It's interesting how much the arcs really did vary in quality. A lot of the time it had to do with the quality of the heroine, but not always: for instance, Suruga is a great character who makes me laugh more than almost anyone in her comedic moments, and also makes me feel deep sympathy in her more serious moments. Yet her two arcs were some of my least favorite. I recently started watching the series again, but I stalled out at Suruga Monkey Part III (and this seems to be pretty consistent whenever I try to rewatch the series). Here's how people voted on the ANN poll:
- Hitagi End 14.95%
- Hitagi Crab 10.44%
- Nadeko Medusa 8.12%
- Tsubasa Tiger 7.09%
- Shinobu Time 7.09%
- Tsubasa Cat 6.70%
- Mayoi Snail 4.77%
- Mayoi Jiangshi 4.77%
- Suruga Monkey 4.38%
- Suruga Devil 3.99%
- Shinobu Mail 3.09%
- Karen Bee 2.71%
- Tsukihi Phoenix 2.58%
- Nadeko Snake 2.06%
- Tsubasa Family 1.93%
- Ougi Formula 1.42%
- Sodachi Lost 1.03%
- Yotsugi Doll 0.64%
- Sodachi Riddle 0.64%
I'm not caught up on the Owarimonogatari stories, but here's how I would rank the stories I've seen:
- Tsubasa Tiger
- Hitagi End
- Nadeko Medusa
- Tsubasa Family
- Mayoi Snail
- Tsubasa Cat
- Karen Bee
- Shinobu Time
- Tsukihi Phoenix
- Hitagi Crab
- Nadeko Snake
- Suruga Monkey
- Yotsugi Doll
- Mayoi Jiangshi
- Suruga Devil
- Sodachi Riddle
- Ougi Formula
I haven't seen the others, and they left out Koyomi Vamp, so I will too.
You'll notice that I ranked Hitagi Crab drastically lower than the ANN poll did. That's because it's boring. I just watched it again and it does not get better the more you see it. It's twenty minutes of Hitagi cheesecake and a lot of yappity yap yap. Hitagi is definitely in fine form–she gets in some good ones while she's flashing Koyomi at her apartment–and the conclusion is sweet, but Mayoi Snail is a better Hitagi story than Hitagi Crab. (More on that below.)
On the other hand, I'm puzzled that Tsubasa Family ranked so low. Granted, I have a total fetish for it because it had the best Tsukihi scenes of the series (which were watered down in the anime compared to the novels, but still pretty great). Hitagi is a dangerous chick, but she comes on like a freight train, immediately threatening physical violence in her very first appearance. What makes Tsubasa and Suruga so interesting, and so different from your usual light novel haremettes, is that they're dangerous and slightly unstable, and there's some pretty dark stuff going on in their heads, but no one actually knows it because they're the kind of people to bottle things up inside and put up a front of cheery normality. We viewers find out about this slowly: in Suruga's case, we find out late in Suruga Monkey that Suruga was not a pawn of the Rainy Devil when she committed violent acts, but rather a willing accomplice. And in Tsubasa Family, we discover that Tsubasa is allowing the Sawari Neko to use her body and call upon her intellect to run around and wreak havoc, because some part of her enjoys it.
But the construction of Tsubasa Family is much more clever than Suruga Monkey: it's one of the few Monogatari stories where I feel the plot moves along on its own, naturally, instead of through exposition. Tsubasa's personality leads her to touch the dead Sawari Neko on the roadside and become cursed by it. Her inner darkness, borne of her bizarre and uncomfortable living situation, drives her to yield herself to the Sawari Neko and become Black Hanekawa, a new sort of being. Koyomi's actions, too, seem natural and justified, at least if we accept Koyomi's usual over-the-top style as a given. His confusion over his feelings towards Tsubasa, the strange mixture of friendship, sexual attraction, and pity that may or may not be love, lead him to make a strange and confusing decision to die for her. Koyomi concludes that he doesn't love her, but reveres her, like a religious figure; yet he's still confused about his real feelings all the way up through Tsubasa Tiger, and that confusion makes the love triangle between Koyomi, Hitagi, and Tsubasa much more than just a simple love triangle. Tsubasa Family an amazing story, dark, bleak, complex, and emotionally revealing. As a Monogatari viewer, I come for the fan service and fun dialogue, but I stay for stuff like this, and I'm surprised that it wasn't more widely appreciated.
Mayoi Snail is just about where it should be in the ANN poll, but I'm surprised the people like Mayoi Jiangshi so much. I thought it was a pretty lame story. Seeing grown-up Mayoi was fun, but nothing really came of it and the rest of the story was rather boring. I generally don't like time travel in fantasy stories and I'm not a zombie fan, so shoving a zombie apocalypse into Monogatari didn't do anything for me. Mayoi Snail was just so, so much better. Even if you don't like Mayoi, it was at least half a Hitagi story, and had some of the best Hitagi moments in the series, the parts where you actually understand what Koyomi sees in her. (I've long suspected that he agreed to go out with her more out of fear and curiosity than attraction, and only later grew to love her; another blog, perhaps.)
In particular I loved two moments, both of them moments where a less skilled writer would have botched the characterization but Nisio Isin and the anime writers just completely nailed it. One is towards the end of Mayoi Snail Part I when Hitagi, who keeps becoming less and less subtle in the hopes that Koyomi will realize she's coming on to him and ask her out, inquires out of the blue if Koyomi wants a girlfriend. Koyomi asks what will happen if he says yes, and Hitagi tells him that he'll get a girlfriend. The way Hitagi keeps on becoming less subtle through this episode was already completely on-point: unlike a lot of anime heroines, she's not the type to let one failure, or even a dozen, put her off. Even though she claims to be a delicate maiden, she's not the sort to sit around fantasizing and cursing fate for conspiring against her love. And she's also not very good at subtlety—this is the girl who put a staple in a guy's cheek—so it was inevitable that she'd come to a point of just saying "Do you want a girlfriend? Because you can have one if you want." Koyomi never asks the obvious question—who exactly is going to be the girlfriend? He seems to be avoiding it the whole arc because he's afraid Hitagi is going to say "Me", and when she finally gets back around to it at the finale, he approaches the topic gingerly. The wording of the line is also perfect, Hitagi's trademark bluntness mixed with her attempt to retain a final scrap of subtlety.
My other favorite Hitagi scene of Mayoi Snail comes at the very end, when Hitagi presses Koyomi to give an answer to her confession. Koyomi responds with "I hope it catches on. Senjougahara tore", referring to a word Hitagi made up earlier to replace "moe". When Hitagi gets over confusion, she just smiles, one of the nicest smiles we see from her in the series. It's so characteristic of their relationship; neither one of them ever wants to talk honestly about their feelings, but they find these little ways to communicate through actions and symbolic language, like when Hitagi steps in to save Koyomi at the end of Suruga Monkey saying that she swore to be the one to kill him, going back to a joke she made in Part I.
The last few where my list and the ANN list differs are Shinobu Time, Karen Bee, and Tsukihi Phoenix. With these ones, I understand more where people where coming from. I found Shinobu Time Part I and Part II static and boring, but Part III's final scene for Mayoi was a definite tearjerker. And I understand that not everyone loves Karen and Tsukihi like I do. Tsukihi in particular seems to be thought of mostly as a background character. I see a lot more in her, but there's no denying that Tsukihi Phoenix is not a particularly good story. The Tsukihi scenes aren't very good; she had much better scenes in Tsubasa Family and Karen Bee, and even her scenes in Tsubasa Tiger and Yotsugi Doll were better. It also always bugged me that the Araragi house gets smashed up by Yozuru and Yotsugi, but is magically repaired by the next arc (I believe Mayoi Jiangshi was chronologically next) and the damage is never mentioned again.
Karen Bee, though it has its moments, is also not a very good story. It tries too hard to squeeze in everyone. The scenes with Mayoi, Suruga, and Nadeko, as funny and iconic as they are, pretty much add nothing to the story. As with Tsukihi Phoenix, we learn very little about Karen's personality even though she's supposed to be the heroine. It's a Hitagi story more than anything, but as a Hitagi story, it's far too drawn out. It would have been better to leave Hitagi and Kaiki out of it at the beginning, and do an entire story about the investigation that led up to Karen confronting Kaiki. Then Hitagi comes into it, and we do a three- or four-episode arc just about Hitagi and Kaiki, where Karen fades into the background. The story we actually got was almost all Hitagi material, and it felt thin, as if the scenes with the other characters were just there to fill out seven episodes so they could draw out Nisemonogatari into an entire cour.
On the other hand, Hitagi End is exactly the skillful mixture of Hitagi, Kaiki, and one other character that Karen Bee wants to be but isn't. In this case, the other character is Nadeko instead of Karen. Some of the contortions that Nadeko Medusa goes through to make Nadeko plausible as a villain really aren't fair to her; while it's acknowledged that Nadeko was manipulated by Ougi, she also gets blamed (within the story by Shinobu, but the narrative seems to agree) because her childishness facilitated Ougi's plot. But Nadeko is only fourteen; it seems unfair to blame her for being childish. Hitagi End remediates this. Through Kaiki's observations, it builds on Nadeko Medusa's critique of the cutesy moe shy girl personality that Nadeko embodies, but in a way that feels fair to Nadeko as a character, that acknowledges her humanity. Nadeko childishly gets drunk with power (and sake) after she becomes a god, but Kaiki talks her back to her senses. Even as he lies to her and expresses contempt for her to Hitagi and Tsubasa, Kaiki seems to recognize that she's only a child acting out because her fantasy love with Koyomi was destroyed. Kaiki is very much part of the adult world of money, greed, and selling out, so it's both fitting and ironic that he uses adolescent "follow your dreams" pablum to convince Nadeko to become human again.
I ranked Suruga Monkey lower than the people did because, while Suruga has some hilarious scenes and even a few scenes that make you go "Aww..." (the scene when she admits to Koyomi that she was rejected by Hitagi comes to mind), a lot of it is rather clumsy exposition. As much as I love listening to Yui Horie's voice, I can't call an episode that ends with fifteen minutes of Tsubasa talking on the phone great storytelling. Monogatari's great weakness is that it can never seem to consistently convey drama with the same cleverness that it does comedy. It has its moments—the final scene of Hitagi Crab gets in some good ones, as does Hitagi's phone conversation with Nadeko at the end of Nadeko Medusa—but it often bogs down when it tries too hard to be dramatic and tragic, and this is the plague of Suruga Monkey and even more so Suruga Devil, as well as Ougi Formula and the Sodachi stories (which I haven't finished).
Otherwise it seems like my opinion hews pretty close to the will of the people. Therefore, we, the people, request that Nisio Isin please write more stories like Hitagi End and Tsubasa Tiger, and stop writing stories like Ougi Formula and Sodachi Riddle. If that isn't possible, I'll take the laughs and fan service of a Karen Bee over the ponderous philosophizing of a Suruga Devil, please.
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