At the end of my Dandadan review, I discovered that Dandadan was written by a former assistant of Tatsuki Fujimoto, author of Chainsaw Man (which I also reviewed). A lot of my Dandadan review was about how much it was seemingly influenced by Chainsaw Man, even before I knew about the connection, and upon learning it I got the idea to watch another adaptation of a manga written by a Fujimoto assistant: Hell's Paradise. My idea was, by tracing Fujimoto's influence, I could get a better idea of what, truly, Fujimoto brings to the table as a creative figure -- or at least what people
...
are taking away from his work.
Approaching Hell's Paradise from this angle was actually fascinating, because it is both recognizably influenced by Fujimoto but is also influenced in a way that is almost diametrically opposite the influences seen in Dandadan. Dandadan emphasizes Fujimoto's irreverence, focusing its plot on the emasculation of its protagonist, the strong women who push him around, and especially humor, particularly humor that undercuts its otherwise treacly emotional beats.
The first thing I noticed about Hell's Paradise is that it isn't funny. There are few jokes; those that do exist are usually dry, something that provokes a chuckle at best. Accordingly, the tone is much more consistently serious than Dandadan or even Chainsaw Man.
In fact, other than the structure of a few fight scenes, and main character Gabimaru constantly repeating his motivation to the audience (I need to get the elixir so I can go home to my wife!), Hell's Paradise doesn't feel much like a shounen at all, either traditionally or in the irreverent-emasculatory subversive way of the other two works. It did remind me of something else, though, something I am truly and deeply familiar with, a brand of story near and dear to my heart:
The SciFi Channel Original Movie.
Until the tragic and disgraceful Sharknado in 2013, when these films started being intentionally bad for memetic reasons, the SciFi Channel (now called Syfy) churned out (or rather bought the rights to) an endless array of straight-to-DVD shlock B-movies. They would premiere a new one almost every week, and I was always there for it. Though there were so many of these it'd make your head spin, the most common were shameless echos of one of the following two plots:
The Jaws plot: A monster of some sort, or a swarm of monsters, is loose near a small town. A local sheriff and/or local scientist is aware of the monster and tries to convince the mayor it exists, but there's a major festival/tourist season coming up and the mayor refuses to listen. The monster(s) predictably attack the festival, causing a major bloodbath, before the sheriff/scientist manage to kill the monster(s) and save the day. Examples: Snakehead Terror, Swarmed, Killer Bees, like fifty other shark movies
The Jurassic Park 3 plot (specifically 3): There's an island or otherwise isolated wilderness (jungle, cave, mountain, whatever) where a monster or species of monster lives. A group of people become trapped on this island/etc. and are picked off one by one by the monsters as they seek a way to escape. Examples: Raptor Island, Pterodactyl, Blood Monkey, Crocodile 2: Death Roll, Centipede!
Hell's Paradise hits the JP3 plot perfectly. The premise is basic: 10 death row inmates and 10 executioners are sent to an island where the elixir of life is said to be. The inmate who brings back the elixir alive will receive a pardon from the shogun, but of course the island is crawling with dangerous monsters and the 20 characters are rapidly whittled down as they fight to survive.
This is my kind of story. I love it.
Compared to the obscenely high production values of Chainsaw Man and Dandadan, Hell's Paradise looks significantly cheaper, which only emphasizes its B-movie feel. There's also a genericness to the character designs that gives the proper suggestion of disposability. I've found that as anime character designs become more complex and florid, the writer becomes more reluctant to kill them off, as if doing so would be wasteful of the effort that went into the design. (Look at something like My Hero Academia, which flirts so frequently with having a dark and edgy turn, but cannot bring itself to axe even one of the 100 irrelevant-but-colorful blorbos blorbing around in the background.)
There is some similarity to Chainsaw Man in this regard, which also gives its characters anonymizing and generic black suits and is also willing to kill them at leisure. But most similar to Chainsaw Man, and in this way also sharing some DNA with the competing Dandadan evolutionary branch, is role of women in the story. Gabimaru is a criminal, and the female executioner assigned to him, Sagiri, holds complete legal power over his life, similar to the subordinate nature of Denji to Makima. The power imbalance is emphasized by their designs, with Sagiri being roughly a head taller than Gabimaru (who looks like a dead ringer for Near from Death Note, incidentally). However, Hell's Paradise is not particularly obsessed with male subordination and emasculation, the way Chainsaw Man and Dandadan are. It is shown early that, although Sagiri is capable of killing the otherwise-indestructable Gabimaru, he is still a superior fighter to her, and her actual level of control over him is dubious at best; eventually he outright ditches her and goes off on his own adventure. Ironically, the lack of dominating power Sagiri exhibits in comparison to Makima or Dandadan's Momo allows her to be a more dynamic character in her own right; rather than a static force who exists solely for the male lead to bounce against, she has her own issues and struggles that she overcomes mostly independent of Gabimaru. In a surprising turn, the final battle of the anime is spearheaded by Sagiri, while Gabimaru is off somewhere else mowing down fodder. (This shift in focus also sets up an effective twist that calls into question everything the viewer knows about Gabimaru and his ad nauseum-repeated motivation.) This is not necessarily a comparative value judgment; though static, Makima is undeniably iconic and leaves a much bigger impact. But Sagiri's dynamism contributes to Hell's Paradise having a different feel when it comes to its perspective on gender.
At the same time, Hell's Paradise's much more serious tone compared to Chainsaw Man does not indicate a difference in preoccupation with emotional sincerity. While in Chainsaw Man, Denji frequently undercuts moments of serious emotion with humor, Hell's Paradise maintains this same idea of emotional detachment even without it. Gabimaru is known as "The Hollow," which refers to his status as an emotionless killer; the first episode revolves around his emotionless response to his own execution as he repeatedly tells himself he doesn't care if he lives or dies. Rather than irreverence, Hell's Paradise uses apathy to engage with the same theme, as Gabimaru is gradually redeemed due to his status as Wife Guy (I need to get the elixir so I can go home to my wife!). (As a side note, the existence of this wife is a definitive rejection of the emasculation of Chainsaw Man and Dandadan.) This struggle is rendered in a simple, perhaps overly simple, fashion, with Gabimaru imagining his emotionally-encouraging wife as more-or-less an angel on his shoulder while the master who trained him to kill remorselessly appears as a devil. There is a twist at the end of the anime that throws all of this into question in a way that is highly salient to the theme of apathy-versus-sincerity, but given this review is kind of a recommendation for people to watch the show, I won't discuss it.
It is this idea of sincerity in the face of emotional detachment that pervades Chainsaw Man and both of Fujimoto's acolyte's works, the most common fixation I can find between all three. Compared to the cripplingly earnest protagonists of shounen past (Luffy, Goku, Naruto, Deku), it gives this Fujimoto brand of shounen a distinct flavor, one perhaps perfectly attuned to these deeply media-savvy authors and their equally media-savvy internet age audiences. Once you're writing the manga equivalent of a SciFi Channel movie, or perhaps Sadako vs. Kayako, you're necessarily a little emotionally detached, no?
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Apr 10, 2025
Jigokuraku
(Anime)
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At the end of my Dandadan review, I discovered that Dandadan was written by a former assistant of Tatsuki Fujimoto, author of Chainsaw Man (which I also reviewed). A lot of my Dandadan review was about how much it was seemingly influenced by Chainsaw Man, even before I knew about the connection, and upon learning it I got the idea to watch another adaptation of a manga written by a Fujimoto assistant: Hell's Paradise. My idea was, by tracing Fujimoto's influence, I could get a better idea of what, truly, Fujimoto brings to the table as a creative figure -- or at least what people
...
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 4, 2025
BanG Dream! Ave Mujica
(Anime)
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It's 2008, and Doug Walker is confused.
The famous film critic is doing a ten-year retrospective on Pokémon: The First Movie (1998). While watching the opening scene, in which a group of scientists explore a jungle, he poses a series of questions: "What are those things? Who are you? Where are we? What's that thing? Where am I? Is this Earth? Are we in another dimension? Is this the past? The future? The present? What's going on?! Where does this even take place?! Oh, my God, I'm, like, one minute into this movie, already I'm totally lost!" To Walker's credit, Pokémon is a notoriously impenetrable narrative, known ... for its high complexity and thematic depth. As he explains: "For those of you who don't know what [Pokémon]'s about, I can't help you because nobody knew what the hell it was about. [...] Nobody could follow it. The only people who understood it at all were the kids." A similar confusion descended upon me as, on the recommendation of several people in my orbit who called it the criminally underrated sleeper hit of the season, I watched the first episode of BanG Dream! Ave Mujica. They compared it to Umineko, Madoka Magica. None of them told me the show is a sequel (to 2023's BanG Dream! It's MyGO!!!!!), nor any other crucial bits of context: that plot details and twists have been foreshadowed via ARG; that there are music videos for the songs the show's band plays, themselves containing oblique hints to the narrative; that the band itself is real, not in the vtuber sense where rigged anime girls bob their heads on stream but in the sense that each character is voice acted by the members of a real five-person band called Ave Mujica that plays live shows in goth costumes. Oh no, I thought. I've stepped into a bear trap!(!!!!) My initial confusion mostly stemmed from the show expecting the audience to already know all the characters, not simply the five members of the band Ave Mujica but also the five members of the band MyGO!!!!!, who are the main focus of the predecessor series. There are few establishing shots, few immediate character beats that cause one character to stand out from the rest, and the character designs have the traditional sameface of idol anime, so hair and eye color are often the only notable aesthetic differences between them. I watch a lot of anime, and sameface doesn't usually throw me, but here it was a struggle to tell some characters apart (particularly Ave Mujica's two blonde guitarists, Uika and Mutsumi). Disorientation can cause one to stop thinking at all, though, even to understand things that are perfectly understandable. The irony of Walker's baffled series of questions about the opening scene of the Pokémon movie is how most of them pertain to the setting, when the scene's setting (the real-world nation of Guyana) never appeared before or since in the franchise; even the most dedicated six-year-old had as much ability to answer questions about it as Walker himself. It's not even important, really, in the scope of the plot. It's a jungle somewhere, some distant land. It's in one scene and disappears forever. But Walker, like most parents of 1998, encountered a few details he couldn't understand (the franchise's foreign-sounding name, the endless array of unique monsters) and gave up trying to understand anything at all. In Walker's defense, the most insidious aspect of confusion is not knowing what you don't know. A Pokémon fan watches that opening scene, well aware of the typical setting of Pokémon, and thus knows that this jungle setting is someplace new, some foreign locale, something they're not supposed to know. Walker cannot, at a glance, discern that. To him, maybe this jungle is the primary location where the action is set. Maybe he really is at a disadvantage for not being aware of it already. The trick to understanding Ave Mujica is that the five members of MyGO!!!!! do not matter nearly as much as their screentime suggests. There is some connection, as two members of Ave Mujica (Sakiko and Mutsumi) were previously in a band (CRYCHIC) with three members of MyGO!!!!!, and Sakiko's abrupt and unexplained departure from CRYCHIC is the root of the interpersonal drama between Sakiko and Mutsumi. Otherwise, the MyGO!!!!!ites serve as outsiders to the main drama who look in and occasionally comment on it; not knowing anything about them is fine. Once I figured that out around Episode 3 or 4, the show became generally comprehensible. I think. It's 2019, and Doug Walker is confused. Everyone is. A collective confusion as, during the climax of his avant garde musical reassessment of Pink Floyd The Wall (1982), an anthropomorphic mustelid slithers onto his shoulder while singing a Cockney rendition of "The Trial". Across a series of discombobulated fantasy landscapes, Walker has been regaled by this and several other digital creatures designed with an almost obscene attention to detail, lavish fur and fabric textures far beyond the pale of Walker's more workman-like VFX flair. If there was context, it has been lost in the characters' impenetrable accents and vocal layering. All anyone watching can do is ask: What are those things? Who are you? Where are we? What's that thing? Where am I? Is this Earth? Are we in another dimension? Is this the past? The future? The present? What's going on?! Where does this even take place?! Nobody can follow it... Except Doug Walker. This isn't the reason he's confused. If anything, he is oddly, uncharacteristically accepting of the situation. He is a critic best known for animated facial expressions and wild gesticulations, but here he stands perfectly still almost the entire length of the song, even as the CGI creatures pluck his hat off his head or lift him bodily into the air or toss him into a little spike-studded Doug Cage. His face is stone. No, this is a Walker who exhibits, at last, mastery over the raw facts of narrative. It is not plot, character, or setting that confuse Walker about The Wall. When he criticizes the song "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2", he correctly assesses that the song is about the cruelty of the education system. What he's confused about, lacking the cultural context of British grammar schools in the 1950s, is what this means, how to interpret it. He can only do so in the frame of the suburban American education system he remembers, and so ascribes to the song meaning relevant to that context; namely, that school isn't that bad, that teachers can be nice, and that anti-school youth sentiment is meaningless counterculture. It's a misunderstanding, not of fact, but of heart. "Pretentious," Walker calls it, a word he repeats across the video. Pretentiousness is a fixation of Walker's. He loves the word; he uses it often. It's perhaps the perfect word for a workman-like man like Doug Walker, one of the first true outsiders to achieve success in the democratized media landscape of the internet. "Pretentious" means the author believes their work possesses more meaning and importance than the critic can derive from it. This confusion of interpretation struck me too as I watched Ave Mujica, even when I understood on a summary level the plot and characters. In the first episode, one of the few characters to distinctively establish herself is Ave Mujica's drummer, Nyamu, who starts a catty argument with the band's keyboardist and founder, Sakiko. The crux of the argument is simple. Part of Ave Mujica's gimmick as an avant garde act that blends live music with acted skit segments is that its five members wear masks on stage, concealing their identities. Nyamu, in Walkeresque fashion, wants to dispense with this "pretension," claiming to be bored of it. Her true goal is mercenary; she believes, as the only band member who is not already established in the entertainment industry, that publicly associating herself with her more famous bandmates will elevate her personal profile. Sakiko, for whom this project is an artistic venture of deep psychological importance, rejects her proposal. But Nyamu disregards her bandmates' wishes and forcibly unmasks them at the next concert anyway. I understood the argument. What I didn't understand was how to feel about it, how interpret Nyamu's role in the story. In a vacuum, I could only imagine she was intended as the show's villain. She is vain, petty, a shameless social climber, self-absorbed, a YouTuber, and also the driver of the initial conflict that causes the other bandmates to spiral psychologically out of control. Beyond that, she is commercial. In my preconceived cultural understanding of "fiction about art," the sellout is the villain, and the person with legitimate artistic vision (in this case, Sakiko) is the hero. The rest of the first episode supports this reading: it focuses on Sakiko's perspective and home life in a way that lends her significant pathos, while Nyamu exists solely to cause her grief. Yet the rest of the show does not support this reading. When a band member has a schizophrenic break a few episodes later, Sakiko is framed as the core cause, due to her demanding auteurism. Nyamu, who sparked the inciting incident, is never blamed, either by the other characters or by the narrative as she slips away, unregenerate, into a minor and isolated subplot. She never abandons or even interrogates her crass commercialism, and despite being the most replaceable member of the band and the least interconnected to the others' social circle (she appears, actually, to be a college-aged adult while everyone else is a high schooler), nobody suggests she be replaced when the band breaks up and reforms. Nobody demands anything of her at all. Nobody even really seems to see her as a problem. I love it. I love it when shameless little shits don't get any comeuppance at all. I love Nyamu. (Honestly!) But how am I supposed to interpret her argument, within the framework of Ave Mujica as a story? The obvious interpretation is that Nyamu is correct, or at least in wake of the show's ambivalence toward her, not wrong. Cynical commercialism has value, is at least an important consideration for artistic decisions. This interpretation makes sense considering it's the artiste Sakiko who winds up shouldering the blame for the band's internal collapse, but at the same time it's a bizarre proclamation to make in a show that is otherwise so concerned with rendering Sakiko empathically, with exploring her psyche and motivations, and with -- ultimately -- selling the audience her artistry. Ave Mujica, as I explained, is a real band. All the goth flair, the arcane skits, the oblique narrative hints, and the doll symbolism that are core to Sakiko the character's artistic vision are also core to the real-life Ave Mujica the band. It's inconceivable to me that the show is actually dismissing its own aesthetic as "pretentious." Why, then, does its own in-universe Nyastalgia Critic go unchallenged, escape unscathed? What does it mean that these criticisms emerge not from unconnected outsiders (even with five members of MyGO!!!!! right there, with their significantly more down-to-earth, more workman-like band) but from one-fifth of Ave Mujica itself? What, exactly, is Ave Mujica's identity? It's 2013, and Doug Walker is confused. Existentially. The video is titled "The Review Must Go On," with an ominous subtitle in the vein of End of Evangelion: "Demo Reel Finale." Something, indeed, is coming to an end here, and it isn't just Doug Walker's lifelong passion project. In this postmodern künstlerroman, Doug Walker stares into a mirror, but what he sees is not Doug Walker. It is his past and it will be his future. (Is this the past? The future? The present? What's going on?!) It is the fixed and unchanging edifice of 18 long years and counting, an entity unstuck from time, who, despite changes to format, site, contemporary taste, and the internet itself, remains immutable. It cannot be denied, cannot be destroyed, can only -- briefly -- be bargained with. And Doug Walker bargains. "Not every week," he says, staring his down his creation. "Once every two weeks." His creation, only somewhat put off, accedes. (Now, in 2025, it's once a week once more.) A single word: "Done," and the deal is made. "Alright then," Walker says, with a beleaguered sigh. "What's next?" The cold voice replies: "I think you know what's next." Walker does know. He returns to his desk, where he had been typing the script to the Demo Reel Finale, and dutifully writes what he has known all along. Donnie DuPre, the main character of Demo Reel, that lifelong passion project, that original creative work, was always him. The Nostalgia Critic. It's a final surrender. There will be no more passion projects. No delusions of artistic accomplishment. None, at least, that don't involve this thing that Doug Walker has become, this thing to which he has given the rest of his life. This moment mirrors the argument between Nyamu and Sakiko. Though Walker claims otherwise in the video, the decision to revive the Nostalgia Critic is clearly commercial; the Nostalgia Critic is popular, Demo Reel is not. Walker has abandoned his artistic vision in favor of what sells. Nyamu has won. Except it's Sakiko, not Nyamu, who makes the demands that the Nostalgia Critic makes of Doug Walker. "I am not going to let this band be just a passing fad," Sakiko says. "I told you. Give me the rest of your life." Doug Walker is giving the rest of his life to the Nostalgia Critic. Is trapped by it. As Ave Mujica progresses, its members become similarly ensnared. I claimed previously that Nyamu is never punished by the narrative, never challenged by the other band members or blamed for her actions, nobody ever attempts to get her replaced, but the opposite side of that coin is that she is incapable of getting herself replaced despite her desire to use the band as a stepping stone for a personal career. Though she gains industry connections via a bandmate's actress mother, she is crippled by the memory of one of Ave Mujica's most perplexing images, an image that similarly left me at an utter loss: the guitarist Mutsumi, collapsed in a disassociating stupor, on stage before an audience of thousands. This moment is the beginning of Mutsumi's character arc, in which she is consumed by her band persona, Mortis, in a literalized split-personality storyline that itself has obvious parallels to Doug Walker's relationship with the Nostalgia Critic in The Review Must Go On. What fascinates me about this moment, though, is the reaction of everyone watching. The moment Mutsumi unexpectedly collapses, Sakiko deftly weaves it into the band's narrative, concocting a story about how the song they were playing lulls the "dolls" (Ave Mujica's band members) into eternal slumber, before abruptly ending the entire concert. The other four members step off the stage, leaving only the collapsed Mutsumi in the spotlight, motionless and silent. The audience loves it. The band explodes in popularity. It's such a memetic event that the fans become disappointed when it isn't repeated at the next concert; Nyamu suggests that they repeat it, even to the point of showing up to concerts and not playing music at all. "Ignoring the audience's expectations -- what's the point of that?" Nobody, in or out of the band, reads Mutsumi's collapse as a cry for help. She can't cry for help. No matter what she does. When the band announces their breakup, she screams hysterically on the stage, even as the other four members are quiet. "Mutsumi was cooking until the end," a social media post later remarks. She has a breakdown on the street, arguing with her split personality in Gollum/Smeagol fashion (complete with camera angles swapping back and forth to indicate her two selves), and though people gather around and film it, the audience's only possible interpretation of the event is that it is a promotional stunt for the band. Even Nyamu, haunted by that image of Mutsumi collapsed in the chair, isn't haunted because of the psychological toll her actions inflicted on her bandmate (and, eventually, primary yuri shipmate), but because she believes Mutsumi was acting, acting so ingeniously that it torments Nyamu she cannot achieve that same level of skill. Mutsumi is entrapped within the narrative ambiguity of Ave Mujica. Like Doug Walker, everyone watching her is confidently confused, only able to interpret her actions within their own contextual framework. What is the contextual framework of Ave Mujica, though? It is a Babushka doll of meaning, an anime based on a real band that contains within it contradictory proponents of artistic vision and common-denominator commercialism, that is itself contradictorily artistic -- if my struggle to interpret it is enough to suggest -- and commercial, the way its poetic symbolism about dolls and control is draped on samefaced 3D anime girl models that move stiffly and unconvincingly. But the show is willing to make those 3D models contort their faces into distinctively un-idol-like (distinctively Doug Walker-like) maniacal expressions, to throw them on the ground and scrape open their knees with blood streaming out, to have them hurl each other down the stairs in fits of rage, to pair them in incestuous yuri couplings. The story both gesticulates toward a cynical, darker take on the idol industry like Perfect Blue or Oshi no Ko, yet is part of an established idol franchise selling these characters as actual idols. Even in the narrative, the depiction of the idol industry is confused; the band seems to have no managers, no agents, nobody telling them what to do. They don't even have secretaries; bassist Umiri handles scheduling and itineraries. Men only exist in the world of BanG Dream! as fathers or grandfathers; every behind-the-scenes staffer at the concerts, in fact every concertgoer, is female. Nyamu is not Akane Yonezawa, Ave Mujica's real life drummer. But both are industry outsiders in their first real role, compared to their four bandmates who are already established. Rich girl keyboardist Sakiko is not Kanon Takao, but Kanon Takao was winning international piano tournaments in Milan at age 10. Where is the line between fiction and reality? How real is this anime, and how fake is this band? How much is the Nostalgia Critic a character, and how much is he Doug Walker with a hat? And isn't it within this endless array of ambiguity, of questions, of confusion, that Ave Mujica ensnares? "Give me the rest of your life," Sakiko says, but with these ARGs and multimedia comb-over-it-with-a-magnifying-glass details and crossovers with other bands, whose life is she demanding? To the incurious, the Doug Walkers, confusion is enough to dismiss out of hand. But for those who want to know more, there are an endless amount of dolls to open... Perhaps Walker was right, all those years ago in 2008, to not gaze too deeply into the world of Pokémon. It is a franchise, after all, that has exploited the human instinct toward curiosity to become the highest-selling media property of all time. ("Ignoring the audience's expectations -- what's the point of that?" Nyamu says.) It's 2021, and Dan Olson is confused. He is a critic criticizing a critic. In this case, he is criticizing Doug Walker's review of The Wall. Unbelievably, this criticism has over 2 million more views than Doug Walker's The Wall video does. Over twice as many people have seen this criticism than the thing being criticized. Olson asks: "What is this? Why does this exist?" He doesn't know why Doug Walker would do this. Why would he put such elaborate effort into a musical review of The Wall, something Walker barely seems to understand or care about at all, something he only seems to have watched for the first time in preparation for creating the review. Walker's lack of curiosity baffles Olson, particularly because it is balanced against the effort on display in the review itself. How can someone spend months on costumes, visuals, parody lyrics, and celebrity guests, all to call something pretentious? What Olson doesn't realize is that there is a Doug Walker, wannabe filmmaker, involved in this production, a Doug Walker with -- for better or for worse -- an artistic vision, who is willing to go to great lengths to apply that vision. But someone else is running the show. Someone to whom Doug Walker has given the rest of his life. He's called the Nostalgia Critic, but, as in Ave Mujica, this avatar of commercial greed is only an abstraction, isn't it? A figment of ambiguity in which all cries for help, no matter how loudly they are screamed, can be extinguished. There's someone else, unseen and unacknowledged, with real control over these dolls, the one who forces them to perform as perfect time capsules, ageless and eternal. I'm not sure what they're called for Ave Mujica, but for Doug Walker, their name can be found with a bit of searching: Mike Michaud. "Let me show you," says that anthropomorphic mustelid, Lucy Lacemaker, as the first notes of The Trial begin. "Let me show you what happens when your dreams no longer need you."
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Mar 23, 2025
Sword Art Online
(Anime)
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Not Recommended Spoiler
Sword Art Online is a Frankenstein monster. Here is every episode of the first arc and how it was adapted:
- Episode 1 is from the original web novel, published in 2002. - Episode 2 is from a more detailed rewrite of the story, Sword Art Online Progressive, published in 2012 (only a few months before the anime aired). - Episode 3 is from the second volume of the light novel, published in 2009. - Episode 4 is from a side story published shortly after the original web novel, in either 2002 or 2003. - Episodes 5 and 6 combine a side story published in 2007 and another side story ... from the eighth volume of the light novel, published in 2011. - Episode 7 is from a side story published shortly after the original web novel, likely in 2003. - Episodes 8, 9, and 10 are from the original web novel, published in 2002. - Episode 11 and 12 are from a side story published in 2003. - Episodes 13 and 14 are from the original web novel, published in 2002. By stitching together stories written across an entire decade, often with wildly different purposes and goals, the anime is tonally erratic, with glaring plot and character inconsistencies. For example, Episode 3 is a tragic episode in which Kirito brings several low-level players to a high-level floor, leading to their deaths. Kirito is traumatized; he later explains that this incident is why he plays as a solo player, so nobody else will ever get hurt because of him. Episode 4, by contrast, is a lighthearted episode in which Kirito—having learned nothing, because this story was written six years before the previous one—brings a low-level player to a high-level floor as bait for dangerous player-killers. When the low-level player is comedically groped by a tentacle monster and cries out for Kirito to save her, Kirito only shrugs and says, "Come on, it's not that powerful." He's ultimately correct, and this time the player survives, but what happened to his trauma? These inconsistencies, combined with Sword Art Online's massive popularity, made it the favorite target of the fledgling anime video essay community circa 2014 to 2017. Though it's possible to do a longform video poring over every single plot hole for almost anything, Sword Art Online made it easy; half of its "plot" was never intended to be arranged in this way, and even when there was intent, it was the intent of an amateur author writing their first-ever story. You couldn't generate a work more perfect for endless nitpicking and angry rants in a lab. But if the show is blatantly incompetent, what made it so popular? It's tempting to ascribe its popularity to "right place, right time." By 2012, the year Sword Art Online came out, the internet had changed the primary way people interacted socially. Rather than being bound by family, proximity, race, creed, religion, or so on, people grouped together by hobby. "Gamer" was now a community-binding identity, an attribute that distinguished a person and their niche online space from the othered outside. And the Gamers craved legitimacy. They craved the approval and recognition of mainstream culture. They craved representation, that feeling of seeing yourself reflected in the world around you. The world refused them. The mood of the entrenched pop cultural elite was best encapsulated by Roger Ebert, famous film critic, who had been waging a years-long crusade against video games as an artistic medium. In 2005, in response to the live-action Doom movie, Ebert said, "Video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized[,] and empathetic." He reiterated this claim in statements and essays in 2006 and 2010, and in March 2012, on the eve of Sword Art Online's airing, described Dark Souls—Dark Souls!—as a "soul-deadening experience." "Video games can never be art," he asserted plainly later that year. In this milieu, it makes sense why Gamers glommed onto Sword Art Online. If nothing else, Sword Art Online takes video games seriously, more seriously than any non-video game media before it (asterisk; excepting .hack). This seriousness manifests in a consistent theme, a singular perpetually present thread that lingers even as plot, character, and tone skew wildly, stated by Kirito to Klein in Episode 1: "This may be a virtual world, but I feel more alive here than I do in the real world." This statement defines Asuna, who stops seeing her time trapped in the game as years stolen from her life, and instead learns to live each moment as if it were truly real. It defines Silica, mourning her dead Neopet and willing to risk her actual life to revive it. It defines Lisbeth, hurtling a million miles into the air but still for a moment enraptured by the beauty of a digital sun shining over a digital land. It defines Griselda, murdered by her husband Grimlock for motives he can only confusingly explain as related to how she "changed" in the game, how she became more confident, more self-realized, while he sank into despair (he was not a Gamer. He lacked the Gamer spirit). It defines Yui, the sentient NPC whom Kirito and Asuna adopt as part of a pantomimed marriage that the show's nauseatingly boring second arc is about protecting against an outside world that does not acknowledge it. And it defines Akihiko Kayaba, the game's creator, who when confronted at the end over why he trapped 10,000 people in this death game, can only say that he no longer remembers, before rhapsodizing about the "castle in the sky" he so achingly desired to bring to life. Unstated is that, to make it truly alive, he needed to make it—and the people inside it—capable of death. This logic is twisted, even more bizarre than Grimlock's murder confession, but neither the scene's wistfully poignant tone nor Kirito's responses reject it. As the video essayists have done, it's pathetically easy to pick apart Kayaba's rationale. But to mire oneself in the story's logic is a mistake; Sword Art Online is not a story guided by logic. What matters is that Kayaba's illogical words are consistent with the ethos that underlies the narrative: The virtual world is as important as, or even more important than, the real world. The anime's production values reflect this ethos, too. Sword Art Online looks strikingly cheap for its level of popularity. In almost every fight, still images with blur lines vibrate in tacky simulation of animation. There is no dynamism in the camerawork, and sword duels are often depicted in shot-reverse shot so only one participant is on screen at a time. Nobody interacts with their environment; every battle occurs on a flat, empty plane. Some of the monsters are CGI and look awful. The character designs are bland and generic. Even the music, by the otherwise-excellent Yuki Kajiura, sounds like phoned-in B-sides from her work on Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) and its sequel film, Rebellion (2013). But what the show does expend effort on is its backgrounds, which are both visually inventive—floating islands, towering columns that hold up the sky—and depicted with glimmering post-processing effects to bathe them in sunsets, sunrises, rainbows, and starry nights. First and foremost, Sword Art Online sells its virtual world to the viewer, makes them believe in that world the way the characters in the story do. And in having that world sold to them, in expressing its legitimacy and the legitimacy of those (hero or villain) who believe in it, the Gamers had their rallying cry, the work of media that finally said: You are seen. But was it really Gamers that Sword Art Online saw? While Sword Art Online is invested in selling its virtual world, it is not invested in selling its virtual game. The in-universe Sword Art Online is primarily defined by its lack of gameplay mechanics, rather than those it actually has. In Episode 1, Klein explains that the game lacks a magic system, which he describes as a "bold choice." In Episode 2, members of the raid party state that the game also lacks a job or class system. There is no long-ranged weaponry; everyone uses melee weapons, usually swords. The only strategy during raids is human wave tactics, where armies of players charge in and attack at once. The only cooperative maneuver is "Switch," a mechanic that is never explicitly explained but seems to involve a player who has already charged in backing off so another player can charge in their place. Compared to even basic single-player RPGs, these mechanics are primitive; for an MMORPG, they're antediluvian. The point isn't whether a game with these mechanics would be fun or not (in many ways, it's similar to Dark Souls, where the basic core gameplay of dodge-and-hit is rendered meaningful by the consequences for failure), but rather that the game's mechanics have little importance within the story. They're so unimportant that it's never explained why Kirito is so good at the game, what he's doing differently from everyone else. He's not even a grinder. He spends most of the first half of the story slumming on floors far beneath his level. It's no-nonsense Asuna who grinds hard, who tries to exploit the game mechanics, like when she proposes using NPCs to lure a boss. The plan makes logical sense, but logic is absent from Sword Art Online's ethos; Kirito rejects it, not on the grounds it wouldn't work, but because the NPCs would be killed. He prioritizes respecting the game world, while Asuna—at least initially—prioritizes respecting the game mechanics. Kirito's philosophy is ultimately proven right when he and Asuna adopt an NPC daughter who turns out to be sentient. Meanwhile, Kirito's most impressive feat involves him ignoring the game's rules entirely. The one mechanic described in detail is that if you die in the game, you die in real life; when Kirito dies, though, he wills himself back alive to defeat the final boss. The game, the experience of gaming, being a Gamer—none of these are part of the underlying ethos that guides the narrative decisions of Sword Art Online. Kirito didn't tell Klein, "I feel more alive playing this game." He said, "I feel more alive in this virtual world." Asuna didn't find happiness by exploiting the game, but by learning to live in it as though it were her real life. Kayaba didn't design Sword Art Online because he loves games, but because he wanted to make his world real. This isn't a story about Gamers. It's a story about a virtual world. It's a story about the internet. It's a story about online community. In his introduction to Speaker for the Dead (1986), Orson Scott Card describes the heroes of most science fiction novels as "perpetual adolescents": "He belongs to no community; he is wandering from place to place, doing good (as he sees it), but then moving on. This is the life of the adolescent, full of passion, intensity, magic, and infinite possibility; but lacking responsibility, rarely expecting to have to stay and bear the consequences of error [...] Who but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger? And yet to me, at least, the most important stories are the ones that teach us how to be civilized: the stories about children and adults, about responsibility and dependency." Card, of course, wrote Gamer fiction long before anyone craved it. Ender's Game (1985) is obsessed with the mechanical minutiae of its titular game in a way Sword Art Online is not; its protagonist is successful in the mold of Asuna, able to understand and exploit game mechanics better than anyone else. But in this quote, Card describes Kirito perfectly. Kirito is, of course, an actual adolescent, emphasized by his character design and Columbine trench coat ("Don't show up to the GameStop tomorrow," you can almost hear him say), but his character is also adolescent in terms of Card's model. He spends the first half of the story as a solo player, wandering from floor to floor, doing good (usually), moving on. He lacks—or rather, avoids—responsibility. While Asuna is second-in-command of a top guild organizing high-level raids, Kirito is off on his own reviving some girl's Neopet. When viewed from this perspective, Sword Art Online actually does have a coherent and comprehensible character arc for its otherwise inconsistent protagonist. Kirito develops as a result of his relationship with Asuna, finding through his marriage to her the responsibility that he previously forsook. When Kirito's error causes Sachi to die in Episode 3, he moves on, immediately abandons even his own trauma by Episode 4; Sachi is never mentioned again. (Of course not, since her story was one of the last ones written.) He feels no lasting responsibility for his actions. But later, Kirito realizes he could not brush off the trauma if the same thing happened to Asuna. It is through his responsibility to her that he joins the final raid and thus bears, shoulder to shoulder with everyone else, the cooperative responsibility of the entire virtual community of Sword Art Online. He has become an adult, with wife and child. He has become "more cultured, civilized[,] and empathetic," as Ebert would put it. (And isn't that what Ebert is really saying, when he criticizes video games? That they are adolescent, childish, playthings?) Through Kirito's character arc, and its underlying ethos about virtual worlds, Sword Art Online depicts online community via the language of marriage and responsibility that is traditionally ascribed to real-life community. This too resonated with its audience. After all, it wasn't just Gamers who craved recognition. Teenagers in 2012 had lived their entire conscious life in a world defined by the internet, and yet the "real world" considered online relationships and communities to be a joke. Sword Art Online, rather than legitimizing Gamers, legitimizes the virtual world, the internet. But does it really even do that? Immediately, Sword Art Online rejects the notion of online identity. Kayaba's first move upon trapping everyone inside the game is to force them all to look like their real-world selves. As per Sword Art Online's anti-logic ethos, he does not explain why he does this. Shortly afterward, Kirito looks at his real-world finger, which received a paper cut before he entered the game; he imagines it bleeding profusely, before saying, "It's not a game. It's real." By enforcing real-world identity within the game world, Kayaba possibly intends players to see the world as more real too, the way Kirito does. This fits the monomaniacal focus of Kayaba, and Sword Art Online as a story, on the importance of virtual space over any other aspect of virtual experience, and it's not surprising that Kirito tacitly agrees with Kayaba's decision when he and Klein tell each other they look better as their real selves than as their avatars. But it also alienates Sword Art Online from its connection to the reality of the internet, where personal identity is far more fluid. Furthermore, despite his character arc, Kirito ultimately stands apart from his online community. At the end of the story, everyone lies on the ground paralyzed as he alone is given the privilege to duel the final boss, one-on-one. At this climactic moment, Kirito returns to being a solo player, while every other member of the community lacks agency, including Asuna. Especially Asuna. Shortly before the final battle, Asuna claims she'll commit suicide if Kirito dies, which is already an unhealthily adolescent view of marriage (as seen in Romeo & Juliet). Then, before the duel, when Asuna is paralyzed, Kirito demands that Kayaba "fix it so Asuna can't kill herself." Not only has Kayaba, the villain, stolen Asuna's agency over her own body, but now her husband is requesting he steal even more of it. This, too, is part of Sword Art Online's ethos. Though the game has 10,000 people, nobody except Kirito actually matters. He is a "Solo Player" in the sense of Solo Leveling, the most popular airing anime, which has a mistranslated title; it should be "Only I Level Up." The implication of the real title is clear: Only the protagonist has agency. Kirito is the same. Only he plays the game, in any meaningful sense. The game—reality—bends to him; none of its rules, even death, constrain him. It is total self-centeredness, a complete rejection of the responsibility to society that Card describes. This ethos pervades the show. Kirito is never wrong, even when he obviously is, like when he rejects Asuna's proposal to use NPCs as bait. The entire reason he realizes Heathcliff is Kayaba is because, during an earlier duel, Heathcliff beat him; Kirito (correctly) posits that someone who beat him must have been cheating. Everyone who likes Kirito is good, everyone who dislikes him is evil; Kuradeel, who chafes with Kirito initially over bureaucratic guild regulations, eventually unmasks himself as a sadistic serial killer. Every girl is in love with him, a harem rendered vestigial because Kirito is married to Asuna and expresses zero interest in Silica or Lisbeth or his sister or the second season's Carne Asada; but it's not about whether Kirito wants a harem, it's about the prestige of his ability to command one. This is where the true face of Sword Art Online shows itself, what truly made it so popular, and where the core of its long-lasting influence remains. Only the virtual world matters. Not the game, not the online community, not online identity. Only a different world, one that isn't the real world. And in this world, only Kirito matters. Sure, he'll fight to protect other people. Exactly like he'll fight to protect NPCs. In this world, real people are worth the same as NPCs, compared to Kirito. His wife is a real person; his daughter is not. But really, both his marriage and his child are a form of playacting, pretending at adulthood. When convenient, they are disregarded and trampled upon. Asuna spends the next two arcs of Sword Art Online sidelined—even viciously sexually assaulted—so Kirito can hang out with girls he doesn't even like, just because they're shiny and new; Yui is almost completely forgotten after the second arc, like a discarded toy. This is an ethos of pure, distilled escapism. It is an escape from the real world to a false one, where every conceivable selfish fantasy is rendered real, where every desire can be granted and then disposed of when no longer wanted. It is an ethos without responsibility, without consequence. And without shame. Sword Art Online is remarkably devoid of self-consciousness. It treats as real its virtual world, but doesn't feel the need to justify that world with logic. It doesn't feel the need to justify anything with logic; what it says is so, self-evidently. In my Kill la Kill essay, I mentioned Sword Art Online's vast influence, and someone wrote (and sadly deleted) a well-reasoned response that explained how the aesthetics and tropes of modern isekai are much more heavily influenced by Japanese webfic that predate Sword Art Online, like GATE or Overlord or Re:Zero. That's true; I'd add that modern Gamer fiction, which is often obsessively concerned with the rules and statistics underlying game logic, is also not very similar to Sword Art Online on a superficial level. But Sword Art Online's ethos transcends genre. It can be found in isekai, Gamer lit, or even genres popular long before Sword Art Online, like battle shounen. Sword Art Online created the web fiction to light novel to anime pipeline, and in doing so popularized amateur literature and its decidedly adolescent mentality of shameless and solipsistic self-indulgence. Only I Play the Game.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Mar 17, 2025
Kill la Kill
(Anime)
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So, twelve years on, did Trigger save anime?
Existing in the present will invariably inundate one with lifeless, disposable, trend-chasing pop media, no matter the medium. Not only do moneymen like to imitate whatever made money before, but artists like to imitate the art they enjoy. The current moment will always seem bloated by dreck, while the past, filtered via the sieve of time, will always seem to contain only gleamingly original works of greatness. Were the 1980s not a golden age of blockbuster cinema, with Aliens and Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters? Please ignore the 1,000 shoddy E.T. knockoffs, thank you, or the million formulaic action ... hero flicks aping the Schwarzenegger formula. Anime in 2013, when Kill la Kill began airing, was no different. The past two years had seen Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Hunter x Hunter, Fate/Zero, Stein's;Gate, Kuroko no Basket, Nichijou, Nisemonogatari, Psycho-Pass, and Attack on Titan, all popular and well-regarded shows both when they released and today. So the memetic idea in the anime community that Trigger was "saving anime" with Kill la Kill is patently ridiculous. (If you don't believe how widespread this idea was, two of the three top reviews for the show on MyAnimeList, written the same day the show finished airing, allude to it.) It's easy to see how the idea became so popular, though. Trigger was a brand new studio formed primarily by staff from debt-stricken Gainax, the legendary studio that in 1995 revolutionized anime with Neon Genesis Evangelion. Eva's main creative figure, auteur director Hideaki Anno, wasn't with Trigger, but many of the people behind Gainax's other popular shows like Gurren Lagann and Panty & Stocking were, so the studio had a new-look fresh-start feel while drawing on a proven lineage of success. At the same time, Kill la Kill itself promotes its revolutionary nature. Its plot revolves around a lone rulebreaking badass taking on an entrenched system defined explicitly by its aesthetic uniformity. It's not a difficult leap to read this storyline metaphorically, Trigger battling the waves of copy-paste seasonal anime. However, what is most striking, most obviously eye-catching and unique about Kill la Kill, what hits the viewer with the immediate sense that this show is something different, something new, something like nothing you have seen before, is that it looks like nothing you have seen before. Kill la Kill is brimming with unique and memorable images, from the gigantic red block text used to introduce every new character and concept, to the bizarre ship-like architecture of Honnouji Academy, to the blend of fluid sakuga with choppy PowerPoint animation for comedic effect, to smaller iconic moments like Satsuki clicking her heel. It's always in-your-face about it, too. The opening scene sets the tone when a dry history lecture gets interrupted by Gamagoori squeezing through a door like a behemoth, utterly ignoring any rules regarding on-model consistency. It's this devotion to the unique image that sets Kill la Kill apart from most of the other 2011-2013 shows I listed previously, shows that, while they might have a consistent aesthetic sensibility (such as Stein's;Gate's washed-outness or Fate/Zero's glimmering post-processing effects), are often conforming at their core to ideas of what anime "should" look like in terms of character design, setting, and animation. (The two Shaft shows I listed are an exception, but by this point Shaft's Akiyuki Shinbo had been doing his idiosyncratic visual style for over a decade, and wasn't exactly a fresh face.) Trigger's staff previously created Panty & Stocking, a show imitating the look and feel of western cartoons; Kill la Kill advances that idea into a wholly unique fusion of western and Japanese animation traditions, allowing it to break free of the insular anime landscape and its expected visual signifiers. Obviously the counterpoint lurking beneath this preamble is that, under the unique visuals and tone, Kill la Kill isn't all that innovative at all, even painfully standard at times. Battles are decided by the power of friendship or the power of staying true to oneself (Don't Lose Your Way!), the hero is mind controlled and her friends call out to her until she breaks free, the one-dimensionally evil villain has a big end-the-world plot that everyone teams up to defeat. Even within the parameters the story establishes for itself, Ryuko proceeds linearly, starting out by fighting small fry club captains, then the Elite Four student council, then Satsuki the student council president, and finally Satsuki's mother who owns the school, with only a few speed bumps along the way. But Kill la Kill makes the argument that aesthetics are too intimately interwoven with content to be disentangled that way. It's the crux of the conceit of the show, which is founded on a series of puns. "Fascism" sounds like "fashion," so in the world of Kill la Kill those concepts are now entwined. "School uniform" ("seifuku") and "conquest" ("seifuku") are homophones, so uniforms are the method by which Satsuki exerts her intra-Japanese imperialism. (Early on, Satsuki delivers a monologue in which she remarks on how Japanese school uniforms are aesthetically modeled on military uniforms, making it natural for her to militarize her school.) The title is itself a tripartite pun, combining words for "kill," "cut," and "wear." (Notably, this is a pun that blends the English and Japanese languages, much like the blended animation style.) Despite the visual, slapstick nature of Kill la Kill's humor, puns abound throughout. Some are obvious even in translation, such as the "Naturals Election" used to choose the new student council, while others can be difficult to catch. Nui, for instance, apes Dio Brando's catchphrase of "muda, muda, muda" (useless, useless, useless); later, when her arms are cut off, she screams "ude, ude, ude" (arms, arms, arms). The core idea of most of these puns is that superficial similarity indicates similarity of content. Sometimes, this is an insightful observation, such as with the pun between fashion and fascism. Fascism is notoriously difficult to define rigidly in relation to other forms of dictatorship, but what is easy to define about it is its aesthetics, to the point that films like Star Wars are able to use aesthetic signifiers of fascism to define the politics of its villains even when withholding any actual explanation of those politics. Star Wars never has to show what the day-to-day rule of the Empire is like, because its army looks like the Nazis, so the audience gets the idea. Fascism as a political ideology and fascism as an aesthetic are, effectively, the same thing. And if aesthetics are equivalent to meaning, then doesn't that mean that Kill la Kill looking new in fact makes it new? That its plot, generic in dry summary, is elevated by the distinctive way it's depicted? One pun, delivered upon the revelation that parasitic alien clothes have influenced humanity's evolution for the purpose of harvesting them for food (a story beat itself derivative of Puella Magi Madoka Magica), is that "the clothes make the mankind." The common refrain of Satsuki and Ragyo that people are "pigs in human clothing" hammers the point home: Aesthetics are everything. There is no meaning without aesthetics, just as people without clothes are unevolved animals. Ultimately, though, Kill la Kill rejects this statement. Clothes are the enemy, literally, and the heroic organization fighting against them is Nudist Beach, whose members fight naked. At the end of the show, all clothes are destroyed, and the final image before the credits is of the entire cast in a giant, naked, triumphant huddle, an assertion of the inherent value of humanity even without aesthetic adornment. Isn't that the point behind all those power-of-friendship, power-of-believing-in-yourself speeches that Ryuko, Mako, and Senketsu use to turn the tables and win the battle? An appeal to a hidden inner nature that one must remain true to (Don't Lose Your Way!!!), that can overpower superficial displays of strength? Ryuko's mind control arc depicts this idea most overtly. She is controlled by having clothes sewn to her skin -- having an aesthetic forced onto her -- but Mako manages to dive into Ryuko's inner world to bring her back to her "true self." This kind of undermines Kill la Kill as a work, though. What does a "nudist" Kill la Kill look like, stripped of its unique visual language? Certainly not something that would stand out from the waves of high school battle shounen that have been a fixture in the anime landscape since time immemorial. Kill la Kill's thesis might assert that there's a reason these power-of-friendship cliches endure (a sort of, if you'll allow me to become a parody of myself for a moment, post-postmodern reclamation of a narrative mode tarnished by irony and cynicism), but it contradicts the unique visual style that Kill la Kill developed to convey that idea. In some ways, Kill la Kill does strip down to a nude, or at least semi-nude, state by the end. Many of its earlier concepts, including the connection between fashion and fascism, vanish as the story progresses. Satsuki and her fascist system are revealed to have been a deception while she secretly worked to betray her mother (playing on Ragyo's mistaken belief that aesthetics mean everything by Satsuki looking compliant while not actually being so), and once the twist occurs, the entire fascism plotline goes out the window. It's never really mentioned again; even when Ryuko gets on Satsuki's case for her past misdeeds, she only calls her out for "Looking down on people from on high," a general and ideologically-agnostic call against elitism. The 1-episode OVA set after the series briefly touches on the fascist system Satsuki enforced, with the episode's villain accusing Satsuki and the Elite Four of generating real, actual terror and abuse despite their ultimately pure motives (an assertion, once more, that aesthetics mean everything, that looking fascist makes you fascist no matter your true beliefs), but Mako quickly dismisses the claim with another power-of-friendship speech. Satsuki and the Elite Four have grown as people, she says. They're no longer bad like they used to be! Kill la Kill also gets stripped down tonally by its end. The show's opening scene depicts a disobedient student being whipped, seemingly to death; later, his nude corpse(?) is displayed over the school gates. Combined with the title "Kill la Kill," it sets a dark, violent tone that lends weight to the otherwise cartoonish animation style. By the end, though, this dark tone is revealed as a false aesthetic; there is remarkably little killing in Kill la Kill. Stripped of real narrative stakes, the climactic battles diminish to flashy lightshows, action figures bouncing against each other. Worst of all, the blend of "fluid sakuga with choppy PowerPoint animation" I mentioned earlier increasingly tilts toward the latter. This is largely due to the prominence of Nui as an antagonist, since her cartoonishness is part of her character, but given Gainax's track record of running out of money and/or time by the end of its shows and phoning in parts of them, I wonder whether the habit transferred over to Trigger. In short, as Kill la Kill strips down, it becomes a weaker show. In doing so, it not only undermines its own theme, but undermines itself as a truly new and innovative work, exposing its reliance on superficial aesthetic. The notion that Trigger "saved anime" would depend not only on Kill la Kill's individual success, but on its influence; twelve years out, and the only other notable shows like Kill la Kill were also made by Trigger. Perhaps you can see some influence on Masaaki Yuasa, who also blends high-quality sakuga with deliberately cheaper animation for comedic or stylistic effect, but he had already established himself in 2010 with Tatami Galaxy. Another show with a distinctive "Trigger" feel, Flip Flappers, was a flop flopper that caused its studio to immediately pivot to generic seasonal stuff. My friend Lurina, when I asked her whether Trigger really had any influence over the larger anime landscape, suggested that Trigger sparked a general desire for more high-quality animation, which can be seen today in shows like Chainsaw Man or Dandandan. I would counter that those shows, while well-made, lack the distinctive blend of high and low, east and west that defines Trigger; if anything, the notion of the high-quality seasonal shounen adaptation comes from My Hero Academia, where Bones eschewed the traditional 500-episode weekly low-effort adaptation style of Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece and set the blueprint for shows like Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, and so on, which adapt their source material in 12-episode chunks with lavish production values. At the same time, I question whether Trigger even saved itself. Kill la Kill would be the studio's peak, and much of its subsequent output is a pale shadow of the show. (Its only other megahit, Darling in the Franxx, had an even more disastrous ending.) This culminated in BNA, a show that takes Kill la Kill's themes and iconography but does them cheaply and lazily. Since then, Trigger has rebounded -- but not by being "Trigger." Cyberpunk Edgerunners and Dungeon Meshi were both popular and well-regarded shows, but they were adaptations where Trigger had minimal control over the storytelling or aesthetic; Dungeon Meshi, other than a few sparse sakuga moments, doesn't even look distinctively like a Trigger show. It feels like any competent studio could have turned Dungeon Meshi into a hit. Trigger still exists, and in its partnership with Netflix is possibly stronger than ever, but it is losing its unique identity, becoming more standard, more similar to the crowd. Another conformer. Maybe the upcoming Panty & Stocking sequel can turn it around, but who can say. Either way, Kill la Kill's moment has passed, without the cataclysmic ripple on the anime industry fans at the time expected or craved. Honestly, though, despite how I opened this essay, I can't blame them for their desire to see anime "saved." After all, the biggest anime of 2012, the year before Kill la Kill aired, did cause a cataclysmic ripple, one undoubtedly felt to this day. Unlike Kill la Kill, the biggest anime of 2012 spawned countless imitators, an endless flood of imitators, imitators that have themselves spawned imitators and imitators of imitators. That anime of 2012 has even extended its reach past anime, coating the current webfic scene; one could say that the site RoyalRoad would not exist if not for it. In face of such an oppressive, daunting influence, perhaps those fans of 2013 were right to clamor for something, anything, that would reveal a new direction, a way out. In such a context, one might even see it as tragic that Kill la Kill failed to deliver, that at the last moment it came up short. If Kill la Kill was the fork in the road leading to sunnier pastures, this anime led the industry into a deep, dark forest. The name of that anime? Sword Art Online.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Mar 15, 2025 Mixed Feelings
In my review of the Chainsaw Man anime I mentioned that Dandadan, which I was still watching at the time, seemed to borrow tonal cues from Chainsaw Man's irreverence. The main point of comparison, and what caused me to make that claim, is the emphasis both works have on the literal and figurative emasculation of their protagonists. Not only do CSM's Denji and DDD's Ken lose part or all of their penises, they are both surrounded by forceful, controlling, or outright aggressive female figures who propel the plot.
And could there be a more irreverent take on shounen, a genre literally called "Boy," than emasculation, the ... elimination of its maleness? Both shows may cleave to certain shounen tropes to the letter (especially in their fight scenes), but in this way they set themselves apart. It's certainly a far cry from, say, My Hero Academia, where female characters are relegated to minor supportive roles. In Dandandan, the purpose of this emasculated hero is much more clear. DDD uses a familiar nerd-to-coolguy storyline for its protagonist. He begins friendless, isolated, defined by his nerd hobbies. As a symbolic representation of his situation, he not only loses his penis, but his name; Momo, the female lead, refuses to call him "Ken Takakura" due to it also being the name of her favorite actor/celebrity crush, and refers to him instead as "Okarun," a play on "occult," which his otaku interest centers around. The real-life Ken Takakura was known as a stoic, tough, and thus stereotypically masculine figure, the opposite of DDD's Ken Takakura; the suggestion of the narrative arc is that Okarun will gradually develop into a character more deserving of the name, at which point Momo will call him by it. Then he'll also get his balls back. The emasculated hero also stands in foil to the Serpo, the all-male alien race who serve as the show's recurring villains, and who are the only other male characters in the show until its last couple of episodes. The Serpo are, like the hero, depicted as emasculated, with high-pitched effeminate voices and a lack of sexual organs. Also like the hero, they're depicted as nerds, wearing stiff tucked-in white shirts buttoned up to the neck and spouting sci-fi technobabble. The difference is that they cannot "evolve," as they claim. This is explained as a byproduct of their reliance on cloning for reproduction (and is the reason why they want to harvest human sexual organs), but symbolically suggests a state of perpetual manchildness, the otaku who never develops or grows, compared to Ken, who does. Meanwhile, for lack of a better word, the Serpo are rapey. An involuntarily celibate failure state of otaku-ness, and by the implication of the foil what Ken must work to avoid. After all, the Serpo also have no penises. They have replaced them with whirring phallic probes, a literally weaponized masculinity. They introduce themselves to Momo as simply wanting to be friends, before revealing their nefarious sexual ulterior motives; this contrasts Ken who first sees Momo legitimately as a friend before he even begins to develop romantic feelings for her. It's in Dandandan's simple, unified clarity of purpose that I find my comparison to Chainsaw Man to be ultimately flawed. As it goes on, this simplicity starts to make DDD saccharine, treacly. The same dramatic loop is wrung again and again: Ken or Momo say something mean to one another, or lie, or make a mistake, then they mentally kick themselves over it ("I was such a jerk!"), and lastly give an earnest apology for their behavior. This happens countless times, sometimes rooted around the flimsiest, most obnoxious of misunderstandings. The show pulls the same bullshit as Parasyte (another nerd-to-coolguy story!) where Girl A sees Boy A touching Girl B, and assumes that means Boy A is being unfaithful, but really Girl B was being forcefully sexually aggressive and Boy A didn't like it and was trying to get away, but Girl A doesn't know this, and it becomes this whole big thing despite nobody (except Girl B, morality's sacrificial lamb) actually having done anything wrong. I hate "misunderstanding" plots like this. They're complete contrivances for the sake of drama. But that's more-or-less the level DDD is operating at. There's a part near the end, when the show's only other human male character shows up. He's Momo's childhood friend, he has a rapport with her, and even though it's clear to the audience Momo has no romantic interest in him, Ken gets jealous, which the audience knows because he stews over it in class while the teacher lectures about the word "jealousy." It's facile. If Chainsaw Man invited the audience to turn its brain off, DDD is doing something much more annoying by inviting its audience to turn its brain down to the level of a 10-year-old. Meanwhile, the supporting cast doesn't have much going on. Momo is ostensibly at least a deuteragonist and is in some ways framed as the main character, and while she is certainly active in the story and its battles, she is also a much flatter character than Ken. The basic conceit of the show seems to be what happens when an otaku meets a gyaru, with the indication that this unlikely combination will somehow improve them both, but the onus for improvement is placed entirely on Ken, other than a few instances where Momo says something mean and then immediately apologizes for it. She is introduced as getting romantically involved with a series of dirtbag guys who she mistook as masculine ideals due to their superficial similarities to the actor Ken Takakura; but the moment she meets the character Ken Takakura, she ceases to have any romantic interest in anyone else and is essentially waiting around for the character Ken to develop into something akin to the actor Ken. She's quite patient about it, too. Momo is not defined by her gyaru-ness the way Ken is defined by his otaku-ness. There isn't a suggestion, say, that she is stereotypically superficial or vain, the way Ken is stereotypically awkward and monomaniacal. (In fact, the show introduces Aira as superficial and vain, which only makes Momo look more put-together by contrast.) She is, at most, prone to emotional outbursts, which can always be papered over by an "I'm sorry." She even has her own friends! There are significantly lower emotional stakes in her relationship with Ken compared to Ken's relationship with her. Because of this, while Ken is emasculated by the story, he is also centered within it, core to its foundation. This is in contrast to CSM's Denji, who increasingly comes across as a minor part of his own show, a pawn in the schemes of others who is emotionally divorced from the consequences of anything that happens. It creates a narrative that is doing one thing and devoting all of its energy to that one thing, but it doesn't give the show much breadth, or much to think about. Ultimately, where forcing myself to think more deeply about Chainsaw Man improved the experience and led me to some insights I otherwise wouldn't have made, thinking about Dandadan didn't lead to a similar result. It doesn't help that Dandadan's story is far more episodic than Chainsaw Man's, rarely compounding upon itself. This episodic nature is emphasized by how the studio didn't even bother to end the season at a logical place, instead cutting its current episodic arc right down the middle. Lastly, I suppose I should mention that, like Chainsaw Man, this show looks amazing. The production values are all excellent, especially the OP. It feels like any flavor-of-the-month anime is going to look great, but I am currently trudging my way through a rewatch of Sword Art Online, and it's staggering how cheap that show looks, how it cuts corners at every conceivable opportunity. Can't take "looking good" for granted in this racket.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Mar 14, 2025
Chainsaw Man
(Anime)
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Some anime invite viewers to think deeply about it. Take, for example, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Its plot is tangled and complex; it draws on religious iconography that gestures toward deeper symbolism; and its tone is weighty, self-serious, and ponderous. None of this is to say that Evangelion actually has deeper meaning (it becomes increasingly clear, for instance, how much of its kabbalah references are purely aesthetic table dressing), but it certainly wants you to ask yourself what it means.
Chainsaw Man, by contrast, is aggressively irreverent. Its main character Denji is a superhuman doofus; he and arch-doofette Power bingus brother about in a Beavis & Butthead ... routine that undercuts any pretensions toward seriousness the supporting cast might scrounge. Rather than oblique references to Judaic mysticism, Chainsaw Man draws its iconography from popular films; the OP directly remakes shots from such classics as Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and The Grudge vs. The Ring. Even the title "Chainsaw Man" is bluntly brainless, and the anime ends with a climactic battle between Chainsaw Man and Katana Man, except Katana Man's katanas look more like machetes, fulfilling the Sadako vs. Kayako horror crossover promise of the OP via Leatherface vs. Jason Voorhees. It's a show that is very easy to watch, go "Yeah that was fun," and have nothing more substantial to say. In many ways, the show invites that reading. It does have a few things going on under the hood, though. The first is how despite its irreverent tone it often cleaves tightly to plot beats I've seen in other shounen shows. Kobeni is a useless crybaby, but in a fight turns into an unstoppable badass; I saw this in Demon Slayer. A bunch of fodder characters are introduced, developed, and then summarily executed to give the impression "anyone can die" (the core cast has all survived); I saw this in Attack on Titan. The main character is too weak, so he gets trained by an eccentric mentor who kicks his ass until he gets stronger; I saw this too many times to list. Denji's Beavisness is itself only an intensification of the Monkey D. Luffy template for shounen protagonist, a well-meaning dipshit who takes ridiculous joy in simple creature comforts like stuffing his face with food. In a way, by overtly asking the viewer not to think about things too deeply, Chainsaw Man is defending itself from the realization that little of what it is doing is particularly unique. That it is, at its core, a series of recreated shots stitched together from pop cultural sources. It works, though. I thoroughly enjoyed all of those regurgitated elements I mentioned before, even the fake-anyone-can-die shtick that annoyed me to no end when Attack on Titan did it. The brain-off style encourages the viewer to engage with the story at the level of an earnest and excitable child, the kind of person who would think someone called "Chainsaw Man" is super cool and not lame at all. It's fascinating, because there's an element to the story's willingness to undercut itself that is reminiscent of the Joss Whedon-style snarkery that has rendered the MCU unwatchable. Someone giving their serious backstory only for Denji to go "HNNNGGH? That's dumb!" is pretty similar to Loki's big villain monologue being interrupted by the Hulk. How much of Chainsaw Man's effectiveness is simply because it's hitting the exact right note at this moment in time, the way Avengers did in 2012 (when I finish my rewatch of Sword Art Online I'll have a lot to say about the year 2012), attuned to the exact right frequency of irony, before years go by and that frequency becomes passe, out-of-tune? It feels inexplicable now, but people really thought "Puny god" was an amazing joke back in the day. Now it's hollow and lifeless. Is Chainsaw Man doomed to the same fate, after a decade of imitators bite it to pieces? (And there are imitators; I'm currently watching last season's big anime, Dandadan, which takes a lot of tonal cues from CSM.) I can't see the future, but Chainsaw Man has a bit of narrative bite of its own to sustain itself. There's a thematic throughline about the sacrifices people make to attain their goals. Denji is introduced as literally selling off parts of his body for money in pursuit of pathetically unambitious goals like "eating bread with jam"; later, most members of Public Safety are shown to have made contracts with devils in which they also literally give up body parts in exchange for the goal-fulfilling power. Like Denji from that first episode, though, the members of Public Safety are in a form of slavery they have no hope of escaping. Their sacrifices are noble gestures, but ultimately useless. In one scene, Aki uses a cursed sword that steals his lifespan to kill Katana Man, only for Katana Man, being functionally immortal, to stand up seconds later. Likewise, Himeno gives the Ghost Devil all of her body to save Aki, killing herself; the Ghost Devil is immediately devoured by the Snake Devil moments later, failing to do what Himeno wanted. (It's then revealed that all Himeno had to do to save Aki was pull the string on Denji's body.) It is that sense of futile nobility that Chainsaw Man skewers most stringently, both in its text and its tone. Aki and even the devils taunt Denji for his lack of ambition, framing themselves as superior because they pursue something loftier than him. Yet Denji, of course, always prevails; even against Aki, he responds to the taunt by kicking him in the balls. Aki claims that only people with strong ambitions can survive in Public Safety, but the story proves him wrong at every turn. It's Denji and Power, in their brainless contentedness with basic pleasures in life, who survive battle after battle unscathed. They are both immortal (or "near immortal," as Power is described), as though they are simply too stupid to die. Even among the human characters, the only one who crawls out of the show unscathed is Kobeni, who seems to have no ambitions of her own beyond survival; she was forced into Public Safety by her family to pay her brother's college tuition. At first glance, this makes the message of Chainsaw Man seem clear: "Ask for too much, and you'll simply be destroyed." This message perfectly matches the story's irreverence. If you wanted a deep and thoughtful story, too bad, you're getting a guy with a chainsaw for a head cutting up zombies. It's bread with jam, and the story wants to make sure you enjoy it. But there's more at play here. Denji is unstoppable, sure. He lives while his colleagues die or get maimed. At the same time, he's trapped in the same web as the rest of them, Makima's web, and his simple ambitions only make him trivial for her to manipulate. At the end of the day, Makima is the only one who is getting what she wants, who controls everything. I once had a dream about Makima that accurately spoiled her role in the story, so even though I've only seen the anime I have an inkling of what's to come. I only wonder, narratively, how it'll play into the ideas about ambition introduced in this opening arc. Then, there's the scene where Kishibe first starts training Denji and Power. In an endless graveyard of all the Public Safety employees who have died, he asks them what their ambitions are, why they fight. They give characteristically low-minded answers, and Kishibe chokes with emotion. "You're perfect," he says. "I love you." He hugs them, then snaps their necks as the first part of his training regimen. Weeks later, speaking to Makima, Kishibe explains. He thought he could look at Denji and Power as toys. Meaningless, silly, able to be sacrificed. Not like the hundreds, thousands of dead Public Safety employees he's buried, who had real dreams with emotional weight. Only, after weeks of training, he's finding that even they can't truly be seen as toys, that something about them is growing on him. I read this scene as a metaphor for Chainsaw Man's irreverence as a whole, for the purpose of ironic detachment in art. In the MCU, characters give undermining quips to avoid emotionally interfacing with the art. It's the ethos of "comic relief" in general. Relief; as though seriousness is too much to handle without some silly joke to take the weight off. Denji and Power are toys (there's something toyetic in the idea of Chainsaw Man himself), comic relief, an excuse to not become emotionally invested, Beavis & Butthead who go "HNNNGGH? That's dumb!" whenever things get serious. But, in Chainsaw Man at least, the seriousness is still there, under the surface. There is a field of graves, there are people sacrificing themselves for no reason, there is a whole ecosystem of serious men and women in salaryman suits and ties being thrown into the meat grinder. (It's interesting that the characters who survive unharmed -- Denji, Power, even Kobeni when she goes badass mode -- forgo the black blazer of the Public Safety uniform and wear only the white shirt that gives them a younger, more student-like look, as though it is a metaphorical childhood that protects them, whereas the more formal black-suited members are consigned to an adult oblivion. I wonder if Makima's dogshit fit means anything in this dichotomy.) The irreverence is not a full reprieve. It doesn't make the emotional elements go away, and as the show goes on, more and more time is spent in the perspectives of characters like Aki, until Denji starts to feel like an alien element in his own story, the piece that doesn't fit correctly into the established emotional framework. Additionally, Denji starts to notice sociopathic traits in himself, like when he ponders Himeno's death and finds it made no impact on him at all. This element only appeared near the very end of the show, so I don't know how it develops across the rest of the story, but on its own it suggests the downside of ironic detachment, an inability to feel emotion even when emotion is warranted. That was David Foster Wallace's bugbear with postmodernism; that it was too insincere, too distant, capable only of metatextual flippancy, and that there was a need for a "New Sincerity," a post-irony, a post-postmodernism. Chainsaw Man is, like so many works that are popular today, post-postmodern. What fascinates me about it is how it manages that not by abandoning irony and irreverence, but by embracing it even more totally. Or is that a necessary component of post-postmodernism, distinguishing it from simple pre-modernism? You can't simply forget the genre savviness that makes you see a story as a series of tropes rather than an emotional whole. The challenge in the post-postmodern landscape thus becomes to make a story work emotionally in spite of, or perhaps because of, that detachment. I'd also be remiss if I didn't at least mention the animation. The show looks amazing. Anime has finally gotten adept at using 3D by blending it with 2D, the way the best live action films blend practical effects with CGI. Even beyond that, there's an excessiveness and indulgence to the show; every single episode has a fully unique ED, some of which are among the best EDs I've ever seen. What studio did this? ...Oh. I guess it was natural to make a show about adults sacrificing their bodies in pursuit of impossible goals when 300+ animators made that exact same sacrifice for the benefit of MAPPAkima.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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