Winding Back to A Wind in the Door

As dearly as I held A Wrinkle in Time as a child, I had always liked its follow-up, A Wind in the Door, a bit more. And having read Wrinkle again and found it often unsatisfying, the higher quality of Wind is thrown into even sharper contrast. It turns the plot skeleton of Wrinkle, in which a young protagonist is pulled from the troubles of ordinary life into a battle with cosmic forces that reflects those ordinary troubles, into a formula; and it elevates that formula.

The story picks up with Meg and Charles Wallace some time after Wrinkle, and the events of the first book seem to have been forgotten, since they’re never mentioned again. But their father is around, though he spends most of the book on call in Washington and out of the way. Charles Wallace has started school and is bullied by his classmates. Meg, in distress, appeals to the principal, Mr. Jenkins, her old foe, to no effect.

Charles Wallace is also coming down with a mysterious disease related to his mitochondria and their tiny inhabitants, farandolae. (Mitochondria are real; farandolae are an invention.) Mrs. Murry is doing research in this area and trying to figure out what’s wrong with him. One night, the Murry children and Calvin, who’s back and just as irrelevant as ever, are visited by Blajeny, a Teacher, and their fellow student Proginoskes, a cherubim. In the world of Wind, practically everyone is a Teacher and cherubim are a horrific agglomeration of eyes, wings, and claws that can dematerialize or turn into a wind or a flame. (The characters point out that “cherubim” is a plural word but Progo responds “I am practically plural.”) Meg and Progo team up to complete three trials in a battle against the Echthroi, the vaguely menacing creatures alluded to in the first book, whose nature and purpose is made more clear here. Meg and Progo become Namers; when Progo talks about an earlier assignment to Name all the stars, he says that “part of the purpose was to help them each be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That’s basically a Namer’s job.” Later he says, more plainly, “A Namer has to know who people are, and who they are meant to be.” The Echthroi, then, are un-Namers; they induce their victims to abnegate their own identities, losing their place in creation and dissolving into nothingness, a process known as Xing.

Meg and Progo first Name Mr. Jenkins, picking the true Mr. Jenkins from a pair of Echthros impostors. Then they and Calvin, who randomly appears at this point, meet Sporos, one of Charles Wallace’s farandolae. We find out that farandolae are weird mouse shrimp creatures who take root and become tree-like farae in a process called Deepening. The second trial is to Name Sporos, and convince him to give up his callow youth and Deepen into a fara. Sporos and a group of young farandolae have decided to kill off the farae and their song, a mystical song that rings throughout the universe and is also sung by the stars. Meg, Calvin, Progo, and Mr. Jenkins succeed, but the Echthroi attack and Mr. Jenkins jumps in to rescue Meg. In the third trial, Progo Xes himself to save Meg and Mr. Jenkins from the Echthroi. Charles Wallace is saved from his mysterious disease, and Meg and Calvin are left with the power to kythe, taught to them by Progo, which is basically Windows shared directories but between your minds. Meg and Calvin redeclare their love and decide they aren’t really that torn up over Progo after all.

A Stronger Sense of Conflict

Wind has elements which are poorly developed or abrupt, like Calvin’s sudden and unceremonious appearance in Metron Ariston alongside Meg prior to the descent into Charles’s mitochondria, or really everything to do with Calvin in this book. I think I would have preferred if Calvin never appeared, or only appeared in the opening scene, but made his presence felt through Meg’s thoughts and memories.

Nevertheless, A Wind in the Door arranges its strange cosmic battles of emotion and morality to much greater impact than its predecessor. As I mentioned in my review of Wrinkle, Meg’s first trial, in which she must find it in herself to love Mr. Jenkins, leads to much more growth in Meg than her sudden, easy victory over IT due to her love for Charles Wallace in the first book. Progo even says during the trial “Oh—you love your family. That’s easy.” Most of the “action” is a dialogue between Meg and Progo where Meg insists that she can’t love Mr. Jenkins, and Progo, using the mind-sharing powers of kything, digs into her subconscious memory and finds examples of good things she knows about Mr. Jenkins. This lets her understand him, and choose him from among the two Echthroi.

In the second trial, instead of arguing for good against the immovable evil of IT, Meg, Calvin, Mr. Jenkins, and Progo find themselves arguing with the arrogant and wayward Sporos, who intends to abdicate his place in the universe in order to hang on to the pleasure of his youth. The Echthroi stand against them and encourage Sporos to give in to those urges. If Sporos doesn’t Deepen, Charles Wallac dies. Instead of the aimless debate across a moral and cultural gulf that we saw between IT and the children in Wrinkle, there are actual stakes and an actual win condition to this argument. It’s a central part of the action, instead of a long digression purely to make a point.

A Curious Contradiction

Interconnectedness is a major theme of A Wind in the Door. Stars, among the very largest objects in creation, sing the same universal harmony as the tiny farae that live inside human mitochondria. Every being has a place in creation. To abdicate that place is to abdicate creation, to yield to the nothingness of the Echthroi. But this is the opposite of the message we got in Wrinkle, that conformity was evil, that to struggle against society was noble.

On its face this might seem like a contradiction: why is it evil to conform to the society of Camazotz, and yet also evil for the farandolae not to conform to the inevitabilities of their strange life cycle? But it seems likely that this apparent contradiction is symbolic of Meg growing older, maturing, and grappling with the complexity of the world. In Wrinkle, Meg was a misfit who felt misunderstood and hated by the world, and her adventure on Camazotz reflected that, telling her that it was noble to struggle against an unjust order. But in Wind, Meg has grown up a little. She’s fallen in love with Calvin, and from him has learned to fit in better at school, the society where she currently resides. She’s trying to help Charles Wallace do the same. It takes strength and maturity for Meg to go visit her old enemy, Mr. Jenkins, and humbly ask him to help Charles Wallace, a strength and maturity that Wrinkle Meg didn’t have but that Wind Meg has gained. Charles also accepts rather than rebels; he talks about his struggle as a need to adapt, in a Darwinian sense, and fit in better with his environment, one where first-graders don’t talk about cutting edge biological research or quote Shakespeare.

Camazotz, the cruel society of enforced conformity where the unconventional are tortured and killed, was the world as Meg saw it during her early high school years. The world we see in Wind, of farae and stars, the tiniest things and the largest, singing a song of harmony in a world where everything has its place, is society as Meg sees it now in her later teenage years: still full of mysteries, still uncertain, but a place where she is now able to fit in and has people precious to her, such as Charles Wallace and Calvin, who help define her place in it. Unlike Camazotz, where everyone did the same things in the same way to the horrid rhythm of IT, in this new world, everything is interconnected and all beings have a duty to take up their unique places in creation and serve the greater order, and to do that they must grow, mature, and realize that everything is interwoven. To do otherwise, to refuse to grow up and take one’s place, is to throw off the order of creation; as Progo puts it, “The temptation for farandola or for man or for star is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe. A fara or a man or a star has his place in the universe, but nothing created is the center.” But later Proginoskes mentions that one individual, no matter how small, can still be important in the vastness of creation. On two occasions, Mr. Jenkins asks why Charles is so important. The first time, Progo replies, “It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.” The second time, he answers, “It is the pattern throughout Creation. One child, one man, can swing the balance of the universe.”

(Digression: I really don’t like the example Proginoskes brings up here, of Charlemagne falling at Roncevaux being an Echthroi victory. I assume this as a reference to the popular belief that Charlemagne was the West’s bulwark against Muslim takeover and without him the Moors would have made further inroads into Europe and possibly wiped out Christianity. Not only is this historically naive, it’s also ethnocentric to assume that all good in the world came from Christian Western Europe and the world would have fallen into darkness otherwise. History would certainly have been very different if the Muslims had had a larger presence in Western Europe, but I have a hard time believing it would have been worse; Christians at the time were hardly spreading peace, love, and enlightenment either. Many profound advancements are credited to the weakening of Christianity with the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment; if anything, these advancements might have come sooner if a stronger Islamic presence meant the Catholic Church had less of a stranglehold on Western Europe. Digression over.)

Creation without a Creator

Wind uses the concept of “Creation” liberally, and speaks of an order to it. When Meg, Calvin, Proginoskes, and Mr. Jenkins first enter the mitochondrion Yadah, the tree-like farae proclaim themselves and the stars the singers, and say, “Our song orders the rhythm of creation.” The rhythm of creation, like the rhythm of IT in Wrinkle, sets the beat for all those who dwell in the universe, from farandolae to stars, cherubim to humans. But unlike the rhythm of IT, to move with the rhythm of creation is to take one’s rightful place in the universe, a beautiful act and a painful duty imposed on all beings. The place of the farandolae is to Deepen into farae and sing with the stars.

But like Wrinkle, Wind stops short of implying a Creator. Even Proginoskes, an “angel”, a singular cherubim based more on the weird creatures of the Old Testament than on the winged men that adorn Christmas decorations, is called “nothing but a deformed emanation of energy” by the Echthroi. If his existence is based on natural laws, he’s less a divine being and more like the powerful energy creatures in Star Trek. We’re left to infer that the Creator is the source of the rhythm of creation that the song of the stars and farae shapes. But the Creator, if one exists, cannot have the same central place in the universe as the Christian god, because “nothing created is the center”, unless L’Engle was using “nothing created” as a loophole, signifying that the Creator was never created and simply was.

The Christian influence instead comes through in the book’s approach to good and evil, and its deterministic view of the universe. The Echthroi, “fallen angels”, are creatures of pure evil who attempt to destroy creation by stopping beings from taking their rightful place in it. Each being has one single rightful place in creation. To accept that place is good, is affirming of creation. To abdicate it is evil, is to deny creation.

Wrinkle, as I pointed out in the previous review, had obvious similarities with C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, but these end with Wind. While there are some similarities between Wind and Perelandra, L’Engle’s book makes its points more subtly, and its ideas are complex and beautiful enough that even an unbeliever can find pleasure in them, whereas Perelandra, to me as a non-Christian reader, felt very caught up in particular moral and doctrinal questions, to an extent where story and action suffered compared to Out of the Silent Planet.

But is it good?

Even terrible books can have lots of ideas, but as I alluded to earlier, when it comes to literary construction, Wind is a better book than Wrinkle. The plot is better put together and the characters are more interesting this time around (even Calvin), but Wind also improves on Wrinkle in smaller ways. The incessant quotes are replaced with meaningful references to literature and history, such as Mr. Jenkins’s comparison of the rebelling farandolae to the power hungry Hitler and Napoleon.

The dialogue, which makes up the majority of the “action” in the book, is kept from getting too heavy with clever puns and double meanings. When the Echthroi invite Sporos to give up creation, they say, “Come with us to naught, to nought.” Proginoskes uses the word “matter” as a verb to mean “assume a material form made of matter”, since he has the ability to be pure energy. Later, when debating with Sporos, Progo tells him that all farandolae are princes, to which Sporos replies contemptuously, “In Name only.” Progo says, “The Name matters”, and Sporos counters, “Only to matter.” And early in the book, when Progo tells Meg there’s a word for what she needs to have to name Mr. Jenkins and gets cagey about saying the word, afraid she’ll misunderstand it, he tells her, “It’s a four-letter word. Aren’t four-letter words considered the bad ones on your planet?” Although the ideas and outward trappings couldn’t be more different, the narrative technique of advancing plot and character through punny dialogue reminds me of Nisio Isin’s Zaregoto and Monogatari books.

Wind came out in 1973, eleven years after Wrinkle. Like its heroine Meg, it’s matured over its predecessor. The story it presents is more nuanced; the ideas it conveys are subtler and harder to grasp; and the way it tells its story is challenging, possibly even too challenging for many adults. It still has flaws, but I enjoyed its plot and characters, especially the sarcastic whinger Proginoskes, and found its message about finding your place in a complicated universe powerful and beautiful. I’m glad I moved on to read it again even after Wrinkle didn’t quite live up to my nostalgic memories, and because I enjoyed Wind, I’ve now moved on to read the third book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which I never did finish as a teenager.

Revisiting A Wrinkle in Time

I loved A Wrinkle in Time as a child. It was imaginative, fascinating, smart, and it had all my favorite things, like space travel, time travel, unlikely heroes chosen by destiny, titanic clashes of good against evil, and a message against bland conformity. So I decided to re-read it. That turned out to be a mistake.

Some parts of the book don't hold up as well as I remembered. Some parts seem frankly clichéd nowadays; it's tough to keep in mind that this book came out in the 1960s and those clichés are clichés now because of this book and others like it. Other parts are clumsy or rushed because it's a children's book, and children probably won't notice that. As a child, I connected more with the ideas and feelings of a book than with its wordsmithing or plot construction, and I was more willing than now to swim out of my depth and paddle through a book where I was lost at sea, where some elements were beyond my experience or comprehension. That's how I was able to get through things like Mrs. Who's endless quotations from the original German, Latin, Spanish, and even Greek at one point. (The Kindle edition of the book contains a clumsily inserted picture of the Greek text.)

Meg Murry, the book's protagonist, is a gawky, geeky, spindly high school girl with glasses and braces and low self-esteem. She's smart, but she gets low grades because she's bored with the schoolwork or because her teachers are narrow-minded or biased against her. She tends to act out, backtalk, and roughhouse. At home she's gifted with a beautiful mother with dual Ph.Ds in the life sciences, two normal twin brothers in middle school, and a savant younger brother named Charles Wallace who seems to be able to read her mind, but she yearns for the return of her physicist father, who's been away doing black ops for the government for several years.

One night, the Murrys are visited by a strange woman named Mrs. Whatsit, who informs Mrs. Murry that there is such a thing as a tesseract. In real life, tesseract is an old name for the mathematical object now called a hypercube: a geometric object analogous to the three-dimensional cube but existing in four space dimensions. In the book, a tesseract is basically a wormhole: it refers to a way of bending spacetime to allow instantanous travel over long distances. Mrs. Murry used to discuss the idea with her husband and is deeply upset to hear the word again out of the blue from Mrs. Whatsit. Meg and Charles Wallace meet two more mysterious beings, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, staying with Mrs. Whatsit in a cabin out in the woods. They also meet Calvin, another smart boy from Meg's school who's managed to fit in by having social skills. They invite him home for dinner, where he makes nice with their mother and twin brothers and has a talk with Meg about her low self-esteem.

If I were very unkind (and I am, very), I would point out that Meg feels like a proto Bella Swann. Both are teenage girls unsatisfied with their lives, bored by schoolwork they're too smart for and misunderstood by narrow-minded adults. The main difference, which stops Meg from being insufferable, is her lack of self-confidence; instead of always being deeply convinced of her own superiority, Meg rags on herself for being unable to fit in. If Meg is the elf of misunderstood teenage girl protagonists, Bella is the orc: a twisted, evil perversion.

Being very, very unkind, I'll also point out the strange Oedipal (and Electral) subtext in much of the scene where Calvin visits the Murrys for dinner. Calvin raves about the beauty of Mrs. Murry, even comparing her to his own old, ugly, haggard mother with eleven children. He seems romantically uninterested in Meg, but perks up when he finds out that Mrs. Murry was also geeky, gawky, and spindly at Meg's age, and finds excuses to whisper passionately of her secret, hidden beauty in a grove. He also probes into Meg's deep desire to be with her father again, saying at one point that it's clear she's "crazy about" her father. The whole dinner scene and following romantic scene in the grove came off as awkward and uncomfortable because Calvin's words and actions were so strange. I think Madeline L'Engle can't have intended it to come off like this; in the third book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, I recall Meg and Calvin married and expecting their first child, and I don't remember their marriage being strange or emotionally abusive. (Then again, that might have been Calvin's plan all along: knowing that by the time he was old enough to have a chance of luring Meg's mother away from her father, Meg's mother would be old and not hot anymore, and knowing that Meg would grow up like her mother, he ingratiated himself with the family and carefully raised Meg into his perfect woman.)

Fortunately, this awkward scene is interrupted when Mrs. Whatsit, Who, and Which appear along with Charles Wallace and whisk Meg and Calvin off to another planet, where they show a great darkness enveloping pieces of the universe, described as pure evil. (Which caused me in a later scene to cry out, "No, don't touch it, it's evil!") They also bring the children to the Happy Medium, some sort of gypsy fortune teller with a crystal ball living in a cave on a distant planet. The Happy Medium shows them Earth, which is tinged with shadows but not yet fallen to the darkness. Mrs. Whatsit, Who, and Which explain that Earth has warriors against the darkness, like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Euclid, and presumably Steven Spielberg, who battle to keep the darkness from enveloping our fair blue planet. They then whisk the children off to Camazotz, a planet where everyone is exactly the same due to the influence of the sinister IT, which turns out to be a giant brain (but giant like Andre the Giant, not giant like the BFG) that exerts mind control on everyone. Charles Wallace is taken captive and becomes one of IT's servants; Meg manages to rescue her father, who also has the ability to tesser and whisks himself, Meg, and Calvin off to another planet inhabited by furry, eyeless things with tentacles for fingers. They turn out to be nice and nurse Meg back to health after a run-in with the darkness during their escape. Meg goes back to Camazotz alone to rescue Charles Wallace using the power of love. She returns to Earth with her father, Calvin, and Charles Wallace, where they all hug and the book ends abruptly.

I was pretty snide about the book throughout my summary, and that's because, to an adult in 2016, there's a lot about it that doesn't hold up. Compared to a more modern children's book like the Harry Potter series, the plot of A Wrinkle in Time is poorly constructed and relies too much on the deus ex machina; the characters are clichéd; and the style is pretentious. Genius children who save each other with the power of love are a stereotype of the fantasy genre, and Mrs. Who’s quotes from such luminaries as Cervantes, Dante, and Euripides come off as trying too damn hard. Even the message about nonconformity feels very of its time; as Anna Quindlen says in her foreword, “Madeline L’Engle published Wrinkle in 1962, after it was rejected by dozens of publishers. And her description of the tyranny of conformity clearly reflects that time.” Quindlen goes on to point out contemporary fears about the Soviet Union, but the 1960’s were also a time when Americans were starting to rebel against the bland suburban conformity expected of them during the 1950’s, and there’s a little of that in Camazotz too. But I dispute Quindlen when she says that the story “still feels contemporary today”. Angst over conformity or one’s inability to do so is timeless, as Quindlen points out, but it doesn’t occupy the zeitgeist today the way it did in 1962.

That Hideous Wrinkle

Even though the plot and characters don’t hold up as well as they might, A Wrinkle in Time does have some interesting ideas. It came out nearly 20 years after the 1945 publication of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, but otherwise you’d swear they were in the same universe. Both stories feature science fiction concepts like space travel and aliens in a universe that’s very clearly based on Judeo-Christian religious philosophy. In both books, there are godlike beings with abilities that appear supernatural, identified through symbolism or explicit connection with Judeo-Christian angels, fighting for good against a great darkness, representing the forces of evil, with this battle playing out on a cosmic scale. Despite the vast scale of this battle between good and evil, the actions of individual humans do matter to the end result, in the same way that every believer is significant to the war between God and the Devil. Lewis purposefully set out to unify the science fiction genre with his Christian philosophy. He does this across the entire Space Trilogy, but the plot structure of A Wrinkle in Time is closest to That Hideous Strength: a small group of humans discover that Earth is threatened by evil and fight alongside the good cosmic beings to stop it from falling to the darkness by struggling against a dystopia. In That Hideous Strength, it’s the N.I.C.E., a cabal of fascist pseudo devil worshippers who embody the sins of imperialist Europe, as Weston and Devine did in the previous two books. In Wrinkle, it’s Camazotz and IT, who embody stifling conformity.

However, L’Engle allows a more humanist view on this universal struggle. She represents Earth as falling under a shadow, instead of fully encircled by darkness from the beginning as Lewis does. Lewis depicts Mars and Venus as Edenic gardens where the people are simple, happy, and willingly maintain a low level of technology. Throughout the Space Trilogy, Lewis focuses on the worst of humanity, depicting them as fallen beings, and uniquely singles out Earth as a dark planet; this is most clear in Weston’s speech at the end of Out of the Silent Planet, but also very evident in That Hideous Strength as it shows a dystopia beginning to form. L’Engle allows human cultural achievements in art, music, science, mathematics, and philosophy to be godly things which fight against the darkness. And in A Wrinkle in Time, positive human emotions such as love have power to fight against the domination of evil. Lewis occasionally associates positive emotions with goodness, as in the free loving finale of That Hideous Strength when the spirit of Venus descends to Earth and everyone starts getting it on, but throughout most of the Space Trilogy, emotions and relationships are ignored in favor of abstract theological concepts like temptation; in Wrinkle they are key to everything.

L'Engle's partially humanist philosophy raises some interesting non-theological questions. A Wrinkle in Time isn't clear on how figures such as Jesus and Beethoven fought against the darkness, but if the book is to be thematically consistent, it must be linked to their capacity to spread peace or create great art. I joked above about Steven Spielberg being a warrior against the darkness, but that joke is also a serious question: in L'Engle's view, is Steven Spielberg a warrior against the darkness? Is Roald Dahl, or Stephen King, or Alan Moore, or Wes Anderson, or John Lennon? Is Quentin Tarantino, who creates films that many consider great works of art, but which focus on amoral protagonists and graphic violence? Are Friedrich Nietzche or Karl Marx, who are doubtless great philosophers but whose work has inspired at least a few authoritarian dictators?

There are two root questions here: what products of human thought are great enough to make their creators into warriors against evil, and does that product need to have a certain character or promote certain emotions above others? Steven Spielberg films such as E.T. and Schindler's List promote peace, compassion, and understanding, but they're popular works, not "high art" like Bach or Shakespeare, meant for an educated elite capable of appreciating them. Tarantino, whose work was initially seen as art house cinema, is closer to "high art", but if the power of love is what defeats the darkness, it's hard to imagine that Reservoir Dogs is an effective weapon against it.

We don't learn enough about the exact mechanism of "great thinkers are warriors against the darkness" to be able to answer these questions. Perhaps just by doing their work, they create some kind of psychic energy that repels the darkness. Or perhaps all of these great thinkers were literally whisked off by cosmic beings for black ops missions on dark planets, like Meg is in the book. In which case we can still ask what it was about these particular humans that attracted the cosmic beings; do cosmic beings have taste? Do they make a judgment call that Shakespeare's work is better constructed than Stephenie Meyer's, making him worthy to whisk off into space for a mission?

In 1962, pop culture criticism was just beginning with pop art, and L’Engle was classically educated in the world of upper-class boarding schools, so chances are she never thought about these questions; it probably never would have crossed her mind that a filmmaker like Steven Spielberg or a comic book writer like Alan Moore could be in the same league as Shakespeare and Beethoven. Still, it’s interesting to think about, even if the author herself had no intention of introducing it.

Agency and Ability

One more trait that Wrinkle and Lewis’s Space Trilogy share, and which sets Wrinkle apart from modern young adult stories like Harry Potter, is the main protagonists’ lack of agency in anything that goes on. Not much in the story happens because of any action or decision on the part of the main characters. Meg, despite being our viewpoint character, is particularly bereft of agency. Everything happens to her; MacGuffins and dei ex machina are provided to her, and she just figures out their meaning and how to apply them to the current situation, always left maddeningly vague by whatever godlike being provided it to her.

I would be tempted to put this down to societal attitudes towards women in the 1960s, except that the male characters are nearly as lacking in agency. Calvin meets the Murrys because he feels a mysterious compulsion to go to the crumbling shack where Mrs. Whatsit, Who, and Which are staying. Even though Calvin, as the perfect love interest, is a more important development for Meg than for anyone else, she remains mostly silent during their first encounter, while Charles Wallace verbally duels him and then invites him over for dinner. Calvin is very nearly superfluous anyway; he barely does anything, other than being gifted with the magical power to talk to the furry aliens. The three children follow a set of instructions from the three cosmic beings which are at once rigid and so indefinite that they make the vague pronouncements of characters such as Gandalf and Yoda seem as straightforward as a recipe for pancakes, and end up facing IT on Camazotz.

During the showdown with IT, Charles Wallace becomes the only character in the entire book other than the three cosmic beings to exercise any kind of agency. He agrees to take on IT directly at the mental level, giving in to hubris and going against the instructions he received from the Mrs. W’s. He succumbs to IT’s control and has to be rescued by Meg, returning to Camazotz alone. She uses the power of her love to rescue him from IT.

The close relationship between Meg and Charles Wallace was well established earlier in the book. The problem with this climax is that we’ve known all along that Meg loved Charles Wallace, so she’s not using any ability, exercising any agency, or growing as a character when she wins this way. In the sequel, A Wind in the Door, Meg finds out that she has to rescue Mr. Jenkins, the school principal she clashed with in the first book and by this point blames for not protecting Charles Wallace from bullies. Meg resists, protesting that she can’t possibly love Mr. Jenkins. But she does, by learning to understand him, by learning to see his point of view and find out what makes him the person he is. This is a real moment of character growth; what we get at the end of Wrinkle was obvious from the third page of the book. It doesn’t show Meg growing, and it doesn’t represent any agency or ability on her part.

Because no one has any agency, the entire story comes off as mostly predestined. As this air of predestination becomes obvious during the second act on Camazotz and the early third act on the furry tentacled beasts’ planet, the story loses all its stakes. Even if the reader manages to suspend disbelief and forget that out-of-universe laws of children’s books prevent the characters from failing or dying, we now have to contend with in-universe laws that guarantee the main characters’ success. To me, this is the core flaw of the story, much more damaging than the surface elements that I made fun of earlier. L’Engle is much more interested in ideas than in plot or character. Some of the ideas are fun and creative; L’Engle’s space creatures and alien planets are mostly interesting, and she offers plausible explanations based in scientific fact for phenomena like the tesseract and some of the technology that appears. But the core ideas, the political and philosophical ones, are no longer strong enough to carry the book on their own. And the characters, while not completely beyond reproach, are interesting enough that some good character development, some way of tying the events they go through to who they are and their relationships with each other, could have gone a long way to strengthening the third act in particular.

It seems too easy to blame this lack of agency and feeling of predestination on L’Engle’s religious philosophy. The children are going on an adventure, but the dangers they face are abstract: not hunger or death, but loss of identity and ethics. They are fighting forces too big for them to handle; the only way they could win is divine intervention.

Conclusion

The book is definitely flawed, but I would still recommend it to lovers of fantasy and young adult literature. If nothing else, it serves as an example of how sophisticated a young adult book can be. Even if we ignore the copious name dropping of classical writers and artists, the book still deals creatively with fairly complex themes and includes some suprisingly hard science fiction elements.

I can also recommend the book to its intended audience: children. I was about seven when I read this. Children will differ in how fast their reading abilities develop, but with the amount of media that children consume nowadays, they’ll probably find this book boring and clichéd if it doesn’t get to them before age ten.

My Moe Incest Anime Can't Be This Confusing!

I’m pretty burnt out on anime right now.

This has happened before. Usually I would find some amazing series that would get me back into it. In 2008 that was Haruhi. In 2010 it was Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai, which became famous across the Internet as an example of disgusting Japanese fetish porn. Which isn’t completely fair, but it’s also not entirely unfair. I’m going to speak up for this show a little here; for all its flaws, all of which deserve to be pointed out and mocked, there was real feeling and something earnest about it.

The central plot of Ore Imo follows Kyousuke, a high school boy who doesn’t get along with his middle school sister Kirino, who ignores him, insults him, and yells at him. This is hardly uncommon among fourteen-year-old little sisters in real life, and it’s a point in the show’s favor that it got this so right, even if it means we don’t always like Kirino. Kyousuke discovers that Kirino, despite the front of perfection she presents to the world, loves magical girl anime and pornographic visual novels about little sisters, so Kirino takes him into her confidence, and they slowly grow closer as Kyousuke helps Kirino overcome the challenges that being an otaku brings into her life.

Kyousuke helps Kirino befriend Kuroneko, a.k.a. Ruri Gokou, a chuunibyou; and Saori Bajeena, a.k.a. Saori Makishima, a rich girl who dresses like a sterotypical otaku with crazy swirly glasses and an ugly flannel shirt. He also helps her make up with her best friend Ayase, who hates otaku, and their father, who can’t abide the thought that his perfect little girl is into weird incest porn.

Looking back on it now, Ore Imo exists in my mind as a weird, fun series that also had plenty of awkward and boring moments, due to its most prominent flaw, incredibly inconsistent writing. Like most moe anime, it plays to instinct and id. It doesn’t dazzle you with logic or a highly developed plot; it’s about a feeling and an experience, and the characters and setting that create them. It’s a unique mixture of genuine feelings and experiences that ring very true with forced plot coincidences and surreal sequences of anime logic.

It’s also a show about otaku. For a while, every show seemed to have an otaku or some otaku elements in it somewhere, but there were only a few that actually went all in on it. Ore Imo and Genshiken are two of the big ones: not only were they two of the most popular, and two of the shows most focused on that particular element, they were also the two that, for my money, best captured a realistic picture of what being an otaku is like. Both of them also shoot themselves in the foot later on in the story by letting the universe play by anime rules at certain points instead of playing out realistically; both had this tendency all throughout, but both went too far by doing something big and clumsy with it, to the global detriment of the series. Ore Imo had always let things play out by anime logic more than Genshiken, meaning it had further to fall, and by the end it’s certainly fallen every inch it can.

The Trio Before the Fall

I’ve found that it’s uncommon for anime to “jump the shark” or “grow the beard” midway like we see with Western TV shows. Most of the anime I’ve watched were either good or bad from the first episode; sometimes the good ones got better, and sometimes the bad ones got worse, but I could typically see the trajectory from early on. (This most likely happens because anime have shorter runs and don’t change staff midway like Western shows do.) The exceptions are shows that are generally good throughout their runs, but completely botch the ending; Mahoromatic and Yu Yu Hakusho fall here. So does Ore Imo, to an extent, but even before reaching the end, it had taken us through a few ridiculous subplots, a few pointless tertiary characters, and at least one episode that tried to stretch ten minutes of content into a twenty-three minute episode by padding it with one painfully long sequence.

Ore Imo was at its best when it focused on the growing relationships between its core three cast members, Kyousuke, Kirino, and Kuroneko. Series I shows how Kyousuke and Kirino reestablish their relationship after a long period of estrangement. It’s clear by the end that both of them wanted this for a long time; Kyousuke’s feeble claims that he hates Kirino start to ring false by the midway point of Series I, while Kirino’s temper tantrums and abuse belie the eagerness with which she brings Kyousuke into her secret otaku life. Kuroneko, who at first seems like a “wealthy frenemy” character for Kirino, turns out to be practical and caring and not at all wealthy; through Series I, she forms a friendship with Kyousuke as well as Kirino, setting her up to start dating him in Series II.

By Series I Episode 9, Kuroneko was my favorite character, and her character arc was by far the most satisfying (at least until the ending, which I’ll have more to say about later). She’s introduced as a rival for Kirino, a fellow otaku who has different taste and insults Kirino’s taste, leading them to fight. But since both are outcasts from the main group, they end up stuck together and reach some kind of understanding and mutual respect by the end of Series I. Kuroneko also befriends Kyousuke, who often has the task of mediating between her and Kirino. As Series I wears on we slowly discover things about her: she’s not rich, but lives with her family in a humble Japanese-style house without much privacy; she has two little sisters of her own, who she helps her parents take care of; she’s rather talented, writing detailed fan fiction and original work that’s a bit too self-indulgent and impenetrable; she’s in fact deeply loyal and caring, despite her eccentricity and social awkwardness. After Series I we get a three-episode OVA with Kuroneko at its center, where with Kyousuke’s help she grows a little and makes a friend aside from Kirino, though her standoffish nature seems to guarantee that all her friendships are combative. In Series II, she convinces Kyousuke to date her despite his focus on Kirino. Kuroneko does her best to navigate their complicated relationship, eventually agreeing to stop dating him since it bothers Kirino too much. She tells Kyousuke that her true goal is for the three of them to be happy together, but it’s also clear that she continues carrying a torch for him and hopes that a day will come when she can date him without destroying both of their relationships with Kirino.

Kirino also grows, though her growth is partially a regression; as we see in later episodes, she looked up to Kyousuke when she was younger, and their estrangement happened after Kyousuke’s personality changed and Kirino became disillusioned with him. During Series II, Kirino returns more and more to her childish admiration of Kyousuke and her desire to be pampered by him and occupy all his attention. Unlike Kuroneko, who becomes more mature in her outlook as the series progresses, Kirino actually becomes more childish. Her jealousy, possessiveness, and tendency to create melodrama to get her way also worsen after an ebb towards the end of Series I. These are typical teenage traits, so in some sense they do represent a maturing, given that Kirino is only fourteen and fifteen years old through most of the series. We do see her mature in small ways; for instance, she learns how to better value Kuroneko and Saori, and even Ayase, as her friends. By the close of Series II, we understand her motives better, and we can have faith that she’ll keep growing and achieve a more mature relationship with Kyousuke, possibly even feeling comfortable with letting him date someone.

Kyousuke is the solid, boring anchor between the more tempestuous Kirino and Kuroneko. He’s also a complete pushover; he can never say no to any scheme he’s asked to participate in, no matter how absurd. In one scene during Series II, Kirino implies that she’s sometimes intimidated by him, which is extremely hard to swallow as she physically abuses him several times throughout the series and he never fights back.

Having examined the evidence from Series I and Series II, I’m forced to conclude that Kyousuke is not quite all there in the head. He’s prone to obsessiveness, stubborn denials of reality, and outbursts of temporary insanity. This is more obvious in the novels, where we see everything from Kyousuke’s point of view: many of the situations in the series frighten or shake him, and he often reacts by having a bout of insanity, ranting and screaming at someone until they give in. But the anime writers picked up on this trait; the anime-original Series I, Episode 8 ends as so many of the early episodes end, with Kyousuke persuading someone of something on Kirino’s behalf during a temporary bout of insanity, impressing them with his stubbornness and knack for self deprecation.

By the end of Series II, Kyousuke is nonetheless in a better place than he started at: he’s drifted away from his longtime friend Manami, but he’s much closer to Kirino now, and also has relationships with Kuroneko and Saori that he’s built by being part of the otaku world.

The final episode of Series II is all about Kirino and how she grew to hate Manami and become estranged from Kyousuke. The equivalent part of the novel is actually told from Kyousuke’s point of view and includes a long subplot that is only hinted at in the anime. From a character perspective they serve equivalent purposes: both finally show us how Kyousuke and Kirino reached where they were at the start of the series, hating each other and barely speaking. The anime version is much more economical.

After the Fall

In the previous section I was careful to say “by the end of Series II”. I was intentionally excluding the three OVA episodes that conclude the series. That’s because, from a character perspective, they destroy everything.

In the finale, Kyousuke decides rather suddenly that he’s in love with Kirino and decides to confess his love to her. Kirino decides to accept it. He rejects Kuroneko, telling her they can’t ever be together, and then rejects a string of other girls who confess to him, including Ayase and a minor character called Kanako who only exists as an otaku in-joke. (She resembles Nanoha from the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha series, is voiced by the same actress, and cosplays as a parody of Nanoha.)

Kyousuke and Kirino start “dating”, ending at Kyousuke’s high school graduation, when they “marry” in a church. We find out that this was the end of their “dating” period and after this they will go back to being just siblings.

There was a lot of clumsy writing and contrived coincidences in this series. There were a lot of times when I had a hard time believing that someone could be stupid enough to fall for something. There were a lot of moments of teen sitcom silliness and a lot of times when the world worked by anime rules instead of anything approaching realism. I’d even say a good portion of the series was built on such things. But this ending reached a new level of incompetence. The characters and their arcs were the one thing that had always remained consistent throughout a lot of silliness in Series I and Monty Python’s Flying Circus levels of silliness in Series II, but this ending broke them. Of course, ever since the beginning, the series had intentionally used double entendres when portraying Kyousuke and Kirino’s relationship so that those who were inclined to do so could infer romantic subtext. But in this ending, the series assumed that everyone was inclined to infer that subtext and made it into supertext.

There was a clear trend in the main trios’ character arcs, of growth away from childish bickering and sibling resentment, and towards the development of mature relationships. Kyousuke and Kuroneko, both people defined by protectiveness towards younger siblings, started to reach outside the home and learn to have feelings for each other. They learned to listen and to talk frankly and discuss their feelings openly. Kuroneko especially, but we also saw Kyousuke learn this lesson during the time when they were dating, and the two of them even got Kirino to do the same when she admitted that she wasn’t ready to see Kyousuke dating someone. Kirino perhaps didn’t grow quite as much, but she did manage to move her relationship with Kuroneko away from petty bickering and towards loyalty and caring and support for each other. In both the anime and the novels we see her revisit the past, demythologize it, and start to end the vendettas she began back then.

This ending utterly subverts that trend. Kirino succumbs to perverse nostalgia and seizes the chance to wallow in her childhood fantasies of dating her brother. Kyousuke outright loses his mind, this time not temporarily. Kuroneko is brushed aside so quickly that we never quite focus on what a tragedy this is for her. Immediately after Kyousuke rejects her, she is devastated, and understandably so; the dream she told Kyousuke about, where he, she, and Kirino could all be open and happy together, is crushed. She has two choices: she can disavow the Kousaka siblings, and lose two of her best friends both in one swoop; or she can bottle up her feelings and pretend to be fine with it, and keep her friends. We’re told that, after some reflection, she’s decided to be fine with it. That seems to be the end of it; instead of getting to explore what Kuroneko must be feeling now that all her dreams and plans have been burned to the ground, we get a few weak scenes of Kyousuke and Kirino acting like a boyfriend and girlfriend.

This actually makes ever so slightly more sense in the novels. It still makes very little sense, but it makes ever so slightly more sense, because in the novels Kyousuke talks in his monologue several times about which girls he finds most attractive, and Kuroneko is never on the list. Once I noticed this, I realized that his dithering and reluctance in the early parts of Series II were not just the usual emotional incompetence of male heroes in this kind of anime; he was actually not that interested in Kuroneko, and ended up going out with her because she pursued him. His attempt to get involved in her life during the first OVA episodes gives her the wrong idea, and she falls in love with him. Because he’s a teenage boy and because she’s Kirino’s friend and pursues him fairly hard, he dates her, but maintains the idea of trading up in the back of his mind. Yet later, when the girl he consistently ranks as his favorite—Ayase—confesses her love to him, he rejects her too. Presumably, by this time, he’d decided on Kirino.

While I put most of this down to bad writing, if we limit our perspective to in-universe, we get an alternate interpretation of Kyousuke as a mentally unstable, manipulative person who pathologically meddles in other people’s lives. By demeaning himself, giving in to bizarre demands, going along with insane requests, and inserting himself into situations, he gets at least two girls—Kirino and Kuroneko—to develop feelings for him. (In the novels there’s also a longer subplot where he uses similar tactics on Ayase; most of this didn’t make it into the anime.) In the long flashback we get towards the end of the novel, Kyousuke is in fact shown as a pathological meddler, and all the same tactics he uses on Kirino, Kuroneko, and Ayase worked for him on another girl called Sakurai back in sixth grade. Throw in a dash of crazy, and we get current day Kyousuke, who purposely leverages these tactics, whose efficacy he discovered by accident, to pursue several girls. This would also explain his lack of interest in Manami: he’s physically unattracted to her, but she’s also missing the element of pursuit that he enjoys. Kirino, as his blood sister, is the ultimate prize, but she’s not unwinnable; Kyousuke trades on various secrets he learns about her, first her otaku hobby and later her childish admiration for him, to create romantic feelings towards him in her. But as crazy as Kyousuke may be, he’s also a coward who doesn’t want to deal with the consequences of a lifelong romantic relationship with his sister. We see evidence of his basic cowardice all throughout the series, such as his reluctance to confront Kirino over anything. So he and Kirino make the deal to end things after he graduates high school, which also appeals to Kirino’s remaining rationality, and Kyousuke gets to win the ultimate prize as well as all the lesser prizes he sought, then is freed from all consequence. We could even go out on a limb and surmise that the new girl in Saori’s otaku group, who is mentioned in the final scene of the series, will be Kyousuke’s next prize.

There’s a story around the Internet that Tsukasa Fushimi, the author of the light novels, actually wanted to end with Kyousuke and Kirino together, but the publisher wouldn’t allow a full incest ending, leading Fushimi to devise the ending we got. But even a full incest ending would have been completely character breaking in terms of the logical character arc mentioned above; for Kirino to mature, she had to give up her childish admiration for Kyousuke and desire to be the center of his attention all the time. She had to stop interfering in his life and holding him back from establishing relationships with girls aside from her. But regardless of whether the incest continues or ends at Kyousuke’s graduation, Kirino has not matured; to borrow a phrase, she’s either achieved something close to a total victory or an actual total victory, for her childish fixation and immature temper tantrum tactics, and she’s done so with Kyousuke’s full knowledge and endorsement. So in fact, a full incest ending also supports the alternate interpretation of Kyousuke as a willful meddler and manipulator; in a full incest ending he’s just a willful meddler and manipulator who is romantically and sexually attracted to his full-blooded sister, instead of one who may or may not be but gives her up because he doesn’t want to face the societal consequences.

As a side note, this is an interesting contrast with the Monogatari series, where Koyomi seems to have feelings for Tsubasa but dates Hitagi because she pursues him hard and becomes his girlfriend first. Over the series he really does develop feelings for Hitagi, or at least thoroughly convinces himself that he has them, and in the end rejects Tsubasa. Because Koyomi’s rejection of Tsubasa is an act of loyalty towards Hitagi, as well as an act of respect towards Tsubasa by telling her once and for all that he won’t leave Hitagi for her, the relationships among the three of them are preserved. Kuroneko’s relationship with Kyousuke is definitively destroyed; we don’t see whether she sticks around to rebuild it, nor whether she maintains her relationship with Kirino, during the months after her rejection. From what we learn of her in the series, she’s a bit of a doormat, but it’s hard to believe that she could resume as if nothing had happened in such a bizarre situation.

There was a lot of bad writing involved in these character arcs, and the ending broke them all, but their essential strength seems too deliberate to be a coincidence. Like most anime characters, the main trio start as clichés, but they manage to transcend the cliché by growing in interesting directions.

All those other people

There are also a ton of minor characters. None of them are particularly interesting aside from the one joke they embody. Hinata and Tamaki Gokou, Kuroneko’s younger sisters, at least help develop Kuroneko, so they’re not a complete waste. Ayase’s one joke is hitting and yelling at Kyousuke and being a yandere towards Kirino. After Episode 5, her impact on the story tends to be very limited; she’s mostly around for eye candy and humor. Sena Akagi steps in to play the role of frenemy for Kuroneko while Kirino isn’t around; her one joke is loving yaoi. The female otaku in Genshiken were such yaoi fanatics that it was surprising when Sena was the only fujoshi in Ore Imo.

Less necessary were Mikagami, a good-looking otaku who briefly pretends to be Kirino’s boyfriend, and Ria, a young girl from America who comes to visit Japan and stays with the Kousakas. Ria could have been dropped from the anime, like Sakurai, with little to no detriment. She wasn’t funny and she certainly didn’t advance the plot. Kanako was occasionally useful and sometimes amusing, but the attempt to give her a story arc towards the end of Series II felt rushed and unnecessary.

The novel spends more time with some of these minor characters, but very little of it actually builds a character arc. It’s mostly comic relief or small advancements of arcs for the main characters. Saori is the only side character who gets an actual backstory, and it does shed some light on who she currently is, but it’s also boringly written and never has any real impact on the main story. (It shows that Kanako has an otaku sister so we stop hating this character we were clearly meant to hate just in time for her sudden and random rehabilitation, and it explains where Saori gets a car and driver so she can sweep in during the final arc with Kuroneko and absolve Kyousuke of his guilt just in time for him to confess his love to Kirino. Otherwise it has no impact on the main story.)

Otaku: Pretty much the scum of the Internet

For all the weakness of its writing, and all the sabotage it commits toward a coherent understanding of its characters, Ore Imo shines in depicting the experience of being an otaku. For me it rings even truer than Genshiken.

In America nowadays, it’s become socially acceptable to be a gamer or a Trekkie or a Star Wars fan or a comic book lover, and if you keep up with Naruto and Dragon Ball Super and appreciate Ghost in the Shell and Studio Ghibli you’re probably fine. It’s much harder to be a moe fan, even if you prefer relatively harmless stuff like K-On and Aria and Love Live, and whatever suspicions people might have about you will be confirmed if they find out that you watch material like To-Love-Ru, MM!, Kodomo no Jikan or Ore Imo itself. These shows have a kind of sexuality to them that most people find strange and repulsive.

Ore Imo captures the loneliness and yearning for companionship of this situation amazingly well. The otaku elements of Ore Imo are not tacked on for humor like Lucky Star; the impetus for all the relationships that start (or restart) in the show is the yearning for camaraderie and desire to be understood created by the isolation of being an otaku. When Kirino bares her soul (and certain parts of her body) to Kyousuke in the first episode, there’s a desperation to have that part of her be accepted. The series exaggerates things by having Kirino as a perfect student, talented athlete, and model, but that dual life and feeling of wanting someone to accept her otaku side rang true to life for me. My actual experience was closer to Kuroneko. Her family is aware that she’s an otaku. Her sisters regard her as eccentric and sometimes mock her. They certainly don’t understand or accept that side of her. Still, they accept her as part of their family, and accept that there’s a side of her they can’t understand.

What happens when Kirino and Kuroneko first meet also felt genuine. Each vociferously defends her secret vice, and they fight, because stubbornness and the longtime habit of secrecy amplify minor differences in taste into dire conflicts. But each understands that desire to be accepted, to be able to shed that habit of secrecy and expose that part of herself to someone else, so they remain friends despite their conflict. This may also motivate Kuroneko’s romantic interest in Kyousuke; as far as we know, he’s the only boy she’s ever been able to show that side of herself. Her difficulty making friends with Sena suggests that Kirino and Kyousuke might be the only people at all that had seen and accepted that side of Kuroneko. Kuroneko repeats the process with Sena, first conflicting over minor differences in taste, then reaching a détente.

Genshiken hints at this feeling in the first few chapters, but it begins with Sasahara finding a place to belong and never revisits the idea of loneliness of conflict. The Genshiken guys all like the same shows, especially Kujibiki Unbalance. There’s a mild conflict between the otaku members and Saki, but Saki, like Kyousuke in Ore Imo, is not only determined to understand and accept otaku, but also takes on a bit of the taint herself as the series goes on. (Not to the same extent as Kyousuke, though.)

Conclusion

If you’re inclined to search for flaws in Ore Imo, you’ll find them without much trouble. It’s a deeply flawed series, even on its own terms. That is: if you accept the implausible situations, the melodrama, the over-the-top characters as part of the medium of anime, which you must if you want to engage with anime on its own terms at all, still Ore Imo is deeply flawed. It introduces too many characters that do too little, many of its sequences are clumsy even by the standards of its genre, and it definitely contains more than a little pandering to a certain type of audience (which I was emphatically part of at the time I saw it, and am still not completely divorced from).

Still, there is good in it. There are things which are powerful and genuine and skillful, even when they appear blemished by the weak and the artificial. Very few anime manage to end well; it’s a testament to Ore Imo’s strength that it came so close to doing so, even as it baffles that so many endings much more obvious and satisfying were passed over for the one we got. (To name just one example: an ending where Kyousuke and Kirino’s period of “dating” ends with Kyousuke resuming his relationship with Kuroneko, showing us that the three months of “dating” were an exorcism of Kirino’s childishness rather than an indulgence of it, and that she’s now matured enough to let her brother just be her brother.)

Despite all its flaws, Ore Imo made a real and lasting impact on me, unlike the apparently more bulletproof Haruhi Suzumiya series, which I’ve mentally left behind with Pokémon and Power Rangers. Unlike Haruhi Suzumiya, which trades in winking and superficial cleverness, Ore Imo takes the risk of being schmaltzy and manipulative and contrived for the reward of evoking a real emotion; though it is schmaltzy and manipulative and contrived by turns, it does evoke real emotion with both its humor and its melodrama by grounding them in characters who feel human and identifiable, even when the situations they find themselves in don’t always.

Exiles: A Song of Nonsense and Plagiarism

There was a time in my life when I would read basically anything, because there wasn’t enough good stuff on TV to keep me entertained. One day, I decided that everything on TV was so bad that it was really time I should get my life together and go do something. I started school, learned to program, graduated school, got a job programming, got really sick of programming, and kept doing it anyway because of the money. If this were happening now, when there’s a ton of good stuff on TV, I’d probably never have decided to get my life together and I’d still just be sitting around watching TV, and I never would have read the Exiles “trilogy” by Melanie Rawn.

I say “trilogy” because the series was supposed to have three books—The Ruins of Ambrai, The Mageborn Traitor, and The Captal’s Tower—but it’s been over fifteen years since the second book came out and the third one is nowhere in sight. There was an announcement in 2014 that she was going to get started working on, so it could still appear.

Exiles takes place on a planet called Lenfell. Magic is real and mages loaded up in a ship with a bunch of Catholics to fly off somewhere they wouldn’t be persecuted. They proceeded to have a gigantic war for dominance that poisoned the world and made it so most women couldn’t have children. After a series of eugenic pogroms, the Lenfellians created a society which is basically a mirror of Elizabethan England: women are dominant, men are property and have no rights, women have all the power, men are generally treated like garbage.

I have two major problems with this setup: a) It’s ridiculous, and b) It’s nonsensical. I find it very hard to believe that a bunch of magical Catholics would have created a female-dominant society when a bunch of distinctly non-magical Catholics (and other sects) are some of the greatest impediments to equal treatment for women in modern society. I also find it very hard to believe that the infertility and subsequent eugenic pogroms would have led at any remove to a female-dominated society. For a much more convincing portrayal of a similar scenario, read The Handmaid’s Tale, where a military dictatorship with strong religious influence takes power and known fertile women are made into sex slaves and forced to bear the children of high-ranking men in society. I actually found the speed with which women’s rights were lost in The Handmaid’s Tale a little jarring, but in a medieval society like Lenfell, it makes perfect sense, magic or no magic.

You can tell from reading the books that Rawn didn’t really care if this scenario made sense, she just wanted to do all sorts of table-turning by having women talk about men as property and progressive women supporting men’s rights. There’s even a weird sex scene where the woman is on top, but the man still has to do all the “work”. I have trouble imagining how that works. I guess he squishes himself back into the mattress, then thrusts upwards, repeat until satisfied. Also, I’m disappointed that none of the women in this society have discovered pegging yet. It seems so natural.

Given that, I wish Rawn would’ve just left it unexplained how this world came into existence. After all, she doesn’t bother to explain magic at all. It’s not a mutation and it doesn’t involve midichlorians or unlocking the remaining 90% of your brain. It’s just there. I think readers would have accepted that it was purely a plot device to be able to write all those table-turning scenarios and given her a pass on it. In the real world, the development of patriarchy had complex, multivariate causes; the later development of women’s rights also had complex, multivariate causes mostly linked to social shifts that came out of the Industrial Revolution, when machines made the greater upper body strength of men matter way less than it used to. But who cares, that stuff is boring. I would’ve ignored all that if Rawn hadn’t made a show of just how backwards and unlikely her scenario was.

The main story takes place about five hundred years after the above-mentioned war, when the Lenfellian society is well established. It follows the last members of a once powerful family called Ambrai. Throughout the following summary of the first book, Ruins of Ambrai, I’d like you to keep your eyes open for details that sound suspiciously familiar:

Auvry Feiran, a powerful and somewhat arrogant young mage who all the older mages are afraid of, marries Maichen Ambrai, a princess. The constant belittling Feiran receives from Maichen's mother and the older mages causes him to turn against the Mage Guardians and join their enemies, the Lords of Malerris. Auvry Feiran and Maichen Ambrai have three children: Glenin, Sarra, and Cailet. Feiran takes Glenin with him when he goes over to the Lords of Malerris. Maichen dies giving birth to Cailet; Sarra is sent to grow up surrounded by pomp, luxury, and circumstance while Cailet is raised by distant relatives in the desert. While there, Cailet is trained in magic by Rinnel Solingirt, a mysterious old man who is actually Gorynel Desse, a famous and powerful Mage Guardian. Sarra becomes involved with the Rising, a movement to overthrow the tyrant Avira Anniyas, who came to power during a time of civil war and rules with an iron fist along with her servants Auvry Feiran and Glenin. After many travails, Sarra and Cailet meet and come to realize they are sisters and Auvry Feiran is their father; Gorynel Desse is killed, and Cailet becomes Mage Captal, leader of all the mages. They also meet Collan, a good-looking, roguish minstrel who at first infuriates Sarra, but later she falls in love with him and is heartbroken when he is captured by Auvry Feiran. In the final scene, Collan returns; Cailet fights Avira Anniyas, who is killed, and then faces Glenin, trying to bring her to the side of good. Auvry Feiran appears and realizes Cailet is his daughter and in a final act of good, sacrifices himself to save her from Glenin's magic. Cailet burns his body and Sarra and Collan get married and live happily ever after.

Didn’t notice anything? Maybe this selectively edited version makes it more clear:

Anakin Skywalker, a powerful and somewhat arrogant young Jedi who all the older Jedi are afraid of, marries Padme Amidala, a queen. The constant belittling Skywalker receives from the older Jedi causes him to turn against the Jedi and join their enemies, the Lords of the Sith. Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala have two children: Luke and Leia. Padme dies giving birth to them; Leia is sent to grow up surrounded by pomp, luxury, and circumstance while Luke is raised by distant relatives in the desert. While there, Luke is trained in the Force by Ben Kenobi, a mysterious old man who is actually Obi-Wan Kenobi, a famous and powerful Jedi. Leia becomes involved with the Rebel Alliance, a movement to overthrow the tyrant Emperor Palpatine, who came to power in a time of civil war and rules with an iron fist along with his servant Darth Vader, a.k.a. Anakin Skywalker. After many travails, Luke and Leia meet and come to realize they are brother and sister and Darth Vader is their father; Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed, and Luke becomes the last of the Jedi. They also meet Han Solo, a good-looking, roguish smuggler who at first infuriates Leia, but later she falls in love with him and is heartbroken when he is captured by Darth Vader and frozen in carbonite. In the final scene, Han Solo returns; Luke faces Emperor Palpatine, and tries to bring Darth Vader to the side of good. In a final act of good, Darth Vader sacrifices himself to save Luke from Emperor Palpatine's Force lightning. Luke burns his body and Leia and Han get married and live happily ever after.

Ruins of Ambrai switches things up a tiny bit: it rips off a few things from Dune, such as a scene where Glenin is forced to abort her first child because it’s a daughter and she was ordered to bear only sons (the opposite of Jessica!); it forces Anniyas and Glenin to share the part of Palpatine; and it adds tons of filler and lots of extra characters that mostly die, because Rawn loves introducing mildly entertaining bit players and then killing them off while making it abundantly clear that the main characters are safe, sort of like The Walking Dead. There’s also no real analogue to the Death Star; instead, everyone has schemes within schemes, like in Dune except not smart. In the second book, Sarra and Collan have two annoying children who are analogous to Jacen and Jaina, Han and Leia’s children from the Star Wars EU novels, while Glenin takes on the role of sloppy second villain along with her son. I won’t say his name because his reveal is a surprise in the second book, but the now thirty-year-old Cailet decides pretty early on that Glenin’s son has to be one of two characters, so by a third of the way into the second book, you’ve got a 50/50 shot at guessing who he is. (Yes, a third of way in; the second book takes forever to get going. Which isn’t surprising since it has to resume with a fifteen-year-old Cailet where the first book left off, send her on a pointless side quest, show how she establishes a mage academy, show how Sarra and Collan have kids, show how they’re still hot and in love even though they have kids, show how their kids are annoying, show how their kids have personalities that are annoying, show how Sarra and Collan are the cool parents and not the creepy ones like Glenin, who has incestuous undertones with her kid, then show how the kids go to the mage academy, then finally get to the main plot.)

I’m picking on Exiles because it’s an easy target and I actually read both books, but this sort of crap is really widespread in modern fantasy novels. There’s no originality whatsoever. Exiles is actually at the high end of the scales because Rawn didn’t just do a world where elves and dwarves fight orcs and trolls and the hero is an unassuming farm boy who is actually The Chosen One and gets to bang elf maidens. Exiles is actually out ahead of the pack because the characters have personalities (even if they’re annoying or plagiarized from Star Wars) and the focus is on story and character arcs instead of stats and video game-like powers. It’s no wonder Harry Potter was such a huge hit. I like it too, but its main strength is character and plot, not shocking originality; yet compared to the drivel that the fantasy genre has devolved into, Harry Potter is indeed shockingly original and strikingly creative. I like Harry Potter better than The Hunger Games, but they did similar things to find their audiences: they took old ideas, put a new coat of paint on them, got them in front of a young audience, and managed to impress an older audience by not being total garbage or plagiarized from The Lord of the Rings, Dune, or Star Wars.

But let’s circle back to the things I did like: Cailet. Before I figured out that she was Luke Skywalker, I actually liked her. Even after that, I still liked her, because of all the blasted ripoffs, Cailet was the only one whose personality wasn’t an exact copy of her Star Wars analogue. Where Luke was whiny and cocky, Cailet was...well, she could also be whiny, but she was often unsure of herself and would blame herself for everything. Then she would come over all confident, do something bold, screw up, and blame herself for everything. That, her adorably tomboyish personality, and her occasional bad-ass moments made her fun to read about. Plus, she had the most confusing love life. She started out in love with her adoptive older brother, then discovered that her elderly mentor had kind of a crush on her just as he died, then saw her adoptive brother killed, and then was hit on by her bisexual adoptive cousin, who explains that she likes to have sex with men but prefers to fall in love with women. Cailet gently rebuffs her and there are no hard feelings between them. In the second book, Cailet finds out that one of her students, who is fifteen years younger than her, has a crush on her, and is encouraged by all (including aforementioned bisexual cousin) to break her celibate streak and jump his bones. (If I remember correctly, she was mind-raped and had half her breast blown off by Glenin during the final battle of the first book, which pushed her into celibacy.) I don’t know that I’d call all this bad luck in love, but it had to be confusing as hell, especially for a girl as young as Cailet was in the first book.

Cailet becomes drastically less interesting in the second book as she spends all of her time brooding and trying to unroll Glenin’s wheels within wheels that end up making not a whole hell of a lot of sense. The story, having used up the entire Star Wars original trilogy, drifts without a purpose and succumbs to filler and boredom and the irritating minutiae of the teenage love lives of Sarra and Collan’s kids. Since the books were at their best when they were stealing the plot of something else, I’m hoping that if The Captal’s Tower ever does get written, it’ll just rip off something. Maybe The Wizard of Oz: a young mageborn girl named Dorothet sets out on a journey to find The Captal’s Tower, meeting along the way a mageborn without a brain, a mageborn who used magic to replace his entire body with tin (losing his heart in the process), and a Wraithenbeast who was too scared to be Wraithen. Along the way, they sing a song whose chorus goes “We’re off to see the Captal, the wonderful Captal of Lenfell.” In the end, they find Cailet at her tower, where she sends them to defeat Glenin and bring back her loom (the Malerrisi are obsessed with weaving and threads). It can’t be worse than Tom and Jerry Meet the Wizard of Oz, and at least it wouldn’t wander through years of filler like The Mageborn Traitor.

The Oblivion of Haruhi Suzumiya

I’ve been reading a lot of Anime News Network posts recently. There are times when it seems like Anime News Network has a hive consciousness that transmits thoughts between the minds of all the writers at once, so they’re all on the same page about things. I’m pretty sure it’s actually just that they all work together in a small office and share gossip around the water cooler, but as a reader, it takes way more effort to realize that than it does to jump to the conclusion that they’re a Borg-like collective of beings, when you see the exact same, not very common, idea expressed in three different articles by three totally different people in a short period of time.

I first noticed this when I saw two or three articles, plus an ANNCast, talk about how Haruhi Suzumiya, which was once incredibly popular both in Japan and in the US, has pretty much disappeared from the public consciousness. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it seemed to be true: the Haruhi Suzumiya love train had left the station and wasn’t coming back. It was particularly striking because I, personally, had seen Haruhi Suzumiya go from a favorite series to a second-tier favorite to a third-tier favorite to an ambient classic—the kind of thing you remember fondly, but don’t really actively seek out—to not even that. I was buying and reading the novels for a while. I enjoyed each one less than the last, though they never jumped the shark; there was never a moment where I thought “These have turned into crap, and I’m not reading any more.” I just kind of slowly bled away my desire to read them. The last one I bought, I think it was The Dissociation, I never read past the third or fourth page. I just slowly stopped caring.

To see something I once loved become so irrelevant was a sad thing. But I always knew the series had structural problems that would ultimately kill it. This blog is a postmortem, an autopsy of the rise and fall of a series that it just became really hard to care about.

The Rise of Haruhi Suzumiya

I first watched Haruhi in 2008 or 2009, not long after it came out. I rented the DVDs from Netflix.

Haruhi is, in a lot of ways, a clever series. Anime in 2006 had basically reached rock bottom in terms of intelligence. The parade of Eva clones from the early 2000s had overdone the “intelligent” side of things, and the Love Hina clones had drowned them out for a while. Haruhi appeared in the middle of a giant smear of really awful harem shows and offered something that had most of the good parts of the harem shows—an intelligible plot, likeable characters, a marked lack of pretentious and ultimately meaningless Christian symbolism, and lots of cute girls who sometimes get naked—without most of the downsides. There was no slapstick comedy, no falling in girls’ breasts, no screaming “Eek! A pervert!”, no obsessive and over the top love at first sight. Most harem shows of the time were for people who, as teenagers, participated halfheartedly in everything and graduated high school with a C average. Haruhi is a show for sarcastic loner teenagers who pretend to be cynical and aloof while reading Dune in the corner and get straight F’s because they reject this unfair system of judgment. Since that was pretty much me, the series appealed to me.

In fact, if Haruhi hadn’t come along, I’m not sure how much longer I would have been into anime. I’ve been on the cusp of abandoning it a couple times, only for some amazing series to come along and make me interested again by showing me what the medium can do. At the time, that was Haruhi. Fundamentally, I’ve always enjoyed harem shows; I was a huge fan of Tenchi Muyo back when it broadcast on Cartoon Network, and later I was a huge fan of Love Hina. But harem shows had just become too commonplace and too stupid by 2006. Love Hina and Tenchi Muyo definitely weren’t works of genius, but they were fun and had a kind of genuine quality to them. They weren’t money grabs like the later harem shows.

Haruhi was also clearly not a money grab. Even if it did have Mikuru, who very nearly deserves to be called the m-word due to her lack of personality and minimal effect on the story. (The m-word is moeblob, which I won’t say again out loud. Filthy word.) The initial premise, given enough background in 90s and early 2000s anime, was really quite smart. 90s anime was full of average teenagers who turned out to be special in some way: able to pilot a giant mecha, or gifted with psychic powers, or given magic and tasked with fighting monsters. Haruhi Suzumiya, the character, was rather a teenager who wasn’t special in any way and desperately wished to be, except that, unknown to her, she really was special after all, but could never know it.

Part of the show’s problem is that it tries so hard to introduce clever twists on the formula that it forgets that those formulas exist for a reason. They create dramatic tension and drive a plot forward. Haruhi Suzumiya constantly neuters its own dramatic tension and trips up its own plot because it’s more concerned with clever twists on the formula than it is with being an effective work of art. Endless Eight is the perfect example: while it was clever and audacious to throw away more than half of the season on reanimating the same episode eight times, it wasn’t an effective storytelling choice. It didn’t accomplish anything that four episodes, or even one episode (as in the novels) couldn’t have accomplished. You see this over and over again in Haruhi: the stories end on a complete anticlimax, because they have no real stakes to them. The various game episodes (the baseball episode, the computer game episode) always end with the SOS Brigade winning, despite their complete ineptitude, because of Yuki’s superpowers. Other stories, like Mysterique Sign or Remote Island Syndrome, start out like they’re going to have a meaningful plot of some kind, but the central conflict is usually resolved with almost no effort and then explained afterwards by Yuki or Koizumi in a long, boring dialogue. Charitably, I choose to believe this was intentional. It was Tanigawa (and the KyoAni writers who adapted his work for the anime version) trying to be clever by turning what would have been a big, serious plot in the kind of show they were referencing into an anticlimax which is easily resolved and quickly forgotten. This is amusing for a while, but it eventually gets tiresome.

Thus began the fall.

The Fall of Haruhi Suzumiya

At the time I watched Season 2, I was still pretty into Haruhi. I’d moved on a bit, but I definitely bought the second season and looked forward to it arriving from Amazon with excitement.

And I actually did enjoy it, aside from Endless Eight, which was…I don’t know. I watched all eight episodes of it. I wasn’t sure I would make it at times, but in the end, I did. I’ve never actually watched the second season again. It’s a combination of my waning interest in the series and the tedium of Endless Eight. I have a problem starting shows. That makes it hard to watch Haruhi Suzumiya Season 2, even though I know I can skip parts of Endless Eight. If I skip some episodes, I have to start another show sooner. I have trouble with that. I also have a problem with super long shows and manga. I took a four-year break from Negima after the school festival arc. I took a fifteen-year break from One Piece in the middle of Sanji’s recruitment, and only picked it up again a few weeks ago. One or two cours is the perfect length for me. In manga, eight or nine volumes is pretty optimal.

Since I was still hungry for Haruhi, I started buying the novels. The Sigh and The Boredom were just okay, but The Disappearance was amazing, and kept me going in the Haruhi world. I also bought the first volume of the Haruhi-chan manga and enjoyed that, though not enough to buy the second volume.

After The Disappearance, I kept buying the novels, kind of robotically. I would read them, get kind of into them for a few days, put them away, and forget about them.

The Disappointment of Haruhi Suzumiya

I liked the Haruhi Suzumiya characters. I mean, they’re not all genius—Koizumi is pretty boring, and Mikuru is kind of an m-word. Tsuruya is kind of gimmicky. But Kyon, Haruhi, and Yuki are genuinely interesting and likeable characters.

Since the plots are usually pretty weak, so eager to defuse themselves in the name of cleverness, I was sticking with the series for the characters. I wanted to see them grow and learn. I wanted to see them maybe get closer.

We got a little of that. Mostly between Kyon and Yuki. Some between Kyon and Haruhi. A tiny bit between Kyon and Mikuru. It might have been nice for Haruhi and Yuki or Yuki and Mikuru to have a real relationship, like Tsubasa and Hitagi in the Monogatari series or Kirino and Kuroneko in Ore Imo. But some real, meaty relationship building between Kyon and one of the girls, more of what we saw in The Disappearance, would have been enough to satisfy me.

However, when I read The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya, it became clear that the book had not just shot itself in the foot, but had shot itself in the foot with a speargun, and now couldn’t move because its foot was pinned to the floor by a spear. The whole setup of the series precludes actual character development. Kyon and Mikuru can never get closer, because Haruhi will get mad. But Haruhi and Kyon can never get closer, because Kyon still refuses to acknowledge that he likes her. Kyon and Yuki can never get closer, because Haruhi and Mikuru will both get mad, and Yuki is ruled by the great data mind thingy that won’t let her. There can never be any character development.

But there also apparently can’t ever be a plot, because the series pathologically refuses to let one develop. Anything that seems too plot-like gets abandoned pretty much right away with little fanfare. The later novels kind of hinted that there might be a plot in the works, but it was developing at a snail’s pace, and didn’t really seem that interesting anyway.

I was disappointed after I read The Intrigues. I was hoping there would be either a plot or some character advancement one of these days, but it seemed it would never happen.

The Fade of Haruhi Suzumiya

And just like that, I sort of stopped caring. There was never a big moment where I came to the stunning realization that I didn’t care anymore. It was implicit; I implicitly didn’t care. Sometimes I thought I should care. A few times I thought about buying The Disappearance movie. I always found something else to watch instead. One time that something else was Oniichan Dakedo Ai Sae Areba Kankei Nai yo ne!, which ought to show how much I didn’t care about Haruhi anymore. I bought The Dissociation just to fill out an Amazon shipment so I could get free shipping. Then I tried to read it, and I made it through about three pages before I stopped caring.

Haruhi Suzumiya faded from my mind.

The Aftermath of Haruhi Suzumiya

In the end, Haruhi Suzumiya didn’t amount to much more than Digi Charat. It was a bunch of good-looking characters with funny quirks that was clever in a sort of vapid, superficial way.

It did have some nice science fiction elements. I mean real science fiction, at least at the Star Trek / X-Files level, that kind of pretends like it’s a little bit plausible, and not the out-there stuff in most anime made after the early 1990s. It also had some nice moe, even if Mikuru is sort of an m-word.

But I got bored with the series, because it was inherently constructed not to ever have character or plot advancement. You couldn’t have any of the characters grow closer to each other because they were all either working for rival organizations, or the object of unadmitted love by Haruhi, or were Haruhi. Haruhi couldn’t advance because if she ever stopped wishing to be special, there wouldn’t be a show anymore. She also couldn’t relapse, because it was established that getting to mess around with the SOS Brigade satisfied her enough to prevent that. The series was also crippled by being so closely tied to Kyon’s point of view. You couldn’t really develop any relationships except for Kyon’s, because the point of view never left him. Even Mikuru’s friendship with Tsuruya is an informed attribute; we hear about it in a distant way, because Kyon hears about it in a distant way. Kyon could never get closer to the girls, because Haruhi would get jealous. He could theoretically have gotten closer to Koizumi, but Koizumi annoys him, and honestly Koizumi annoys me too, inasfar as he’s a boring character whose only purpose is to explain stuff in giant chunks of dialogue. And the plot could never advance, because any kind of real plot development would provoke some kind of response from Haruhi, and the entire point of the series was never to provoke a response from Haruhi, so it would fundamentally change the structure of the story if they could allow that to happen.

My love for Haruhi ended not with a bang, and not with a whimper, but with a sort of bemused silence. It’s like having a best friend you move away from and forget about, until one day you wonder what ever happened to that guy, and you look him up, and you find out he became the manager of a Big 5 in Bismarck, North Dakota, and you think that maybe if you’re ever in Bismarck, North Dakota, you’ll look him up, but you know you’ll never be in Bismarck, North Dakota. Occasionally you try to come up with reasons why you would be in Bismarck, North Dakota, but you can’t think of any. Then one day you go to Bismarck, North Dakota on your way to Canada for a camping trip, and you need a backpack, so you stop in a Wal-Mart, and then once you’re in Canada, you realize that you could have gone to Big 5 and seen your friend. You think maybe you’ll look him up on your way back down, but you end up getting frostbite and having to be airlifted to a hospital in Ottawa and you forget about your friend. Then three years later you suddenly remember that you were going to see him on the way back down before you got frostbite, so you look him up, thinking maybe you’ll at least email him, and you find out he died last year in a tragic bikeshedding incident. You feel a little bit sad that you never went to see him, but you ultimately figure “Well, that’s that” and get on with your life.

That’s pretty much how things went between me and Haruhi.

Kodomo no Jikan: One of the most reviled series ever isn’t that bad

With the Kodomo no Jikan Kickstarter now funded, it seemed like a good time to publish these notes I made after I read the manga series in July of 2014.

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Let me start by acknowledging that Kodomo no Jikan is one of the most reviled series ever. This is because its main subject matter is disturbing loli sexuality, and while it began as a lighthearted loli series about having sex with little girls (?), as it develops, it does not actually shy away from the disturbing parts of disturbing loli sexuality. This makes it simultaneously a much more disturbing and more complex work than its critics usually give it credit for; some parts of it even come close to something like a critique on the pedophiliac tendencies in anime and manga (and Japanese society in general). Then at the end, it sort of falls on its face. More about that later.

The premise is that Aoki Daisuke is a newly minted elementary school teacher who is assigned a third grade class at his first job out of school. One of the students in that class is Kokonoe Rin, a problem child who acted out so badly that Aoki's predecessor quit. Aoki discovers that Rin was getting back the teacher for her friend, Usa Mimi, who was tormented in ways I don't remember by the teacher and stopped coming to school. Aoki convinces Usa to come back to school, earning the respect and love of Rin and Usa and the ire of their other friend, Kagami Kuro, who has a lesbian crush on Rin.

Rin proceeds to start coming on to Aoki in all kinds of over-the-top ways, like showing him her panties and asking for him to have sex with her as a reward for good grades. Aoki resists, although the way he reacts is pretty much like the way To-Love-Ru's Rito or any other harem hero would react, except Rin is in third grade. I presume most people only made it through the first volume or two of the manga, so pretty much everyone said "Child porn" and proceeded to hate it. It does not help the series' case that the sexual content gets more and more extreme as it goes on and that Aoki does actually end up falling in love with Rin.

It turns out that Rin has a pretty screwed-up past; her mother, Aki, was unwed and thus shunned from the family, but refused to marry Rin's father because he asked her to get an abortion and she wanted to have the baby. Aki died when Rin was young, right before her eyes; at the time the series starts, Rin is cared for by her cousin Reiji, who moved in with Aki when his abusive parents were killed in a car wreck and ended up shacking up with Aki and falling in love with her. Reiji is totally fixated on Aki, and his mental state is none too stable; not long after he's introduced, he starts treating Rin like a substitute for Aki, giving her hickeys in bed and thinking disturbingly about how she's going to replace Aki when she gets old enough. Aoki finds out and ends up setting him straight by dressing him down about being a child-man; although still crazy, Reiji does get better over the series by trying to deal with his issues, and also by helping Rin's friend Usa, who doesn't get along with her own mother and who has a crush on Reiji.

Other characters' pathologies are also explored, including Shirai-sensei, a senior teacher at the school, whose parents pushed her to achieve while also lowering her self-esteem. Shirai bonds with Kuro, who befriends her by force when she takes over the class while Aoki is away. The main theme of the series is how the adults in a child's life, especially parents and teachers, influence the people they end up becoming. The series surprisingly does a pretty good job exploring this theme. In Shirai-sensei's and Kuro's and Reiji's stories, it focuses on non-sexual aspects; in Rin's and Mimi's and some of the shorter arcs, it focuses a lot on the sexual parts of growing up. Weirdly, the series comes out on the side of encouraging sex ed by having Houin-sensei, a busty teacher with a secret crush on Aoki, anonymously combat misinformation on a secret forum the students are using. When it got down to it, Kojikan was actually not bad at doing realistic stories about sex ed (the forum story and Mimi beginning her period), sexual harassment (the final story arc where the school principal is a pedo), and sexual exploration (Rin's discovery of porn and masturbation). Mostly, those stories didn't feel pornographic or exploitative at all, though they did deal very frankly with sexual material.

But the two faces of the story—the serious, realistic side and the lighthearted loli side—conflicted somewhat. The subject matter, even considering only the realistic stories, is so controversial that only a greatly skilled writer could deal with it and not end up offending someone. Actually, it may not even be possible for anyone to deal with this material and not offend someone. Kaworu Watashiya, the manga-ka, weakened her (yes, Kodomo no Jikan was written by a woman!!! Shocker!!) position almost irreparably with the things that did feel cheesecakey—the early stories, and the composition of certain scenes in the later stories. And yet, moments like Reiji's revelations about himself when he tries to ghost-write Rin's PTSD survey after she sacrifices herself to expose the pedo principal, or Shirai's honest attempts to change herself, were so well-written that it's hard for me to believe that Watashiya only wanted to make little girl cheesecake and just incidentally threw in a story. It's the opposite feeling I got from Chu-Bra, where I did think the original point was cheesecake and the stories about flowering youth were just tacked on because the series had to go somewhere.

In the end, Aoki falls in love with Rin, telling himself that he loves her as a person, and not because he's a lolicon. Which seems to be true in the context of the story, although I can see why people would find it still creepy and weird. He turns down Houin-sensei's confession and decides to wait until Rin is older so they can be together, thinking back to Rin telling him that he was born too early and that Reiji and her mother were thirteen years apart in age when they were together. Rin graduates to middle school and Aoki takes a new job, at a middle school, though not Rin's (she goes to an all-girls' school, along with Mimi and Kuro). They don't see each other for three years, and Aoki even stops responding to Rin's text messages. But Rin tells him her sixteenth birthday is coming up, and she wants to see him; Reiji also comes to Aoki and tells him to see her, and vaguely acknowledges the debt he owes Aoki for his self-revelations. Aoki goes to see her, wondering what she looks like, and finds that she...looks exactly the same as ever. They go to a love hotel and have sex anyway, although Rin is hurt and can't go on immediately.

I really liked the conclusions of Mimi's, Kuro's, and Shirai's stories, and I thought the ending was really good...but then Rin still looked like a ten-year-old girl. The situation actually had the potential to be pretty romantic, if still a little disturbing, and to reinforce the idea that Aoki isn't a lolicon. Instead, it reinforced the idea that he is a lolicon and also ended the series on a "little girl cheesecake" note instead of the serious note that all the other arcs ended on. Sixteen-year-old girl and guy in his thirties is still creepy, but not like ten-year-old-girl and guy in his thirties. But even though we were told that three years had passed, and even though Kuro and Mimi and even Aoki all looked different, the feeling I got from the final scene was that Rin was still ten and Aoki had decided to do a little girl after all. Which, you know, wasn't what I wanted. I wanted the series to end on the high ground. So I was kind of disappointed.

I feel like Watashiya or her editors were afraid that the later parts were too deconstructionist towards lolicons, who, after all, were almost certainly the chief audience for this series, and probably wouldn’t appreciate having their fantasies deconstructed like that. (Any more than I appreciate the Internet’s lame attempts to “deconstruct” cute girls doing cute things.) So they threw in the ending to comfort the lolicons, while also avoiding the fallout that would have resulted from having Aoki sex up the ten-year-old Rin for real. (Japan may be freer with that stuff than America, but it’s not a complete free-for-all; as evidence I submit the watered down ending of Ore Imo that came from the conflicting desires to have Kirino and Kyousuke get together while not appearing to promote incest.) Rin’s entire backstory was basically a deconstruction of the trope of the precociously sexual child. It demonstrated the kind of trauma that could lead a nine-year-old child to behave that way, and demythologized adolescent sexuality by depicting the gory details of puberty. If you’re a lolicon and you’ve been following along, your fantasies have all been smashed. Kojikan did always maintain a certain amount of humor to help the uncomfortable subjects go down better; the humor was also the usual excuse for doing blatantly lolicon stuff. So it was pressed into service one last time, and the “Rin is a pedomorphic loli who looks ten forever so Aoki can hump her without being a pedo” twist ending was born.

Does this series deserve to be so reviled? No, not when you just consider on its own merits, although I can see why people don't like the way it affects anime's image. I heard a news story not long ago about Japan officially outlawing child pornography featuring real children, which I somehow thought had been done a long time ago. The story specified that the law wouldn't affect the manga industry and added that representatives from the industry had said such a law would "destroy the industry". Which makes the whole anime and manga fandom sound like a bunch of pedophiles. Which some of us might be, but is it fair that people who have nothing to do with that kind of thing get stuck with that image?

Kodomo no Jikan’s subject matter is the kind of thing that's incredibly controversial no matter which medium or what country it comes from, and it makes some missteps that are akin to tripping and falling while carrying nuclear waste in an open pot. But it does have some artistic merit, which surprised me as much as anyone, and I don't regret reading it, although I'm definitely deleting it from my Kindle before I try to pass through customs.

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The story of the failed attempt to release Kodomo no Jikan in the US is actually kind of interesting.

Seven Seas, the company that released the Toradora manga, almost released Kodomo no Jikan in the US. But there was a gigantic uproar and the company decided not to.

The Seven Seas head honcho, Jason DeAngelis, had read the first two volumes and was under the impression that Houin was Aoki's love interest and that Rin was just an annoyance and her inappropriate behavior was entirely for humor, like Crayon Shin-chan. That was a reasonable belief, but it turned out to be wrong. Apparently there was a scene in Volume 3 that he didn't like where Rin and Aoki were in the bath and Aoki got a stiffie from Rin rubbing on him (I don't remember the scene).

Kaworu Watashiya totally misunderstood the reasons for the uproar and thought that it was about taking baths together or the fact that Reiji and Aki are cousins. She got this from reading American forum discussions translated by Google Translate. Apparently she never got that people were complaining because of the sexual content involving a child, even though not even the Japanese just do that stuff willy-nilly. Or maybe she thought that people were okay with that since it was in evidence throughout the manga and you would've had to be an idiot to miss it, yet they were still considering it for publication.

According to DeAngelis, Watashiya insisted that the translated title be "Nymphet", which doesn't really sound that good and creates an unfortunate parallel with Lolita, whose protagonist is exactly the kind of predatory pedo that Aoki is not (whatever else you can say about him). After the Volume 3 scene, which DeAngelis singled out as the scene that went too far for him personally, and with the Internet trolls tossing rotting vegetables and orders from stores being retracted left and right, Seven Seas decided not to release the series...which was almost certainly the only winning move in this game. As my thoughts above indicate, you can almost defend Kojikan as a work of art, given how far it goes trying to explain why Rin is so screwed up and how realistic a great number of its plots are. But then it falls on its face with the ending, which would have been okay for American audiences if Rin had grown up like Mimi and Kuro (or even started to dress a little more mature), but as it is, basically gives everyone the pedo ending that it came so close to avoiding. If DeAngelis had read ahead, he almost certainly would have ended up tripping over something even more disturbing later on. I don't even remember that scene that got him all bothered. That's how hardcore Kojikan is—it got worse. And even if Seven Seas hadn't decided on its own that America couldn't handle the content, some jerk would have started waving it around and going on about an evil Japanese conspiracy to turn good American boys into child molesters in a shocking real life reenactment of Welcome to the NHK!.

Kojikan, with its serious themes and deconstructionist tendencies, feels in so many ways like a work created not to pander, but out of a real artistic drive—not just a drive to draw cute characters, but a drive to write a significant story. It's still with me now, needling me with its dark and complex story, making me question things. I have a hard time believing that Watashiya meant it as a run-of-the-mill loli story and happened to take it a little too far—Kojikan was meant to be how it is. Even when I consider that the pedophilia issue affects me more deeply than it would a Japanese person because of my culture, it still feels that way. And even though it was no masterpiece, there's something to be said for that.

But...I still feel that not releasing it was the only winning move. It would have taken a brave (and fully clued-in) manager who understood what the work meant to even have a chance of not being skewered in the media, or ducking skewering by simple obscurity. Watashiya's reaction to the controversy shows that she's not an author capable of explaining what her work means at that level, and she was separated from DeAngelis by a layer of corporate structure, and so probably incapable of explaining herself anyway.

There is also the alternate possibility that I am absolutely insane and Kodomo no Jikan is a work about diddling little girls for fun and profit, with some other random stuff thrown in just to fill in the space between.

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This was all written two years before the Kickstarter campaign, which was fully funded on July 5th, 2016, about a month ago at this point.

The company backing the Kickstarter, Digital Manga Inc., is a company that seems to favor manga with more of an underground comics feel. They appear to do a lot of yaoi and unconventional shoujo. Just reading their description on the campaign homepage, you can tell they understand Kodomo no Jikan in a way that Seven Seas and DeAngelis did not—as an attempt to deal with controversial and complex material as a real work of art, rather than a run-of-the-mill gag comedy about obnoxious children. They also seem to be working closely with Watashiya, who is providing illustrations as special prizes for backers. So it looks like the second release is headed for success; it has a publisher that understands it, knows how to defend the work as art, and isn’t afraid of a little controversy. Whatever flaws Kodomo no Jikan has, I feel like this is the release it deserves—to be remembered as a flawed attempt at a commercial work that treats with controversial themes, instead of as a metonym for disgusting East Asian child porn.