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typellblog · 3 months ago

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Shinobu Time - An Analysis

This arc is difficult to talk about because it’s hard to extricate it from the context of Second Season more broadly and Mayoi Jiangshi more specifically - so much so that it’s really more focused on Mayoi than the titular Shinobu. But I don’t think this works unless we take them both, together, as telling the story of these two girls (and maybe some other characters as well).

In Mayoi Jiangshi, Koyomi and Shinobu are catapulted to 10 years in the past. It’s a result of his desire to save Mayoi, but being a considerate person, he thinks about what he can do for his other friends. Can he rescue Hitagi’s family from a cult? Can he give Tsubasa more stable living conditions? No, he can’t. These issues are too big, too complex, for him to solve as just a random high-schooler, regardless of how early he gets in on it. Much the same for Suruga, Nadeko, and anyone else he knows. Except for one Hachikuji Mayoi, whose single unlucky accident seems eminently correctable.

It makes me think. What exactly is the difference between Mayoi and these other characters? I suppose it comes back to Meme’s old phrase - oddities arise for a reason. The circumstances that the other characters grew up in resulted in a condition where they almost had no choice but to call on oddities to help with their problems.

You could say that Mayoi’s parents divorce is the reason for what happened to her, but there’s no particular reason why she had to be hit by a car, why she had to be unable to see her mother on Mother’s Day. After all, that wasn’t the effect of an oddity. It was the origin story of one.

In a way, Mayoi’s situation feels fundamentally unfair. A character like Tsubasa, Nadeko, even Numachi Rouka - they become oddities because on some level, they want to be. That’s how they see themselves. It’s not good for them, but it does something, you can see why it happens. Hachikuji, though, isn’t a person that turned into an oddity. For all intents and purposes, she’s a supernatural entity from the start. Even as it causes her to suffer as a person does.

The difference between Mayoi and other characters - this is also the topic of a discussion between Koyomi and Ononoki Yotsugi. Koyomi has continued to live, even after being made undead, while Ononoki was reborn, becoming a new person out of the corpse of the old. Mayoi does neither, simply remaining in place. The point of such continued existence is what Ononoki wants to know. She questions the meaning of her own life. Surely life arises because of a strong desire. Surely, these undead oddities persist for a reason.

We might say that the reason for Ononoki is the desire of the people who raised her from the dead. We might say that for Koyomi, it’s his relationship with Shinobu. But thinking of it from this perspective, Hachikuji Mayoi’s reason for existing must be by far the simplest to answer.

After all, it’s a standard element for ghosts that they persist because of an unfulfilled regret.

Of course Mayoi didn’t want to become an oddity, didn’t want to become the Lost Cow, but she did want to meet her mother again. She did want to persist after death. In this sense, her fate is really quite excessively merciful. Fair to the point of indulgence. There’s no reason for her being hit by a truck, but there’s a reason for her becoming an oddity. And there really is a good chance that fate could be averted by simply bringing her to her mother’s house on a day 10 years ago.

The real question here is why she chooses to persist after she’s no longer lost. Ononoki wants to know if she’s happy with the current state of affairs. That’s something that Koyomi wants to know too, if there’s anything he can do for her, but he never asks. It’s the unspoken part of their relationship.

I want to say that Mayoi Jiangshi, as a whole, is about speaking aloud these unspoken truths, but it applies much more heavily to Shinobu than it does to Mayoi.

Shinobu would have destroyed the world had Koyomi not found her in Tsubasa Cat. This is left unspoken. Koyomi didn’t want to insensitively interrogate her motives during her silent period, knowing that he’d already imposed on her enough for a lifetime. Shinobu didn’t want to share, didn’t want to be seen as more petty and selfish than she already is.

The destroyed world is a shock to both of them, but nothing more than that. It’s not a challenge, or a mystery to solve. The problem, and its solution, are both inevitable consequences of the kind of person that Shinobu is. She confronts herself, and in doing so, much that she would leave unspoken is said aloud. That she only needed to open her heart to Koyomi a little more. That she doesn’t know how she could have. It’s needless to say, it goes without saying, it was left unspoken until now, but a Shinobu who couldn’t connect with Koyomi - might as well be dead.

The jiangshi, a form of zombie with a more solid feeling to them that calls to mind the concept of rigor mortis: being set in one’s state at the moment of death. The Shinobu of this world was dead for months, and yet unable to die. But Hachikuji Mayoi herself - not continuing to live, not being reborn, is she not a kind of jiangshi herself, persisting outside of her allotted time without any meaning or purpose?

This is a question Koyomi couldn’t bring himself to ask her, but he gets an answer by the end of the arc. He sees how much the Mayoi of the other timeline was changed thanks to his influence, and, returning to his own, he sees how his influence has also affected this Mayoi. How, because of him, she’s started enjoying being a ghost. Because of him, she wanted to stick around even after fulfilling her original goal.

A real apocalypse to Koyomi is the absence of other people, and that too is the true death of these undead oddities. Neither Mayoi nor Shinobu can live a worthwhile life, where they’re capable of changing and changing others in turn, without making a friend first.

However, in the pursuit of this goal, the two of them still have things left unaddressed - for Shinobu, in the past, and for Mayoi, in the future. Thus we move on to Shinobu Time.

The ‘time’ in the title is oddly reminiscent of the time travel plot Shinobu just got involved in, and the similarities don’t stop there. In both, her carelessness leads to widespread loss of life, the loss of her human connections. In both, she has to leap far into the air to avoid the consequences of her actions. Time is the thing Shinobu possesses most abundantly, stretching her life both far backwards and infinitely forwards, and the more we learn about her the more we learn this is not a boon at all.

We’re told that after enough time in one place, her nature as a vampire will draw negative energy to an area and cause masses of oddities to arrive, spelling destruction for the residents. I like to think of this as a smaller-scale reminder of the nature of vampirism - you cannot have mortal friends, they will inevitably perish with the passing of time. You, yourself have more time than you know what to do with, but it’s not a kind of time that can be shared. It can’t be used to build anything.

Which is why the incident where she was worshiped as a god is so tragic. Why did she continue giving the people of the area rain even after the first accidental miracle? Why did she do nothing to dispel their impression of her as a divine being, even by accident? Why didn’t she leave as soon as she realized they had no legends of vampirism, as she muses later? I mean, she tries to play it off as being careless, arrogant, indifferent, but there are enough hints that we’re not seeing everything here. If anything, the question is why she wouldn’t want to stay in a place where people like her, and she can help them instead of hurting?

Time is the curse of vampires, and the darkness slips naturally into that role when it demands an actor. After enough time, enough indifference, people start disappearing. Because there’s no way a vampire can get away with having a positive relationship with humanity.

It’s simply impossible. Shinobu was doomed from the start. Is what I want to say, because I like the tragedy of it, but in reality there is a very simple way out. Just become a god for real. Don’t tell me it’s impossible, this is Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade in her prime, it would have been as simple as willing it. As wanting it. As admitting it to herself.

But she doesn’t, because the all-mighty vampire isn’t willing to admit that she needs something from other people that can’t be taken by force. She wants only that which can be given without her asking, and what isn’t given she watches go up in flames just out of her reach, not moving a finger. Is that not what caused the whole mess in Mayoi Jiangshi? It really puts into context, then, the opening scene of the Kizumonogatari movies, where she moves to drag Koyomi out of the sun. The desperation she must have felt, begging for help when she first meets him on the side of the road.

Time is the curse of vampires, because it at once broadens your perspective and narrows it. We don’t hear this story before this arc, Shinobu feels no need to tell it, because she forgot. The whole incident made her feel bad, so she shoved it to the back of her mind, let the endless waves of time wash over it until it was gone, and carried on as she had been. Or so she claims, anyway. I think the way she treats Koyomi after the fate of her first kin tells a different story.

Back to Mayoi, though. The tale told by Shinobu isn’t the only ‘time’ in this story, and the darkness slots neatly into the present day as well. Mayoi, also, is cursed by time. Eleven years of being lost and getting others lost is not time well spent. For Mayoi, too, as soon as her natural curse is dissipated, the darkness arrives to plug the gap. For Mayoi, too, there is a limit, an allotted amount of time that she can spend in the company of others.

As Izuko puts it, they’re both liars. Shinobu lied by omission, failing to inform the villagers of her vampiric nature, posing as a god without genuinely fulfilling the role of one. Her crime was indifference, or a deliberate facade of such. She made no attempt to communicate with others, and as a result they never got to know her. Unspoken truths, left on the table forever.

Mayoi, though - Koyomi denies quite flatly that she ever lied to him. He knows she doesn’t want to be a liar, doesn’t want to act rude to passers-by in order to put them off. So Izuko makes the accusation lying to herself. Making Mayoi herself the victim of the crime, because in doing her best to avoid causing trouble for others, she let herself suffer silently. She, too, has left truths unspoken, never clarifies the nature of her relationship with Koyomi, the nature of the gag routines they always do, the nature of her existence, what she really wants.

Time can solve the vast majority of people’s problems, Numachi Rouka says in Hanamonogatari, and throughout Second Season we see characters put this advice into action by running away. Kanbaru’s aimless sprinting, Shinobu’s mighty vertical leaps, Nadeko’s deflection and looking aside - they’re all examples of people trying to avoid confronting their troubles. Trying to get lost. I’ll get lost with you forever, Koyomi says to Mayoi, and he’s not just talking about an unspecified location. He’s talking about losing his entire life, failing to confront the things & people he really ought to.

Mayoi, on the contrary, doesn’t try to run away in the slightest. She doesn’t wait for the darkness to catch her, she goes out on her own terms and in her own time. In doing so she drops the shield of banter and irony she and Koyomi have used to make their relationship and feelings for each other ambiguous this whole time. He knows she’s been biting her tongue on purpose, but before now that was left as an unspoken truth. In a similar way, even Koyomi’s aggressive lecherousness towards her tells you something about their relationship. He does, in reality, experience desire for her, but exaggerates so much in the expression of it that it comes off as more of a gag than anything, which perversely becomes more comfortable for Mayoi. She can simply brush it off as a regular routine while continuing to scorn him as a lolicon.

An actual, genuine kiss is the exact opposite of his indiscriminate licking, and it comes along with an actual, genuine confession, albeit delivered in the past tense. Perhaps the only situation where she could have brought herself to say it.

After all, unlike Shinobu, there’s no way out. Mayoi is doomed from the start, by nature of being already dead. Unlike a vampire, ghosts don’t truly continue living after death, can’t actually change, especially not into a god of all things, that would be ridiculous-

Dear reader, I have watched this series before. As much as it’s in my nature to over-dramatize the tragedy of this arc, it seems more fitting to leave it on a hopeful note. Because Hachikuji Mayoi, in her final moments, did stop lying to herself. She stopped trying so hard to remain a ghost, a being that can’t change, and instead reached for something new - an unfulfilled regret different from the one that originally extended her existence.

I think in a fundamentally fair world it makes sense that would leave room for her to be saved.

#monogatariposting #onimonogatari #hachikuji mayoi #oshino shinobu #araragi koyomi

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