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.