Social Facades in “Yuri is My Job!”

As usual, I picked up Yuri is My Job! for the most superficial of reasons. I like yuri, I like the subgenre of yuri about yuri girls schools, and the art on the cover was really cute. Then it sucked me in with its interesting plot and characters, and I kept reading because I wanted to know what happened next. But Yuri is My Job isn’t really about yuri girls schools. It’s only tangentially about yuri. The characters aren’t even in an actual yuri girls school; they’re in a cafe themed as a yuri girls school, where they all play characters and act out scenarios as if they’re in Maria-sama ga Miteru or Strawberry Panic. That’s fitting, because the series is actually a lot more concerned with social facades, the constructed personalities that people adopt to make it easier to live in society and relate to others, than it is about yuri, and the fiction of the cafe is an integral part of exploring that theme.

The cafe at the center of Yuri is My Job! plays the part of a yuri girls school, Liebe Girls Academy, and the patrons play the part of honored guests visiting the school and being waited on by a special cafe team formed from the school’s most beloved students, who the cafe staff play. The main character is Hime Shiraki, an extremely small and cute girl who’s adopted a peppy, sweet character to match her appearance. However, she’s actually manipulating everyone to like her, and hopes to someday use her appearance and constructed personality to marry into money and live a comfortable life. Hime accidentally knocks over Mai, the manager of the cafe, and with Mai’s wrist injured, she press-gangs Hime into working there so they have extra help until her injury heals. Mitsuki, another waitress who’s tall and cool, takes an immediate dislike to Hime, and Hime responds by laying on the sweetness as thick as possible. Hime takes advantage of the appearance of friendliness that Mitsuki has to maintain out on the cafe floor and arranges for she and Mitsuki to become schwestern—“sisters”, like the soeurs in Maria-sama ga Miteru. Hime discovers that Mitsuki dislikes her because she’s actually Mitsuki Yano, a former friend of Hime’s from sixth grade. Mitsuki thought Hime had betrayed her, and she was so hurt by it that she told everyone about Hime’s facade. This damaged Hime’s relationship to her classmates so much that she was alone until graduation, and Mitsuki transferred away, so they never had a chance to clear the air. Hime’s best friend Kanoko also joins the cafe to spend time with her and ends up in conflict with Sumika, the most senior member of the floor staff. Kanoko is secretly in love with Hime, and Sumika finds real romance to be a threat to the facade of the cafe.

All the characters in Yuri is My Job! have complicated relationships with social facades, which is fitting, since Liebe Girls School is also a facade, and the way each character engages with that tells us something about her. Hime’s facade is thickest and most obvious of the main characters. She treats her entire daily life as a performance, a game with the goal of winning everyone’s love, and she slips easily into the same pattern while working at the cafe. Yet over and over we see her contempt for people who are charmed by her facade. She doesn’t seem to be that happy to be tiny and cute, and she doesn’t seem to enjoy being peppy and perky and lovable. Early on, when some girls in her class compare her to the pure, beautiful heroine of a shoujo manga, she demurs, saying she’d rather be like the tall, cool beauty, who she sees as more practical and effective. She’s very taken with the tall, cool, beautiful Mitsuki the first time they meet, and later tells Mitsuki she’s jealous of Mitsuki’s body and appearance. She seems to think being pleasant and lovable and relying on the goodwill of others is the only way to make it with the hand she was dealt, and that she’d have more options to forge her own path if she were more of a cool beauty. She wants to marry a rich man because she sees herself as otherwise outmatched in the world; people won’t take her seriously because she’s tiny and adorable, so social “soft” power is her only option. To Hime, netting a rich husband is a high-level act of social power. It’s not really what she wants, but it’s something she can get with just her cute face and her constructed lovable personality. If she can net a rich husband, she’s set; all she has to do is keep her husband on her side, and his money will make her way for her in the world.

And in pretty much every situation, that’s what Hime does: she tries to make everyone love her, and then she aims for the highest level of social power she can achieve with that love. When the cafe runs an election for Lady Blume, Hime insists on campaigning for the title even though everyone tells her it’s not quite proper for a first-year student and she probably won’t win. It’s important to her, even though Lady Blume is a completely fictional construct that only exists inside the fiction of the cafe. The election is somewhat rigged. They do collect customer votes, but each of the staff members gets 90 votes to simulate a student body voting, and those votes are combined with the customer votes to decide the winner. And even within the fiction of the academy, Lady Blume isn’t a position of any real power. Mai vaguely describes the Lady Blume as a model student who evokes an image of “they’re all so wonderful”, but the Lady Blume has no official duties or privileges even within the fiction. It’s purely about influence. The Lady Blume does get to make one decree, but it’s a decree within the fictional world of Liebe Academy, so its scope is sharply limited. Hime doesn’t even have a real decree in mind; she says she wants to decree that everyone must love her, which Kanoko reminds her is something the Lady Blume already has. Yet Hime still sees it as a desirable position of social influence, and after she accepts that she can’t win on her own, she throws her weight behind Mitsuki in the hope that some of the sheen will reflect onto her as a Blume Schwester.

Yet even though Hime, the master of facades, tries to secure positions of social power in any group she finds herself in, she also gravitates towards people like Mitsuki and Kanoko who aren’t good at social facades. The first time she meets Mitsuki in sixth grade, Mitsuki is crabbing at her and some other girls for being in the way when Mitsuki’s trying to clean. The other girls are annoyed at Mitsuki, and try to hurt her by convincing Hime to replace her on piano at the upcoming school recital, but Hime lies that she can’t play the piano to protect Mitsuki. Later, she goes out of her way to make friends with Mitsuki and tells Mitsuki about her social facade. It’s similar with Kanoko. Kanoko is quiet and unsociable, prefers to be alone, and can’t stand her sociable classmates. But she doesn’t know how to refuse when the other girls push off a project they don’t want to do onto her alone. Hime starts seeking her out, trying to help her, even telling her she should speak up if she doesn’t like the work she’s been asked to do. When Kanoko gets angry and breaks the sign she was asked to make, Hime covers for her, then opens up to her, telling Kanoko about her facade and advising Kanoko to construct a facade of her own so it’s easier to get by in class. In both cases, Hime could have been content to join in her classmates’ disdain, but she was drawn to the outcast, to the person without a facade, and she went out of the way to use the power of her own facade to help them.

Kanoko does develop a facade of her own, but it’s not quite the one Hime had in mind. Kanoko maintains a facade that she and Hime are just best friends, when she’s actually in love with Hime. She’s terrified of anything that could interrupt the status quo, such as Hime finding out Kanoko is in love with her, or Hime developing feelings for someone else, so she sees Mitsuki as a threat. Just like Kanoko, Sumika is trying to maintain a status quo facade, but in her case it’s the facade of the cafe itself. She sees real-life romance as a threat to the image of Liebe Girls Academy friendship the staff portrays for customers, because in the past, a bad romance between coworkers put her at the center of problems for the scenario. So when she discovers by accident that Kanoko is in love with Hime, it brings them into conflict. Sumika seems to understand better than anyone else that the fiction of Liebe Girls Academy can’t exist unaffected by the reality of the staff’s own lives. Kanoko insists that Hime will never discover her love, so it will never affect their performances at the cafe, but Sumika doesn’t believe that’s possible when Kanoko’s feelings are so intense. And her meddling, big sisterly nature drives her to worry about Kanoko, to keep trying to help her even when their goals are at cross-purposes. Eventually, Sumika becomes for Kanoko what Kanoko is for Hime. Kanoko is the only person in Hime’s daily life who knows that her personality is a facade. She’s the only one who sees Hime behind the scenes, who Hime can talk to naturally without putting on a performance. And Sumika, having discovered the facade that Kanoko hides her love for Hime behind, offers to play that same role for Kanoko, to be the one Kanoko can talk to about her love for Hime. These developments in real life do affect the fiction of the cafe, just as Sumika predicted. With Kanoko’s and Mitsuki’s votes, Sumika wins the election for Lady Blume. She asks Kanoko to be her schwester, and Kanoko accepts. Sumika decrees as Lady Blume that all the cafe staff keep being friends, asserting the status quo of the fictional scenario that she did all she could to maintain.

Sumika’s real personality may be caring, sisterly, and meddlesome, but Kanoko only discovers this after unwrapping several layers of Sumika’s own social facade, which she only does at Hime’s urging. Inside the cafe, Sumika plays the character of a bookish, caring, but flippant sempai. Sumika’s fictional character is always reading, shirks responsibility, and flirts shamelessly with the younger girls. Outside the cafe, Sumika presents herself as stylish, confident, and carefree. Hime and Kanoko are both shocked at the contrast between her character in the cafe and how she appears outside. Kanoko at first takes her at face value and assumes she’s shallow and that her character inside the cafe is a complete fabrication. But Kanoko discovers that Sumika’s character is drawn from elements of her real personality. She may dress stylishly, but she actually does enjoy reading. She actually does care about the other staff both personally and professionally, and she wants them to enjoy and learn from their time working at the cafe.

Mitsuki is even more hopeless with social facades than Kanoko. She’s literal-minded, terrible at reading social cues, and not good at guessing intentions. She’s also strongly emotional. When Hime starts working at the cafe, she can’t stop herself from being angry whenever they talk behind the scenes, but she is able to put on a convincing enough performance inside the cafe that even Hime is thoroughly confused as to how someone can hate her so much yet pretend to be nice to her. But even though she’s grown, she still has trouble with facades. Her serious, tempestuous character in the cafe is essentially her real personality reacting to the fictional scenarios. When she and Hime were friends, she saw Hime blow off the other girls in class to hang out with her over and over again. She saw Hime tell them lies, and then come to her and tell her that it was a lie and her friendship with those girls was all a sham. Yet when Hime quits the piano recital and lies to the other girls for Mitsuki’s sake yet again, Mitsuki is so shocked and angered by what she overhears from the door that she bursts in and tells the other girls Hime is lying. Not only is Mitsuki unable to construct a facade for herself, she’s also unable to distinguish the facade from the real thing. Even though Hime always used her facade against the other girls and never against Mitsuki, Mitsuki couldn’t understand that what she was hearing Hime tell the other girls was a white lie. She spends three years puzzling over why Hime turned on her like that. But she does make some progress. She does realize it made no sense for Hime to turn on her, and wonder if Hime had a reason for what she did. She even feels bad for the way she lashed out at Hime afterwards, and hopes to someday learn to understand social complexities so she can avoid hurting anyone like that again. So when Sumika and Mai invite her to join the play at Liebe Girls Academy, she sees it as an opportunity to learn.

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When I first started reading Yuri is My Job!, the setting of a cafe themed after a yuri girls school seemed weirdly complex and overly meta. If it were just a setting for a modern-day girls romance, like Girl Friends or Hana and Hina After School, which I thought the series was at first, then it would be. Those stories get by just fine with basic school and work settings. So why does Yuri is My Job! have such complex, meta window dressing?

Noticing the theme of social facades answered part of the question: a themed cafe is perfect for a story about social facades, because themed cafes are a very extreme form of social facade, one that the customers willingly submit themselves to, and which they still respond to emotionally even in full knowledge that it’s fake. When we see others act pleasantly, and hear them speak pleasantly, some sub-logical part of our brain translates that into a pleasant feeling, even if our logical brains are fully aware that they aren’t behaving that way naturally. So customers at themed cafes can enjoy being waited on by maids or having a tsundere go from tsun-tsun to dere-dere towards them over the course of a meal, even though everyone knows the wait staff are just putting on a show. Hime uses the same facade personality for her classmates as she does for the cafe customers, but the cafe customers are one step ahead of her classmates, because they already know it’s a facade.

A maid cafe or tsundere cafe would have also given us a fitting backdrop for a story about social facades, but a yuri girls school cafe is uniquely suited for telling this story, because facades and formalities are a constant preoccupation of anime and manga about yuri girls schools. Lillian Girls’ Academy in Maria-sama ga Miteru has a strong image of elegance, purity, and cleanliness. It expects certain standards of behavior and appearance from its students. The student council uses an elaborate system of titles—Rosa Gigantea, Rosa Chinensis en bouton, Rosa Foetida en bouton petite soeur. Several stories in the series revolve around certain characters’ suitability to hold these titles, and passing them on is regarded as a very serious affair. Yet these titles confer little more actual power than the title of Lady Blume does in Yuri is My Job!; they’re mainly about social power, their holders expected to exemplify the academy’s attributes most highly. Or in other words, Lillian expects its girls to maintain a certain type of social facade, and the Rosa title holders are those who are best at maintaining it.

The soeur system of Lillian Girls’ Academy, referenced by the schwester system of Liebe Academy in Yuri is My Job!, represents multiple layers of facade. Soeurs are formally bonded under an institutional system, but in Maria-sama ga Miteru, their actual feelings often lie somewhere between a very close friendship and a romantic yearning. The soeurs system gives them a facade to cover up feelings of romantic attraction. They can be together like girlfriends without anyone questioning it. Even the name is part of this facade—it implies that they’re close like sisters, not like romantic partners.

But in Japan, the sort of relationships between schoolgirls that we see in Maria-sama ga Miteru have also been recognized as something different than friendship or sisterhood. The modern yuri girls school anime and manga descend from a genre of literature called Class S that existed in the early 20th Century in Japan. Class S literature co-evolved with an actual thing that was happening in early 20th Century Japan. According to the essay “Women Loving Women in Modern Japan”, “Even if [two schoolgirls] engage in a homosexual relationship (or simply experience feelings of attraction for a member of the same sex) during junior high or high school, they are not considered to be lesbian or bisexual—Class S is seen as a phase, nothing more”, even in modern Japan. Japanese society doesn’t regard Class S relationships as real romances; they are at best play-acts of romance, a practice run for a relationship with a man later in life.

But Yuri is My Job!, draws a clear distinction between that sort of Class S relationship, which mostly exists inside the fiction of the cafe, and romantic attraction between girls. Romances between girls outside the fiction are treated as romances, not as a phase or a sisterly bond or a spiritual connection. Kanoko’s feelings for Hime are not the gently ambiguous feelings between Yumi and Sachiko in Maria-sama ga Miteru; they are very much the intense and slightly creepy feelings of someone with an unrequited love that they’re afraid to act on because it might ruin a friendship. When Sumika tries to talk to Kanoko, to understand how she can feel so intensely for Hime and also be so dedicated to hiding her feelings, Kanoko decides to trust Sumika because Sumika always took her feelings seriously as romance. And the relationship between two of the previous staff that led Sumika to be afraid of the effect of romance on the fiction is also unambiguously a romantic relationship. One of the pair was Sumika’s schwester, and Sumika tells Kanoko, “We got along just fine, but we weren’t in love”, clearly distinguishing a schwester relationship inside the fiction from a love outside it. Mitsuki even discovers that one of her female classmates is in love with another, and her social interactions with them both have gone awkward because she’s trying to find an opening to confess and Mitsuki is getting in the way. In Yuri is My Job!, romance between girls is not a facade that can be hidden behind an institutional bond wrapped up in a cute name like “sisters”. It’s real romance, with all the complicated, tender feelings and raw emotional power that comes with it.

That’s why Yuri is My Job! had to take place in a cafe themed after a yuri girls’ school. Social facades are integral even to the fictional genre that the cafe is based on. That makes it the perfect setting for the girls to grapple with social facades in their real lives, to learn more about the complicated ways they interact with the truth of things.

A Summer of Cute Girls: Hinako Note, Yuru Camp, and A Place Further Than the Universe

Last summer I watched like five cute girl shows in a row and also read some cute girl manga during the same period. I made some notes discussing and comparing them that I thought were worth writing up as part of my continuing obsession with story structure analysis on cute girl shows.

What makes these three shows worth discussing together, aside from the fact that I happened to watch them all within a short period of time, is that two of them are really good and one of them is pretty not good, and the two good ones illuminate the flaws of the one not good one in an interesting way.

Hinako Note: It’s Pretty Not Good

Hinako Note is a series with a lot of ups and downs. The first two episodes are extremely adorable, with cute characters and a lovely setting. It’s supposed to be in Tokyo, but the cozy little coffee shop / bookstore / girls dormitory where the characters live, and the beautiful green park with all sorts of trees and terraces and food stalls, don’t scream Tokyo to me at all. They actually look shockingly similar to the Swiss Japanese Italian village where Is the Order a Rabbit? takes place.

Hinako is a girl from the country who comes to the city to join a theater club for high school. She has acute social anxiety and whenever strangers talk to her, she freezes up and animals come and perch on her. She also has the ability to talk to animals somehow. She ends up rooming with Chiaki, a soft-voiced sempai who loves acting; Mayu, a tiny cute blond girl who wears a maid outfit and is in love with Chiaki; and Kuina, a laid back girl who likes both reading and eating books, like Bungaku Shoujo. Later, Yua, a semi-tsundere semi-rival for Hinako, comes in as a fifth member of the group.

Hinako Note is very confused about what it wants to be and flails around trying to find its feet for about six or seven episodes before it achieves any sort of consistency. It tries to do a plot in Episodes 3 – 6, but the plot is really bad and turns into a complete mess. Hinako left her home and came to start an unfamiliar life in the big city in order to join the theater club, but it turns out the theater club is on hiatus because the advisor left. So they decide to start up their own little private theater troupe, but then Chiaki’s theater club buddies make her a theater society at the end of an episode (Episode 4, I want to say?). Then in the next episode the theater club advisor is back so they can restart the regular theater club, and they do a play. It’s a complete mess. It continually sets up conflicts only to immediately shoot them down with easy solutions that require no effort on any of the main characters’ parts. You might have noticed from my plot summary that the show resolves the same conflict three times: first with the theater troupe, then with the theater society, then with Ruri, the advisor, coming back to restart the theater club. The second two times were just random happenstance that came out of the blue so something would happen.

Once the theater club resumes, the show focuses on the rivalry between Hinako and Yua a lot and how Yua comes to slowly accept Hinako by seeing how hard she works. This works a lot better. It has an actual dramatic arc where Yua starts out hating Hinako and being jealous of her, then comes to like her a little bit and feel sorry for some of her actions, but then her jealousy flares up again when Ruri casts Hinako as the lead in the play that Yua wanted to lead. But Yua finally sees Hinako working hard and decides to respect and support her. There’s also a nice little subplot about how Mayu dislikes theater because it takes Chiaki away from her, but in the end she uses her propensity for wearing a maid outfit to rescue the production by coming out of the audience to bring Yua a prop she forgot, using the maid outfit to blend in with the setting so it looks intentional.

The characters have their charms, but the character writing is also very confused and messy. Mayu and Yua both love Chiaki, which seems simply excessive, but so far they haven’t realized this about each other and it hasn’t been an issue. Kuina is supposed to be a book girl and a big eater as well as a laid back wacky character, which is just too many traits. And being a book girl is just a minor plot device to explain why she works in a bookstore and who writes the scripts for the theater troupe that they still do for some reason even though the theater society was formed an hour later and then the theater club was resumed the next day. Yua is your standard tsundere rival, but at least she’s consistent. Hinako is a pretty good, pretty consistent character, but she needed a better supporting cast to interact with, because she’s not interesting enough to sustain the show on her own. And Chiaki is pretty bland. She’s supposedly so cool that girls go gay for her—not just Mayu and Yua, but also a group of random girls we see in a flashback who switch from being gay for Mayu because she’s small and cute like a doll to being gay for Chiaki because she’s supposedly so cool.

The art and design are the bright spot of Hinako Note, but even this is marred by the fact that the show, especially in the later parts, throws in near constant and utterly gratuitous fan service, mostly of Hinako or Chiaki. The camera constantly focuses on their bouncing boobs or their butts when they’re laying down, or lovingly pans over their bodies as they’re changing clothes or in the bath, or takes cheap excuses to dress them up in bunny girl outfits like a harem show. Most of the episodes end with Hinako naked in the bath and us getting an eyeful. The next episode previews are all spoken over a piece of art of one of the characters that looks like it came from an eroge. These just get more and more gross and pervy as the series goes on (one towards the end has Hinako on her knees about to lick Kuina’s foot for some reason). What bothers me about this is less the presence of fan service and more the way it’s done. I’m old now and just a pan over a naked girl’s body isn’t going to do much for me; I want fan service to happen in ecchi situations. I want the entire show to be ecchi and sexual in nature if I’m going to enjoy that. The constant and gratuitous fan service also highlights even more how confused this show is about its identity.

A lot of the cute girl shows I haven’t enjoyed don’t pick the right subgenre of cute girls show, or they try to mix and match elements from too many subgenres in ways that conflict. Hinako Note is interesting because of just how badly the elements it chooses conflict. The characters, setting, pastel color palette, and chibi art style are overwhelmingly adorable, somewhere between Wakaba Girl and Is the Order a Rabbit?. That art style works for those two shows because they were pure cute girls doing cute things; they had no plots, they were just about fun and friends and looking at pretty things. When Hinako Note commits to that direction more in Episodes 1, 2, 7, and 8, it works well—much better than anything else the show attempts. But the middle portion, with its limp attempts at plot, reads more like cute girls drama, like a Hibike! Euphonium or a Clannad or, as we’ll discuss below, A Place Further than the Universe, except it’s exceedingly incompetent in its execution. Clannad makes an entire story arc of the theater club being shut down and Nagisa trying to get it going again and recruit members with Tomoya’s help. Hinako Note resolves that problem within the same episode and then resolves it twice more for good measure.

Some elements of Hinako Note read more as wacky surreal comedy with cute girls, like a Digi Charat or a Bakuon!!; Hinako’s ability to talk to animals and the fact that they cluster around her or that she can walk through the city with chicks on her shoulders and no one remarks on it is either a genuine supernatural ability or comedic exaggeration. But I would accept this in a cute girls doing cute things show; after all, in Is the Order A Rabbit?, it’s strongly implied that Chino’s grandfather died and his soul possessed an Angora rabbit. I have a harder time accepting Ruri, who is only nine years old, but is a professional actress as well as a drama teacher in a high school, and also has like C-cup boobs at the tender age of nine. (Her boob size is remarked on in the show.) I would have accepted her, with exactly the same character design, as a very short woman in her twenties. That’s a common trope for teachers in anime, and it wouldn’t have changed anything because no part of her personality and nothing she ever does in the plot are in any way affected by her being a child. But a nine-year-old teacher is too far from anything remotely realistic for me to accept in a cute girls drama or cute girls doing cute things. Hinako talking to animals can just be a weird, mysterious thing that exists on the fringes, but for a nine-year-old to be a teacher, society has to be fundamentally different than it is in real life. That’s fine for a wacky comedy where these things don’t need to be addressed; it works in Negima, or Pani Poni Dash. But cute girls drama or cute girls doing cute things need to be more grounded.

And then there’s the constant fan service, which doesn’t fit within any of these three subgenres. It’s the closest fit with wacky comedy, but in wacky comedy, the fan service is usually played for humor by making it part of a ridiculous situation. Hinako Note just slips it in there for no reason. The characters aren’t aware it’s happening. It comes from no one’s perspective. The camera leering at the girls ruins the cute and fluffy tone that the art and the stories in later episodes create, and sabotages the show’s attempt to be cute girls doing cute things or drama of any kind.

I won’t say I hated Hinako Note; in the end, I enjoyed some parts of it and liked some of the characters. But it’s more interesting for its flaws than for its minimal successes. Someone with some level of competence was clearly working on it, but either they let their worse natures win out or they were overridden by studio executives who were out to make a buck, or they too faithfully adapted a manga that had the same flaws. And what makes it frustrating is that when it finally starts to succeed towards the end, it does so at something that’s well understood. It is well known in the anime world how to make a good cute girls doing cute things show. You pick a fun theme, pick a beautiful setting, you get some cute girls, you choose from a couple standard art styles (something more realist like K-On, something more chibi and cute like Yuru Yuri, or something in between like Kiniro Mosaic) and put your own little spin on it, you put the girls together and let interplay happen, and after that it’s all down to your skill in executing said interplay and how well you planned out the way the girls’ personalities mesh. And that part is indeed hard, but that’s not where Hinako Note messed up. It messed up in the planning stage, the part that should be well understood and almost formulaic at this point. They picked a fun theme, theater. They picked a beautiful setting, the nice little enclave of Tokyo that looks exactly like the Swiss Italian Japanese village from Is the Order a Rabbit?. They set up some cute girls and picked out some of the standard dynamics (the strict tsundere one who yells at the slow clumsy one, the girl who’s gay for another girl, the one who eats a lot, the short girl who looks like a child and hates being called a child). They had an obvious path forward from here: get them together in a theater club or troupe and show them enjoying every day while they prepare for performances and then give performances. Instead the show decided to try and do drama for six episodes, and then gave up and went back to what seems to have been the original plan, based on the art style, all the while sabotaging itself with massive amounts of gratuitous fan service and unrealistic elements that take away the cohesion of the world.

Yuru Camp: It Made Me Want to Go Outside

Pretty shortly after watching Hinako Note, I watched Yuru Camp. This turned out be a good decision, because Yuru Camp is almost certainly the best anime I watched in 2019. I can’t remember the last cute girls doing cute things show I enjoyed so much.

It absolutely nails every part of the formula I described above: the theme (relaxing winter camping), the visuals (beautiful forest, mountain, and lake shots with an amazing color palette that’s both earthy and vibrant—if you told me the backgrounds were all Bob Ross paintings, I’d believe it), the music (a fun, relaxing, eclectic mix of country, folk, and Celtic), and the characters. Unlike a lot of cute girls shows, Yuru Camp actually take a long time to bring the main group together; we don’t see them all on a trip together until the last two episodes. Because of that, I didn’t get as attached to some of the characters as I might have, but I loved loved loved Rin Shima, the de facto main character. Not only is she adorable with her huge bun, her scarf, her shawl, and her introverted, quiet, and bookish nature, she’s also awesome. She’s genuinely competent and rugged, braving the tough road and the bitter winter cold in return for the solitude of an empty campground and a beautiful private view of the mountains and the lake. In the first episode a campground worker sees her going out to the empty campground in the winter cold and comments on how tough she must be. She pitches her tent and sets up her campsite with a practiced efficiency, and she has no trouble gathering supplies, planning out her trips, hauling all her things on a bicycle, or building a campfire from wood she gathers off the ground. But she’s also not perfect; she still has trouble pitching her tent when it’s windy out, she needs help to figure out how to make the coals hot in her portable grill, and she falls asleep in a roadside rest area and ends up having to make camp in the dark. When her first trip by scooter takes some unexpected turns, Rin gets worried and frustrated, but she also keeps her cool and thinks through what to do next, and she gladly accepts help from her friends to get her through.

Rin pairs really well with Nadeshiko Kagamihara, the co-lead, too. Nadeshiko is energetic, friendly, and sort of an airhead. She and Rin meet because Nadeshiko heard she could see Mt. Fuji, so she biked up to the same campground where Rin is camping, but she forgot to bring her phone or any money and she doesn’t know her home number because she just moved, so she gets stranded dying of hunger and has to borrow Rin’s food and phone to call her sister. Nadeshiko later joins the Outdoor Exploration Club and makes friends with its two members, Chiaki Oogaki and Aoi Inuyama. With them she starts to learn more about camping and acquire equipment. She also goes on more trips with Rin, who seems fond of Nadeshiko even though she sometimes acts standoffish towards her. There’s enough contrast between them to be interesting, but enough similarity that their friendship feels realistic. Rin has a type anyway—her other friend, Ena Saito, is also sort of a lackadaisical airhead. The one Rin claims to have trouble dealing with is Chiaki, whose personality is more hyper and purposefully silly. Since the series takes so long to get all five girls together, there’s less focus on group interaction, but we still get to see them interact in pairs or triads throughout the series before the big finish, which means the series doesn’t have to purposely set aside time for certain members of the group to peel off and interact like in shows that build the group right away. Plus, with Rin as the main character, it feels true to her personality that she’d be slow to join a larger group and only want to do it after feeling comfortable with all the members.

Every episode of Yuru Camp felt like it was only ten minutes long because I enjoyed it so much it just flew by. I delayed watching the final episode for a week because I didn’t want it to be over. I ordered the soundtrack from CDJapan because it makes such great music to work or read to. Rin’s peaceful weekends reading by a beautiful lakeside even made me consider camping myself, something I’d never before felt the urge to do. In the middle of writing this blog post I felt a sudden urge to rewatch it, which I’m now doing, and it’s just as I remembered. The first episode just shows Rin go to the campgrounds, set up her campsite, read, make a fire, meet Nadeshiko, eat cup ramen, and see Nadeshiko home, but it felt like it was over in ten minutes and I enjoyed every second of great music, beautiful scenery, and the vicarious cozy feeling of sitting by a warm campfire eating hot soup while piled in shawls and cloaks and scarves.

A Place Further Than the Universe

I watched A Place Further Than the Universe slightly before either of the other two, and it, along with Quintessential Quintuplets, got me fired up to watch cute girl anime again. It’s a comedy/drama about four girls who go on an expedition to Antarctica. Shirase Kobuchizawa lost her scientist mother to an Antarctic expedition and is determined to get down there herself. What she hopes to get out of the trip isn’t entirely clear at first—does she hope her mother is still alive? Does she want to continue her mother’s work?—but her determination inspires Mari Tamaki, aka Kimari, and Hinata Miyake. Kimari is ditzy and lacking in ambition, but she meets Shirase and gets fired up to do something amazing. Hinata has stopped going to school and is working her tail off in a convenience store when she meets Shirase and Kimari and also gets sucked in to their passion. They get their chance by teaming up with Yuzuki, an idol who’s been asked to host a documentary following an Antarctic expedition led by Gin Toudou, an old friend of Shirase’s mother.

A Place Further Than the Universe has a similar vibe to Hibike! Euphonium. The look is more realistic than Hinako Note or even Yuru Camp, the color palette more muted. The characters come off simple at first, but we’re kept somewhat at arms’ length from them and we discover they’re more complex than they seem as the series develops. Hinata, for instance, seems friendly and boisterous at first, and Shirase seems cold and impassive. But we soon discover Shirase is burning with passion, and Hinata is actually deeply standoffish. And also like Hibike! Euphonium, the drama comes from the characters’ actions, which come from their personalities, and not because of happenstance dictated by the script. Every character gets a satisfying arc to unravel what she was trying to get out of going on the expedition. Shirase’s was suitably the most full and satisfying, but I really enjoyed Hinata’s arc, and her unique personality made her my favorite character. Kimari’s and Yuzuki’s were less good, but they also received less focus because their problems were smaller, so it still came together well.

Between the drama, we get to see what daily life is like during several stages of an Antarctic expedition. We see the girls learn how to pitch their tents in sub-zero temperatures, and how to avoid getting lost in a blinding snowstorm, during training. We see them dealing with nausea on the ship ride down. Then we see what meals and work shifts and sleeping arrangements and Christmas are like at the Antarctic base. It sometimes felt like the best written and most moe school video ever. Yuru Camp made me want to go camping, but A Place Further Then the Universe didn’t make me want to go to Antarctica—still, it was a great series that I enjoyed a lot, with light humor to keep the drama from getting overbearing and great arcs for all the main characters.

What made the other two better than Hinako Note?

Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe are far and away, unquestionably, undeniably, indubitably better than Hinako Note, and it’s interesting to think about why. After all, from the outside, it might look like they’re all the same—three shows about cute girls doing boring daily stuff.

But there’s one big reason why Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe are better than Hinako Note: both of them are original ideas with carefully thought out casts and clear identities, while Hinako Note is the cute girls doing cute things equivalent of a taco you make by throwing whatever’s left in your refrigerator in a tortilla and microwaving it. Some things it directly stole from other, better anime: Hinako wants to be in the theater club only to find it’s shut down, just like Nagisa in Clannad; Mayu works in a coffee shop, just like the girls in Is the Order a Rabbit?; Kuina eats books, just like Touko from Bungaku Shoujo. Its characters are common tropes: the tiny cute girl who gets mistaken for a child; the tsundere rival who comes to like the main character; the big eater; the gentle, mature sempai; the child teacher. The way they relate to each other is mostly tropes: both Mayu and Yua have yuri crushes on Chiaki, but the show never goes anywhere with this, so it just looks like they were so out of ideas that they just went, “Make two of them in love with Chiaki!”

This refrigerator taco nature of Hinako Note is the main reason why it fails. For a cute girls show, identity is vital. Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe both have very strong identities. When I read their names, I immediately get a picture of the visuals in my head, the earthy browns and greens and beautiful night sky for Yuru Camp and the muted color palette and bright white snow and orange snowsuits for A Place Further Than the Universe. I immediately identify them with their characters—especially Rin for Yuru Camp, and Hinata or Shirase for A Place Further Than the Universe. I recall specific scenes and events. The whole show—visuals, characters, story, music—comes together in a coherent package. Even less original, more bland cute girls shows can still cohere into an identity, albeit not one that leaves as strong an imprint on the mind as these two extremely good ones create.

But Hinako Note has no identity. It has no idea what it wants to be. The visuals say it wants to be cute, simple, and colorful like Wakaba Girl. It manages to somewhat succeed at that, but it sabotages itself with elements that work against that identity. The attempts at story say it wants to be more of a drama, like Hibike! Euphonium or A Place Further Than the Universe. There’s a big difference between the type and scale of problems the characters face in a drama compared to a more simple, iyashikei cute girls doing cute things show like Wakaba Girl or Is the Order a Rabbit?. In these shows, the characters’ problems are small-scale and resolved easily because the show’s goal is a fun, light feeling of daily life. In Hibike! Euphonium or A Place Further Than the Universe, the problems are much bigger and much harder to solve. They come from the characters’ personalities and personal journeys, and showing how the characters resolve them and how it changes them is the show’s goal.

Hinako Note sets up problems that could be on that scale. Getting a theater club running and a theatrical production put on is the subject of an entire story arc in Clannad. And nearly the entire story of Hibike! Euphonium revolves around rivalries, grudges, crushes, and friendships in a club. The story towards the end of Season 1 where Reina is given the solo but Yuuko insists that Kaori should have it is conceptually pretty similar to Yua’s jealousy when Hinako is given the lead role in the play. But Hinako Note simply resolves these problems with a wave of the hand, by pure coincidence, so it utterly fails as a drama. On the other hand, these kinds of problems don’t set up a fun, light, everyday tone, so they don’t fit an identity as an iyashikei show either. Later on, when the show does find some measure of success, it does it by scaling down the problems to Mayu getting lost at the beach and feeling embarrassed because everyone treats her like a child and she just proved them right.

And the unrelenting, utterly pointless fan service works against both identities as well. Neither Yuru Camp nor A Place Further Than the Universe would do something like a scene late in Hinako Note where Hinako and Chiaki are sitting at the table talking, and while Hinako thinks about what she wants to say, the camera pans over Chiaki’s boobs and ass for no reason and then goes under the table and shoots up her skirt apropos of nothing. That’s because they understand the stories they’re telling, and the place that eroticism and fan service have in those stories (pretty much none). A Place Further Than the Universe is a touching story about four girls who become friends and find themselves while doing something extraordinary for personal reasons. If it was the same characters, same story, same visual style, same dialogue, same voice actors, but the camera was constantly focusing on the girls’ boobs and asses and we got shot after shot showing how their boobs bulge out under their orange snowsuits, it would be as if everything happening in the show was occurring under the gaze of some unseen horny man leering at the girls from the sidelines. That detracts from everything happening on screen. Just imagine the camera pulled back a little and you could actually see the disgusting horny man leering at the girls from the sidelines. Imagine you could hear his inner monologue thinking, “Look at those great tits! That amazing ass! I want to rub my face on them and touch myself!” while the girls were having personal revelations and learning to survive in Antarctica. It would completely undercut the girls as characters and devalue their personal journeys, which are the things that make this show great. Same for Yuru Camp—the feeling of relaxing immersion is ruined if some horny man is constantly leering at the girls from the sidelines. Both of these shows understood that that sort of eroticism would completely destroy the tone they were trying to create and the feelings they were trying to invoke, that there was nothing inherently sexual or erotic about their characters and that it would be ruinous to try and impose that eroticism on them, and consequently both ended up on this list of most feminist-friendly anime of 2018 that I randomly turned up when I was looking up one of the minor character’s names.

I’m hammering on this point about the fan service so much because it’s the most common mistake for cute girls shows to make. Even K-On got this somewhat wrong, with Mio tripping and showing her panties on stage and Sawako forcibly dressing Mio up in fetish costumes. But K-On minimizes the damage to its tone; we viewers don’t see Mio’s panties, and the fetish costumes aren’t revealing and aren’t framed in an overtly sexual way. And unlike Hinako Note, K-On did this only when it was an actual part of the story. Mio trips. Sawako forces her into costumes. It’s not being imposed on scenes where it doesn’t fit in at all. Eroticism and fan service work when they’re a purposeful part of the show’s story and tone, as in harem and ecchi shows like To-Love-Ru and High School DxD. You may or may not like these shows, but they were made to be sexy and the fan service is part of that purpose. Throwing fan service into a show where it doesn’t fit is like throwing birthday cake into your refrigerator taco. It may taste good in the right setting, but it can’t be just thrown into whatever food you want as some magic spice to improve it. If you put birthday cake in the wrong food, you’ll ruin both the birthday cake and whatever that food was.

Sharing My Thoughts on “Mononoke Sharing”

I was completely blindsided by Mononoke Sharing. I bought it blind from the three-page preview on Comixology, and I thought after the first volume it was just an exploitative ecchi manga. But I don't mind a good exploitative ecchi manga once in a while, and the characters were pretty likable, so I bought the second volume after a while, and then, inexplicably charmed, the third and fourth.

Mononoke Sharing follows Yata Kagami, an extremely poor high school girl who lives on her own. Searching for cheap rent, she finds a house full of classical Japanese folk creatures trying to blend in with humans as part of an experiment to see if they can live in human society. They want to take the experiment to the next level by having a human in the house with them. At first, Yata wants none of it, but she realizes that everyone in the house seems nice and that living among a bunch of supernatural creatures gives her a chance to feel less singled out and alone.

The series is by Coolkyoushinjya, the same manga-ka behind Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon, and there are a lot of similarities. Both are harem series that have a normal girl with mean eyes at the center of the harem instead of a generic loser guy. Both harems are made up of supernatural beings who either dislike humans or have a certain disregard for human life. Both have acceptance and tolerance of those different from you as major themes. And it's obvious that Coolkyoushinja likes big boobs, because both Mononoke Sharing and Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon are full of them. Mononoke Sharing takes a sharp turn into the serious in its second half; having only seen the Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon anime, I can't say if that series does the same.

The manga's first half follows the characters' daily lives in the house as Yata gets closer to them and deals with weird roommate troubles. The first chapter introduces all the characters by showing Yata get annoyed at them for their various bad behaviors with the trash. Kappa Mizuchi sheds bowls out of her head that jam up the trash compactor, while devil Momi's horns shred the bags and make them leak. Fox spirit Youko has a voracious appetite for sex and throws out huge numbers of used condoms, and rokurokubi Kuro has a bad habit of taking out the trash without going outside by holding the bag in her mouth and stretching her extremely long neck from the window over to the trash cans. Only snow woman Yuki has no problematic trash behaviors, though she has to bundle up in a winter coat and scarf to avoid freezing the trash bags with the cold air that constantly surrounds her. Subsequent chapters show how Yata first moved into the house, how she became closer to each of her housemates, and what happens when she goes with them to the pool or to a summer festival.

In the second half of the series, a high-ranking mononoke official named Chiehime, a hannya, appears and tries to disband the shared house. Chiehime insists that mononoke and humans shouldn't try to live together and is disturbed that mononoke are slowly becoming more human. She challenges the house to a contest to determine if they'll be allowed to continue living together, and uses all sorts of underhanded tricks, recruiting friends and family of the housemates to fight against them. Even though Chiehime and Yata oppose each other bitterly, they also recognize there's something similar about the two of them. In the end it's revealed that Chiehime is a mononoke with no mononoke powers; time and interbreeding with humans is making them slowly lose their unique abilities. When she's attacked by a group of mononoke who were using their shared house as a front for bad behavior when she disbanded it, Yata saves her, earning her gratitude. At Momi's behest, Chiehime starts living in the house and quickly comes to see the appeal.

The series ends rather abruptly; Yata finds out that Momi is one of the gods who created the world, and that in her loneliness while she waited millions of years for humans to appear, she created mononoke, much like Aule creating the dwarves in The Silmarillion. Yata grows up to be a liaison between humans and mononoke, and takes part in creating a mononoke district where the mononoke can be out with who they are while they slowly lose their powers and are absorbed into the larger population. The series ends with a new girl moving into the shared house and Yata showing up to greet her.

Surprisingly Good…

Mononoke Sharing is, to my surprise, a really good series. The dialogue is surprisingly clever and fun. The characters are unique and charming. The sweet and shy Yuki is the kind of character I'd usually pick as my favorite, and she definitely ranks high, but I never expected to like Youko as much as I did. Her unbridled sexuality comes off like a cheap excuse for sex scenes at first, and the series definitely takes advantage, but she's enjoying herself so much, doing exactly what she wants, just because she wants it, that she was a lot of fun to watch, and I had to admire it. And Kuro was the character who made me laugh the most, as she aspired to become a manzai comedienne with an array of terrible neck-based jokes. Kuro in particular is a weird, unique character that no other harem series could have come up with. While it would have been easy to just put the characters in the usual array of cliched harem situations, the stories take full advantage of the premise and focus on the daily challenges and oddities of mononoke living in a human world. When Yuki steps on the carpet, she freezes it, and later it melts and leaves behind little spots of water. Mizuchi usually absorbs the water, so no one notices this until she's gone on vacation for a few days and there are damp spots all over the carpet. Mizuchi's colleagues have noticed she has an odd habit of pouring water on her head to refill the dish hidden under her wig. At one point Yata walks into Kuro's room and finds her with her entire neck unraveled, which she has to do sometimes to exercise it. It's so long it fills up the entire room, and it's so strong that she can make a chair or bed for Yata, and massage Yata by vibrating it.

To my even greater surprise, Mononoke Sharing transitions to a darker tone really well. It keeps its humor, but it does so without cheapening the more dramatic parts. In Volume 3, Mizuchi's stage of the contest becomes a life-or-death swimming race with her younger sister, whom her kappa relatives have elevated above her because she has pure kappa heritage while Mizuchi is part human. When it looks like Mizuchi will win, the kappa cheat by pushing a boulder on her, but her younger sister, who was deeply shocked when she discovered that she was chosen only for her heritage, pushes her out of the way and is injured. The series follows this serious plot with a silly plot where Youko and her old friend Souko compete to see who can seduce and bed the most men, but it handles the transition and the other characters' reactions so well that what could have been horrible tone whiplash instead feels natural. Yata and Chiehime discuss serious issues of ethics, philosophy, and morality around mononoke-human relations for an entire volume, then begin the next volume with Yata accidentally molesting Chiehime in her sleep, and somehow allow both characters to retain their gravitas when they need it. A lesser series would have debased and degraded Chiehime when it did this, or when it showed her forced to pose for pictures in a micro-bikini, but Mononoke Sharing allows Chiehime to keep her grace and confidence even though she's not accustomed to erotic things.

…but a rushed ending that leaves a bad taste

While Mononoke Sharing does a lot of things really well, it's not very good at following up on all the threads it introduces. The ending leaves so many interesting and funny stories on the table, and there are so many things about the characters we never learn. We know a lot about Yata as a person by the end, but we never find out much about her past or how she got to be the way she is. There's a tiny mention that she was abandoned in an orphanage, which helps explain the loneliness that Mizuchi points out early in Volume 1, but we never find out more. We don't find out a lot about Chiehime's past or her family or how she attained her position of power in the mononoke community. We meet Yuki's and Mizuchi's estranged sisters in Volume 3, but we don't get to see them interact or slowly rebuild their relationships. We never meet anyone from Youko's or Kuro's families or find out much about their pasts. The last to take place before we skip ahead a few years to the finale concerns Yata getting permission to reveal her housemates' mononoke nature We don't get much development or any closure with Yuki's and Youko's crushes on Yata. I especially wanted to see Youko's crush develop more, because it's unexpected for her to fall in love; she has sex with both men and women constantly and never seems to fall in love, so she must see something special in Yata, but we never get to explore that feeling. The ending just implies she's been carrying a torch for Yata for years.

Speaking of the ending, it comes so abruptly that I assume the series was cancelled or Coolkyoushinja just lost interest all of a sudden, and in trying to wrap up the plot with such haste, it makes a weird point about minority populations that I don't agree with and which bears some examination. In Yata and Momi's conversation where Momi reveals that she created mononoke, Momi also mentions that mononoke are supposed to lose their powers over time and be absorbed into the human population, which she did so that the history set out by the other gods, where there were no mononoke, wouldn't go too far off course. The ending shows that Yata, working with the mononoke government, came up with a plan to reveal the existence of mononoke and establish a special cordoned district of the city where they can live freely and openly. The expectation is that the mononoke will learn to integrate with human society in the special district, slowly lose their powers, and eventually disappear from existence and be subsumed by the human population.

It's not hard to see mononoke as a metaphor for minority or immigrant populations within a larger society, and the series helpfully establishes this reading for us during Chiehime's first appearance. She asks Yata how Yata sees mononoke, and Yata replies that she sees them as like humans but different, sort of like a separate race. After this, the parallels between mononoke and minority communities abound. Throughout Volume 3, Chiehime's argument against allowing humans and mononoke to integrate is based around two points. First of all, that mononoke are dangerous, unpredictable, immoral, and deceitful by nature, and humans cannot tolerate this, so conflict is inevitable. Second, that mononoke will lose what makes them special and unique by integrating too closely with humans. She uses the first point mainly to berate Yata and the others, trying to persuade them that humans and mononoke can never live together, as many a separatist firebrand has done in real life. When the kappa try to kill Mizuchi to prevent her inferior lineage from triumphing over the eugenically superior Mamizu, Chiehime says with cruel glee that this too is part of mononoke nature.

But the second point pains Chimehime. She's proud of her mononoke heritage, but she considers the powers a fundamental part of being a mononoke. She plays up her heritage by wearing a hannya mask and very flamboyant kimono, agitating for mononoke pride, and fighting for segregation and against integration with humans. In doing so, she's attained a high rank and a lot of respect and influence in the community that she loves. But without any powers, she can't see herself as a real mononoke, and she fears other mononoke will feel the same, so she lives in terror of being outed. Her inability to fully consider herself a part of the mononoke community has driven her to fight twice as hard to preserve it while living in constant fear of losing her right to be a part of it. If mononoke symbolize a minority population within a larger society, then their powers, customs, and oddities symbolize their unique culture and history. Chiehime is like a child born to an immigrant population within the United States who never learns her parents' language, grows up celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving instead of her parents' holidays, and prays to the Holy Trinity instead of to her parents' gods, who realizes on becoming an adult that she's proud of her parents' culture and becomes an activist, fighting to preserve it despite knowing little of it herself. While she can do her best to learn their language, their customs, their religion, she'll always trip a little over the unfamiliar sounds of their language, and the words of the prayers will never quite come to her naturally. And she might live in fear of other members of the community discovering just how Americanized she actually is as she goes around berating the young people for eating burgers and pizza instead of their heritage foods.

But at the conclusion of the story, we find out that Momi made mononoke to lose their powers after a few generations and be absorbed into the human population. And the special district that Yata helps establish at the end is known, at least by some, as the last gasp of mononoke identity. In the final chapter, the building manager for the shared house tells the new girl moving in that "Mononoke are slowly trying to become human" and "In time, mononoke won't be so rare anymore…and they'll eventually just be called 'people'". The new girl responds, "That means it's the last chance in history to meet someone this mysterious, right?!" So people know that mononoke are going to soon become indistinguishable from regular humans. This is viewed as a great victory by everyone, including Chiehime, who once fought so hard to maintain what made mononoke unique.

If mononoke symbolize a minority population and their powers and quirks symbolize their culture, language, and customs, then mononoke losing their powers and becoming more like humans symbolizes cultural assimilation. This assimilation is presented as a good thing by the story and is seen as such by both Yata and Chiehime. So the message of the ending is that minority populations should assimilate and disappear into the dominant culture, possibly after a period of living in a special ward where they can mix with the dominant culture and learn how to assimilate better. That's a weird and kind of disturbing message. The way Coolkyoushinjya presents themes of tolerance and understanding both in Mononoke Sharing and in Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon makes me think that is not at all what he was trying to get across. Nonetheless, that's what this rushed ending says.

There's an entirely different, also interesting thematic thread that the manga doesn't explore enough to say much about. In real life, cultural assimilation happens because of social pressures: the minority population learns the majority population's language because they need to communicate with monolingual members of the majority, and they have to send their children to public schools where the majority population's language and culture dominate. But real-life minority populations can resist assimilation to an extent. In the United States, there are Chinese schools and Hebrew schools where Chinese and Jewish children born in America can go to learn their ancestral languages. There are Mexican markets and Russian delis where they buy familiar foods and speak their languages. In many regions the local governments will publish forms in multiple languages. Mononoke, on the other hand, can't resist assimilation in the same way, because their loss of their powers was imposed on them by their creator, Momi. It's an inevitability of who they are. They were literally made by God to assimilate. This, and the entire idea that destiny in this world is an inexorable force set from the beginning of creation, mentioned during Momi's tell-all conversation with Yata, introduce questions about free will and meaning that are too quickly dropped and too scantily sketched out to impact the story much.

About Starlight

Starlight Glimmer catches a lot of flak. I agree she’s a hard character to like in some ways, but I don’t hate her, I am glad they added her to the show, and today I’d like to explain why.

Reasons to hate Starlight (that I disagree with)

When I go online and read discussions about hating Starlight, I usually see one or a few of the reasons that I’m going to list here given. I don’t find any of them compelling enough to hate Starlight myself, and I’ll set out why as we go through them.

Reason 1: Starlight was a horrific fascist dictator and shouldn’t have been forgiven

The framing and point of view of “The Cutie Map” make what Starlight does in her village seem horrific. If we take a more objective look at what she actually did, all of it was nasty, but all of it was also forgivable:

• She created a sort of anti-cutie mark cult in a village and installed herself as the cult leader.
• She used magic to take away the members’ cutie marks.
• She inducted the members into a philosophy of extreme equality where everypony is completely the same in every way possible.
• Other ponies came, apparently willingly, and joined the cult, allowing their cutie marks to be taken away.
• Later, some of these ponies started to express discontent. Starlight ruthlessly quenched this by putting them through a reeducation program.
• She forcefully stole the cutie marks of the Mane 6 and subjected them to the same reeducation program to try and get a princess in her cult so it would gain legitimacy.
• She lied to her followers and hid that she still had her cutie mark.

All of this was nasty, unpleasant, and points to a dark impulse inside Starlight. At the same time, people in real life have done much worse things and have been forgiven by those they wronged. Starlight didn’t kill anyone, didn’t grievously injure anyone, didn’t incite violence, didn’t torture anyone, didn’t rape or sexually assault anyone, didn’t foster hatred. She didn’t feed her followers poisoned Kool-Aid like Jim Jones, or order them to murder a pregnant woman like Charles Manson, or marry the fillies off to old stallions like Warren Jeffs. She didn’t electrocute dissenters, like IT does in A Wrinkle in Time. Frankly, I’ve heard of tech startups that are eviller cults than Starlight’s.

Of the members we see in the show, the one most wronged by Starlight seems to be Party Favor, who was forcibly reeducated alongside the Mane 6 for a night and had a minor breakdown. But he didn’t seem to suffer any lasting damage. He had the willpower to wipe off Starlight’s fake equals sign cutie mark and out her to the crowd. And he forgives her as readily as anyone. You could argue that maybe he shouldn’t have, but he did, and there’s nothing unbelievable about it. If rape victims can forgive their rapists and children whose parents were killed in genocides can forgive the leaders who instigated the genocide, then Party Favor can forgive Starlight for making him sit through a really boring book on tape.

Reason 2: Starlight is too powerful and good at magic (sub-reason 1 of “Starlight is a Mary Sue”)

Starlight gets called a “Mary Sue” a lot in online discussions. Reading between the lines, this seems to cover three distinct complaints, one of them being that Starlight is presented immediately as a powerful and talented magic-user.

I agree that Starlight’s incredible talent for magic isn’t the best set up or motivated. It works great when she’s a villain, in “The Cutie Map” and “The Cutie Re-Mark”, because she needs to provide a challenge for Twilight, and she does that well. Of all the villains in the series, none of them matches against Twilight as directly as Starlight does. Then she becomes a hero, and she seems overpowered.

On the other hand, if that makes her a Mary Sue, then Twilight’s a Mary Sue too. Twilight was apparently born with incredible magical talent, and was afforded the luxury of sitting around studying all the time to hone it. If anything, Starlight’s less blessed than Twilight: she didn’t get to be Princess Celestia’s prized pupil or have her own observatory or massive library to spend all her time in. She didn’t get to have indulgent friends who would keep hanging out with her even after getting flaked on time and again like Twilight did. Remember, part of the classic definition of a Mary Sue is that the usual rules of the universe seem to bend themselves to create exceptions, loopholes, and special cases that benefit the Mary Sue—the original Mary Sue was a 15-year-old Starfleet Academy graduate who served on the Enterprise in someone’s fan fiction—and that applies much more to Twilight than to Starlight. Twilight’s such a Mary Sue that she was chosen by the all-powerful Elements of Harmony to be their locus; the other Mane 6 just happened to be there, so the Elements were like “Eh, I’ll make do with what I got.”

So why don’t people complain that Twilight’s a Mary Sue? I think there’s a deeper reason why people complain that Starlight’s a Mary Sue, but not Twilight (or Rainbow Dash, who seems to become an incredible flyer who can join the most elite flying corps in the land by napping a lot). Starlight just isn’t likeable. People don’t enjoy watching Starlight because they don’t like her on a personal level, and they don’t feel like she deserves to be good at magic, or to have any of the other good things that happen to her.

The comparison with Twilight is obvious, but the comparison with Rainbow Dash interests me more, because I find Rainbow Dash unlikeable too, yet she’s well loved by fans, where Starlight is extremely divisive. Part of it is the incumbent advantage that Rainbow enjoyed as an early addition to the cast, but I think it’s partially that Rainbow’s particular pattern of antisocial behavior—constant boasting and arrogance—is accepted and somewhat respected in US culture, while Starlight’s pattern—lack of social awareness and anxiety that leads her to extreme measures to try and take control of her situation—isn’t. Of course, Rainbow has had several episodes where she gets knocked down and has to learn to be more humble, which makes me like her a lot more. Starlight has had fewer, and they were usually played more subtly. But some fans whinge and complain whenever Rainbow gets knocked down, so that can’t be how everyone sees the situation. That leads me back to “People like Rainbow, but just don’t like Starlight” as the reason. We’ll talk about this more later.

Reason 4: Starlight does terrible things and then gets out of it without being punished (sub-reason 2 of “Starlight is a Mary Sue”)

This one’s kind of true. There is one case where I think that Starlight does something really terrible and then seems to get off relatively easy. It’s “Every Little Thing She Does”, where she mind-controls the Mane 6 minus Twilight. I’ll discuss later why I still don’t find this enough of a reason to hate her.

Reason 5: Starlight gets too much screen time (sub-reason 3 of “Starlight is a Mary Sue”)

This one is actually directly quantifiable by counting the number of seconds Starlight is on screen in the three seasons in which she appears so far. But I’m lazy, so I won’t do that. I don’t think it would be that illuminating, anyway; at that level we can’t even comprehend the scale we’re talking about.

Instead, I’m going to count episodes which focus on her as part of an A plot or B plot, or in which she plays a major supporting role in an A or B plot. This is a pretty liberal definition, and will include a lot of episodes that you wouldn’t think of as “Starlight-focused episodes”.

In Season 5 we have four episodes:

1. “The Cutie Map”, Parts 1 and 2
2. “The Cutie Re-Mark”, Parts 1 and 2

In Season 6 we have eight episodes:

1. “The Crystalling”, Parts 1 and 2
2. “No Second Prances”
3. “A Hearth’s Warming Tale”
4. “Every Little Thing She Does”
5. “To Where and Back Again”, Parts 1 and 2

In Season 7, we have nine:

1. “Celestial Advice”
2. “All Bottled Up”
3. “Rock Solid Friendship”
4. “A Royal Problem”
5. “Triple Threat”
6. “To Change a Changeling”
7. “Uncommon Bond”
8. “Shadow Play”, Parts 1 and 2

We can also throw in the “Mirror Magic” Equestria Girls special.

So out of the entire series, we have 21 episodes, plus one summer special, that either focus heavily on Starlight or feature her in a major supporting role. That’s five episodes shy of an entire season all about Starlight, so I can see why that would feel like a lot when they’re all clustered into three seasons, especially if every moment she’s on screen is excruciating to you.

Whether this is too much Starlight or not is a matter of perception. Still, look at some of those episodes. They’re some of the best material in their seasons—“The Cutie Re-Mark”, “No Second Prances”, “A Hearth’s Warming Tale”, “Rock Solid Friendship”, “Triple Threat”, those are all amazing episodes. I’d go to bat for “Celestial Advice” and “A Royal Problem” too. Of course, those are all ones where Starlight is a villain or a supporting player. The ones where she’s the main focus, like “Every Little Thing She Does” and “All Bottled Up” are a bit more equivocal. My favorite element of “To Where And Back Again” is the banter between Trixie and Discord, not Starlight.

The other thing to keep in mind is that everyone else has five seasons of screen time under them when Starlight first joins the main cast. To catch her up, they had to give her a lot of screen time. And I appreciate that so many of the episodes she appears in use her in a substantial role. When I look back on the series, most of the episodes I didn’t like as much were ensemble-heavy, because they dilute everything too much. You can see this with the Cutie Mark Crusaders: they spent two seasons doing everything together, and the episodes that focused on them as a group were middling at best. Everything got better for them once we got episodes that focused on one of them at a time.

Starlight’s personality

I hate psych evals on fictional characters. I never feel like they add anything useful to the conversation. They usually oversimplify by trying to fit a character’s behavior to a list of DSM-V symptoms. They often have this self-satisfied air of “Ah ha, I, a brilliant literary scholar slash psychiatric diagnostician, have just given the definitive scientific explanation of this character!” They’ll reach for hand-wavey interpretations that aren’t supported by textual evidence. And in the end, I don’t think they’re helpful. Okay, Romeo had borderline personality disorder. What does this tell us about storytelling or human nature? That some people have borderline personality disorder, and that you can write stories about them? Psych evals are not a literary analysis technique that I find interesting; they’re a medical technique for helping real people who suffer from mental illness by identifying which treatments might be effective for them. As such I find psych evals on fictional characters about as interesting as an armchair diagnosis of the skin condition pointed to by Mikuru Asahina’s star-shaped mole.

Still, with modern fiction, there are times when a character’s personality is so extreme that it does feel like the writers were intentionally trying to make you think of a certain condition. In Starlight’s case, she fits the pop culture profile of autism to a T. She fails to read social cues, often speaks or acts without regard to others’ feelings, has a need to feel in control at all times, is prone to panic when overstimulated, and has a single interest, magic, in which she excels to the exclusion of everything else. These traits all feed into each other. Some of her behavior reminds me a bit of Friendship is Witchcraft Twilight, who “threw herself into her studies to have the world in [her] control”. She never vaporized the competition, but she has the same lack of awareness that led FiW Twilight to claim that “it’s not evil”, and I could see her, during her dark period, imprisoning Cadance Not-Evil Goodpony in the caves under Canterlot. Starlight, though, doesn’t have the sociopathic grandiosity of FiW Twilight. Plus, I bet she’s still allowed in bounce houses. (There was a bounce house in My Little Pony: The Movie, but we didn’t get to see if Starlight was allowed inside.)

Starlight’s time as a villain

When Sunburst got his cutie mark and left her, Starlight felt powerless: her friend just all of a sudden sprouted this thing on his flank and then was whisked off and left her, and there was nothing she could do about it. She could have blamed his parents or Sunburst himself for this, but instead she blamed cutie marks. She started her cult because she wanted to create a controlled, orderly, sterile environment where she would never be powerless. Since she had this childhood belief that cutie marks made her environment unstable and took her power away, she had to get rid of them to make her perfect order a reality. Letting her cult members get back their cutie marks or leave would render her powerless, so she couldn’t allow that and turned to force to stop it from happening. She initially wanted to get Twilight to join the cult so it would expand; the larger her cult was, the less of the world was out of her control, and the less chance she would get the same powerless feeling she’d had when Sunburst left.

At the end of “The Cutie Re-Mark”, Twilight convinces Starlight that she went too far indulging that avoidance of feeling helpless, and Starlight agrees to make herself vulnerable again by having real relationships, ones where she can’t always control what the other pony thinks or does. The first relationship is her friendship / apprenticeship under Twilight: Starlight lets someone else be in control by handing Twilight the reins for her destiny. This is a good first step to overcoming her issues, but it doesn’t solve them all.

“Every Little Thing She Does”

We see throughout Season 6 that Starlight has problems understanding the feelings of other ponies, and admitting that things can’t always go her way, and giving up the power in some situations. Magic is her chief way of exerting control over situations, so when she feels overwhelmed or panicked, she always ends up using magic in some thoughtless way to try to regain command—not because she desires dominance, but because she feels like the situation is slipping into chaos, which makes her panic and try to get things orderly again.

“Every Little Thing She Does”, where Starlight casts a mind control spell on the Mane 6, is a perfect storm of everything she’s struggled with going wrong all at the same time. The episode starts with Starlight feeling apprehensive about the friendship lessons, and trying to distract Twilight by excelling at her one big interest, magic. Because she’s so literal and doesn’t understand social interaction, she misses the point of the list of activities that Twilight gave her, and she tries to finish them “efficiently” by scheduling everything at the same time on the same day. When the others start objecting to the plan she set—Rarity doesn’t like the lighting in the library, Fluttershy wants to take each individual animal where it will be comfortable, Rainbow Dash can’t find anywhere that suits her nebulous idea of a good “chillaxing” spot, and all of them protest that you can’t do the activity by squeezing it into five minute intervals while running between four other activities—Starlight gets overwhelmed and frustrated and uses a mind control spell so they’ll all adhere to her plan, as usual falling back to magic when she panics.

I won’t disagree that Starlight got off pretty easy for this. Using mind control on someone is a fundamental violation of their right to free will. It’s actually worse than anything we saw her do when she was running her cult, at least on a philosophical level (nothing she made them do was inherently unforgivable, just the idea of taking someone’s free will like that). On the other hand, Starlight always seems to be pretty concerned about what other people think of her, and after this incident she got yelled at by Twilight and shunned by the others for a while, so maybe it was harder on her than it seemed. We’ve consistently seen that Starlight feels emotional hurt very deeply. Her hurt when Sunburst left her, for instance. Or her hurt when she thought Trixie was just using her to get back at Twilight in “No Second Prances”, which was pretty intense for someone she’d just met that day. Or the depth of her guilt for what she did in her village, which is much deeper and more persistent than the guilt we see from the other reformed villains like Discord, Trixie, and Sunset Shimmer, even though I’d argue that at least Trixie did worse things. (Luna is a bit of an exception; she also seems to feel her guilt deeply and persistently. And she also seems to have something of a special connection with Starlight, as seen in “To Where And Back Again” and “A Royal Problem”.) So it’s possible that she got more of what she deserved for this incident than we could see on screen.

“To Where and Back Again” and On

As the series goes on, Starlight becomes more able to deal with situations where she loses control, and uses magic in a panic less often. She still does occasionally, such as in “A Royal Problem” when she switches Celestia’s and Luna’s cutie marks, but that was a more heated and difficult situation than what she’d faced before: her initial plan had failed, the princesses were arguing, Starlight had very few options because they’re princesses and she can’t tell them what to do, and she knew that a past argument had resulted in Luna being exiled to the moon for a thousand moons and coming back to try and kill Celestia and plunge Equestria into eternal night. This is, I hope we can agree, a much more difficult situation than Rarity not wanting to sew in the library.

Starlight also turns her lack of social awareness into a strength. She’s willing to be incredibly blunt with other ponies, which helps keep her from feeling like situations are spiraling out of control and avoids seeding the panic that would lead her to do something stupid with magic. She starts learning how to do this in “All Bottled Up”, and it helps her in “Rock Solid Friendship” and “A Royal Problem”, but in “To Change a Changeling” she almost makes a big mistake with this trait when she nearly tells Thorax that he has to exile Pharynx. Her blunt tactlessness also helps her relate to Maud, who’s also pretty tactless, in “Rock Solid Friendship”. The joke of “Maud Pie” was the Mane 6’s frustration when Maud didn’t understand or respond to normal social conventions; the genius of “Rock Solid Friendship” is the way Starlight and Maud bond over this.

Starlight isn’t likeable…but I still don’t hate her

When I said above that Starlight just isn’t likeable, this is what I meant. Her deeply felt hurt, social unawareness, need for order and control, and propensity for panic when she doesn’t get it make her come off as someone with little empathy who thoughtlessly resorts to extreme actions, and yet has an emotional glass jaw and reacts strongly when hurt herself.

The Mane 6 have sometimes exhibited some of these traits, but there was always some kind of counterweight that made them still likeable even after acting this way. Rainbow and Twilight and Rarity and even Pinkie Pie have done things that were lacking in empathy, but all of them have also done things that were very sweet. Rainbow, for instance, mocked and belittled Fluttershy in “Dragonshy”, but supported and encouraged her in “Hurricane Fluttershy”. Rarity acted selfish and superficial in “Green Isn’t Your Color” and “Inspiration Manifestation”, but helpful and kind in “Filli Vanilli” and “The Gift of the Maud Pie”. Starlight hasn’t had many such counterbalancing moments yet. “Rock Solid Friendship” was probably the closest, but she’s also painfully blunt towards Pinkie Pie, which ruins the effect a little. All six have had moments of fear and panic in the series, but none of them handled it as badly as Starlight. Twilight did use something like a mind control spell in “Lesson Zero”, but for the most part, they might cry or sing a whole freak-out aria, but that was it. And Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy both seem to feel hurt very deeply, as we see with Pinkie in “Party of One” and “Pinkie Pride” and Fluttershy in “Hurricane Fluttershy” and “Putting Your Hoof Down”, but they’re usually the sensitive, empathetic characters, so instead of seeming hypocritical, it seems like part and parcel of who they are: their capacity for deep emotion cuts two ways. They also have never been shown to let their hurt lead them to the kind of dark impulses that we see from Starlight in her very first appearance, starting with her establishment of an anti-cutie mark cult.

I don’t hate Starlight, but I can’t exactly say that I like her either. She’s interesting to watch, that’s for sure. I see some of myself and people I’ve known in her, which lets me sympathize with her, but there are also times where I wince watching her fall apart because I know that I’ve also fallen apart like that, and it’s a little uncomfortable to see it play out on screen with ponies. In Season 7 she manages to get her panic and nervousness under control a lot more, but then she starts playing the role of the really blunt friend who says the bad things that need to be said, and the person who plays that role is also hard to like, even if you appreciate them.

But Starlight was a good addition to the show. Watching her may not always be comfortable or pleasant, but she’s added new character dynamics and plot types to explore. Having her around has also been good for Twilight’s character. After “Twilight’s Kingdom”, Twilight is still working on the smaller issues in her life, but the big stuff is all settled: she’s reached the height of her career, she knows who she is as a pony, she has a job and friends and family who love her. Adding Starlight gave us a character who’s still working all that stuff out to follow; without her, there might have been a temptation to retread “Lesson Zero” or “Princess Twilight Sparkle”, but now those kinds of stories can go to Starlight, and Twilight can just keep honing the small things, like she does in “A Flurry of Emotions” and “Once Upon a Zeppelin”, or supporting her friends, like she does in “A Health of Information”. Adding Starlight also gave Twilight someone to interact with in a way we hadn’t seen before: she gets to mentor someone, and we get to see how she’s matured and why she deserves her title as Princess of Friendship. I’m convinced we’ve seen so few Cutie Map episodes in Season 7 because the Cutie Map was a generator for plots that would show off how the Mane 6 have grown and matured, but the writers realized there were better ways to do that, and Starlight was the way for Twilight.

An Alternate Interpretation of “Let It Go”

The song “Let It Go” from the Disney film Frozen has often been interpreted as a generic paean to banal ideas like “be yourself” and “let the real you shine through”, but it is entirely possible that, if one really examines the lyrics closely, it has a different and far more sinister interpretation. Consider that Queen Elsa, the character who chants these lyrics at our children, is both the absolute monarch of a small nation and inexplicably disgruntled, secretive, and able to wield superhuman powers, and we gain a picture of her as a radical leftist with an anti-democratic philosophy, an inherent hatred of free markets, and deep hostility towards men (as seen in her treatment of Prince Hans).

If we consider “Let It Go” with this interpretation of the character in mind, we see that the song actually represents the moment Elsa decides to reveal herself as a fascist, anti-corporate, anti-gun, man-hating dictator, ruling by the power of her magic and the fear and complicity of a people cowed by endless winter and barely able to feed themselves from the infertile, snow-covered land that Elsa has created. Let’s examine the song.

The snow glows white on the mountain tonight.
Not a footprint to be seen.
A kingdom of isolation, and it looks like I’m the queen

Elsa notes here that Arendelle has become diplomatically and culturally isolated since her father died, similar to authoritarian Communist dictatorships such as Cuba and North Korea, and that she is now the queen and unchallenged ruler of this “hermit kingdom” (except for the threat of Anna’s future suitor; Anna herself is pliant and easy to manipulate, but a suitor could pose a challenge to Elsa’s rule, which is why she rejected Prince Hans so stridently).

The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I tried

Elsa comments that she’s tried these past few years to uphold the values of her nation, in word if not in spirit, but she finally reached a point with her coronation where she realized that with her father dead, she could allow her own anti-democratic tendencies to come to the fore.

Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know
Well, now they know

Elsa describes the mindset she took to hide her authoritarian persuasion and sexist tendencies: by refusing to “let them in” or “let them see” her true hatred for freedom and for men, and playing “the good girl” that she “always ha[d] to be”, a good girl who would never shut down commerce, tax the job creators, and throw out competent male advisors in favor of corrupt, incompetent ones who either happen to be female or are weak and yielding enough to act as rubber stamps for Elsa’s policies. She tried to conceal her true desires, and avoid feeling them or showing any sign of them, but her authoritarian leaning has become obvious, and “now they know”.

Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let go
Turn away and slam the door

Elsa has resolved to “let it go”. She uses this phrase with two different meanings in this passage. In the first, she follows with “Can’t hold me back anymore”, signifying that she is now going to let “it”, her militant left wing matriocratic ideology, loose upon the people she rules, grinding them down under her radical feminist bootheel. In the second, she follows with “Turn away and slam the door”, signifying that she is going to let Arendelle’s constitution, crafted by the Founding Fathers to uphold democracy, freedom, and property ownership, “go”, “turn away” from it, and “slam the door” on it.

I don’t care what they’re going to say
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway

Elsa knows her people will murmur with disquiet when she begins dismantling the protections of the Bill of Rights by taking away their guns, subjecting them to illegal searches and seizures, and curtailing their free speech. However, she will ensure they have no power to fight back by letting the storm rage on, destroying their property and the ability of the land to feed them. This won’t affect her because she will send jackbooted thugs to collect what little food the people do produce as taxes, so the cold will never bother her, anyway.

It’s funny how some distance
Makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me
Can’t get to me at all

“Distance” is metaphorical; Elsa now considers herself a higher being, above all others, atop a pedestal from which she looks down at everything, which now seems small. The fears that once drove her to maintain democratic rule and a nodding relationship with the Constitution can’t get to her at all.

It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I’m free

Elsa now intends to start undermining the democracy that her family upheld for generations, and to see how much she can get away with. She’ll test the limits by first using pseudo-legal measures such as executive orders and shady backroom deals with private sector apostates and Big Charity to achieve her far left extremist agenda, but when those prove insufficient to continue her march towards militant lesbian autocracy, she’ll “break through” and use force and direct coercion to achieve her ends. Elsa believes she is beyond primitive notions of good and evil and can do whatever she wants because there is no right or wrong or any rules for her. In so declaring, she also implies her agenda to use her cult of personality to set herself up as a god, destroy all churches, make practicing the Christian religion illegal, and establish death camps for any Christian who refuses to give up their beliefs and set Elsa as a false idol in the place of the one true God and His only begotten son, our lord and savior Jesus Christ.

Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky
Let it go, let it go,
You’ll never see me cry
Here I stand and here I stay
Let the storm rage on

Elsa’s secret police will have eyes everywhere searching for dissenters. The secret police’s network of spies and informants will be so expansive that it will gift Elsa with near-omniscience, as if she were “one with the wind and sky”, and so able to be everywhere and see everything. This will ensure that you never see her cry, and also that she will continue standing and staying exactly where she is, because any action by her people which might cause her to cry or endanger her position will be swiftly rooted out and squashed due to the omniscience afforded her by her secret police and monitoring system.

My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around
And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast
I’m never going back, the past is in the past

Elsa realizes that she has even more power than she thought now that her militant fascist attitude has combined with her ice powers. She has suddenly become aware that she has the power to execute a pogrom of white men among her advisors and bring in transgender Muslims to fill those positions and plan a genocide of white heterosexual men among the general population.

Let it go, let it go
And I’ll rise like the break of dawn
Let it go, let it go,
That perfect girl is gone
Here I stand in the light of day
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway

Elsa is going to rise like the break of dawn and stand in the light of day, having left the darkness, and lay her intentions bare, declaring her intention to repeal democracy, suppress dissent, and create a police state ruled by militant lesbian leftist kleptocrats, with herself as grand despot, ruling over Arendelle with a cult of personality based on her godhood. Revealing this to the outside world will cause a political storm as her own people and other countries oppose her, but she can weather this storm since “the cold never bothered me anyway”. This is an ironic metaphorical callback to her earlier literal statement about creating a storm to destroy her people’s ability to feed themselves or engage in any economic activity not sanctioned by her corrupt cabinet of anti-male anti-hetero transgender lesbian socialist Muslim suicide bombers.

Conclusion

Queen Elsa represents a threat to American democracy. She is determined to turn all of our daughters and as many of our sons as possible into man-hating transgender socialist Feminazis and to create a world in which it is illegal to own a gun or a business and heterosexual white men are interned in death camps where they are forced to either submit to gender reassignment surgery or die in the gas chamber while their wives have sex with blacks and Jews outside.

The only way to stop this travesty is to fight back against Queen Elsa and her servants, the Disney Corporation, by making our own children’s movies that teach real American values, such as gun ownership, the natural dominance of white alpha males over women and other pathetic men with small penises, beating up egghead dorks who are into science and have small penises, and a view of God as the ultimate alpha male with the largest penis of all. Only then will we be able to take our children, and our country, back from the socialist lesbian genocidal maniac with ice powers known as Queen Elsa.