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.