#penguindrum explained

[maggiecheungs]

my mother, walking past my screen: oh, those little magical penguins are so cute! what’s this anime about?

me, taking a deep breath: um well. okay. uhhh. do you remember the 1995 tokyo subway sarin gas attack…?

[kingteeth]

3 siblings. One is terminal. She dies. But a magical penguin hat revives her. She's now linked to a diety. The diety needs the penguindrum. A timeline altering object. The brothers have to find it, or the sister dies. Another person is also involved. There are magical penguins that exist because of the diety. The timelines of like maybe 6 people are affected one tragic day. That's why the penguindrum is necessary. To reverse the tragedy and reset timelines on their true path, not the one altered because of the diety existence.

[horse-girl-anthy]

Between the Soap Opera and the Fairy Tale: Sex, Death, and Ikuhara

essay below the cut.

I've never actually played Silent Hill, but one way or another, many years ago, I came across a clip from one of the people who worked on it (I've since tried to locate this interview but have not been successful). I remember him saying something like "when you look into what troubles people, you find that they are preoccupied with sex and death. and so in order to affect them, we play on these themes of sex and death."

this isn't exactly rocket science. your average soap opera writer has it down. what differentiates soap operas from Silent Hill is how they incorporate sex and death into their narratives.

in Ikuhara works, sex and death are often used as short-hands; because people react to them on a visceral level, they can be used to get viewers' attention--and because they hold so much symbolic weight, they can be used to communicate any number of things to the audience. I don't think art has to play on eros and thanatos to be compelling; however, it can certainly help to do so. Ikuhara is particularly interested in eros.

consider this exange from the Ikuhara/Saito episode 38 commentary:

Saito: He'd say, "Make sure you design it so you can tell where the breast is positioned." He'd also say, "Make sure you design it so you can see the outline of the butt." And "Design it so the armpits are visible." He made a lot of various, very typically boyish requests, but I learned a lot from it. He repeatedly bothered me about where the buttons should be. He instructed me that "The buttons have to be positioned exactly at the top of the breasts!" (laughter) Ikuhara: Makes sense. Learned a lot, right? Saito: Yes, I did. Mori: Are you always trying to work in this type of erotic undertone? Ikuhara: Yes, well... if it doesn't have that kind of stuff... it's not very interesting! Either I'm doing it to make it interesting or maybe I just wanted to see that.

Ikuhara doesn't deny that he may "just want to see" eroticism. titillation may be done for its own sake, used for humor or aesthetic purposes. however, a surface-level glance at his works reveals certain patterns in how sex is employed narratively.

this was originally going to be an essay on sexual predators in Ikuhara. he has a lot of them. I started writing it, but it came out a bit too thin for my tastes. I compared the various characters and their motivations for committing sexual harm and came to the conclusion that Ikuhara works avoid the myth that lust is the primary motivator of such behavior. Mitsuko is an example of a sexually motivated predator, but she's pretty much alone in that; the other characters are driven by a variety of factors, with lust low on their list of priorities.

rather than go through and describe each characters' motives, I thought it would be more interesting to explain how their predation is used metaphorically. in YKA particularly, it's difficult to claim that the bears are committing sexual assault; they are attacking and eating prey. while sexuality is caught up in that metaphor, so are other things. however, even in RGU and Penguindrum, sexual predation is used to allegorize other aspects of human behavior.

I've been thinking about this for a while, sparked by this passage from Enokido's privacy files:

We did not go into depicting what Touga’s parents obtained by going as far as selling their son. We would like you to think of it as a kind of metaphor. 

I'm not trying to deny that textually, Touga is sold into sexual slavery by his parents. it's worthwhile to depict such extreme examples of abuse, because they do happen. but why are they so common in fiction? there's the soap-opera instinct towards melodrama, but I think these things can strike a chord with a wide audience because of their metaphoric power. a son, exploited by his parents. humans can exploit each other in all kinds of ways, blatant and subtle.

in this way, Ikuhara works are more fairy tale than soap opera. fairy tales sublimate the darkness of childhood into narrative. returning to the matter of death, it may be employed in a soap opera manner--Himari's illness has shades of this--but generally, death is used to strike at the heart of the audience, in an existential rather than melodramatic way. the death of Utena's parents, first mentioned in the light-hearted opening narration, is reframed in episode 9 as a life-changing crisis. death may be metaphorical--social death, spiritual death--but it is also very real. perhaps the most central question of human existence is how we are to live in the face of death, and Ikuhara works are all the more powerful for facing that question head on.

[boymagicalgirl]

Penguindrum Episode 9: Super Frog

Yayyy Himari-centered episode! This explains the Dear My Future Ending visuals and the showiness of the Survival Strategy. She wanted to be an idol.

Himari watching Triple-H become Double-H with the latter becoming hella successful must have been really bittersweet.

The Fruit of Fate is definitely an Adam and Eve reference and the Bride stuff feels like Utena again, especially with the don't forget me I'll tell you the answer next time we meet stuff.

Also I looked up Super Frog Saves Tokyo and it's apparently a magic realism short story by Murakami which fits with Penguindrum's whole vibe.

I'm interested but also mildly frustrated like how I was when I first watched Utena. I can feel the pieces, see the threads of the themes and what it all means, but can't quite tie things together yet.

P.S. Forgot to add when first posting, but the library annex thing definitely felt like heaven and hell with the deeper Sanetoshi and Himari went, he wanted to tempt her like the serpent tempting Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge

[xtinacherry]

Penguindrum P.2 Blog Post 3/25

I don’t care if they aren’t actually related, I still find all the romance and sexual tension between the siblings really weird… And I don’t exactly understand it’s importance in the plot. I don’t know, this show gets weirder and harder to understand the more I watch it. 

We finally understand how all the siblings met each other. It is definitely confirmed that they are all not blood-related which brings a small bit of relief. They meet at the Kiga group, in which Shoma is the son of the leader (I assume?) while Himari is sadly waiting for her mom to return, but it is pretty evident that she will not. She talks about how there are people chosen and unchosen in this world, and she falls under the unchosen. She is sent to the child broiler, where the unwanted children go to become “invisible,” which essentially means to die. Shoma saves her and takes her into his family. She finally feels chosen by someone. Kanba is also chosen as we see through the scene where he finds the apple and Shoma does not. However, Kanba shares the apple with Shoma, thus their fates are both assigned. 

I think we finally learn what the penguindrum is in the final episode. I thought it was the diary, in which Momoka explains that the diary can transfer fate. However, Himari rips out Kanba’s soul and presents it to Shoma, noting that half of it is the penguindrum. It then flashes back to the scene where Shoma and Kanba were trapped in those cells. I guess consuming the fruit and playing with fate, their souls became the penguindrum. I don’t know if that makes sense. And I guess sacrificing themselves is what allowed for Himari to survive. It’s sad that Himari has no recollection of her brothers, but she subconsciously remembers them deep within as we see her crying when she found the note from them. These episodes really confused me, so I’m excited to hear what all the interpretations are going to be of them tomorrow. 

[christianlep]

Blog 27- 3/25

This second viewing of Penguindrum was a stark contrast in tone and mood from the first half, and although there were clearly a lot of things that happened that we didn’t watch, I think this show was a little better than I initially thought. This show kind of reminds of Evangelion in the fact that the begins with a lot of unexplained information, and with a heavier focus on external goals and the childlike innocence of the main characters, but it goes on, we notice a shift into introspection and elaboration that helps the viewer understand the pieces of the puzzle and why things are the way they are. It was already explained in our last class that the siblings aren’t actually related, but I still think it’s weird there’s a sexual tension between Himari and her brothers, but the importance in this revelation is the fact that we are shown that Shouma had altered Himari’s fate by taking her in when she was destined to die. I believe this destiny, paired with the karmic debt incurred by the Takakura family is what becomes the basis for Himari’s terminal illness. In the last two episodes, we see that Shouma seems to be defeated in trying to figure out how to save Himari, while Kanba is convinced that the only way to save her is through sacrificing the life force of others, which we see later is the truth, but not in the way he was planning to do it. Reaching the ending, it is here that Kanba and Shouma come to terms with their desires, their selfishness, and their actions that they’ve taken that have seemingly played with the natural course of events. They realize that they have to sacrifice their lives (although not in a traditional sense, as it’s through literally taking away the years they’ve lived in the world, and along it the experiences they’ve had, and the family dynamics that they desperately held on to for the whole show), in order to save the ones they love the most, even at the cost of disrupting everything they’ve come to known and their very existence. In the end we witness an amended reality in which Kanba and Shouma stay with each other, but never interacted with their family (including Kanba’s biological sister, although I don't know who would be their parents), and although each character is oblivious to each other’s existence, they are still attached spiritually, as represented through the penguins hanging out with each other.

Also I know it’s an anime, but I thought it was kinda strange that Himari and Shouma were like six and nine years old in the flashback but they were talking so philosophically and maturely about being discarded and destined to die when not claimed and being chosen by each other.

[jamyaahhh]

3/22

The main question in penguindrum is do we have power over fate? Himari is destined to die in order to atone for her parent’s sins, and her brother will do all that they can to turn her fate around. In these first few episodes, challenging fate seems useless as Himari dies two times. Her brother Kanba sacrificed parts of his life to keep his sister alive. She is possessed by this penguin queen spirit who tells the boys they must find the penguin drum to keep Himari alive. I also wonder if the penguindrum would keep Himari and the queen alive as she seems to die when Himari dies and comes back when she does as well. Will the penguin queen spirit continue to live through Himari??? Himari and her brother’s parents were responsible for a terrorist attack that occurred in a subway and Himari was punished for their action. An analogy of 3 lambs and their caretaker is used to explain the family’s dilemma. When the caretaker disobeyed the goddess, the goddess decided to take the life of the gentle youngest lamb, as the ultimate punishment would be the most unfair. Himari represents this lamb as she pays for her parent's sins with her life…several times might I add. The boys fight for the chance that fate can be challenged and one does not have to follow a predetermined destiny. The characters Momoka and Ringo believe in fate and don’t think of it as something cruel. The subway incident in penguindrum represents the Tokyo subway sarin attacks that happened on March 20th, 1995. A terrorist group/cult that had religious undertones released sarin, a lethal chemical into subway lines, for reasons that are not completely clear. Around 13 people died and over a thousand were injured; in episode 13 pays tribute to the subway attack their parents were responsible for. I see this as Penguindrum’s way of acknowledging the subway attack in 1995 and critiquing the way Japan went about the situation. There are also hints of criticisms of capitalism, as the parents and Sanetoshi believe the world is heavily influenced by selfishness and people being placed in boxes where they do not have to care for others which are the root of evil in this world. The only solution they see fit is to destroy the world. Momoka is a direct contrast to this idea as she is optimistic and sees the beauty in the world. Lastly, why penguins? Penguins represent a struggle with identity. While they are birds, they are not the first that comes to mind when you think of a bird. They have wings but can’t fly, they spend a lot of time swimming but aren’t exactly sea animals. The three penguins in these episodes each represent a sibling. One is obsessed with spicy girl magazines, one is always killing roaches, and the other is cutely knitting a blanket. As the siblings are faced with so much turmoil we forget that they are kids with their own unique personalities. The cute penguins remind us of their child-like nature even though they cannot simply live as kids and are forced to grow up. I apologize for the yapping.

[crehador]

enjoying one last cup of cocoa by the fire before heading home (ichinui has been explaining the plot of penguindrum for the past 57 minutes and samanui is contemplating divorce)

[thefloatingstone]

Do you have a favorite anime studio or creator

Not particularly. I tend to like individual shows and MAYBE franchises.The most I do is check if a studio who is tackling something I like has a good track record or not.

For instance, the studio behind the new Sailor Moon movies is studio DEEN which would explain why the animation in the Sailor moon movies, despite being MOVIES, looks so clunky and mid-level TV quality. Studio DEEN does not have a great repertoire. Most of their shows on MAL are somewhere in the 6/10 range with some dipping to 5 which is VERY low for MAL.

On the other side, the upcoming anime for Kaiju No. 8 (which is a manga I love) is Production I.G. which has a much better pedigree in terms of quality even if you ignore them doing every Ghost in the Shell ever. Most notably they're behind quite a few animated versions of Ultraman which makes them a good fit for Kaiju.

KyoAni probably has one of the best track record for animation quality in TV animation, even with the extreme loss they recently suffered due to an unhinged fan murdering 30 of their staff. But I am not actually the biggest fan of KyoAni as they tend to focus on Light Novel adaptations. And I don't enjoy the writing style of the kind of Light Novels KyoAni likes to take on as projects.

But the king of animation at the moment is probably studio Trigger, the spiritual successor of Gainax who are set to tackle Dungeon Meshi which means the Dungeon meshi anime is probably gonna be fucking amazing. Trigger's biggest problem is they lack restraint, and need projects that can pull on their reins a big to stop them from going overboard. This is why Edgerunners worked so well for them as it forced them to work within certain parameters.

Bones is a lot like Trigger in terms of the level of quality they put out, but Bones is currently stuck in My hero Academia hell which eats up most of their time and focus. That being said, their work on Mob psycho 100 shows they are still a top contender when it comes to animation quality when given the opportunity.

As for Creators, I'm not a big hanger on of anyone. Usually I just end up noticing patterns between the shows I like where I suddenly realise the same director or writer or storyboarder worked on several shows I like but that's about it. I like Ikuhara for Sailor Moon and Utena, and I enjoyed what I've seen so far of Mawaru Penguindrum, but I don't go out of my way to seek out work specifically by him.

I focus more on individual creators when it comes to manga. And that extends to anime. So if I see a manga author I like has a new anime adaptation coming up, I'll check to see what studio is working on it because I am interested in that manga author's work.

I tend to be this way with music for the most part too, especially growing up. These days yes there are individual bands I like, but for most of my teenage years and even early adult years, I was more interested in individual songs I liked rather than a band or singer.

[canmom]

I have been thinking about this ever since I saw this post. Please accept a serious answer to your joke post <3

Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother is a musical play about a mother’s political awakening during the Russian Revolution, based on a novel by Maxim Gorky.

It had a didactic intent, it’s supposed to also sharpen your attitude towards the class struggle; this didacticism is something that’s often mentioned in reviews of the play as a flaw. Brecht himself called these Lehrstücke (‘learning plays’) “anti-metaphysical, materialistic, non-Aristotelian drama.” Published in the early 30s, it’s just too young to get caught in the public domain, but you can of course get translations of Brecht’s plays on libgen.

The explicit leftist intent of Brecht’s plays is something you don’t really see a lot in anime. The story’s a little complicated - in the 70s and early 80s, a lot of the major anime creators were leftists who had been involved in events like the Anpo Protests, but anime of the time isn’t as overtly radical as, say, the films of someone like Nagisa Ōshima in the ��Japanese New Wave’. More ‘serious’, narratively complex anime started coming in during the late 80s and especially the 90s, but at the same time, the otaku subculture was becoming a lot more apolitical in its attitude, and stories could be said to take an inwards, psychological turn.

So, if we want to identify an anime that’s like The Mother, we have to choose a dimension for comparison. I think I may have figured out an answer, but first let’s rule out a bunch of things...

For an avant-garde leftist anime director who plays with form and constantly draws attention to artifice, the obvious choice is Kunihiko Ikuhara. He even frequently uses songs! Certainly we can hear the echoes of something like Utena or Mawaru Penguindrum in this description of The Mother...

In the play, Brecht utilizes narrative, irony, the juxtaposition of self-proclaimed "truths" to reveal their flaws, the concretizing of complex ideas into dramatic events, an understanding and simple presentation of human behaviour, and a comedic optimism that things can be changed and that reason and common sense will overcome fear and superstition.

Ikuhara is certainly direct in his themes, in a way that is sometimes a little disarming. But I would say Ikuhara’s anime are not really didactic, certainly not as specifically about The Class Struggle, in the way The Mother is. For example, The Mother opens with a song about the wretched position of the working class (trans. John Willett):

Work even harder than now Cut down your expenditure Reckon it more exactly! If you’re a kopeck short You can do nothing.

Whatever you do You’ll still have to struggle Your position is bad It’ll worsen. This cannot go on, but What is to be the answer?

and the MC’s son joining the ‘revolutionary workers’ within three pages. Scrolling to a page at random, I see characters discussing Marxist ideas of private property versus personal possessions, and explaining the concept of a strike. Perhaps you could compare this to the characters in Penguindrum discussing their isolation (if you are not chosen...), but it feels a lot less in general like Ikuhara has a syllabus he’s trying to convey!

That said, on this front Ikuhara is probably the closest you’ll get. You simply won’t find an anime that sincerely preaches the good word of communism.

Maybe if they were making anime in the 30s... well, they were, if you take ‘anime’ in the sense of ‘Japanese animation’, but it was stuff like Benkei tai Ushiwaka (1939), mythological stories that wouldn’t upset the far right government. Animation was way too niche of an art form back then.

(Though as an aside, as far as German animation in the 30s goes, Lotte Reiniger, creator of the earliest surviving feature-length animated film, was active at the same time as Brecht! Her films are not overtly communist in the same way, but she was way ahead of the game in making gay characters the centre of her stories. Like Brecht, she had to flee Germany when the Nazis rose to power due to her leftist connections.)

So, if Ikuhara uses (somewhat) Brechtian methods, but doesn’t really have the same didactic ethos as Brecht, who else might we turn to?

Perhaps Miyazaki and Ikuhara, once compared to the Kremlin by Mamoru Oshii, might be another place to turn. Miyazaki abandoned his Marxism during the 90s, following the collapse of the USSR, and his own changing feelings. But even so, Miyazaki and Takahata have long held an certain attitude that their films ought to edify the decadent, consumerist kids of today.

However, there is also the matter of historical circumstances. Brecht was writing in a time when there was sincere hope that a communist revolution would take place and create a better world. The Russian Revolution was still recent history and the Nazis had not yet crushed the communists in Germany. By contrast, Pom Poko, dir. Takahata, depicts tanuki struggling against urban development destroying their forests using a variety of direct action tactics. But it has a wistful air; by the time the film was made, the wave of development had already happened, and it’s the story of a romantic failure.

Otherwise, sci-fi tends to be where you find stories that deal most explicitly with revolution and revolutionaries. The original Gundam, coming at the tail end of the 70s, has both an overt pacifist ethos, and a new age idea of transcendance represented by the ‘Newtypes’. Dallos, directed Mamoru Oshii, depicts an anti-colonial revolution on the Moon. Some years down the line you get works like Akira, then in the 90s e.g. Patlabor and Kerberos/Jin-Roh (hot mess as it is), which are to a varying extent scifi projections of the decades after the WWII, complete with leftist terrorists. Ghost in the Shell imagines all sorts of near-future scifi social conflicts although its major concerns are more about technology and transhumanism; its later successor (of a sort) Psycho-Pass will cheerfully namedrop Foucault and Fanon. These stories, which typically assume the POV of a police unit, vary in how sympathetically they depict the leftists but none of them are really trying to Marxpill you, so I don’t think they count.

For another angle... The Mother is, as the title suggests, about a mother! Despite the infamous ‘anime mum syndrome’, there are some excellent anime films centered on mothers, such as Wolf Children dir. Mamoru Hosoda where the mother is raising two werewolves in the Japanese countryside, or Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms dir. Mari Okada where the mother is a genocide survivor making her way in a fantasy world. The latter, which sees her live through huge historical events, has some superficial similarity to ‘a mother living through the Russian revolution’, even if its concerns are very different.

But actually, with a bit of thought, I think the answer might be... Rose of Versailles (1979-80). Like Brecht’s play, it’s got a historical setting (centering on the French court before and during the Revolution), and it’s written by a communist who put her politics into the work fairly explicitly. Wikipedia comments thus:

Ikeda's depiction of the events of the French Revolution are informed by both her feminist and communist political leanings, and are personified in the story by Oscar.[29] The narrative of The Rose of Versailles dramatizes the social realist doctrine advocated by the Japanese communist movement, addressing issues such as class consciousness, inequality between economic classes, the subordinate status of women, the duties of citizens, the material conditions of labor,[30] and the manner in which rights for citizens arise from a mass and spontaneous revolt.[31] 

The story primarily follows Mary Antoinette and an original character, Oscar, the iconic instance of the ‘girl raised as a boy’ archetype. The anime version changed directors halfway through; the latter half, directed by Osamu Dezaki, introduced a lot of his more ‘theatrical’ framings, and devices like the ‘postcard memories’. The manga actually did get adapted to stage (as a musical no less!), becoming one of the most successful productions of the Takarazuka Revue.

It’s definitely not a perfect fit - it’s a long historical drama with many characters, centred on the aristocracy, not a short play about the personal development of one everywoman character. Even so, I think it’s a left-field enough answer that it’s too good not to pick.

(You might also look into adaptations of classic novels in series like World Masterpiece Theatre. I can’t find any that did Russian lit, but they did do a version of Les Mis.)

which anime is the most like Bertolt Brecht's 'the Mother'

[kanralovesu]

Mawaru Penguindrum Explained... Is what I’d like to say about the ending.

Because I haven’t posted in a while and the ending of Penguindrum left me more than a bit disappointing, I’m just gonna drop a long, slightly analytical list of things I disliked about it. Before that I’d just like to say that I tried my damnedest to keep up with all the metaphors and callbacks even calling the show the “chekhov's gun” of anime mid way through viewing. I hope you’ll see through these points that I really did think about it and am not writing it off purely because it didn’t drip feed me the info. With that said, though, I think a primary failure of the ending was that it posed new questions and created new metaphors instead of leaning into answering existing questions and explaining existing metaphors. We need to understand the stakes of a dramatic encounter to actually feel like the actions the characters are taking is warranted. Anyway here’s my list: 

Was never clear why the brothers had to sacrifice themselves. We were told the spell to transfer destinies would kill whoever used it so why not have them use the spell instead of Ringo?

The brothers being locked in the boxes must be symbolic of how their parents didn't love them and then sharing the fruit was symbolic of them loving each other, but my problem with all of this is that they dropped all this symbolism moments before important plot stuff happened and it took me until after the show ended for me to figure out what it meant. An ending is for tying up loose ends not introducing new ones! You shouldn't be dropping new metaphors in the final minutes before the audience needs to understand those metaphors to understand the ending.

The penguindrum not being the diary is an okay twist, but this twist was not well set up at all. If it were to be anything it would be the fruit of destiny I guess. So their quest all along was to realize that they loved each other enough to sacrifice? Didn't they start the show like that (as a happy family). All the tension to their relationship happened during the second season!

I never want to know exactly what the two pink haired people are whether they be gods or ghosts or aliens or whatever, but what was Momica's connection to the penguin hat? We're shown that the pink haired dude went to the north pole with the evil penguin group so why didn't he split into penguin hats and Momica split into black rabbits (we're even told she revived a rabbit using her powers)? You know what maybe its because the pink haired guy cursed Momica and Momica cursed him back so they each became each other’s animals? You know I’ll buy that for a dollar I guess.

Why did we never get any change to or explanation of the transformation sequence? For something that took up a lot of screen time I figured it would have subtle changes later. The only real payoff was when we see the Pink haired guy "transform". Also we never got a direct payoff to the idea that Himari's costume was based on her potential Triple H costume and even when she transferred destinies she isn't with Double H despite her sickness being the one thing that stopped her from pursuing that? Isn't her costume a representation of her dreams or destiny?

In terms of season 2 in general, never was convinced as to how the teacher could become a bad guy. He went through a literal 360 from season 1 to 2 and we never even saw his happy side again or got a confirmation that said happy side was just covering up his depressed side. Yuri on the other hand made more sense to swap because all we really knew is she loved the teacher which was then twisted into the idea of the "fake family".

Is the child boilers a symbol of getting abandoned by your parents and being sent into foster care? Probably? I don't know and the show doesn't make any effort to make that clear. Is the evil organization fighting to create better foster care? Probably? Why are they evil and using bombs again, then? The pink haired guy just says some dubious shit like "making a new world". Can't he just transfer destinies like Momica cause they're the same?

Honestly I’m not sure why the spirit penguins even existed. Their part in the larger metaphor is just a huge blind spot they never explained.

By the way I still think this show is very good. That’s why its even more depressing when the ending doesn’t deliver on the potential laid out in the beginning. They could have honestly not done anything special with the ending, handed it off to someone else and told them “write the most obvious ending that ties everything up and makes sense” and it would have been better than the overly artistic and nonsensical ending they put together. 

[genderqueer-miharu]

Nanami, ringo and enta exist in the same spectrum of ikuhara characters

[seasaltmemories]

On a scale of Kyousougiga to Penguindrum, how interwoven into the narrative is the weird incest subtext in your surreal, fantastical family drama from the early 2010s?

[sailormoonsub]

I'm just a rock 'n roll MAN 😔🎸

We're just a rock 'n roll BAND 🤘😔

[xtinacherry]

Eden of the East P.2 Blog Post 4/15

Wow, I was way off on the theme and meaning behind the anime from my last post! These half of the assigned episodes allowed me to gain a new perspective. Last time I talked about how this show was revolving around identity and the ability to disconnect from your former self, but even if that might be a small part of that, the larger theme was definitely about the Japanese government. 

In the earlier episodes and the first two episodes assigned for today, they try to show NEETs as useless shut ins that do not contribute to society and, thus will be the reason it falls apart. However, that is not the case. Also, so much hate against NEETs! Off topic, but I think given some of the work cultures in Japan, kinda like in ZOM100, this might skew the opinions of NEETs. Work culture in Japan is very intense and you basically dedicate your life to your work and one company. I liked how this anime tried to humanize NEETs and show that they are people who are still capable of change and are able to contribute to society in different ways, kinda like the reddit thing. 

This anime also kind of reminded me a little bit of Penguindrum. The Sarin gas attacks in 1995 were explained by the government as just being fate with it just being something that will occur and is out of their control. This anime gives me a sense of that, where they believe that fate drives the decisions of the government and they cannot control what happens. However, this is definitely a cop out and just shows the weakness of a government. Not being able to place prevention tactics either before or after an attack like Careless Monday. It just seems like they try to deflect blame from anyone but themselves. 

[horse-girl-anthy]

some might say Ringo is under-utilized in the second half of Penguindrum, but there’s something so moving to me about her being a witness to others’ suffering. all those scenes of her standing outside the hospital room while the Takakuras are given bad news or listening as Shoma haltingly tries to explain his generational guilt... they feel real, you know? Penguindrum is kind of crazy, but we’ve all been in a position like that, and it serves to make Ringo even more lovable, her character growth even more satisfying.