#okay but seriously the unbalanced power dynamic is really not cool

[secondleadsposts]

so you’re in a contract relationship with the ceo of your company? and under these terms you have to do whatever you’re told or risk being sued ridiculous amounts of money that you don’t have? you also have to live together? and this is to pay for one designer shirt that you spilled coffee on? bestie that’s not okay

[ladyloveandjustice]

Fall 2018 Anime Overview: Continuing Series- Golden Kamuy Season 2 and Banana Fish

Golden Kamuy Season 2

If you enjoyed the first season, this is pretty much more of the same, so check out my review of season one to know what to expect.

Though I guess you could say this portion of the season DOES lean even harder into weirdness than the first one did. There’s not many anime where you’ll see two dudes having the time of their lives modeling fashionable outfits made out of human skin, which include...crotch appendages...only in Golden Kamuy y’all.

Interestingly bizarreness tends to overlap with queerness a lot in this season and its hard to know how to feel about it. For instance, it’s definitely an unexpected revelation that dudes are attracted to Lieutenant Tsurumi like whoa. 

IDK apparently he’s a catch. Half of his subordinates are in love with him. It’s handled as comical and of course the dudes are mentally unbalanced weirdos (as is everyone in Golden Kamuy except Asirpa and Sugimoto only sometimes) and one of them dies, but the show is never overtly mean to them either. Nobody acts disgusted about it and when one character observes the attraction, he basically shrugs about it.

 Satoru Noda apparently also REALLY loose with his fixation with dudes muscles with this part of the story, to the point we got the beef-cakiest hotsprings episode I’ve ever seen, which includes an extended fight scene where the male characters were naked throughout. There’s also an entire scene where apparently otter meat is an aphrodisiac that causes the dudes to be really into each other, so they engage in nearly naked sumo wrestling.

This is all clearly supposed to be wacky and funny, but at the same time it’s pretty clear the mangaka must REALLY LIKE drawing these scenes of muscular, naked men, and I support him following his dreams. Also I won’t deny it’s refreshing to see a hot springs episode where not a single woman got objectified, but there was dude oglin’ a plenty. It healed me a little.

I guess while we’re talking about this show and its weird relationship with queerness I should reporting that my prediction was right and the trans woman I mentioned in the previous review did become an ally. Her transness hasn’t been bought up again (though for some reason the subs decided to switch to “he” despite sticking with “she” before) and her role is pretty minor, she does reveal she’s skilled in both cooking and surgery (because she likes dismembering people) and talks about how great it would be to see people murdered every so often, so pretty much more of the same.

And that’s really all there is to say. Golden Kamuy has only gotten weirder and the plot only more convoluted (I’m starting to have a hard time keeping track of the characters tbh), but it’s an entertaining story and there’s still characters with resonance and heart underneath it all (the scene where Sugimoto discusses his trauma from being in the war with Asirpa genuinely tugged a heartstring. These two are still great and have really settled into a kinda of adorable dad-daughter dynamic at this point) and the historical and cultural research that went into this story is still amazing. 

I can tell the anime’s still skipping a lot of the manga (most of volume 7 was completely skipped), but since the English release of the manga is so slow, I’m happy to watch it in the meantime. It helps that the show has a bangin’ soundtrack and and it managed to pull its ginormous cast together for some truly exciting and action packed final episodes that left me eager for more. 

Banana Fish (13-24)

Again, if you read my review for the first half of the show, you can basically expect more of the same, both with the good and especially the bad parts. We do get more downtime with Ash and Eiji’s relationship, and they continued to make me think this show would be so much better if it focused more on these quiet scenes rather than on piling as much trauma on Ash as it possibly can. 

I think this second half did allow me to see what was compelling about Ash and Eiji’s relationship and why it’s stayed with so many people. When Ash explained that he’s finally found someone who will love him without expecting anything in return, so of course he’s willing to do anything for that person, that got me in the heart. Ash is someone who has either been viewed as a threat or someone to exploit- he’s especially used to being treated like he’s nothing more than a body, a receptacle for desires. Eiji isn’t afraid of Ash, or in awe of him, and never asks anything of him other than for him to be okay and by his side. Ash genuinely can just be a dumb teenager with him while he can’t with anyone else. Eiji is an outsider, to Ash’s gang-bangin’ world, to his culture in general, and that allows him to see Ash as he truly is, just a kid who needs to get out of this mess.

The romantic in me really loves that concept, and as an ace person, I especially connect to the underlying implication that Eiji is a romantic partner who isn’t going to demand sex from Ash or try to force him into it. Though Ash’s implied desire to avoid sex almost certainly stems from trauma, I know how he feels in a broad sense. And I think it’s a thing a lot of women can relate to even if they aren’t ace, wanting to find a relationship where they aren’t used or objectified, so it goes back around to how Ash acts as kind of a representation for the anxieties and desires of (likely) the mangaka and many women despite being a male character, and I still find that very interesting. The scene where Ash has a complete breakdown and screams at his rapist while laughing hysterically was really affecting.

So there’s moments of real resonance here, but is it worth the bullshit surrounding it, which includes every single gay man being represented as a rapist, to the point a gay bar is connected to a child porn ring? The nasty implication that gay sex is inherently evil and non-consensual, and Ash and Eiji’s relationship is only okay because they’re not doing it is very strong, and as much as this ace appreciates a romance that doesn’t require sex, I don’t want it THIS way.

There’s also some SERIOUS anti-Semitic bullshit that I can’t believe MAPPA didn’t edit out in a couple episodes. Like it would have been so easy to cut. Also some more pretty rough scenes of black men being murdered (they’re extras this time at least, and the main black dude for this part of the anime miraculously manages to both survive and not be an offensive caricature. Also his name is Cain Blood which is the best name in this story, and possibly ever). 

The second half of the anime also involved some of the more absurd elements worsening. I got REALLY tired of every character commenting on how hot and amazing Ash is like. I GET IT.  Also Ash’s life of being sexually exploited somehow gives him the ability to seduce any man holding him captive, and every bad guy is down for raping a teenage boy, I guess. It’s actually again, a little surreal to see these tropes with a male character. I’m used to seeing hot female characters who’ve been through sexual trauma and have magic seduction powers and are endlessly drooled over...I almost want guys to watch these segments so they can see how uncomfortable it feels when the tables are turned. 

There’s also some really good examples of ACTUAL jarring tone shifts, where the anime really fails to land some of its attempts at a funny, light moment in the midst of really tense and tragic situations. I think it’s possible the manga managed this better, but I can’t imagine the “joke” where Ash has to crossdress and a male doctor gropes him and Ash punches him out cold and his friends chortle and tell him he’s not a gentle woman could ever be done in a non jarring way. Like, I don’t like sexual harassment humor in anime at the best of times, but it’s especially bad when the person who is harassed has been raped more times than he can count.  We’re expected to take that seriously, but not this, because Ash is in a dress? It’s also like, appalling that his friends who are fully aware of his history would laugh about him getting assaulted again. It’s a moment that feels like it comes from a completely different anime. 

So um, yeah. My conclusion is those resonant moments are not worth the bullshit. The ending really cemented this for me. I had an (admittedly overly flippant) reaction that kind of sums my feelings up. Let’s just say I HATE meaningless cruel tragedy for the sake of tragedy, and I especially hate the implication abuse victims can never find happiness. 

I can’t say Banana Fish is an anime I’ll think fondly of or recommend. I do still find the discussion about it interesting, much more interesting than the actual story (as presented in the anime, again, haven’t read the manga), tbh. And I can see the seeds of a good story there, and I can understand why fans would want to see a reboot that truly modernized the story, cutting out the worst stuff and giving it a better ending, while keeping the resonance of the main relationship and the good characters (I really did like Sing, and Yut Lung was interesting. Shorter and Skip both deserved way better. Also Jessica, who at least got to do something besides be victimized at the last minute. One whole female character got a few moments of agency. Hallelujah.) Maybe someday it will happen. 

In the meantime, there’s a bunch of cool articles on Banana Fish that are worth a read. All of the pieces published on animefeminist as well as this post on Otaku, She Wrote are really informative, illuminating, and break down a lot of the issues I found here.

[nellie-elizabeth]

Sherlock: The Lying Detective (4x02)

Okay. So. Anybody who has read ACD's short stories might be familiar with "The Dying Detective," a story wherein Holmes pretends to be grievously ill in order to catch a bad guy, and he doesn't clue Watson in on the plan. Going in to this episode, I knew that Sherlock would have a trick up his sleeve. How did it all pan out? Let's take a look.

Cons:

I have a lot of questions and complaints. To start with the briefest of plot summaries: Sherlock is in a terrible drug spiral, John is roped in to help him take down Culverton Smith, a very wealthy man who Sherlock believes to be a serial killer. In the end, John sees the video that Mary left for Sherlock, and realizes that Sherlock has "gone to Hell" in order to force John to save him, thus helping him to save himself. John shows up in time to stop Smith from killing Sherlock. John then confesses to the hallucinatory Mary that he's been seeing that he cheated on her emotionally for the last weeks of their relationship. Then there's a big giant twist, which I'll talk about in the "pros" section a bit later.

So. Problems. I have 'em.

I seriously want to punch Steven Moffat for the way he writes his female characters. It's gone beyond what I can in good conscience ignore. Molly gets like two seconds of screen time, as we see that she's been helping babysit Rosie. She also shows up to do a drug test on Sherlock and confirm that he's got weeks left to live if he keeps using at this rate. Then she's never there again. What a waste of a talented actor and a dynamic character. She has become nothing but a plot convenience, whose entire character is there to serve the emotional needs of the male leads.

Speaking of which, Mrs. Hudson was sort of a bad ass in this episode, as she cuffs Sherlock and stuffs him in a car to bring him to John, tired of his drug addled ways. This was a cool scene, but take a closer look: we later learn that Sherlock had predicted John's whereabouts and had told Mrs. Hudson to take him there. We also learn that Sherlock's entire emotional state is a long-con to "save John," so anything that happens to him while he's high is still all part of Sherlock's brilliant plan. We also get Mrs. Hudson saying that she's "not their housekeeper," but all she does in this episode is take care of poor baby Sherlock.

Irene Adler. You've got to be kidding me. She doesn't show up or anything, but she does send Sherlock a text on his birthday. This gives John the emotional catharsis he needs to tell Sherlock that he should grab the opportunity to go make out with Irene or something, since Mary's dead and John knows that chances don't last forever. Or something. My God, the forced heterosexuality is making my brain hurt. (As a side note, even Mycroft is given a female love interest in the form of Lady Smallwood. Can you not just throw us a bone? A tiny one? Nothing?) Irene literally, literally said that she was gay when we met her back in Series Two. I cannot believe they're still pulling this thing wherein she's supposedly attracted to women except Sherlock Holmes because he's just so awesome. Ew.

Mary spends the episode as John's hallucinatory guardian angel, constantly encouraging him to get back to his predestined life on Baker Street with Sherlock. It feels a bit like a slap in the face. Mary was never my favorite, and I thought a lot of the crazy crap she did was forgiven way too easily. But to have her in the story just to remind John that he belongs with Sherlock is just... it's just... oy vey. It's almost like saying "oh, that was a fun little experiment having a woman around to mess with our bromantic relationship. But Mary's gone now, back to business as usual!" And you have Mary herself giving John her blessing for this. And John "confesses" his affair to his mental delusion, so that we can see Mary smile sagely and tell John to go be the man she always believed him to be. This is just blatant proof that Mary's entire character arc, including most definitely her death, was there to serve the emotional catharsis of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. It's Moffat's woman problem all over again. Some things never change.

And John... John's actually kind of a bad person? I don't know how to feel about this. Basically, Mary's plan was to have Sherlock fall so deep into despair that John would come through for him. But the fact is, John didn't. He didn't come to save Sherlock until he saw the video and realized that Sherlock was putting himself in harm's way to get through to John. Here's my big problem with this: earlier in the episode, Molly Hooper confirmed, with John standing right there, that Sherlock would be dead in a few weeks if he didn't stop using. And John did nothing. He knew how badly off the rails Sherlock was, and yet he still beat him to a bloody pulp and accused him of killing his wife. These things can be explained by John's anger and grief, absolutely. But for him to actually follow through with being a dick? For him to actually leave Sherlock to his drug-addled fate? The fact is, John's not an idiot. He sees how bad off Sherlock is, he believes it to be the actual truth. He'd need to be an idiot to not connect Sherlock's current state with Mary's death and their estrangement. And John does nothing until his dead wife shows up in a video to let him know that Sherlock is basically killing himself for John's sake.

I'm sorry, but... what a dick. This is sort of explained in the emotional catharsis moment, where John and Sherlock talk about their hetero love interests (barf) and John says that Mary was wrong about him being a good man. He says he wants to try and be the man she believed him to be. But that's just not... it's not... it doesn't hold true with anything we've seen of John's character. He is a good man. We've seen that time and again. He's loyal and forgiving and brave and smart and all of those things. His behavior in the last episode and in this one comes across as completely out of character. It's like they turned him into a jerk so that he could have an emotional breakthrough about how he's a jerk. That's not good character development. That's a lazy backslide leading to a cheap payoff. This development is also, apparently, supposed to be so that Sherlock could realize that John was "only human." I take it this was supposed to be a clever inversion. We've been so focused on how John views Sherlock, that we missed how Sherlock views John as this morally upstanding, untouchable god of goodness. Interesting in theory. In execution? Weak sauce.

Sherlock Holmes is always going to be a million steps ahead of everybody else. This is what makes a Sherlock Holmes story. I get that. In fact, this episode pulled it off successfully when Sherlock shows up at John's therapist appointment, having arranged to be there a full week before John even made the appointment. This was clever, and showed off Sherlock's deductive powers. The whole idea of going in to a drug spiral and using it to save John is also okay. But what I can't abide? He's drugged to the gills and being kept in Culverton Smith's grasp. At Smith's request, he says "I don't want to die" several times, actually choking up and starting to cry. We later learn that not only did he swap out his IV with saline, so that he wasn't actually being killed of an overdose, but that he also had a recording device placed in John's walking stick, because he somehow deduced that John would leave it as a parting gift for him, and that this would be how he'd catch Smith's confession on tape.

Nope. I'm sorry, nope. The whole thing works better if Sherlock actually does lose control over his faculties. I wanted him to be in actual, real danger of dying due to his drug use, not just the fact that Culverton decided to suffocate him. Sherlock was pretty messed up all episode due to his drug use, but at the end we learn that his actual plan went off without a hitch. Which is... pretty lame.

Lastly, we've got Culverton Smith, the villain who ended up coming across as even more of a cartoon than Moriarty. He was creepy, sure, and there were a few really great and chilling moments, like when he's messing with the corpses in the morgue. But in the end he's just a standard ego maniac who confesses to all of his crimes once the Great Sherlock Holmes takes him down with an elaborate plan that nobody else could have put into motion with such perfect ease. It's a little bit of a letdown. I thought this guy was going to be the real deal.

Pros:

Oh boy. I had a lot to complain about. One of the most difficult things about this damn show is that right alongside all of these legitimate and very serious complaints you have... off-the-charts incredible acting.

Benedict Cumberbatch gave an insane performance as Sherlock Holmes. Last week, I thought he was a bit hokey when playing high, but this week he was on it. My God. I really don't even know what to say about this. I won't bore you with too many examples, but just... the look on his face as John tells him he killed Mary, and then the look on his face later when John takes it back. The unbalanced, out of sorts way he deals with Faith Smith (Culverton's daughter... I'll get there in a minute). I think my favorite bit was his breakdown when he tries to attack Culverton with the scalpel. That was pure unadulterated panic on his face. He was scared and confused and I really don't think that level of animosity was in his original plan. Sherlock spends an entire evening with Faith Smith, and later meets her and realizes that the whole thing was a hallucination. (Sort of. Discussion of plot twist is forthcoming). His reaction when he realizes just how far gone he is... wow. Sherlock needed to let himself fall out of control for the sake of the plan, but I think even he wasn't anticipating it to go this far.

I mentioned how annoyed I was by Mrs. Hudson's service in the plot, but I do have to mention she was a total bad ass. She turned on the tears to get John to agree to see Sherlock, kidnapped Sherlock, held him at gunpoint, shoved him in her car... which is an awesome sports car, by the way. She also called Mycroft a "reptile" and kicked him out of her home, which was just beautiful in like twelve different ways.

Sherlock and John's relationship. Okay. So. It annoys me that Sherlock was so many steps ahead of everybody. And it annoys me that John wasn't going to save him until he learned it was a plan. It annoys me that they talk about their female love interests in their one and only intimate scene together. But my God. That scene. Sherlock is timid and apologetic and everything else in between. He desperately doesn't want John to leave, and John makes it pretty clear that he's only there because he has to watch Sherlock and make sure he doesn't get high again. There's this moment when John gets up to leave, and Sherlock asks "are you alright?" He's not saying it because he thinks he should. He's saying it because he really, really needs to know the answer. Everything he's been through, all the pain and the drugs and all that, he was doing because he wanted John to be alright. In this moment, he just wants to know if his plan was worth it. John breaks down, after talking to Hallucination!Mary for a moment, and then. Then. Sherlock Holmes gets up and holds John while he cries. He rests his head against John's and just cradles him. It was just the perfect moment and even if the lead-up to it had its problems... wow. I'm so grateful I got to witness that.

We've arrived at the last thing I need to talk about: the plot twist. Which was actually sort of several plot twists nested within each other. Everybody has been waiting for the secret Holmes brother, Sherringford. Mycroft actually brings up the name multiple times. We still don't know who Sherringford is, though... unless it's a code name meant to represent Eurus. Eurus Holmes, the East Wind... Mycroft and Sherlock's secret sister. Not only is she a secret sister, but we've actually already seen her. Three. Times. She's the girl on the bus that John had been texting with back when Mary was still alive. She's "Faith Smith," the woman who spends an evening with an extremely high Sherlock Holmes. Turns out, not a hallucination after all... just Sherlock's sister. And finally, she's John's therapist, a woman who sits across from him and listens to him talk about himself. As the episode ends, Eurus reveals the truth to John, and then points a gun at him, holding him hostage.

Eep! These little shits have been planning this for so long. Sherlock talks about the "East Wind" back at the end of last season, and how Mycroft once used it as a scary story to frighten him. And we all knew something was fishy about that woman on the bus. And when Sherlock thought he'd hallucinated a whole person, something seemed wrong about that. And then suddenly John's new therapist... just... wow. We're all culpable, because we all (or at least most of us) didn't see it coming. This woman was in last week's episode, and she was in this episode twice, playing two completely different characters, and I didn't notice it was the same person. That's... really impressive. Not only from the actress, but from the script and the care it took to make these people blend in. Sherlock saw "Faith" through a haze of drugs. John interacted with his therapist across an emotional and physical divide that made him never truly looking into her eyes. I cannot believe John was having an emotional affair with Sherlock's sister. I cannot believe John is being held hostage again. How many times does that make it? I can't believe that Moffat used his disgusting and unfortunate trend of setting women aside in the narrative in order to trick us into ignoring the answer that was right in front of us. It was... brilliant.

I'm forced to admit that this plot twist did a lot in making me come away from the episode with a positive impression. I can't wait to see how the newest Holmes sibling shakes things up. Apparently this is what happens when somebody as brilliant as Mycroft or Sherlock truly goes over to the dark side. It should make for an interesting finale.

My concern, going in to our last episode of Sherlock, maybe ever, but at the very least for several years, is that there's really no way to wrap up all of these dangling plot threads. What about all the ominous hints we've been getting about Mycroft's death? If he does die, will there be enough time to handle the fallout? And what about Moriarty? Is he tied in any way to Eurus, or is this another dangling thread? I feel concerned about what they've taken on, since this show has never been super great at wrapping things up to anybody's satisfaction. We'll have to see how it goes!

7/10