Thinking about
meow you get it
Pitou and Kite are finished! Early! Crazy. Three weeks before the actual beginning of the con we've finished sewing, styling, and tested makeup. That never happens. Granted these were mostly premade, out of things we already owned or things half-made already. The major projects were the sewing for Kite's obi and the construction of a semi-formed tail that we fought with for a couple of weekends. The tail is made of "minky" short-pile plush fabric stuffed with polyfill and with a skeleton of posable wire. We twisted two strands together to make it sturdier so it's sort of a giant pipe cleaner. It's 4 ft. long and has an internal magnet to stick the top to the back of my jacket so that it stays vertical; adding more wire added more weight, so the more solid the skeleton got the more solid it needed to be to hold itself up... In the interest of making it easy to wear to a con and still adjustable for photos etc. I decided on sticking it with a magnet rather than sewing it or using some kind of loop/thread system. It comes away from the jacket with enough pull and I can move the magnet within the jacket if I want it positioned elsewhere. Overall pretty happy with the project! The base of the tail is a little bit unfinished, since I'm not sure the best attachment solution for it, ultimately. It currently folds over a belt with some extra wire. Maybe an elastic or another magnet would work better. TBD!
The main challenge with making the Kite obi was making it comfortable to wear while using the layers of organza which has no give; I wanted it to look like it's wrapped and layered as an actual obi but it's sewn to a stretch-cotton base so that it's easy to put on each time. (An approach to consider reusing for other things that need artful arrangement each wear! Things like the Baizhu belt fabric.)
the prestige
The most noteworthy(?)/memorable(?)/important(?!) thing I consumed this month was the Chainsaw Man movie, which was exactly as much a stunning visual spectacle as I expected from the show, and also made me as uncomfortable and sad as the show did. I think it might have interesting... ish? things to say about exploitation under modern working conditions and how that's entangled with cynicism and poverty and a loss of innocence but also it's a real slog and I'm worried that my feelings about its profundity are based more on style than substance. It certainly seems somehow like it's aiming "higher" than, say, Jujutsu Kaisen, which I will argue is a similar story thematically and on the narrative surface but is less unrelentingly awful all the time? And I'm not totally sure what produces that impression of more thematic complexity. I suspect three things:
- it is more adult in the sense that it's explicit in entwining Denji's sexuality with his exploitation. Yuji starts out with a sort of similar girl-crazy bit but it's treated much more subtly (the only actual information we have about Yuji's sexual/romantic development is him repeatedly volunteering that he "likes girls like Jennifer Lawrence"; more on this in a moment), sensitively (I was pleasantly surprised to not be offended by the short arc about the "ugly girl" with a crush on him! It ended with Yuji being kind but not obligated to make a romance where no mutual attraction existed!), and then, at least to date, dropped completely.
- it is visually more concerned with a broader intertextuality, by which I mean the literal framings of scenes aim for cinema rather than anime. It's clear that the creator cares a lot about movies and has seen some higher-brow Western ones that, as passing visual references, appear familiarly prestigious to my eye. Jujutsu Kaisen aims to look like an especially beautiful fighting anime; Chainsaw Man wants to look like a movie. And no matter how many times I tell myself I am postmodern and free from the chains that bind me to the false idea of the inherent prestige of any particular medium, I grew up in the age of cheap TV, free youtube (lol), and scifi novels that never got hardcover releases. Poptimism's video equivalents may never fully convince me that television isn't necessarily brain-melting slop.
- the unrelenting awfulness is itself part of what convinces me of the profundity and seriousness. My bias is usually that optimism is for rubes, and a show has to work pretty hard to convince me that it's been on the hero's journey through cynicism before it can sell me on the return home to "things can be okay actually." More on that in a moment.
first, an aside about jennifer lawrence
"I LIKE GIRLS LIKE JENNIFER LAWRENCE," Yuji says by way of introduction, multiple times. And, uh, why? I think it's emblematic of the more grounded, subtle characterization (this is not a joke, somehow) of JJK vs CM. At the beginnings of each of their stories, Denji and Yuji are both primarily motivated to use their unique abilities to live a good life. For Denji, the emblem of this good life is the ability to touch breasts. For Yuji, it is to observe his dying grandfather's wisdom to become strong in order to help others and be surrounded by loved ones at death. Eros vs thanatos.
Denji is haunted by the spectre of sex, which turns out to be a monkey's paw. The primary thing Denji thinks about, and the primary thing his inner monologue reminds us about, is women's bodies, even though it's demonstrated that he has no idea about what this means or leads to; his scene with Power in which he does indeed get to touch boobs but sort of hates it because she's in charge during the encounter forms an artful summary of his desire's internal contradictions, and then I honestly don't even want to re-examine the scene with Himeno but it was not a good time despite once again nominally fulfilling his purpose. I'd argue that, even though there are some notably deadly moments of violence in Chainsaw Man, the fact that Denji himself can just regenerate his flesh all the time, and his lack of real attachment to any other characters who might die alongside him, means that, in the logic of Denji's storyline, physical violence has basically no stakes. Only his violation in the sexual sense really feels like it matters.
Yuji is instead haunted by death, directly. His whole crux is to prevent the deaths of others, and the emotional locus of the show is what it means to die well. There's a sense of futility that hangs over both shows, in which the evils of the world are ever arising, monsters born from the infinitely self-renewing fears and sufferings of humanity. Yuji is strong, but not impermeable like Denji, and he thinks and talks about death constantly. He actually does die! The fact that he comes back should maybe undermine the stakes I'm talking about, but I think the show does a decent job of working around this and making it seem like a rare miracle that only etches *memento mori* deeper into Yuji's heart. (The Shibuya arc body count, and the punishment of the famously hubristic Gojo, also helps re-convince us of the real stakes.) Sex doesn't really enter into it, in any direct way, though both shows are interested in adolescence cut short by duty, and what the costs of that exchange are. (Gojo helpfully just tells us the theme in the baseball episode when he declares that he will ensure the students get to act like children sometimes, as they deserve.)
So in the context of this universe that keeps him under the sword of damocles, Yuji's awkwardly shouted verbal-tic/disclosure that he "likes girls like jennifer lawrence" does at least remind us that this is a teenager who sometimes thinks about other things than his inevitable gruesome death. In the context of his apparent disinterest in any of the actual girls he knows, though, it reads kind of weird as the first fact about himself to disclaim? It suggests to me maybe he isn't that artful at handling his first inklings of naive desire. (Or maybe it is simply that none of the actual girls he knows have enough *Jen ne sais quoi...*) The fact that he's chosen a distant celebrity, an adult woman he will never meet, as his "type," can plausibly be read as normal adolescent masculine socialization I guess? But it's also mildly sad and weird in a way that gestures at but doesn't rub our face in (so to speak) Denji's whole adolescent psychosexual obsessive deal, which is to say that none of the plenty of adults around Yuji/Denji manage to tell him he should maybe try dating girls his own age nor give him the social/emotional tools to do that. The world they each inhabit is instead ready to capture their youth (their bodies, capability, energy, desires) and serve them up to the adult world to be exploited as early as possible. Any budding interest in adult concerns, in this context, reads like a sinister trap, even though the jennifer lawrence line is also never not stupid/funny which is what's great about JJK.
who the hell do you think you are
It's here that I'm thrilled to have an excuse to talk about Gurren Lagann, the most important piece of media ever except for Yuri!!! on Ice. Extremely relevant with regard to the whole "optimism is suspect" thing, and also another example of a uhhh similarly themed but tonally opposite show pairing: as Chainsaw Man is to Jujutsu Kaisen, Evangelion is to Gurren Lagann. At least, I suspect -- given that both of the former are ongoing, I can't conclude with certainty that the resolutions of each story won't change the tone to some degree, but at this point in the story Chainsaw Man has an Evangelion-esque cynicism to it that I think sometimes lends it weight it doesn't deserve. JJK doesn't have the same aggressive optimism that is Gurren Lagann's trademark but it seems at minimum uninterested in tailoring its universe to completely extinguish all hope for its characters?
I like Gurren Lagann more than Evangelion, the message is not simply more hopeful but more completely realized artistically; it's handily a better show on all metrics except a grimdark bid for prestigious seriousness. (Side note like a lot of people I'm a little bit obsessed with the fact that the creator of Evangelion is so compelled by a dark urge to re-finish this thing over and over again but I think it tidily demonstrates my point about artistic completeness.) And yet, it is in some ways easier to admit to liking Evangelion, in no small part due to the fact that vastly more people would even know what it is. More pointedly and more bafflingly, I feel significantly less like I need to explain that Yes I Understand the Fanservice Is Bad even though I'll admit here on the record that
I AM LYING AND A COWARD, YOKO'S LUDICROUS CLEAVAGE AND KAMINA'S NAKED ASS ARE ESSENTIAL TO THE RADICALLY LIFE-AFFIRMING MESSAGE OF THIS MASTERPIECE. YOU MUST ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL SOMETHING, EVEN IF THAT SOMETHING IS 'OFFENDED' OR 'AROUSED' OR 'UNCOMFORTABLE' OR MAYBE EVEN ALL THREE. JOY AND HOPE REQUIRE THAT YOU ARE OPEN TO HAVING EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES. A RICH AND FULFILLING LIFE MAKES THESE DEMANDS OF YOU. IT IS RISKY AND VULNERABLE AND FRIGHTENING TO BE OPEN TO LIFE, TO ART, TO LOVE, AND YET THAT IS THE ONLY WAY ANYONE OR ANYTHING MAY TOUCH YOUR HEART. THE REWARDS ARE COMMENSURATE WITH THE RISK. RELINQUISH CONTROL AND HAVE AN EXPERIENCE UNMEDIATED BY THE FEAR OF FEELING SOMETHING 'WRONG.' IN ORDER TO FULLY INHABIT YOUR ONE PRECIOUS LIFE ON THIS PLANET YOU MUST ALLOW YOURSELF DELIGHT AND/OR FURY AND/OR SOME YET-UNDISCOVERED EMOTION AT WATCHING YOKO'S TITTIES BOUNCING TO A LOONEY-TUNES SOUND EFFECT.
please engage with the frustration briefly as part of the art but there is a secret way out of forcing you to read the marquee tag because i love you
I digress. The point is I'm examining the fact that the gritty "realist" depiction of repeated violation sort of automatically feel like serious art to me when it's not, necessarily, saying anything complex or interesting, and in fact I have some prior evidence to suggest that my absorption of thematic material is actually hindered by unrelenting seriousness when directly compared to a similar and brighter narrative universe. Hopefully this amounts to something more interesting than complaining about Chainsaw Man but to be fair boy was that movie a bummer.
