Kimi no Kakera, volumes 1-4
I cannot rule out the possibility that Kimi no Kakera is a deadpan satire of all the most revolting elements of the moe aesthetic. It's not impossible; there do, after all, exist shounen magazines which appear to exist at least in part as some sort of practical joke. All the available evidence, however, suggests that this manga simply a collection of all the most revolting elements of the moe aesthetic. It's by Takahashi Shin, creator of Saikano, who is evidently even madder than that might suggest.
Every single panel.It shares with the unpleasant Letter Bee both its MacGuffin - a missing sun - and its pornographic fascination with the suffering of wide-eyed, androgynous children. The protagonist is Icoro, a princess who, for reasons not entirely clear, is forced to do menial jobs to support her little brother while being heaped with verbal abuse. She is also constantly starving and cold, never gets a full night's sleep, has no friends, and was born incapable of smiling or laughing. When these various indignities build up too heavily upon her, as they do every two or three pages, Icoro cries massive, bulging, physically-improbable eyefulls of tears, so that it sometimes resembles a face less than a molten Venusian landscape. It's usually snowing, though.
If you worry that watching a Princess cry in the snow might get a little tedious, fear not, for sometimes she also wets herself. Also, there are other children to be tormented. These include her little brother, who is blind, sickly, and probably doomed; two emotionally stunted child soldiers; and an amnesiac boy whom she names Shiro, because he can't remember his name. Shiro, like Icoro, is missing certain emotional responses - he's incapable of crying or expressing grief, even when seriously injured, or explaining to Icoro that she is the first friend he's ever had.
Unfortunately, Shiro loses his memory again every time he's forced to fight to rescue her from something, meaning that he is constantly forgetting about her. Given that, with the exception of her doomed brother, he is literally the only character who doesn't abuse her (even her cute animal sidekick hates her), this sets off even more weeping on her part.
At one point, at the climax of a particularly intense cycle of abuse-and-weeping directed at Icoro, two sets of her tormenters - the child soldiers and some evil adults - are fighting over which gets to kidnap her. She bursts into tears so effectively that everyone has to stop to look at her. She's a virtuoso. She says, "I feel sorry for you all!" and launches into a tearful speech about how pathetic all of their lives are.
One of the child soldiers, later, spends a good deal of time thinking reluctantly about this. He begins to admire Icoro for this; her pity of them, in fact, strikes him as the highest emotion to which one could aspire. He sees something deeply profound in it.
I've been formulating a theory about moe.
Here's the thing: "cuteness," on some level, is just the instinct that makes us want to take care of children. We get a warm feeling that's triggered by, you know, kid stuff: small stature, large eyes and head, high-pitched voice, affectionate behavior, emotional vulnerability, poor cognitive skills, and physical weakness. These qualities trigger affection in adults because kids are a burden and we can hurt them, but our biology and social conditioning are telling us we have to take care of them.
(I did not set out to make this sound unpleasant, but am now at a loss as to how to make it sound any other way.)
The relevant idea is that "cute" is a symptom cluster, but that a character doesn't have to have every single trait to qualify as cute. Chiyo from Azumanga Daioh, Gon from Hunter x Hunter, and Haruhi from Ouran High School Host Club are all cute, even though they respectively are smarter than you, can kill you, and don't care about your problems. They possess a large enough number of the other suggested qualities to pass the test.
It's my theory that the aesthetic defining "moe" distinguishes itself from just "cute" because its diagnostic criteria are less flexible. There's one thing that's not optional, and that's vulnerability.
Seriously, there's a lot of pantswetting in this manga.Chiyo is acceptable as moe - she hurts herself a lot, scares and embarrasses easily, cries, etc. Gon and Haruhi, however, are not, because they're too hard to hurt. If the "cute" ideal is a harmless object of affection, the moe ideal is, I think, a helpless object of pity. We feel pity for the same reasons that we think things are cute - it's an alarm bell telling us to help someone who's been hurt. And we feel it most strongly and convincingly for individuals whom we feel sure are unable to protect themselves.
I'm obviously not suggesting here that moe manga and anime are all abuse narratives; with a certain obvious exception, most of the manga on these lists seem to be fairly light-weight. However, embarassment is a major theme in all of the ones I'm familiar with,* and three - Utena, Rozen Maiden, and Hayate the Combat Butler - also involve slavery. And while it's not like that stuff's unheard-of in shoujo manga, another genre known for its devotion to the ideal of cute, it's not ubiquitous the way it is here.
So, this begs the question - what's so attractive about this sort of story? Sometimes it's perfectly innocent: a lot of those manga listed up there are just slice-of-life narratives about people who get embarrassed easily because they have really strong emotional reactions to everyday situations. That's appealing because they imbue familiar landscape with greater depth; and there's also, I think, something comforting about reading about characters so impossibly emotionally helpless. It's similar to the impulse that creates shounen manga protagonists who suck at everything until they get given a magical orb. The reader feels better about his/her own ability to handle him/herself, reading about some character who bursts into tears over the immense significance of having been given a ride home or something.
On the other hand, some of it's obviously just fantasy material for people - okay, mainly guys - who fear adult relationships. They're attracted to vulnerability because a woman capable of taking care of herself is also capable of leaving you, hurting you, not wanting you. Hence little girls blushing up at you from four feet above the floor.**
And this is how we get to the scene in Kimi no Kakera where a starving and beaten Icoro desperately scrapes food off the floor, while her animal sidekick cruelly berates her for it. If pity is the highest form of love, then the more misery and humiliation heaped upon a character, the more lovable s/he must be. I imagine Takahashi concluding this scene, sitting back with a satisfied look on his face, and thinking, "beat that!"
-
* There are four I don't know - Lucky Star, Strawberry Marshmallow, Toradora!, and Minami-ke.
** To be fair, I'm sure there's an element of fantasization about fatherhood in there; Japan's currently toxic economic and gender-role situation means marriage and kids aren't an option for a lot of people. This is the problem with a culture wherein men have to have full-time jobs to support their families, and women have to be stay-at-home-moms, and women have to live with their parents until they're married, and single mothers are the worst thing ever.
But you can't gloss over the problem that a lot of this stuff is pretty sexualized. I'll leave this discussion to Jason Thompson, though.
This post was cross-posted from Dreamwidth. Please comment there using OpenID. (Comments:
)
Every single panel.It shares with the unpleasant Letter Bee both its MacGuffin - a missing sun - and its pornographic fascination with the suffering of wide-eyed, androgynous children. The protagonist is Icoro, a princess who, for reasons not entirely clear, is forced to do menial jobs to support her little brother while being heaped with verbal abuse. She is also constantly starving and cold, never gets a full night's sleep, has no friends, and was born incapable of smiling or laughing. When these various indignities build up too heavily upon her, as they do every two or three pages, Icoro cries massive, bulging, physically-improbable eyefulls of tears, so that it sometimes resembles a face less than a molten Venusian landscape. It's usually snowing, though.
If you worry that watching a Princess cry in the snow might get a little tedious, fear not, for sometimes she also wets herself. Also, there are other children to be tormented. These include her little brother, who is blind, sickly, and probably doomed; two emotionally stunted child soldiers; and an amnesiac boy whom she names Shiro, because he can't remember his name. Shiro, like Icoro, is missing certain emotional responses - he's incapable of crying or expressing grief, even when seriously injured, or explaining to Icoro that she is the first friend he's ever had.
Unfortunately, Shiro loses his memory again every time he's forced to fight to rescue her from something, meaning that he is constantly forgetting about her. Given that, with the exception of her doomed brother, he is literally the only character who doesn't abuse her (even her cute animal sidekick hates her), this sets off even more weeping on her part.
At one point, at the climax of a particularly intense cycle of abuse-and-weeping directed at Icoro, two sets of her tormenters - the child soldiers and some evil adults - are fighting over which gets to kidnap her. She bursts into tears so effectively that everyone has to stop to look at her. She's a virtuoso. She says, "I feel sorry for you all!" and launches into a tearful speech about how pathetic all of their lives are.
One of the child soldiers, later, spends a good deal of time thinking reluctantly about this. He begins to admire Icoro for this; her pity of them, in fact, strikes him as the highest emotion to which one could aspire. He sees something deeply profound in it.
I've been formulating a theory about moe.
Here's the thing: "cuteness," on some level, is just the instinct that makes us want to take care of children. We get a warm feeling that's triggered by, you know, kid stuff: small stature, large eyes and head, high-pitched voice, affectionate behavior, emotional vulnerability, poor cognitive skills, and physical weakness. These qualities trigger affection in adults because kids are a burden and we can hurt them, but our biology and social conditioning are telling us we have to take care of them.
(I did not set out to make this sound unpleasant, but am now at a loss as to how to make it sound any other way.)
The relevant idea is that "cute" is a symptom cluster, but that a character doesn't have to have every single trait to qualify as cute. Chiyo from Azumanga Daioh, Gon from Hunter x Hunter, and Haruhi from Ouran High School Host Club are all cute, even though they respectively are smarter than you, can kill you, and don't care about your problems. They possess a large enough number of the other suggested qualities to pass the test.
It's my theory that the aesthetic defining "moe" distinguishes itself from just "cute" because its diagnostic criteria are less flexible. There's one thing that's not optional, and that's vulnerability.
Seriously, there's a lot of pantswetting in this manga.Chiyo is acceptable as moe - she hurts herself a lot, scares and embarrasses easily, cries, etc. Gon and Haruhi, however, are not, because they're too hard to hurt. If the "cute" ideal is a harmless object of affection, the moe ideal is, I think, a helpless object of pity. We feel pity for the same reasons that we think things are cute - it's an alarm bell telling us to help someone who's been hurt. And we feel it most strongly and convincingly for individuals whom we feel sure are unable to protect themselves.
I'm obviously not suggesting here that moe manga and anime are all abuse narratives; with a certain obvious exception, most of the manga on these lists seem to be fairly light-weight. However, embarassment is a major theme in all of the ones I'm familiar with,* and three - Utena, Rozen Maiden, and Hayate the Combat Butler - also involve slavery. And while it's not like that stuff's unheard-of in shoujo manga, another genre known for its devotion to the ideal of cute, it's not ubiquitous the way it is here.
So, this begs the question - what's so attractive about this sort of story? Sometimes it's perfectly innocent: a lot of those manga listed up there are just slice-of-life narratives about people who get embarrassed easily because they have really strong emotional reactions to everyday situations. That's appealing because they imbue familiar landscape with greater depth; and there's also, I think, something comforting about reading about characters so impossibly emotionally helpless. It's similar to the impulse that creates shounen manga protagonists who suck at everything until they get given a magical orb. The reader feels better about his/her own ability to handle him/herself, reading about some character who bursts into tears over the immense significance of having been given a ride home or something.
On the other hand, some of it's obviously just fantasy material for people - okay, mainly guys - who fear adult relationships. They're attracted to vulnerability because a woman capable of taking care of herself is also capable of leaving you, hurting you, not wanting you. Hence little girls blushing up at you from four feet above the floor.**
And this is how we get to the scene in Kimi no Kakera where a starving and beaten Icoro desperately scrapes food off the floor, while her animal sidekick cruelly berates her for it. If pity is the highest form of love, then the more misery and humiliation heaped upon a character, the more lovable s/he must be. I imagine Takahashi concluding this scene, sitting back with a satisfied look on his face, and thinking, "beat that!"
-
* There are four I don't know - Lucky Star, Strawberry Marshmallow, Toradora!, and Minami-ke.
** To be fair, I'm sure there's an element of fantasization about fatherhood in there; Japan's currently toxic economic and gender-role situation means marriage and kids aren't an option for a lot of people. This is the problem with a culture wherein men have to have full-time jobs to support their families, and women have to be stay-at-home-moms, and women have to live with their parents until they're married, and single mothers are the worst thing ever.
But you can't gloss over the problem that a lot of this stuff is pretty sexualized. I'll leave this discussion to Jason Thompson, though.
This post was cross-posted from Dreamwidth. Please comment there using OpenID. (Comments:
)