked the entire native population and have now effectively enslaved them. This "peaceful coexistence" is actually an invasion, and with all of this freshly implanted, the teenager goes from passive annoyance that she tries to suppress, to open hatred she embraces, consciously wallowing in her misery because she knows that she's a victim now. And then uses that hatred and sense of victimization to indulge in dehumanization, vigilante justice, and open, genocidal hatred. This *is* Racist Dungeon Meshi.

So I don't think that's part is arguable. The story of Drama Queen is anti-immigration, it uses alt-right arguments and framing, and by my count, looking over Umberto Eco's 14 points of Ur-Fascism, we hit 7 of them (rejection of modernism, action for action's sake, fear of difference, appeal to a frustrated middle class, obsession with a plot, enemy is too strong and too weak, and maybe pacifism is trafficking with the enemy). However, there is another question present. Drama Queen's narrative is a fascist one, but is it so because the author is pro-all of that shit, or are we going to get a rug pulled out from underneath us when we reveal that the protagonists are in fact villains, and they're meant to be seen as irrational and bigoted?

I dunno lol

As I pointed out, both Nomamoto and Kitami seem like unreliable narrators. They're obviously biased, and we only have one chapter worth of manga to see what the world is like, so I can imagine that they're skewing things to be in line with their worldview, or else are so trapped in their ideologie *schniff* that they can't see outside of it. Adding onto that is the fact that while Nomamoto is young and dumb, Kitami seems older, more hateful, and more violent. He's the one who proposed the conspiracy theories, he's the one who murdered an alien because he got bumped into, he tracked down where Nomamoto lives online and then forced her into hiding the body. And he's the one who proposed the kill-and-eat plan. Nomamoto is no saint, but Kitami is actually deranged in his hatred, and he's pushing her further into radicalization. Not to mention, "Drama Queen" can refer to nobody else but the main characters, taking their slights and everyday frustrations and blowing them up into a war of extermination. It's not impossible that Drama Queen might be Mouthwashing-esque in the sense that our viewpoint characters are unreliable, warp the story to suit their needs, and not only do you need to read between the lines to see what's really going on, but it will all crescendo in a moment of undeniable denunciation of the thought processes displayed. If this possibility turns out to be the case, then Drama Queen might actually be genius satire, intentionally evoking anti-immigration rhetoric for the purpose of spotlighting and deconstructing it, leaving an open question to the audience of if they fell for it as well. If they cheered on monsters and believed their lies.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that this is not "satire and criticism of the thing" and is in fact just "the thing". I've "read between the lines" to showcase how Nomamoto and Kitami are self-deluded and invent narratives to make themselves the heroes of their own story. But is there anything actually written between those lines, or am I being overly charitable, or stuck in a sense of denial, refusing to believe that such an obviously bigoted work like this would get published. It's not the first time this has happened. If you've never heard of Tokyo Shinobi Squad, don't worry because nobody else was reading it either. I could tell you the plot is about cyberpunk mercenary ninjas fighting each other, but I don't care about that and you don't either. The only thing people talk about when they bring up Tokyo Shinobi Squad is the opening textcrawl and first line of the main character, where they bemoan globalization turning Japan into a crime, slum, and terrorism ridden wasteland (businesses totally aren't in bed with organized crime in modern day Japan, don't worry about it the yakuza doesn't exist). And this was published in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2019!

Everything is very uncertain right now. In the first few pages, Nomamoto complains about women who call their boyfriends "partner", a gripe about progressive trends completely unrelated to the main thesis surrounding aliens. Is that another dogwhistle meant to appeal to reactionaries who view progressive and queer things as being part of the same rot as the immigration bringing aliens into the world, or is that a heads-up to let us know that we're going to be picking apart, making fun of, and talking *about* reactionaries? The aliens are drawn to look out of place in the world, but they also look cute, being goofy, fluffy creatures with floppy ears and elephant trunks. Is it meant to make them look cute, so we understand how monstrous the protagonists are for killing them? Or does the fact that we're brutalizing such patently ridiculous-looking creatures add to the black comedy angle, and it also serves to desensitize us towards the violence committed against them, a reassurance not to take it so seriously (also they kinda deserve it and they look cute and pitiable so you fail to realize just how much they deserve it)?

I don't know. We'll have to wait and see where this is all going. Only one chapter has been released so far [EDIT: I started writing this last night and since then, another chapter has been released. Still inconclusive]. We're basically flipping coins as to whether or not this is peak subversive fiction, or just /pol/. If you want to take away anything from this post, it's two things.

1. Regardless of the answer you know that racist weebs with K-on! icons are going to scream "based based based" and co-opt this manga, we're just asking whether or not it's "meant" for them. Also please note the irony of white Americans cheering on anti-immigration sentiment in a country that would ban them for being filthy rude foreigners all the same. Especially because, if we had to ask "who are the aliens meant to represent", I've seen some people say "Koreans" but the overwhelming consensus has been "Americans and Europeans".

2. Despite everything, I found this a very valuable read. I talked about this manga with my brother, and he doesn't think as a work of art it's very interesting, putting aside the politics. But what I find interesting *is* the politics, how all of the arguments and talking points I've mentioned are laid out so openly, almost masterfully in a way. This is a certified Media Literacy Moment, and I think it's very interesting as a filter or litmus test for said media literacy. Whether or not you personally think Drama Queen is going to be an unironic anti-immigrant manifesto or a subversion thereof is less interesting to me than if you are capable of *identifying* why and how we are having the conversation that we are having.

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