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reductionisms · 1 year ago

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gintama and the powerscale: looking at 4devas bitchslap

today i attempt to answer a question that's been in the back of my mind for over 3 years: is gintama actually about losers?

i'm certain we all know this line:

rough. what about the following page?

in the manga about losing?

i think the bitchslap is very provocative. here, shinpachi-- the narrative-- punches gin for saying, in effect, "please stay alive". he justifies it by arguing that no one's going to die, that they're not going to lose-- but gin, who would normally respond, says nothing.

well, what can he say? gintama is, after all, full of losers; gintoki's job, then, is to tell the losers that yes, they'll keep losing, yes, everyone might die, but, despite it all, they still have to live. against this, the bitchslap declares the opposite: no one's going to lose, no one's going to die. mystifyingly, gintoki does not refute it.

unsurprisingly, the bitchslap's actual context is the narrative parallel between gintoki and jirocho. jirocho's arc process is: make a promise->fulfill promise alone->fail because alone->learn to get help from others->fulfill the promise with help from others.

but since sorachi is sorachi, jirocho's development within 4devas must be clarified by gintoki-as-thematic-mirror. gintoki thereby becomes jirocho's other self. preceding "life doesn't have to be fun" is:

following the shinpachi bitchslap is:

so gintoki is: promises to protect otose->protects otose by himself->fails to protect her->the present conversation. considering that kagura and shinpachi ask to go with gin to fight jirocho, that gintoki is punished by the narrative (literally punched across the room) for saying no to this, and, finally, that shinpachi tells gintoki he's wrong because "no one will die since we'll protect you!/us three have protected so much all this time!", i think we can say that the "development" 4devas demands from gintoki is: promise to protect otose->protects otose by himself->fails to protect her because he's by himself->learns to get help from others->protects otose.

so, what's the issue? within arc, gintoki's subplot holds. but while the message may hold for 4devas, it doesn't necessarily hold for gintama prior. pre4devas gintama, which is (supposedly) about living as a loser, doesn't seem to focus on present outcomes. it says: "you've lost in the past, and the important thing is that you keep fighting". it does not say, "if you keep fighting, you will win". certainly, sometimes gintama situations work out, but gintama doesn't really come out and say that this is a guaranteed or logical outcome.

yet according to 4devas, if you work together with others, you will win. in fact, shinpachi punishes gin for assuming they won't win (⇔that anyone will die). that is, in the manga which, until this point, should have been about not-winning, no matter how good you are, no matter how hard you try, we get a message that guarantees winning.

I actually think this gets at a (the) deeper intra-gintama tension. we consider: is gintama about how to live in a world where no matter what you do, nothing ever works out, or is gintama about shounen-overcoming to concretely change the world because things do work out? similarly, does gin, as a character, change? (⇔according to gintama's "thematic unity", should he change?) and, finally, if we take that some things are unchangeable and some things aren't, how the hell do you tell the difference? is there an actual difference, i.e., is it so that you can take the correct set of actions to affect change, and therefore unchangeability is innately your fault?

(is 4 devas just sloppy writing?)

alright. here we go.

1.Is gintama about how to live in a world where no matter what you do, nothing ever works out, or is gintama about shounen-overcoming to concretely change the world so that things do work out?

we have thus far identified two strands of thought: in the first, that the world is changeable, in the second, that it is not. ultimately, though, we are dealing with a question of justification. if the bitchslap is justified, gintama is about shounen-overcoming; conversely, if “life isn’t fun/i just want you to live” is justified, then it deviates from shounen. the latter is justified in the world where linear change (that is, linear progress) is impossible; this is equally the world where you keep on losing, where surviving is loss itself and to die is to win.

take gintama's favorite, seppuku. seppuku is a way to “win” your death. it allows you to defeat your circumstances by virtue of escaping them, alternatively, and less metaphorically, to preserve the honor of yourself and your loved ones through your death.

yet you only commit seppuku is when there is no other option. in other words, suicide becomes a win only if there is nothing you can do to change your circumstances, that is, in a world where linear change is impossible.

in a world where linear change is impossible, to die is to win. killing yourself proclaims a last mastery over the oppressive unchangeable. further, by dying, you are finally able to do something for your self, and this is what makes it a victory, because dying is actually the only thing you can do– it is the only victory available to you.

then to stay alive in a world where linear change is impossible is to lose. more exactly, it is to continue losing for all of eternity. life is not fun, and survivorship is humiliating; living is to be a loser, in all senses of the word. you've lost your fight and you've lost everything precious to you. in such a world, if you’re not suicidal, it’s because you haven’t realized your situation yet. again, living is not the desirable outcome.

i’m not going to go through all of pre 4devas gintama, so i’ll make a general claim: gintama’s world pre4devas trends towards one without linear change. certainly, there are sometimes victories, but these are better called losses. for instance, the festival arc. gengai wants to win against (change) the world that took his son from him. this world is oppressive and unavoidable. there is an acute sense of the heaviness of fate; it is a sneaking suspicion that things would work out this way no matter anything anyone did, that they would be the same no matter even if gengai’s son was the strongest being in the universe. against this, gintoki stops gengai’s macrocosmic ritual suicide because it is also futile. gengai cannot change anything meaningful by killing the shogun, even in the present; in fact, as if a metaphor, the shogun has already left. in the end, gengai can only bow his head to cry about the futility of life. what is it that you want me to do?/how can you expect me to go on living?

following arcs repeat this pattern. gintoki defeats villains who are trying to kill themselves. when they yell at him, he doesn’t give them some guarantee of future success or happiness, just condemns them to live. hasegawa embodies this perfectly– he makes the decision himself to not win (not kill himself) and thereby lives on as an ontological loser. gintama recognizes the causality.

one might make the point that life doesn’t work out only for people who are not gintoki. gintoki, after all, seems to win his arcs pretty often, and he’s never trying to kill himself. to that, i raise 1. the decisive moment, where gintoki loses, 2. gintoki doesn’t really seem certain he’ll "win"– moreso, he responds to events straight off, with little apparent regard to odds of success, 3. we have one arc where gintoki does "lose"-- the guardian dog arc (gin loses because kyoujirou dies in spite of gin's calls to life), and 4. gintoki is a depressed loser himself (either he’s still actively suicidal or he already chose life in the non-changeable world– that is, to be an ontological loser). the optional 5. is that gintoki is a shounen protagonist, so he has to win semi-frequently to keep getting serialized. this is the probably the best answer. i would still argue that there’s a lack of givenness, a lack of training, a lack of assuredness, a lack of linearity about these wins. gintoki is not naruto; he does not progress through stronger and stronger villains, growing reciprocally more powerful with each one, and he does not make friends for the purpose of growing stronger together.

in any case, the world of gintama prior to 4devas looks like a world where linear change is impossible. if it was not, the world would not be crawling with so many losers.

equivalently, the pre4devas message seems to be: life is losing, but you still have to live. when gengai asks “what do you want me to do/how can you expect me to go on living?” gintoki says, “beats me, just live a long life”. obviously this is shounen-atypical. our suicidal villains are all suicidal because they recognize there is no way to change anything; in short, there is no training arc, no powerscaling, no naruto. what do you do when the world is like this? gintoki denies you your suicide, so you are left being a loser. in other words, you are left figuring out how to live as a loser. is this not, “life doesn’t have to be fun, i just want you to live”?

into this comes the bitchslap.

the stakes are clear. the bitchslap acts against “life doesn’t have to be fun, i just want you to live” to declare, no one is going to die! i hope i have done a good enough job to convince you that this actually means, life is not losing. in any case, it is fundamentally opposed to [life doesn’t have to be fun/just live] ⇔ [life is losing, to live is to be an (ontological, in every sense) loser]. shinpachi, spokesperson of the “living is not losing” ideology, literally punches gin, the loser, through two rooms.

so sorachi presents two opposite philosophies and chooses only one of them. fine. the problem now becomes, is this choice justified?

in a world without linear change, this choice is not justified. logically: the existence of the world itself declares that living is to be a loser. this is essentially what gin says. anything that is therefore not “life is losing” is unjustified. since “life is not losing” is not only not “life is losing”, but its actual opposite, “life is not losing” is the wrongest you can ever hope to possibly be about life in such a world.

i made the general claim that gintama pre-4devas hesitantly takes the form of the nonlinear world. we've never had to directly consider this yet, simply because the narrative has never opened itself up to such a discussion. but, as I have tried to argue, I feel like the world itself trends this way, and gintoki’s continual calls to loserhood (living) therefore make implicit sense.

following this thread, that is, following the assumed thematic thread of the 300+ chapters before 4devas, gintoki is right to say “life doesn’t have to be fun/i just want you to live”, and the bitchslap is unjustified.

yet the bitchslap is justified, and its justification lands us in a world where living is not losing, no one is going to die (because we all work together!). this raises several important questions about feasibility, because the bitchslap is a direct, no, opposite departure from gintama’s prior loserhood. in no particular order: given our 300 chapter background of unchangeable loserhood, how do we justify and/or explain that living is not losing?, [related to the results of the former question] how do you define when things are changeable and when they aren’t?, and, assuming gintoki is wrong, does that mean he undergoes character development?

anyways: how can we justify that life is not losing?

option a) powerscaling

this is straightforward: apply powerscaling logic to gintama. shinpachi actually does this himself; he says no one is going to die because gintoki has fought and defeated much stronger villains prior. further, he claims gintoki has managed to do so by working together with his friends (callback to the theme of 4devas). so shounen.

nevertheless, taking a cursory glance at pre 4devas gintama, we find that gintoki has defeated villains much stronger than jirocho. there is housen (equal in strength to umibozu, strongest in the universe after utsuro), jiraya (equal to the combined oniwabanshu), nizou the butcher (with the individual power of a battleship), et cetera. if we posthumously apply this logic, then yes, gintoki has defeated stronger, which implies either that 1. he was always stronger than all these villains or 2. that he has grown in strength through the enemies and now is stronger than them. here, whichever implication is truthful really doesn’t matter. what matters is that rationally, gintoki should be able to defeat jirocho, and it is ridiculous that he thinks he will not (the “life doesn’t have to be fun”).

this method presupposes that pre4devas gintama actually cared about the power scale, or, in other words, that the power scale had meaning for pre4devas gintama, that it applied to pre4devas gintama. i think that there are enough perfectly strong people always absurdly losing to prove that it doesn’t. put another way, the power scale can’t apply in the world with no linear change (because strength doesn't matter in such a world). equally, there is also no amount of camaraderie that will enact change. from a bird’s eye standpoint, the power scale rationale holds, but a deeper understanding of pre4devas gintama calls it into question.

so the powerscaling rationale applies itself to gintama after the fact, to times and places where it never applied previously. obviously we can allow for posthumous revelations that change our interpretation of prior events. but, selfishly, i would say that this is not one of them. there is simply not enough buildup for it.

option b) genre

this is essentially gintama's meta-textuality, including its tendency to parody/subvert itself and its genre.

gintama is broadly shounen. if we read for genre, we can divide it into past (that is, everything established in-canon as having happened before the first chapter) and present (the current timeline, as is within first chapter and onward). gintama past is a war-hero tragedy, complete with genre-typical archetyping, structure, and hallmark events. gintama present is a satirical comedy that parodies and subverts anything it can get its hands on, including its author.

obviously, in tragedy, souls die. nothing works out, even if you do everything you can, even if it's enough, even if it should. likewise, in true comedy, souls don't die. if people die, they come back to life, or it's not that serious (⇔they needed to die⇔their soul lives on). everything is for the joke: you die for the joke, and it resurrects you in the end. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

gintama, again, is self-referential, metatextual, etc etc etc. while each member of the cast does their own legwork, by far the most frequent meta-textual commentary vehicle is shinpachi. (that arc where otae comments on him not fulfilling his duty as a straightman because he's distracted by his crush on his penpal...?) shinpachi, as the straightman, has to tell gin he's not acting enough like a shounen protag so that comedic absurdity lands as a joke. essentially, we need a point of reference to come back to for anything in gintama to work; and it is shinpachi who, quite literally, holds up the narrative in this regard.

prior to 4devas, shinpachi straightmans largely for comedic storylines. that is in line with gintama's internal logic; there are a couple gags in serious arcs, but things that would be typically gagged (say, stabbing someone with a sword) instead have more realistic consequences to demonstrate that the arc is going to be serious. since shinpachi (or another straightman) is essential to land most gintama gags, it makes sense that he would drop the straightman-get back into your genre!-act to be serious when the narrative turns serious itself. that is, of course, if we read gintama genre as simply a feature of gintama's comedy, and not anything else.

conversely, what if gintama genre is significant for the story beyond comedy?

gintama's past is tragedy, but gintama's present is comedy. the story even moves settings to signify the change: the past takes place in the rural, idyllic south, while the present is in the red-light district of a booming metropolis. in fact, this red-light district is essential to gintama's comedy; its very existence is absurd. kabukicho residents are the outcasts of society, who don't fit into their genres, who aren't conforming to the tragedy of their era, who instead are laughing at it. kabukicho itself is comedic on purpose, in a very serious way. and 4 devas is the arc about kabukicho.

what does it mean, then, for shinpachi to punch gintoki and scream, no one's gonna die? if kabukicho is the present, the present is comedic, and kabukicho is comedic; while shinpachi is a resident of kabukicho, shinpachi is also the straightman who holds together all of gintama's comedy, and shinpachi punches gin because gin assumes they'll lose and people will die. essentially, the punch is a metatextual wakeup call. shinpachi the straightman says to gin, get ahold of yourself, you're thinking in the wrong genre. it's not the past anymore (gin's past, the tragedy, where people die), because we're in kabukicho, and this is comedy, so even things which would realistically end in tragedy, here, will not.

this argument is better than the power scale. unfortunately, it has some continuity issues. that is, how do you have a serious arc in a comedy? in this comedic present, lots of actions don’t work out simply for comedic effect (hasegawa). but actions have to start working out--that is, having consequences-- for any serious plot to move along. when does this begin? how valid are such developments? what is the limit to their working out? if we assume actions start working out in a serious arc in a comedic present, doesn’t that also imply that the comedic limit (which prevents actions from having consequences) on the power scale is gone? if the serious arc does not take place in a realistic world, does not take place in a tragedy, doesn’t that mean there are effectively no negative consequences? if this is all true, then why do people “lose” in serious arcs pre4devas? (what counts as a happy ending?)

i will pick up these thoughts another time.

onto the final option.

option c) gintoki character development

option c assumes the thematic pivot. now, all the disjoint between pre and post4devas can be explained away if we assume gintoki undergoes character development throughout gintama present. i will discuss the specifics of that idea in the next section. suffice to say, we just take the pre4devas living-is-losing philosophy, which has been previously unchallenged, and say, well, it worked up until a point because there was no challenge strong enough to make gintoki question himself, and now, here is the challenge that is strong enough to make gintoki question himself. weirdly enough, the challenge is jirocho, who is a complete one-off villain. it does make more sense if we consider that gintoki is struggling with losing a parent figure again. but, then, why not shouy… yeah, that's for later.

so gintoki’s previously unchallenged living-is-losing is finally challenged in 4devas. he is proven wrong, and he must learn from it, and this course of development was always intended, from the very conception of his character and from the very beginning of gintama, so now the rest of gintama is going to be about gintoki growing as a character.

taken another way, if we reverse-mirror from jirocho onto gintoki, jirocho learns that he can’t do anything alone, that he needs to pass on his duties to his successors in order to achieve success. equivalently, gintoki, who is not a loser, as in, who will not lose anyone else to the oppressive world, needs to learn to pass on his duties to his successors (the yorozuya, kabukicho). promises, promises! handing down promises and trying to fulfill them. (you need your friends to help you fulfill them!) sound familiar?

along these lines, i mean, the pivot makes sense.

it just raises even more questions. well, perhaps i’m raising them. nevertheless.

if gintoki needs to learn that he will not lose, that he can fulfill his promises (⇔win the scenario) if he passes them onto/works for them with his friends, then why did nothing work out in the past? what makes kagura and shinpachi any better, any stronger, any more capable of winning than katsura, takasugi, and sakamoto? (bookmark this for later). further, has gin actually gotten stronger and/or more capable of defeating various enemies than he was as a war hero ten years ago? on what basis can we say that he can win now, when he couldn’t win back then?

continuing, if gintoki needs to grow as a character by realizing that he won’t lose because he has people who will help him win, then gintoki and friends are "morally" convicted for failing shouyou. the possibility of character development (⇔linear change) implies that gintoki could have done something, anything, to prevent, well, the final result, and he didn’t. it implies that it wasn’t a truly impossible scenario, that it wasn’t a situation where both choices were wrong and you still had to choose; that there was a way out, if only he had been better about it, better about it earlier. so gintama turns powerscaling shounen; the struggle against the impossibly oppressive world (c.f. zura’s final lines to takasugi in benizakura) is done away with; there is no reason for takasugi to revolt for the sake of gintoki’s crying face.

finally, and most importantly,

why did the hell did this only happen halfway through the goddamn manga?

2. Does gin change?

okay. i accept that i’m pretty bad at representing my opposition. i think, however, that i have the right to complain, if only because my opinion is certainly the exegetical minority.

in any case, i, not we, because this is probably just a me problem, am now forced to consider: does gin change during gintama present?

to answer this, i must return to some events pre-bitchslap. let’s go back to the graveyard.

it takes a full gintama reread to recall, so i’ll spare you: this is the first time we’ve seen gintoki freak out to this extent. the last time we saw anything even comparable was in our direct predecessor arc, red spider. there, after zenzou reveals jiraya's career history, gintoki does not react; zenzou and yoroyuza implore him not to go after jiraya because he’s too dangerous, and still gintoki does not reply; we see only his back. gradually, we notice that his hand is trembling on his bokuto. then we realize that it is trembling in silent anger, over shouyou. the pivot to his face reveals that his face is shaded. and when gintoki confronts jiraya, we get a lesson about becoming human.

the comparison. when gintoki arrives and sees otose, presumably dead, we are only given his back. it rains. the rain trembles. jirocho addresses gintoki, calls him immortal. we see gintoki’s front, but not his face, which remains shaded. jirocho finishes speaking and the panels immediately cut to gintoki, who attacks without a word in advance. his face is mostly covered in shadow. the veins in his eye are popping. he looks crazed, insane, completely apart from his usual self, almost inhuman, silent throughout. he only hacks and hacks, with no reason, none of his usual logic or continuity, no real skill, and is thereby easily put down by jirocho.

jirocho pierces gintoki’s forearm into a family plaque. gintoki’s eye stays popped out, not looking at jirocho, nor really anything at all. we get the sense he is almost not hearing or seeing anything jirocho says. so jirocho stands there and calls gintoki an attack dog, a guard dog, shiroyasha, with no reply. he does not address gintoki by gintoki’s human name. he only calls gintoki “gintoki” once, in the very beginning, before they fight. gintoki remains there, in the graveyard, silent and unseeing. when jirocho leaves he drags himself towards otose’s body and lays down like death.

the parallels, i hope, are pretty strong. red spider pivots on the revelation of shouyou: the flashback metatextually confirms that the child in the corpse field is a demon, but that shouyou’s love and care for it makes him human. to gintama, these are essential ontological positions. gintama’s ideal self is human; its villains are all struggling to be human themselves, and become human by encountering gintoki, a human. thus, gintama character development is presumably that of becoming human. i agree with this. i’m not that heretical.

anyways, enough of the anthropology. here i'm going to focus on the non-human, the demonic, the ghostly. red spider gives us a set up. we have a glimpse of a never-before-seen anger, triggered by a perceived disrespect to shouyou. this anger is signified to us in that gintoki suddenly becomes entirely unintelligible. usually, we see his face, even if he never truly tells us what he’s thinking. now we suddenly lose access to even the face; we only see his back, the trembling hand. this is gintoki’s true anger. further, while this anger and human-ness are not related to each other within red spider, they show up in the same arc process. to me, that’s enough to think that sorachi’s subconscious is associating them thematically.

4devas takes this setup and progresses it. the anger is developed, expounded upon. we know it is the same anger because it is triggered by disrespect to gintoki’s “new” shouyou (at least in parental capacity), otose. the signifiers are the same: we completely lose access to gintoki as a something knowable. this time, he does not even respond to jirocho’s provocations. so, yes. it is the same anger, but raised a few powers above the glance we had in red spider.

before gintoki freaks out, jirocho calls him gintoki, once. then he calls him an immortal. then gintoki attacks. after this, jirocho calls him a dog, calls him shiroyasha, that is, a demon. he pins him to a headstone. metatextually, we find that gintoki is a ghost in a graveyard. explicitly, jirocho calls him demonic, beastly. here, in his incredible anger, gintoki loses his humanity.

let’s skip forward from 4devas. in courtesan of a nation, we get a panel pretty much the same as that first attack panel in the graveyard. it, again, directly follows a provocation about shouyou (predictable much)? gintoki’s explosive strength is insane– he bites through a sword– but, as tsukuyo will note for us, he isn’t acting his usual self; he’s acting irrationally and actually hindering their fight. tellingly, he gets put in timeout by poisoned darts and is forced to calm down. i won’t go through it, but rest assured: the silence, the insane look, the back, are all present. gintoki becomes unreadable.

flashing way, way, forward, into the utsuro era, whenever utsuro shows up, gintoki immediately goes mad dog and attacks him with no prior explanation. (the shouyou provocation). everyone comments on this. they say, you act crazy when you see him, you completely lose your head. you lose the ability to fight properly.

so, this offers us some insight into the 4devas situation. gintoki’s anger degrades him into something other than human. in this ontological state, he loses the ability to fight. in other words, he lost to jirocho not because jirocho is stronger than him, which he is not, but because gintoki himself lost it, and lost his ability to fight along with it. after all, per shouyou, only a sword that cuts to protect your soul can protect anything, and a sword that cuts to protect your soul is the sword of the ontological human. when we degrade from humanity, we therefore lose the ability to protect entirely. i think this was probably obvious to most of you (thought it was not to me).

this actually makes a lot of sense for the bitchslap. in this light, that is, of an inhuman gintoki who must return to his own humanity, shinpachi tells him he won’t lose to jirocho because he never was supposed to lose in the first place. “you won’t lose because we’ll be there with you” actually means that those who love gintoki make him human, thereby allowing him to fight properly. and, you know what, yeah, there’s nothing wrong with this. the bitchslap is here justified.

and yet, is it really?

firstly, just to get it out of the way, this justification of the bitchslap only works if we isolate “life doesn’t need to be fun”/the bitchslap from context. if we put them back into context, we realize that gintoki is refusing to let kagura and shinpachi accompany him to fight jirocho, which is why he says “life doesn’t need to be fun” in the first place. assuming the obvious rebuttal against perceived suicidality, shinpachi also punches gin because he and kagura want to come along; his justification is that gintoki won’t lose. if we assume character development, then, yeah, gintoki won’t lose. but that doesn’t let us escape from gintama’s overarching sense of unassuredness in victory, from its general stance against child soldiers (in the end of 4devas we have a callback to the bitchslap: gintoki won’t let kagura and shin come with him to fight hada, asks them to trust him instead). in any case, kagura and shinpachi explicitly asking to come along seems a little ridiculous. gintoki refuses seita in yoshiwara, kagura and shin in red spider, et cetera and et cetera… there is a precedent set that makes their request sound out of theme. whichever way we look at it, for or against, i think we can say something’s a little off with the writing.

on the theme of bad writing, we come to my second major complaint: bad writing. 4 devas is the first time we truly see the demon (gintoki). that is equivalent to saying, this is the first time we see anything in gin that needs to change, and, that this is when gin's "character development" is introduced. but, this is nearly halfway through the work. introduce character development at 1/4, 1/3, 2/3, or 3/4 instead.

yeah, yeah, sorachi is killing himself writing on a weekly schedule, he doesn’t plan his arcs, wsj is evil. i want to clarify that i don't really care about that here-- sorachi's actually heinous crimes aren't poor thematic execution. but i still can call it bad writing.

alright. let’s continue to assume that this is character development. if it’s character development, then gintoki must have had this issue before 4devas. how come we never see it? were the enemies just not strong enough to provoke it? (but, housen?) were the fights just not personal enough to bring out the beast? (maybe–but i don’t think that’s strongly supported either). if it’s character development, then gintoki must have had this issue in the past; but in his definitive past moment, that is, that which is revealed to us in the shogun assassination flashback, he doesn’t. gintoki loses, and thereby saves all of time. if he had been anything less than human this would not have been possible. from our bird’s eye view of gintama chronology, gintoki has been human since the very moment he met shouyou.

well, let me grant that his ontological status could oscillate. we then trace a history of gintoki’s humanity. he is inhuman prior to shouyou; shouyou makes him human; he is human at the decisive moment on the cliff. just because he is human in that moment doesn’t mean he stays human after. maybe– just maybe– the moment broke and degraded him into the demon. in that case, we should see him turning into the demon from the very beginning of gintama. yet he does not do this. our earliest post-moment memory of him is when he sacrifices himself, with no sign of anger, for the child asaemon. that, alone, should have enough provocation to the memory of shouyou to make him go absolutely insane. i allow that the yaemon calls him a demon here, so maybe he is. but, where are sorachi’s beloved signifiers?

further, gintama pre4devas is premised on the idea that gintoki doesn’t turn into the demon, that he doesn’t change (c.f. katsura introduction). gintoki is the human mirror, the human self, the human model that each empty, inhuman, suicidal villain is chasing after. he is the one who they can measure themselves against and realize their wrong. how many times, over and over again, does this happen? if gintoki was anything less than human throughout pre4devas, its already episodic plot would fall to complete pieces.

but 4devas asks us to believe that he is. how?

maybe, again, gintoki had just not met an enemy strong enough to provoke him into it before 4devas. maybe gintoki had just not been sufficiently provoked into memory; otose’s death, after all, is no small thing. or maybe gintoki has been secretly oscillating between human and inhuman offscreen, in his own unknowable heart. i think that much is true. it’s more his outward actions i’m unsure of.

i think there are 2 options. either sorachi should introduce the demon earlier, to successfully make it a fundamental part of gin's character, or we should remove the need for him to change at all. returning to my original qualification, yes, i understand that gintama is not planned and poorly written. sorachi inserts an important plot development far later than he should; in his situation, that is not inherently his fault. whatever.

my final complaint about character development centers around other people. shinpachi claims gintoki won’t lose because they (yorozuya) will protect him. in a reading for character development, “gintoki losing” is equivalent to gintoki being the demon. the yorozuya, therefore, turns gintoki human so that he can win. this is very sweet. but, zura and takasugi couldn’t help gin at all in the decisive moment, and he still did what was 'right' (⇔stayed human). what guarantee is there that the yorozuya will do any better than the joui 3?

gintoki needed someone to save him in order to become human (shouyou). that is the same for every other villain in all of gintama. can a person who you protect make you human? gintama says yes, and i agree with it. ethically, too, i agree with this. i think my scandal with 4devas, and specifically, my scandal with 4devas’ suggestion of gintoki’s character development, then, is shinpachi’s assertion that the yorozuya will develop gintoki, will make him human. because,

well, what about his friends from the past? they couldn’t save him, they couldn’t make him human. in fact, he had to save them. and if there is anything that destroyed his humanity, it is his saving of them. so for shinpachi to claim such a thing, when he has not lived through gintoki’s past (when he was not there for the decisive moment, when he can do nothing (in 4devas) to protect gin from the world), seems like it lacks a bit of logic. after all, how is he different from takasugi, from katsura? how can he protect and make human when they could not? how is he any different from anyone else?

but, maybe, shinpachi doesn’t have to understand gin or his sufferings to claim that he will save him. maybe we sometimes have to say things that sound ridiculous and shounen and make no sense, just to declare them and set a standard somewhere, to get them out into action. maybe this is a lesson about friendship, about trying again, because, well, shinpachi has a point, that i’m not even sure he’s making. it’s this. if you refuse even to pretend to believe, then what is left at all?

my very final thought. perhaps i can accept that gin starts getting character development halfway through the work. even accepting such, what does it do to the significance of his past?

which leads me into a question that has been haunting the last 8000 words: if some things are unchangeable and some things aren’t, that is, if there is a difference between shinpachi/kagura and takasugi/katsura, or, alternatively, if there once was no linear change and suddenly now there is, then how the hell do you tell the difference?

3. If some things are unchangeable and some things aren’t, how do you tell the difference?

we are now at a place of thematic departure. our analysis of the bitchslap has collapsed into a central point: the bitchslap is justified if the world is changeable, and it is unjustified if the world is not.

the difficult thing is that gintama is not clear cut about the ontological status of its world. i have conjectured, repeatedly, that things prior seem largely unchangeable, yet into this comes the bitchslap. retrospectively, things start looking a little murky, and we are forced to reevaluate– perhaps sometimes things are unchangeable, and sometimes, maybe, not.

so, what can change, and what doesn't, and when, and why?

i want to emphasize the thematic importance of this question. to do so, i am going to say something ridiculous. here it is: gintama is fundamentally moralistic. okay. what the hell? the dick and balls manga? well, it is a shounen, and shounens all carry messages about friendship, hard work, etc., etc., to inspire their young readers. more pressingly, though, gintama is weirdly moralistic, and by this i mean both that it’s strange for gintama to have morals and that its morals are shounen atypical. rather than honor and victory, gintama tries to align itself with losers and victims. rather than the good self as one who grows continually stronger (to protect, or for whatever purpose), gintama tries to tell us it’s okay to lose, et cetera, et cetera. the point is, gintama positions itself as a story about how to become a good person. any question that leads us to "moral" consequences is therefore important to gintama itself.

as i have touched upon previously, supposing that the world is changeable, there is a certain level of wrongness to loss. obviously, this is a huge generalization, but stay with me. there are so many things can render the world personally unchangeable (disability, circumstance, exhaustion, absurdity, personal will); it is only if you can confidently and definitively say, it was possible for me to do more, it was possible for me to enact change, but i failed to do so, that losing becomes morally wrong. in the sense i'm considering, it’s akin having extra food on hand and ignoring someone starving right in front of you.

now the "moral" undertones of the question start to take shape. assuming gintama’s world is linearly changeable, then the joui 3– in particular, gintoki– are wrong for failing shouyou. why? because there remained something they could have done to bring about the “happy ending”. similarly, we realize that hasegawa is wrong for not managing to get a job, that gengai is wrong for letting his son die at all, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. in any case, we can agree that the question of which things, and where, and why, holds "moral" and thematic consequences for gintama as a whole.

so the most obvious solution to things seeming sometimes changeable and sometimes not is, well, that sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t. for instance: maybe the joui war was nonlinear (unchangeable), but the present is linear (changeable). this fits into several contexts as neatly as i could ask for. it satisfies our conviction that gintoki is right for losing in the definitive moment. it also allows for the bitchslap to be justified in 4devas. finally, and most convincingly to me, it follows the lines of our genre justification: past is tragedy, so of course it is nonlinear, and it thereby makes sense for our present comedy to be linear.

still, there are issues with this argument. as i’ve stressed before, we have several instances of nonlinearity (linear change being impossible) in gintama present. we could argue that these nonlinear scenarios have no personal impact for gintoki, which is why they are nonlinear. perhaps. as counterproof i have really only gintoki failing to save kyoujirou in the guardian dog arc. besides, i guess it makes some sort of convoluted sense that things are different for your protagonist in order to teach him to hope in life again. so rather than a clear past-nonlinear/present-linear divide, we might assume linear change applies only in the present, only to gintoki. why not?

counter argument: if linear change is possible for gintoki in the present, why doesn’t he have a training arc or a noticeable powerup? counter-counter argument: perhaps gintoki’s linear change is his becoming human, which is achieved through forming new bonds. counter^3 argument: if gintoki is supposed to stand in for the “self” (which, in this context, he certainly must, if he needs to “develop and grow”) then why don’t the same rules (namely, nonlinearity-unchangeability) that apply to all the other “selves” in gintama not apply to gin?

therefore the most interesting explanation actually involves gintama time. sorachi gives time about just as much treatment as genre– sazae-san format, the characters always joke, while they defeat a roster of suicidal villains in the same cyclical way, superimposed– but i’ll be biased and say that i think it might carry the more eminent thematic importance. that is, [the past] is something that weighs so heavily on, and within, each person, each arc, and even the settings themselves. a couple theme songs comment on this. “face over there, then over here, come, let’s grab hold of the era!”?

then the cycles of gintama present are clearly nonlinear. what about the past? i think the past is also nonlinear, simply because the joui failed against an undefeatable enemy. the world where linear change is possible must have it always possible; if you can only achieve linear change up to a certain point, then this world is not properly linear in the first place. takasugi’s obsession seems to justify me here.

but shinpachi calls gintoki to trust in linear change as possible and achievable, in the present. is he suggesting a destruction of cyclical time? (is cyclical time not just eternity?)

where is time not cyclical in gintama? that is, where does it flow?

time is cyclical, eternal, both in present and past. even the end of 4devas is just the end of another cycle: gin inevitably rises, and tells jirocho not to kill himself fighting alone, so shinpachi’s call to linear change– that is, the destruction of eternity– which is so fumbled in its setup, falls upon deaf ears. yet shinpachi must be calling to something within gintama if his call is to have any sort of (misguided) grounding. what on earth could he be calling to?

the investigation is remarkably simple: there are really only two events that alter the course of gintama permanently. the first is pre-canon, the definitive moment. the second is takasugi’s “salvation” in shoass. we should be clued into their identicality by that they are presented together, in fact, superimposed upon each other; and, well, these moments truly do break eternity. the decisive moment ends the suicidal cycle of the joui war, while takasugi’s "salvation" reconciles, finally, gintoki to his past, takasugi to his self, and time to its natural flow. time immediately starts moving after both of these moments are revealed to it. eternity is shattered; gintama actually breaks out of the sazae-san format.

so, maybe, the shattering of eternity allows for linear change, allows for character development in that the I can momentarily complete its humanity. truly, stubborn and hateful as i am, even i can accept the bitchslap in all its cliche shounen-ity if i take it as a call to escape eternity. that does not mean i can accept the writing around it, but, the main scandal is dealt with, and i can sleep with peace in my heart, knowing that the rest i can chalk down to bad writing.

as a final note. i, personally, cannot trust in linear change. i think it is suspicious, perhaps too similar to the subjectivity of modern philosophy, or else to what people love to tell you when you’re feeling down and out and just want to lie in the hole and complain for a bit (it gets better!). so while here i have equated the shattering of eternity with linear change for sake of convenience, i want to be clear that time is far more nuanced than my equivalence makes it seem. in fact, i think that the sort of time which shatters eternity is a different type of time from our linear/nonlinear conception altogether.

yet the call to time, i think, is gintama in its purest. it is what gintoki tells his suicidal other selves– that killing yourself only continues your fetid, empty eternity, that winning is to remain complacent in your self. that it is only the complete and utter loss of staying alive which can break you out of your self and into time again.

in that way, our beloved, bitchslapping shinpachi takes on the soul of gin to tell gin, who, in the moment, seems suicidal, to shatter his own eternity. it is simply bad luck that every single part of this set up is fumbled almost to the level of kishimoto writing political discourse. shinpachi, i’m sorry for doubting you. (i still do). i’ll start believing in the power of hard work and friendship. i promise i’ll never shittalk shounen ever again.

anyways.

conclusions

so, to my question: is gintama about losers?

i have no idea. i don’t think sorachi knows either. he probably felt like a loser in his early 20s, and then the taste of success destroyed his resolution to continue living in a world where nothing works out and he introduced the powerscale.

but, again, is gintama about losers? the justified bitchslap tells us that gintoki is wrong for assuming he will lose. the problem is, no matter how much i think about it, no matter how much i analyze and justify and write myself into circles, i just can’t convince myself that gintoki deserved it. why? i just can't bring myself to think that he was wrong, that he was wrong for being a loser.

because gintoki, when his enemies are shocked at his resilience, when they question how he returns to life, how he gets up, how he keeps fighting, when he’s so clearly a loser, always says, it’s no big deal, only that i haven’t fulfilled my promise yet and i won’t die until i do. he is eternally confident in only these words– i will keep standing up– almost like they are his very being. gintoki fights with no regard to his life, but not suicidally. the suicidal kill themselves because it is the only way to achieve victory in their oppressive world. conversely, gintoki knows he will win, no matter if he lives or dies, even as he loses, if only he stands up again.

even in death, even in absolute loss, even in living.

gintoki calls on antagonists to lose because their suicidal victories ignore their duty to the world of the living. suicide, in the sense that they commit it, is entirely self absorbed. gengai is avenging his son only for his self (would your son really have wanted this?); once saved, he starts making toys for children. if gintoki had killed takasugi and zura, it would be for his self. instead, he chose to lose, completely and utterly, and it saves the world.

so just like shinpachi calls gintama to a time beyond the linear and nonlinear, gintoki’s victory, that is, the winning in losing, is a winning beyond the self. the victory that shounen assures is, after all, ultimately for one’s self– whether that is growing stronger or protecting your important people. when the self discovers that it cannot win, it loses its reason for existence. it is emptied, it eats itself alive. “revenge achieves nothing”, et cetera, whatever. it is a nothingness that becomes literal.

gintoki tells those who are tortured by their inability to win that they must lose. why? because it is only when embracing the freedom which ontological loserhood offers that they can become human. equivalently, it is only as a loser that they can receive time, fulfill their promises, that is, fulfill their responsibilities to the world, that is, make change, that is, win.

and this winning is not a winning for your self; it is a winning in losing.

so, yes. gintama is about the righteousness of being a loser, even if shinpachi might say it is not (though, in a very roundabout way, he is saying that it is). losers know they cannot win for themselves, but that they just might be able to win for the rest of the world. perhaps the bitchslap is actually declaring that nobody’s going to die, only because gintoki is not fighting for his self; that nobody’s going to die, that gintoki’s not going to lose, because gintoki is already, well, a loser. and, well, i think i can actually live with that.

more likely, though, we can mark it down to this: