Mawaru Penguindrum (Kunihiko Ikuhara, 2011)

[Mr Sausage]

DISCUSSION BEGINS MONDAY, July 31st


What we're watching::

-All 24 episodes of the anime series Mawaru Penguindrum (also called simply Penguindrum), broadcast from July 8, 2011 – December 23, 2011.


How it works:

-Members new to the series can watch the episodes and record their thoughts and impressions as they go and comment on each other's posts to create a sense of a shared viewing experience. Old hands can comment on those posts or post their overall thoughts on the series.

-This discussion is spoiler-free. All spoilers should be spoiler tagged with a brief indication of what episodes are being discussed, eg.:

episodes 1 and 2Show

nani nani nani

The code for this is:

Code: Select all

[spoiler="episodes 1 and 2"]text[/spoiler]

[Mr Sausage]

Feihong has provided our anime this month. His explanation follows below.

[feihong]

My choice is Mawaru Penguindrum (2011, dir. Kunihiko Ikuhara). It's a Shojo-styled original anime written by Ikuhara (director of Revolutionary Girl Utena, Adolescence of Utena, and the later seasons of Sailor Moon, as well as Yurikuma Arashi), running 24 episodes. I chose the series because it's pretty mysterious to me how the show works in the ways it does, and the show pulls in so much disparate material, and I thought it would be fun to try and chat about why all that stuff might be in there.

It's about two brothers, Shouma and Kanba, trying to save their terminally-ill sister Himari from dying a second time. When a dominatrix spirit who resides inside the penguin hat the brothers buy Himari at the aquarium strikes a deal to resurrect Himari, the brothers become her servants on a psychotropic quest across Tokyo to find the elusive, titular "penguindrum." But...what is the penguindrum?

There, that's my restrained synopsis. The series is allegedly inspired by Kenji Miyazawa's novella, Night on Galactic Railroad. It's storybook-like, dark, full of existential angst, and it attempts to digest a lot of modern Japanese culture all at once. Here's some disparate trailers I could find for it. None of these sum up the experience at all, but they get at bits of it (though the music isn't ever right in these trailers).
Trailer 1
Trailer 2
Trailer 3

The blu rays are expensive now, but the show can be seen on HiDive and Apple TV

[Mr Sausage]

Thread open!

[Michael Kerpan]

I probably won't be able to participate in this much (if at all). As we head off to Illinois tomorrow and will be wandering for at least 10 days (and thus mostly out of Internet touch).

I did look at ep. 1 last week, however, and look at the overall story line. I suspect that this is NOT likely to stir my blood -- as neither the style (as glimpsed) nor the story resonated much. But I will try to watch a bit more --- albeit maybe not in time to be useful.

[Mr Sausage]

Episode 1:

Well this is a bright and energetic show. It's a bit too cute for my taste. And you don't have to wait long for the lone female character to be in various states of undress, including at least one close-up of her barely-clothed pudenda. And thanks to knives pointing out the blue-oni / red-oni trope in the Samurai Champloo thread, I was able to notice the sex-crazed hot head has red hair and the more sober guy blue hair. So again we're going to get a trio where two opposing male personalities are mediated by a female. The female is childlike as is usual, which has been a recurring complaint of mine across these anime watchalongs, tho' she transforms into someone aggressive and domineering at the end, ie. the other role anime affords its women characters. So the show is already heavily invested in anime tropes. I do find the heavy investment in tropes wearying, but I gather anime fans love it.

Thus far the driving theme is fate, but the theme was raised in a superficial way. It's likely more of an organizing principle than a genuine idea, but we'll see. I liked the style, tho', especially the way crowds are represented as little cross-walk symbols, and how journeys of any kind, including just narrative progression, are represented as subway stops. Everything looks wonderful and the pace is fleet. I'm sure this'll be fun.

[therewillbeblus]

I'll finally try to participate this round, at least in a watchalong, but I don't know how much I'll have to say about them. I watched the first five eps last summer, which were absolutely bonkers in the best way, but every time I'd try to express thoughts, the show would take a sharp left turn elsewhere and nullify those impressions. I'm definitely curious if feihong has an overarching sense of analysis, since I thought the whole idea behind the initial rec was 'don't think too much, just go with it'

[Mr Sausage]

I feel like part of the fun is registering these wild shifts and upended expectations. If the pleasures are more surface level, there’s no reason not have a more superficial discussion.

[feihong]

Well, I think there are definitely overarching analyses of the show that can be made, but the show is holding out a lot on the viewer in the first...well, it's always holding out on us, right up until near the end. So I'm a little loathe to say what I think is going on, but I guess I can provide some hints?

I would say that everything Mr. Sausage notes about the first episode is a conscious decision on the filmmakers parts, including the front-loading of anime tropes (most of which will end up subverted in some way by the end). And I'd say that everything he notes in the episode is also an active component of the show––in other words, something that where the goalposts will be moving in future episodes, and the state of play changing––including the way the background figures will be treated. The background figures are perhaps the most annoying element for me, but the payoff for them being rendered that way is, I think, pretty dynamic and moving, even as it's a way for Ikuhara to save a bundle in terms of cost and animation time (this cutting of corners is a commonality with Ikuhara's other shows, and Ikuhara is known for teasing out this technique to absurd lengths––there's self-awareness there by the time of Utena and Penguindrum––so that the long transformations in Sailor Moon and the even lengthier duel prep scenes in Utena build up to the flagrantly protracted and self-consciously exaggerated fetish moments of Himari's transformation into the dominatrix spirit).

But I also think that the cuteness Mr. Sausage notices burns off as the series progresses. The drawings don't change, but the formal cutesyness of the way the characters relate to one another falls away when we start to see the inner lives of these characters, and the darker elements of their background which tie them together. More than in the common anime trope, the trio in this series reminds me of the trio in Jules et Jim––like in that film, instability is the watchword amongst them––for reasons that are, to my mind, sufficiently surprising that I don't want to spill them ahead of time.

I'll try and write something different about the first episode tonight, something that isn't just "wait and see."

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, I just revisited the first episode and was surprised by how restrained it was compared to what comes. I had misremembered more bizarre escalations occurring faster, but the creators relish the details, which also establishes what seems to be another of the show's overarching themes I've gleaned so far (less of an cognitive idea and more of a physiological sense): a profound attentiveness to a sensational intimacy with one's surroundings. feihong indicates that this pivots and strips itself of layers as the show progresses, but that's fitting with what we get right away. The characters, and we as an audience, are cued into just how hypervigilant these people are to their milieu, objects, signifiers, memories, the sublime, the unpredictable disruptors they need to protect against. It's hinted at that this is for both traumatic and introspectively mindful and appreciative reasons. And even if what we're getting right now is a ruse of sorts, or only the surface level of a series of layer-peeling depths to come, that doesn't mean each layer isn't authentic and worth spending time basking in. Each can be honest with a relativity to where the characters are at. I'm excited to see where this kind of sensory-produced theme takes us as things start to unwind into gonzo-town!

[feihong]

Episode 01: The Bell of Fate Tolls

I'll just do this in bullet points. That I can handle:


• The thing that strikes me most about the episode this time around is the very deliberate isolation of the trio of main characters. They sit in a house unlike any other in Tokyo, wedged into a lot, seemingly scrabbled together as a child would put together a house. I first thought of the train-man's house in Kurosawa's Dodeskaden, with the walls covered in child-like train drawings in crayon. But the house in Penguindrum has striking other qualities to it. The central space looks put together by children, with bright colors which hardly go together, messily applied to every surface; Himari's bedroom––the other space we see––is the bedroom of a sleeping princess out of a fairytale. This turns out to be very apt, because Himari is a princess to Shouma and Kanba, and the story is motivated, for them, by a quest to restore her to life––at the end of the episode, one of the brothers even tries the same tactic the prince in Snow White does to restore Himari.

The episode is full of subtle visual representation of the trio's isolation. They are, generally-speaking, the only characters who are really individuated from any crowd. The crowds themselves are generic to underline this isolation. There is a noticeable absence of parents for the Takakura siblings. When Himari collapses and dies, none of the medical staff are individuated, either, and Kan and Shou are eerily left alone with Himari's body. This scene is full of the most obvious isolation motifs––it's clear that––though Kanba mentions an uncle––the boys will have to work all this out themselves. This isolation idea will get significant development as the series goes on. The authors are effecting a similar storyline to Shinji Aoyama's Eureka or Masahiro Kobayashi's Bashing, and so one of the main goals of the first episode is to establish the way in which this trio lives in a little, childlike world of their own––which is always threatened by the frailty of Himari.

• The Characters: The unusual character designs are by Lily Hoshino, a seemingly retired mangaka who was active at the time this came out in the shoujo manga scene. She did notable work in the BL ("Boys' Love") genre, and in het romance titles. The male figures hew close in physique to the Sailor Moon/Utena model, long and sinewy––her female figures are much shorter and more compact, in almost all of her work. The main trio in this series fits handily into her strike zone, and the typical character dynamic she sets up in her manga is at work here. The male figures are romantic archetypes: Kanba her plays the rogue-ish, confident, clever figure, while Shouma plays the sensitive, earnest, slightly foolish one. A lot of the first episode's drama goes into what separates the two brothers––as in the hospital scene, where Kanba accepts Himari's death, and plans for what's next, while Shouma doesn't. Later in the episode, Kanba immediately accepts the kami re-animating Himari, the penguins, and the Penguindrum mission, while Shouma stumbles over each new revelation. The early presentation here is that Kanba is sensible, and Shouma is sensitive, but the show will refuse to pigeonhole the two. Kanba's final action in the first episode tips the apple-cart of what we've presumed about the brothers up until this point. But Hoshino is determined to give us clear reads as to each brothers' go-to presentation: Kanba––masculine, sure––gets sharper lines and sharper angles in his face and hair. His nose is straight in profile. Shouma––sensitive, softer––gets a rounder head, rounder eyes (with thicker eyelashes), a curved nose in profile, and hair that nearly curls at times. As to Hoshino's handling of women, they tend to look pubescent, short, and a weird mix of femme and spunky, rather than glamorous or butch (as female characters hew in series like Patlabor or Bubblegum Crisis). They don't even really look cute in the way that they will in Ikuhara's next anime, Yurikuma Arashi (where the character designs are by Morishima Akiko, who does picture-postcard Kewpie Doll figures doing adult lesbian romance––she is a wonderful artist and storyteller as well). Generally-speaking, Hoshino is best known for her male figures, who often share a sexual tension together, either implicit in the het books or explicit in the BL ones. That will sort of happen here, though the writing of the show is going for something a little different than what might be implied by this (Kanba and Shouma are not going to end up together on the show, as they are in a lot of the show's fan-art––but it is interesting how far they push this idea before pulling away from it––one maybe wonders if Ikuhara was trying and failing and trying again to escape his reputation after the unabashed, thrilling queerness of Adolescence of Utena––before returning there with a vengeance in the subsequent Yurikuma Arashi).

• Doubling: The Hoshino trio dynamic is always that the boys appear as upright guardians to the a sort of awkward, slightly cute, essentially "normal" girl––with the two men representing two poles of glamorous masculinity. Kan and Sho are made Earthbound representatives of the kami that possesses Himari, and the two brothers are somewhat set up as these sorts of doubles. The episode is full of surrogates and doubling: The boys double for one another, and for the dominatrix spirit––as her agents in the real world. Himari is both a dying human teen girl and this all-powerful kami figure (her opposite, a princess ego running without check). The penguins are clear doubles of each of the Takakura siblings. In future episodes they will become agents of the siblings' desires, to one degree or another.

Probably the most abstruse doubling introduced in this episode, which won't be developed until later, is the presence of a second girl in the mix, Ringo Oginome––who we only see for a second. The ways in which Himari and Ringo will be contrasted are a part of the series I've never been able to fully figure out. Suffice to say in spoilers, the strong ironic difference that separates them is the way in which Ringo is so visibly, physically forceful, determined (to a sinister degree) and strong, all fire and purpose––and yet ultimately insubstantial

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(she will come to learn she is––or at least see herself by the end of the show as the afterburn of her older sister's vitality, not really alive, just a breath of her sister's fire remaining in the world, and she'll burn away in the final episode)

––while Himari is physical frail, and yet her soul burns very brightly in the other characters' hearts the whole time.

• Kenji Miyazawa: There's a scene that begins with an exterior view of the Takakura house. We hear what seems to be the Takakura siblings, but which is revealed to be another pair of younger boys, walking by the house. They're in deep analysis of Kenji Miyazawa's novella, "Night on Galactic Railroad." This is going to be a recurring parallel to the narrative of the show,

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tying up in the final episode, where the analysis comes full circle, and, if memory serves me right, identities for these two children are established.

"Night on Galactic Railroad" depicts a young boy named Giovanni, who does all the housework because his mother is sick. His father is long gone, either on a long fishing trip or serving a prison sentence––its not clear. Giovanni is shy and sensitive, but he has a friend named Campanella, who is outspoken and more commanding. But Campanella will never leave his friend Giovanni alone, and when Giovanni refuses to answer a question in school because he isn't sure of the answer, Campanella refuses as well––even though Giovanni realizes Campanella knows the answer for certain. In this spirit, the boys board a train through the stars. They see what are meant to be a lot of metaphorical/spiritual sights––this part of the book was the part Miyazawa left unfinished on his death.

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At the end of the book, Giovanni discovers his friend Campanella has vanished from the train. When he awakes from the dream of this train ride, Giovanni discovers that Campanella has gone missing in the river, after jumping in while trying to save a drowning boy. Campanella's father––who appeared in the dream and told Giovanni not to look for Campanella after he went missing––now mentions to another adult at the riverbank that his friend, Giovanni's father, will be home soon. And Giovanni runs home to tell his mother what has happened.

That's my dimestore recap of the novel. The consistent theme of the book is a sort of admiration for those who sacrifice themselves for others. Campanella is the poster boy for this, but there are parables related on the train that represent this idea. The book was instigated by the death of Miyazawa's beloved sister, whom he perhaps felt was the incarnation of this idea.

Apparently the Apple we see in the credits––which will appear later in several different guises––and the later "scorpion fire" metaphor (both Ringo and Kanba get associated with "Night on Galactic Railroad"'s "scorpion fire" story)––come from the novella. But the early isolation of Giovanni and his huddled kinship with Campanella are elements which are already present in the Takakura house at the beginning of the series. The sickness is Himari's rather than that of a one-to-one mother figure––and the Takakura parents' absence will come to have all the ambiguity of Giovanni's missing father's situation. Essential to the dialogue in the episode of Penguindrum is the analysis the two boys give the later moments from "Galactic Railroad." They're talking about where heaven lies (Miyazawa was a Christian, and the novel is full of extremely stylized Christian imagery––though the series will approach all of this Christian symbolism with a decidedly Buddhist outlook). The idea is suggested that heaven might be on the train. Immediately we cut to inside the house, where a resurrected Himari lounges on the couch, with her brothers nearby, and muses that this is her idea of heaven. The notion of a physical heaven, a place where people might find heaven, will be pervasive throughout the story. Like every other major element of the story, it will have a double, in this case a dark double

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called "The Child Broiler."

There's also, of course, Shouma doubling for Giovanni, the sensitive, hesitant boy, and Kandba doubling for Campanella, the composed one, who is quick to sacrifice. That will develop a lot later on. But I never realized before that the the weird rocket ship that dominatrix Himari emerges from in the Survival Tactic dimension is essentially a train on rails, a galactic railroad in what is initially depicted racing through a starry night, so to speak. Pretty cool.

• Seeding Ideas: the other thing I noticed in this re-watch is that almost nothing in the episode was wasted (a theme that appears in episode two, actually––the belief that nothing in the world is wasted). Virtually every line of dialogue is seeding something to come. When she first dons the penguin hat, Himari leans forward towards Shouma, with a faux-leering expression, demanding that, since it's "Himari Day," Shou has to do anything she wants––harbinger of the dominatrix spirit which will demand in subsequent episodes more extraordinary sacrifices from Shou and Kanba, seemingly on a whim. When they ride the train, there are video ads everywhere featuring a pop duo called Double H, demonstrating to throw all waste into the proper receptacles. This seeds lots of stuff later on, which I should put in a spoilers tag.

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First off, Double H is the pop group Himari used to belong to before she got sick. Himari was the center performer, and when she was there they were called Triple H. Since Himari's illness, the now-duo of Double H has found nationwide success. The band is also an ersatz double for the Takakura children's trio, a presage of what the trio might be without Himari––potent, powerful, but essentially absent of its heart––and the members of Double H will later appear in the series, playing against type and communicating what will be some of the least qualified and most unconditional love anyone will express in the throughout (success has meant nothing to them, they miss Himari keenly).

What's more, Double H sings the Survival Tactic theme song, "Welcome to the Rock n' Roll Night," when Himari transforms––and the dominatrix costume she dons will be an elaborated, ultimate variation on the costumes that Double H wears throughout the series. There are tons of other setups going on. The only moments of this first episode that didn't feel freighted to augur something to come was the teasing discussion of Shouma's cooking. A large part of the foreshadowing is building Sho and Kan as contrasting figures, but even the doctor, with his line about doctors not being miracle-workers, will end up meaning something different later on.

But another piece of sidelong setup is the fact that the first time we see Double H is in this public service commercial for throwing trash in the proper place on the trains. This gets into the sort of hidden subject matter of the show, which will gradually make itself known around the mid-point. Gonna put this in spoiler tags, too, so don't click here if a big twist halfway through the show, which changes everything about how you had perceived the show up until that point matters to you:

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So, one of the show's major surprises is the secret behind why the Takakura siblings are left in this house, all on their own. Their parents, it is eventually revealed, were ringleaders in a terrorist attack on Tokyo that killed thousands. The parents are believed to be on the run, and Sho, Kan and Himari live by themselves because their society has essentially assigned the blame that their missing parents would receive for the terrorist attack to the children––they have inherited the burden of guilt for their parents' crime. This is not an uncommon idea in Japanese culture––blame for the actions of a family member reverberate up and down the chain of connected relatives, and responsibility is frequently thought of not as something born by an isolated individual, but by a network of descendants. The trials and tribulations of the show's main trio are virtually all pinned to this notion of responsibility for their parents, and so the theme of fate in the show is of more importance than it initially seems.

This central conceit of the series is meant to be highly redolent of the Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo subway sarin gas attack of 1995. In the series there are bombs inside of very commercial-looking teddy bears, but essentially the one act is coded for the other. How is this connected to the Double H commercial? The packets of sarin gas the Aum cult members placed in the subway were put on the ground to look like refuse––in some cases covered with discarded paper––and then punctured with umbrellas the cult members had sharpened for that purpose. I had thought that the idea of the subway gas attack as a central, unifying incident for the series was introduced later on nearer to episode 12, but here it is, in the first episode, presented in this sidelong way. I was surprised by that.

As far as the aesthetics of the show, all I can say is that I like 'em. I think Hoshino's characters, with their weirdly-drawn eyes, have an appealing contrast of gravure elegance, undercut with a hint of morbidity a la Edward Gorey. I loved the house made by children, and the idea of a retreat into childhood (of course, the show will go on to suggest that this is the product of regression and emotional/psychic retrenchment, and that the main trio is denying their growing maturity in order to preserve a past that is mostly gone. But I dig it. Later episodes will go on to make clear that the cutesy tone of this episode is done in a kind of mocking insincerity––the show will get darker as it progresses. But I think that when Himari drops dead 10 minutes in, the show is already disrupting its own pallor of cliche and moving into weirder territory. As to the sexualization of Himari when she is possessed by the kami, it seems to me to point to the essential instability of the archetypes these main characters embody early on. Himari can be flipped on a dime, between demure princess and flaunting, demanding empress. And I think the last moment of the first episode––which is what hooked me on the series the first time around, suggests that the sexual exploitation of Himari––which is clearly meant to make us uncomfortable in this first episode (though, typically of Ikuhara, this presentation of Himari will be repeated throughout the series, even as it gets interrogated)––will flit around and continue to make us uncomfortable in challenging ways throughout the series. Like Rei in Evangelion––who is physically suggestive of the "medical art" photos of Romain Slocombe (Japanese girls looking vulnerable in eye-patches and slings)––Himari is an uncomfortably sexualized presence––one of the ways in which her persona as a fairy tale princess is interrogated––just as her victimhood will be interrogated later on. What Himari is about is one of the show's longest, slowest burns, and I'm hoping to get into it in more depth as the show progresses. As far as the fractured, constantly-changing tonality of the show––for me, essentially brought into movie fandom by Hong Kong films, that kind of tonal whiplash is not only totally normal, but sort of the preferred modality for shows. I loved anime earlier on, but nothing in it moved me like FlCl when it arrived––which initially turned mainstream fans off with its diversity of tonal shifts and quickchanges. Eventually, fans have seemed to embrace that show as a classic. Very few other shows do those tonal shifts as aggressively as FlCl––Excel Saga and Flip-Flappers are the ones that come to mind for me, though maybe Excel Saga exists purely in the register of mania. But when I think of tonally dissonant anime, after FlCl, Penguindrum is the next show that comes to mind. It is, so far as I'm concerned, a feature, not a bug. By episode 2 I think the approach starts to bear fruit.

And one last detail: I'm not sure the episodes on streaming preserve the ending art cards? On the blu ray these are fully translated drawings, either by Hoshino or by the character animators. The one at the end of this episode shows Himari with her penguin (No. 3) on her shoulders. The text announces that No. 3 will be the star of the next episode––and everything after that.

[feihong]

Episode 02: Risky Survival Strategy

"Today's Message: Perverts are No Good!"

• Double H is on the subway monitors again, this time warning us about perverts. And the dominatrix sends Sho and Kanba to stalk a girl at an all-girls school. The boys debate the potential form the fated Penguindrum might take. They're certain it's tangible, but already we've met the penguin creatures, whose tangibility seems to be somewhat relative (one of the penguins eats Ringo's friend's lunch, but she doesn't feel the penguin on her lap). So the question isn't so cut-and-dried.

• Almost the full episode goes towards developing the contrast between Shou and Kanba. Lines Shouma won't cross, Kanba will. Morality matters to Shouma, and not––we suspect––to Kanba. Kanba, meanwhile, is impressed with Ringo's audacious deceptions. He seems to understand Ringo right away––whereas Shouma is constantly perplexed and astounded by her trespasses.

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"It looks like she's doing to Tabuki the same thing we're doing to her." "So Ringo Oginome is..." "She's Mr. Tabuki's stalker." The idea that the whole episode is set up as stalkers stalking another stalker is pretty rich irony, for me. And in both cases, the reason for the stalking is not what it first seems. Both groups of stalkers here are on a mission, and the mission if freighted with passions, with needs, with a kind of desperate drive to undo reality, to get a reset of the way things have gone. The boys want to keep their sister alive, and Ringo––well, super-spoilers here:

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Ringo wants to embody her dead sister, living through every element of the sister's diary until her own existence is replaced and her sister, in her body, will live again.

Meanwhile, seen only through the lens of the stalking brothers, Ringo appears totally alien and creepy. This impression doesn't diminish that much in the show for quite some time.

• "Fate" introduces the episode again. We'll get a number of different reads on what fate is throughout the series. The nature of fate is probably the most persistent question we'll get, connecting strongly, as it were, to the sequence of sufferings the principal trio goes through from episode to episode to episode. The first episode presented fate primarily through Kanba's narration, as an abberation, as something he wishes to defy. At this point in the series, Kanba's idea of defying fate would be helping Himari live again. But also, there is the secret Kanba hides until the end of that first episode––that he loves Himari not only as a sister, but in a way society views as impossible. So defying fate is crucial to Kanba. Shou does narrate briefly near the end of the episode, describing everything he's seen so far as an unconnected series of inexplicable, chaotic events. In this second episode, we get Ringo Oginome's idea of fate––glorious, valedictory, conferring meaning on everything. We'll get to learn a great deal more about what she views as fate. Like all the other principal characters, her idea of fate is interrogated by the show, and her own mastery of the term and of her reality will be shown to be only skin-deep.


Episode 03: Then Devour Me Courageously

"My schedule's gotten a little off-track, but that's all right. I've done things as they were written!"

• The outrageous nature of the stalking subplot sort of normalizes in this episode, and we begin to get a sense of how complex this subplot will turn out to be (though later it will grow exponentially more dense and bizarre). Ringo gets duly humiliated for her insane machinations, and then gets brought warmly into the Takakura household. The isolation of the Takakura house is transcended slightly...but their guest is a total oddball, herself, so it may turn out to be a situation of outcasts admitting other outcasts.

• The animation bumps up in fluidity in this episode, with a lot of frenetic shenanigans captured in vivid motion. There are some unusual character design moments for any anime; both Ringo and Himari get significant costume changes. In Himari's case, the costume radically alters the way she looks. If not for the penguin, No.3, accompanying her, I wouldn't necessarily have known it was Himari.

• The range of music in the show branches out a bit this episode. We start to hear some unsettling suspense cues, as well as a weird soprano sax solo when Ringo finally tries to put the day behind her. The unusual music remains for me a really important part of the show. It sounds a little like a lighter version of one of those pseudo-minimalist Carter Burwell scores. The songs especially have a unique flavor to them.

• Ringo's idea of fate gets stretched a little in this episode. She has a book, full of destiny. We're getting towards the reveal of just what is going on with her, though some pieces still have to fit together. The idea that Ringo has "done things as they were written" is introduced into the story, to significant alarums. She is fulfilling a destiny, but it's a somewhat different idea of fate than what Kanba expresses in the first episode, and quite different from what Ringo herself implies in the second episode. For Kanba, fate is a set of prohibitions to be transcended; for Shouma, so far a series of random happenstances; in the second episode, fate is a special meeting between people for Ringo. In this third episode, however, we see Ringo's initial claim to us isn't quite as advertised. Her idea of fate is written down for her, and she is carrying it out to the letter. But this idea of acting as was written will ultimately be more complicated still, because––though we don't know it yet––

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Ringo knows the author of her fate. And she believes that she has chosen to pursue the fate written in the book.

• In a more tactile vein, the idea of devouring food courageously is a curious one. The episode is soaked in the smell of curry––characters even comment on the smell of curry on the train (along with Double H's incredible PSA: "get rid of old-people smells!"). But the idea of devouring curry courageously actually kind of casually links the way one eats food to the idea of sort of "grabbing destiny by the horns," so to speak. As Ringo's plans move forward, the tactile nature of her seduction of Mr. Tabuki will go sensory haywire. Can't remember if that's the next episode, or the one following?

• No special ending cards for either episode here. I believe both are just nice character illustrations from Hoshino.

[feihong]

The tones of the scenes and episodes start swinging pretty intensely back and forth in these episodes, between goofiness and more serious stuff. The nature of the trap the boys are in starts to become palpable. At one point Shouma accuses the kami which has possessed Himari of ransoming her to them in exchange for the penguindrum. The penguindrum, whatever it is, hasn't become concrete yet. In the meantime, Ringo fanatically pursues her goals, and we learn very definitively what those are.

Episode 04: Descension of a Princess

• This episode brings together a list of absurd contrasts. An escaped pet skunk and the Takarazuka Revue. Birdwatching contrasted with "divine retribution." The nature of Kanba's "divine retribution"––facing a association of his exes, out to make him pay––starts as funny,

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and will get more serious over the next few episodes.

• Kanba absents himself: he has something to take care of. There is a lot of development of Kanba over the course of the series. Shouma, by contrast, is a little more "what-you-see-is-what-you-get,"

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with more surprising revelations of Shouma held off until nearly the end of the show.

• In real-life, Takarazuka revue has recently performed musicals of West Side Story and Casino Royale. Their performances of "Rose of Versailles" are what is generally being parodied in this episode (and in later episodes)––it's one of their most iconic productions. For those not in the know, Takarazuka Revue is an enduringly popular musical theater troupe in Japan, featuring only women. Here's a segment from Rose of Versailles that will seem familiar from the parody in Penguindrum:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgSkduKTMQg

Takarazuka seems very dear to director Ikuhara––his previous series, Sailor Moon and especially Utena (inspired largely by Rose of Versailles) both have elements of Takarazuka associated with them. Here the theater itself is a background element of the show.

• Octopus-shaped wieners make a second appearance. Ringo's friend offered her one in episode 2, with a conspicuous double-entendre about Ringo eyeing her wiener. Gender ambiguity remains in the background of the show, more than in Ikuhara's other shows, which are more out their with their gender ambiguity motifs.

• Ringo has been the brothers' direct nemesis for the last couple of episodes; now she gets a nemesis of her own. Yuri Tokikago is really beyond Ringo in just about every way––she even knows what Ringo is up to and is determined to foil it.

• "Why did I have to do all this?" We do get development for Shouma in the episode, after all. He will abandon his primary objective (stealing the diary) to save Ringo. He will step aside so that Ringo's designs on Tabuki can continue.

• The implication at the end. Was Kanba's ex getting maybe murdered part of the plan in Ringo's diary?


Episode 05: This Is What Drives me

• The house will sell, the Takakura children will be broken up. This episode is about Kanba. Double H practically screams at him on the subway ads: "borrow responsibly; don't fall into a debt spiral!" He will risk it all to keep his family together

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(nice big irony coming there).

We get another doubling: Kanba and his father. Kanba wants to see in himself the qualities of his father. When he runs out in the rain after his father, Shou is grabbed by the mother, suggesting another doubling and division between the brothers: Kanba is paired with the father and his qualities, Shou with the mother and hers. Kanba strives to embody their father's flinty, if a little brindly, masculinity (he's described as "a man who achieves his goals"); Shou, meanwhile, has the protective, mothering instincts (last episode Kan called Shou the wife of the family, as well).

• The Mont Blanc is ruined. Ringo is meeting her father, as per the diary, but we are told this is his visitation day. A clue? Nothing in the show seems to be mentioned by accident.

• "It's my fate. My future is written in that notebook." Shouma's confession (amazingly, rehearsed for the doctor ahead of time and rejected there––how naive is he that he tries again in the same way?) falls flat. Ringo has her own idea of fate and won't budge on it.

• Welcome to the Rock n' Roll Night has lyrics that say "We've been running down this road, racing through a path full of signs," and I realize that's a weird description of the Night on Galactic Railroad plot––and the whole show is full of "signs," too; both the metaphysical ones of the sort of general "adventure," and the hundreds of screens playing news and PSAs all the time. The sign that describes flashbacks to us is another one.

• We begin to see the lengths that Kanba will go to for Himari. He runs out into the rain to save her twice in the episode. Even though he accepts her death more readily in the first episode, we see that while she is alive, he will make any sacrifice for her. It's what his father would have done, right? And he loves her, doesn't he? When Kanba has saved the day, Double H is in the background, singing a song called "Daddy Issues." Nothing is wasted.



Episode 06: You and I Are Connected by M

• After the humbling Ringo seems to receive in the previous episode, being dragged face-first into the Takakura's weird situation, that episode seemed to suggest that Ringo was maybe changed? Maybe...she'll end up less obnoxious? But this episode begins with her doubling down, seemingly having a full-blown wet dream about Tabuki, waking screaming about it. But I think we're being led astray here a bit. Ringo isn't really "getting off" on the idea of Tabuki, but on something more complicated

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(she's imagining herself as her sister, making love to Tabuki because her sister apparently did).

• So far, the child-like nature of many elements of the story seem to be appreciated by the filmmakers; the childlike nature of the Takakura house, the Takakura children's well-meaning natures. Specifically, Himari's infantilism is equated with her kindness and innocence. But Ringo is portrayed here as regressively, dangerously childlike (unnaturally clinging to childishness, perhaps, while Himari seems to come by it honestly?) Then there is the disturbing transformation, when Kanba witnesses his exes getting their minds wiped of his memory––another regression. Regardless, what counts as a "regression" and what is simply part of who you are becomes very important as the story goes forward.

• The stalking subplot has come to the fore really fast. Kanba's secret world is getting erased before his eyes.

• The pathology of Ringo's childishness gets fully explicated.

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Ringo's parents are trying to move on from the death of Ringo's older sister, Momoka, and Ringo resolves to hold the family together by becoming her older sister. The connection to Tabuki is revealed: he was her elder sister's lover.

• Young Tabuki campares himself to Schrodinger's cat: "Half-dead, half-alive."

• Ringo's mother knows Shouma's last name, but seems to dismiss it. This is maybe the first full-blown hint of the show's most important plot point.

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The Takakuras are, it turns out, famous––or infamous.

[feihong]

Episode 07: The Egg-Chanting Girl

• The principal action of the episode consists of Ringo's plan getting undermined, Ringo's desperation at the loss of control, and Shouma's attempts to wear her down so he can convince her to show him her "Fate Diary." Then there is Yuri's engagement to Tabuki, which means giving up a world of fantasy on the stage.

• Ringo mentions Yuri's "Glass Mask," which is a reference to a famous manga/anime from the 70s about a driven young woman struggling to succeed on the stage.

• On stage the drama is of Marie Antoinette returning to Paris to presumably face her destiny. Is Yuri facing her destiny by marrying Tabuki? Yuri's co-star has bought into the illusion, confusing stage and reality. The contrast of staged reality to the real thing––Ringo stages a marriage to Tabuki; everything is there but the groom, who doesn't know this has been determined. Yuri's co-star believes their on-stage chemistry and fan rumors make her reality.

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(Of course, later on, there will be revealed a further level of illusion. The glamorous couple is staging their own marriage, and their love affair. And Ringo is actually more closely connected to the two of them than she realizes).

• Yuri's co-star seems to play Lady Oscar off-stage as well as on.

• Not remarked-upon before, but the shot composition in the series is full of intense forced angles and cool setups. The shot where Yuri announces her engagement, and the world falls away from Ringo is really cool.

• More doubling: A second "Project M," enacted by Kanba's pursuer. Ringo's close mania, with frog spells and stolen curry, contrasted to the Project M of the red-headed girl, erasing Kanba from his exes' memories.


Episode 08: Even If Your Love is a Lie, I...

• The western parody (done in cinemascope, with whistling, a la Sergio Leone) somehow is filled with figures from the Takrazuka opera.

• The red-headed girl chasing Kanba has a penguin of her own.

• "Papa, mama; the family will be broken into pieces." Ringo's plan is being carried out for the same reasons as the brother's plan: to keep the family together. Which plan is crazier?

• The dramatic tension between Shouma and Ringo really comes to a head in this episode. Probably the most heated, direct dramatic confrontation so far in the series, where two characters just won't see eye to eye.


Episode 09: Frozen World

• This episode introduces a whole new angle on the story, an entirely metaphysical space in which a separate part of the story is playing out. Like a character from the author which is obviously her favorite––Haruki Murkami––Himari dreams an entire, vital chapter of the story, gaining critical access to her own past––and then immediately losing it again.

• The local town square has a sculpture of two men seeming to fly, one inverted on top of the other. A representation of the brothers?

• Another clever idea not suggested until now. The penguin had the kami comes from is mass-produced. Are there other hats like Himari's? Other servants of this same kami...or of a different one?

• The entire episode is played as a fairytale, yet it takes place in the moments of Himari's death. In flashback, like Alice follows the white rabbit, Himari follows the penguin.

• In the Hole in the Sky Library, Himari looks for Haruki Murakami's short story, "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo." This is a story which just got adapted as part of a French animated film this year, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman. The story is of an ordinary office worker confronted by a human-sized frog, who demands the worker help him fight a great worm under Tokyo. The frog proves himself real to the worker by solving the worker's problems in his office through frightening violence (shades of Himari's kami already). The worker wants to help frog, but is sidelined when an attacker jumps out of an alley and shoots the worker on the eve of the great battle. When he wakes up in a hospital bed, the worker learns the day has passed without an earthquake. When frog reappears, he tells the worker that they in fact made their appointment, and fought the worm, and that the worker helped frog valiantly, and that they finally subdued the worm, preventing the earthquake. Then the frog, tired, melts into the floor. The story comes from a collection called "after the quake," all about the 1995 Kobe earthquake. If followed a bit after the publication of Murakami's book on the Tokyo subway gas attack, "Underground. Pretty much every element of the story has some resonance in Penguindrum––the surreal anthropomorphic animal creatures only select people can see, the national disaster (the connection to "Underground," all about the very relevant gas attack), the metaphorical battle for the soul Tokyo...all will be relevant. "Super Frog Saves Tokyo" seems not to be in the library's database, though?

• The other titles Himari is returning are "Sputnik Weirdo"––which seems to be a parody of Murakami's previous novella, "Sputnik Sweetheart," "Learn to Earn Ten Times More," and "Stephen Queen's" "Christine." All are rendered in elegant, old-school cover designs a little anachronistic for their subject matter.

• In the dream journey Himari undergoes, her penguin already has the "No. 3" mark on its back that Kanba writes there later.

• If you thought Ringo was the most exasperating character you'd have to meet in the series, prepare to meet your new nemesis, Sanetoshi Watase. Like a real sh*t, he mis-names "Super Frog Saves Tokyo's" author. He has a million different books almost like "Super Frog Saves Tokyo," but stories of different people's lives.

• Himari's childhood friends form Triple H with her––their names are all a letter or two apart from one another. They are Himari's other trio (apart from with her siblings)––but also they are very nearly all the same person when we meet them as elementary school students.

• So Himari is not all sunshine and roses. There's a darker personality inside, and the implication she's chosen––having seen the violence her selfishness and anger causes––to repress it. The other two in Triple H back up Himari insanely, trying to murder a koi fish for her. There's another parody here––the girls have read a manga called "Barefoot Gon," which is a combination of "Barefoot Gen," a story of a boy surviving the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, and "Gon," which is a dialogue-less comic about a little dinosaur.

• The penguin hat is called "the wedding veil bestowed upon the bride of fate." Sanetoshi Watase gives it to her, and Himari changes into her kami costume, refuses princely Sanetoshi's fairytale kiss, and is plunged back to the human world and into death. An apple from "Night on Galactic Railroad" follows her, while Double H sings one of the more memorable pieces from the sountrack, "Gray Wednesday"––maybe in reference to Himari's fateful death.

• A little out there with this theory: Sanetoshi Watase's surname is not quite, but very close to the changing name of the villain in Haruki Murakami's two stabs at the Wind-Up Bird story, the short story "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women" and the novel, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." The name is the name of the protagonist's brother-in-law in both cases, a sinister and undesirable figure. In the short story, he is "Noboru Watanabe," and in the novel he is "Noboru Wataya." Watanabe also appears in an earlier Murakami short story, "Family Affair," as just an obnoxious brother-in-law, the husband of the main character's sister. In "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women," the role is swapped, and now he is main character Toru's wife's brother. In both story and novel, the respective Noboru's name is the name they give to their cat, who is missing at the start of both stories. And Sanetoshi Watase's chesire smile is a little bit evocative of the cat. Noboru Watanabe the brother-in-law never appears in "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women," but––and this is interesting––he is the unambiguous villain of the novel, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"––a sinister politician,

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having an incestuous affair with his sister, kidnapping her for that purpose.

He is presented as the inverse of protagonist Toru, effective, strong, rapacious, all-consuming. But to the outside world, he is smooth, charming, and a success. Sanetoshi Watase probably most resembles this figure from the novel––

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he'll be pretty sinister later on.

But the connection goes a little deeper. "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is about Toru, who loses first his cat and then his wife, and who then is confronted with a long list of people, who all tell him crucial, turning-point stories from their pasts. The different characters usually don't know each other, but their stories are all connected, forming a tapestry only Toru learns to read and interpret. This kind of tapestry of shared trauma will come together in Penguindrum as well. I think that, as with other literary reference in Penguindrum, elements of the stories referenced just continue to reverberate throughout the series.

• We get our first look at a metaphorical (?) setting of significance to the story at large here,

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the Child Broiler, where Himari recalls a young boy inviting her to share the fruit of fate, there. We'll later learn that boy is Shouma, but more on that later.

• The last couple of seconds of the episode are mind-bending. So...this episode took place simultaneous with the last one? And Himari doesn't remember anything of this episode, but...but she has "Super Frog Saves Tokyo," checked out from the Hole in the Sky library.


Episode 10: All for Love

• The series' creators like to obliquely repurpose melodrama as a major mover of the plot and as a way to develop themes. Here, Shouma is hit by a car, pulling together the main characters for the first time in a while. Ringo––who needs someone to be hit by a car in order to snap her out of her obsessions––hears Shou covering for her responsibility for the accident to his brother––enlarging her view of Shouma. As if we needed more soapy shenanigans, there's a brief kidnapping here as well––the prize for which turns out to be

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romance & intrigue.

• Kanba is drawn pretty weirdly in the beginning of this episode. He looks a little off-model.

• Shouma's true colors start to come through. Though Kanba will sacrifice first, Shouma is different, and will sacrifice for anyone––regardless of what they do to him.

• But in a typical turn, the episode is more largely focused on Kanba. Kanba's past remains mysterious, but we're about to plunge into it.

• The cloak & dagger over the Fate Diary is moving into genuine paranoid thriller territory.

• Another ending card with some humor attached. The quote is "Survival Strategy: It's Too Revealing."

[feihong]

Episode 11: You Have Finally Realized It


"I was the one who messed up your fate to begin with!"

• We still don't know who stole the other half of the diary from Ringo. This episode has precious little plot content––Ringo moves her seduction project into its final form, and Shouma tries to make up with her. But the episode is full of disruptive disclosures, essential to giving the show meaning. The filmmakers really begin to really tip their hand, with the vital revelation of how Ringo and the Takakuras are connected. The secret origin of the Takakuras starts to be revealed in this episode––the "crime" that binds them all together erupts from the past. All of the quirky elements of the show so far have been leading up to this–––which is probably why Himari's kami is present for the revelation, for both Ringo's and Shou's confessions. What is the meaning of the so-called "penguindrum" in the first place? Of what function is this penguin-hat kami, if not a sort of god of "fate?"

• This episode gives us the ultimate end of Ringo's "Project M," seduction campaign against Tabuki, and provides the hinge to transition into the main substance of the show. The veil is pierced. What is the nature of Ringo's campaign? She actually succeeds in drugging Tabuki, in getting him into the seduction she has dreamt of achieving (though he is ribbiting like a frog as a result of the potion she's slipped him), but love for Shouma stops her from pursuing her plan. The transition happens because Shou and Himari bring Ringo curry, thinking she likes it. In fact, Ringo doesn't really "like" curry at all, does she? Eating curry fulfills a purpose that is part of Ringo's grand scheme to re-unite her broken family, by embodying her dead elder sister. Take that goal away––as this episode starts to do, and what does she, Ringo, actually like? What of Ringo is hers, since the day she resolved to be her sister's replacement?

The revelation that comes out of this is going to be of the event in which Ringo's sister Momoka was killed, whose real-world parallel is the Aum subway gas attack. Next episode we'll learn that

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Shou, Kanba and Himari's parents were the masterminds behind this attack.

It is interesting how Himari's kami forces the reveal of the connection between the Takakuras and Ringo, then watches the emotional devastation that accompanies it come across, impassively. The god in the hat seems really to be shepherding this story to completion, advancing a fate, rather than trying to acquire an actual "penguindrum"-type device. The next group of episodes––as I recall, the most intense and harrowing part of the series––deals with the heretofore unperceived fallout of the death of Ringo's sister Momoka, and how it redounds to the fate of the Takakura siblings. Speaking of the "siblings..."

• Natsume, the "love hunter"––who has been wiping the slate clean of all Kanba's romantic conquests––lays her cards on the table for Kanba.

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Her younger brother, Mario, is in the same position as Himari, with another of the penguin hats. This has always been the most confusing element of the story for me. Is this a different kami possessing Mario's hat? Is it the same one? What's the point of having this second figure in the same position as Himari?

What becomes clear from this scene, though, is that Kanba has, essentially,

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another family. That Natsume and Mariio are his real siblings, rather than Shou and Himari. Over the course of the rest of the series, we learn that the Takakura family has been composed patchwork: Shou is their only biological child, Kanba has run away from a wealthy family, and Himari was an abandoned orphan, rescued by Shouma from the "Child Broiler." At the same time, Kanba bears a very striking physical resemblance to the Takakura father. The show is obsessed with doubling, and now we see that the Takakura "family" is in fact a double for a series of undefined families the show won't really go into. There's also the inverse doubling of the Takakura family––made piecemeal but bound together by fate––and Ringo's own family––composed through birth and inheritance, but torn apart by fate.

Guilt binds the Takakuras together. Suffering breaks the Oginomes into pieces.

• Ringo finally gets her chance, but can't seal the deal with Tabuki. Ringo can't sort out her feelings. There is some fun in the contrast of Ringo––dressed in this sort of deliberately more "adult"-seeming costume of seduction, and Himari in her childlike overalls, with the buns in her hair. Ringo can't understand Himari's sweetness––her own life has been all scheming cruelty and trauma. I think this scene hopefully puts paid to the idea that the sexualization of the main character is some sort of commercial ploy; it's pretty clear here that the female characters sexuality is always being presented as "performance," a playing of a role for a specific end. It's also important to look at which female characters don't get sexualized by the camera at all––none of Kanba's girlfriends, for instance, are portrayed in an exploitative way––though another show might use this as an opportunity to create some "bimbo"––styled sexpots. Ringo, who has spent more than half the show so far trying to seduce Shou's homeroom teacher Tabuki, has been portrayed in lingerie, in fancy evening dresses––but these looks have to be read as self-consciously "too adult" for Ringo. She is trying to pour herself into a role, and an identity, that she isn't ready to inhabit.

That being the case, what about the obvious sexualization of Himari? There's a key element to this which I think makes it clear how self-consciously the filmmakers have approached this issue: in the real world segments of the show, Himari is given this sort of curious costume, a kind of frilled, ruffled dress with a high neckline, and adorable boots, which tie the outfit together. There's a western string tie, and a sense that the outfit is vaguely similar to a high school uniform––but with far more individualized details and a more tailored cut than high school uniforms get. But for the boots, Himari looks like she could be a passenger on the Titanic. When not planning to go out anywhere, Himari wears overalls and does her hair up in buns. Both costumes confer some historical gender identities (identities traditionally at odds with one another––my grandmother might in her youth have worn a dress like Himari's––my mother in her young adulthood might have dressed like Himari dresses at home), but neither one is ogled for sexual qualities. The filmmakers are very chaste in presenting real-world Himari as well. There aren't any low-angled shots depicting her. She never attempts the sexuality Ringo is going for, either (and we know Ringo's attempts at sexuality for what they are––acting out of a role which Ringo is actually not comfortable performing).

It's only in the dreamtime world of Survival Strategy that Himari is so sexualized, with the bizarre costume with bustier, a leotard, and no dress––merely the train of one, trailing behind the obvious lack of it. The camera, in this sequence follows Himari strutting, voguing, and then there is the very obvious shot aimed directly at the crotch of her leotard. So what is this sequence for?

In later Survival Strategy sequences, this filming strategy doesn't come up. The kami Himari of this episode just sits around, with a glassy look on her face, during the subway confession. The camera does not pick out the sexualized elements of the character. There's another Survival Strategy session where the kami Himari tries to prove her existence to the Shou and Kan by dressing in a cow costume and drinking quarts of milk in succession. I think there's a weird subversion of the character's initial fetishization going on as the story progresses. But in terms of the initial appearance, the voyeuristic filmmaking is meant to contrast sharply with Himari's presented personality. What's more, the sexualization of dominatrix Himari occurs for the benefit of Shou and Kan. They're made uncomfortable by it––it doesn't seem like Himari––and yet, Kan is in love with her, and might presumably be drawn to Himari if she were to present herself to him in this way (in fact, Kan is less fazed by dominatrix Himari than Shou is––the differing relationship between Kan and Himari and Shou and Himari starts to be made clear by their varied reactions to the dominatrix version of her––

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this will radiate outward until the show ultimately comes to revolve around the differences between Shouma and Kanba).

So to my mind, the exploitative early sexualization of Himari is done in the service of diegetic story concerns.

• "Curry Day" tradition is revealed––the connection between Ringo and the Takakuras is revealed. Shou, to Ringo: "I was the one who messed up your fate to begin with." "My brother Kanba and I were born that day." What does Shou mean about he and his brother being born that day?

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The Takakura kids are all living together when their parents disappear after the attack. In a way, maybe Shou is trying to say that the unspoken pact cementing the sort of virtual "brotherhood" between himself and Kanba, protecting Himari and binding them all together as a family, originates from the terrorist attack?

• Final card at the end of the episode says "Survival Strategy: Little Sister's Orders," with a seductive image of the two brothers, both staring at us and looking dishy and dangerous (peak Lily Hoshino design). Shou and Kanba have been following the dominatrix kami the whole time, but in a certain sense, the orders they receive come from their little sister––and they would do anything for her. The layering of identities in the show is reaching a kind of terminal confluence:

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the Takakura family is not, in traditional Japanese society, "real"––the siblings come from different family lines (and Himari's provenance is really unknown). But the trio serve each other as an idealized family would––loving and caring for one another regardless of how hard it gets.

The brothers serve this kami, this sort of "god of fate" in Himari's hat––yet they serve Himari at the same time. Ringo is the Oginome's younger daughter, but she wants to replace the older one––negating her own person in the process. There's been significant pathos, I think, in retrospect, in the idea that only Ringo perceives herself as the replacement for her elder sister Momoka, and not any of the people she's trying to convince that she has replaced her sibling. She is entirely alone in this belief

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(and yet, as I recall, we come to learn that the Oginomes don't actually have a younger daughter, and that Ringo is actually a sort of psychic remnant of her elder sister Momoka after all––making the irony a lot thicker).

• This episode really starts to get at one of Penguindrums most effective filmmaking approaches, and one of the things I most appreciate about the show: we are constantly being presented with different versions of the characters, different identities superimposed on one another. Every character can be spread out like a fan of varied impressions. The Himari who is dead and reanimated in the first episode is like three different takes on Himari: one buoyant and alive, one somewhat seductive corpse (Himari's corpse is always presented as gently sleeping), and one petulant dominatrix goddess. But the Himari of Episode 09: Frozen World, is yet another take on Himari, much more mysterious than the others. And yet, there are other takes: Himari at home, with her overalls and boxing gloves. Himari in a cow costume, drinking quarts of milk. Each case is presented as a different valence, almost a separate occurrence of the character. And the nature of the filmmaking is such that we read everyone as being presented in these isolated "modes." They are in one mode for one episode, another for another episode. The vulnerable Kanba taken by surprise in this episode, when he is reunited with

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his real sister, Natsume,

is different from the Kanba of Episode 05: This is What Drives Me, where we see Kanba's absurd, ultimate determination to save Himari. Also, one more intoxicatingly perverse element of doubling: Kanba wants to get together with his sister Himari––this is presented in the first episode as a kind of trespass on their relationship.

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And yet, in this episode, we learn that, as far as society is concerned, it would have been fine––Kanba and Himari are not biologically related. But to make it all more complicated, Kanba's biological sister, Natsume, wants to replace all Kanba's previous lovers, rewriting the world around her so that she and Kanba can be together. This is presented in this episode as sexual/romantic desire on Natsume's part––and yet there's even another crazy valence. Natsume wants Kanba to help her get the penguindrum, for Mario's sake.

Is that the ultimate point of Natsume's seduction? Whatever the case, the relentless doubling deliberately confuses the issue, and at the same time, makes it an issue in the first place. That's what I love, I guess. It continually blows my mind.

[feihong]

This tranche of episodes takes the show hard right, straight into the big twist you really couldn't possibly have seen coming. It turns out the whole show has been about things that we're just barely getting around to addressing, and part of the fun, I think, is in reflecting on those earlier episodes, now that you know what they're sort of about. No wonder the Takakura's house looks like a child's conception of what a cosy home should be. No wonder now the isolation of the main characters, the way in which the humans in the background remain these detached symbols, not relating to the Takakuras at all. The rest of these episodes trace the fallout of this surprise revelation.

In Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu story structure, we've arrived roughly at "Ten," the 3rd-act turn. The point of this part of the structure is to create a twist that re-contextualizes what's already been established by the series. Most of the rest of the structure of the series will be dealing with the fallout of this abrupt turn, before the series twists its way into what I remember to be a fairly devastating conclusion.



Episode 12: The Wheel that Spins Us Around

• We have a return of the "fate" soliloquy as a start to the episode, this time delivered, I think, by Himari's doctor. And then Sanetoshi Watase finally starts f*cking around with the story, showing up in odd places. He's in the office of Himari's doctor, connecting the doctor to the events of the story by revealing to us a photo of the doctor in an antarctic expedition with the Takakura's father. Then he's prank-calling Kanba. He says to Kanba he's someone "from the destination of fate," making another allusion to Kenji Miyazawa's Galactic Railroad. Miyazawa was a Christian, but it's interesting how Buddhist the bent of his train implies things to be. The train, after all, comes around again once it's finished its rounds. The filmmakers pick up on this, and they tend to read "Night on Galactic Railroad" as a Buddhist text, with the repeat voyage of the train delivering a reincarnation reset. This happens by the end of the series. That, and the idea floated in the first episode that Heaven is essentially personal, a place that exists wherever you find it, is an interesting take on the idea. I'm no expert, but I get a strong sense that the series' authors are interpreting the religious meanings of Miyazawa's text in their own way. Even though elements of "Night on Galactic Railroad" are interwoven throughout Mawaru Penguindrum, I don't get the sense that there is any specifically religious bent to the drama. There will be an element of social morality that emerges out of the further explication of the Takakura's parents' situation, but the series seems content to push the religious concepts far to the background

• Shou's confession to Ringo picks up exactly as it left off last episode, as if not a second has past. We get a flashback thick with detail. Mr. Takakura wears a work jacket with the penguin hat logo on the pocket. The

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terrorist action he takes

is called the "Survival Strategy." Shou is, apparently,

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born to the Takakuras moments before the action is initiated. The start of the action is in the subway––shades of the Aum subway gas attack. Tabuki misses the train because the attack has started––otherwise, he would have died with Momoka Oginome.

Tabuki is flanked by crosses at Momoka's funeral, in an interesting composition. Meanwhile, the kami in the penguin hat has fallen asleep, bored with the story. She tells us "the world has called forth the dark bunnies again!" The kami suggests that the fate that binds the Takakuras and the Oginomes can be severed by obtaining the penguindrum. The kami analogizes it to derailing a train from it's track. Sanetoshi Watase appears walking away with two black-haired kids––the same "black bunnies" the kami mentions––who are presumably the same black bunnies we see on the doctor's desk? (Sanetoshi will be treated as a double for the doctor a lot of the time going forward).

• "Stuffed cabbage is our symbol of reconciliation." Himari uses it to mend bonds, and in fact the stuffed cabbage is a metaphor for the way the Takakura family

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has been assembled––different children, stuffed together under the same roof.

• The hospital where Himari is taken has the penguin hat symbol in its cafeteria, and a giant penguin hat logo can be seen on the building in relief when it lights up at night.

• Shou tells a far more convoluted story of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" than is common. The Takakura children are analogized to three "little lambs." The black bunnies enter the story, telling the Takakuras not to give up. Kanba offers his soul in exchange for Himari's life. It seems the kami is running out of juice. Kanba saves the day, but at what cost? His soul––a bright red ball––mirrors the apple of the Miyazawa novella. The "Mary Had a Little Lamb" story concludes with a reminder of the fickle nature of fate. Kanba's plea for Himari's life looks like a prayer. Essentially, the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" story Shouma tells is a mashup of several different nursery rhymes and fairy tales. I feel like there's a purpose to this, which may come clear eventually.


Episode 13: Crime & Punishment for You & me

• Sanetoshi compares his medicine that saves Himari to a prince's kiss. He is mocking Kanba's impotence in the face of Himari's death, but also keeping up a bizarre ruse that he is the new doctor. Between this episode and the last one, Kanba has given up his soul to the kami reanimating Himari, and then been mocked and humiliated because his soul isn't enough to save Himari. On this viewing, it seems this is

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the start of the wedge between Shouma and Kanba, which will lead directly to the climax of the show.

• The apples become more prominent in this episode, in the flashback to the Takakura's home after the parents flee. There is a trio of apples stacked near the doorway, representing the trio of children. There are apples shared amongst the passengers on the galactic railroad in the Miyazawa story, as a sign of togetherness in the text, a sign of people sharing their struggles and joys together.

• Sanetoshi Watase returns to the library after restoring Himari. There is a pink-haired child running before him, playing and laughing

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––it is Momoka Oginome. Sanetoshi tells us his own story––16 years ago, he meets another like him––Momoka. She has clearly died––16 years ago is the incident that propels the story––but Sanetoshi wants her as a partner, an ally, as more? Momoka rejects him. Sanetoshi claims he is using the fate of the Takakuras to determine whether fate rules human lives.

"So, search for the penguindrum together," he says, abstractly addressing the brothers. "Find out if it's real." The penguindrum here seems to stand in for either the presence or the absence of fate as a driving factor in people's lives.

• "Our actions must reflect our humanity." The Tokyo Sky Metro is a train built in the wake of

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the Takakura's terror attack

––tying civic progress to an idea of personal morality. We also see that

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Sanetoshi has assigned Natsume to steal the diary from Ringo.

So part of Sanetoshi's game is to play both sides against each other.

• Surprise! Tabuki knows the Takakuras are the children

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whose parents took Momoka away from him.

Ringo seems to tie up her relationship with Tabuki, acknowledging together their shared pain for the first time. Tabuki has a nicely chilling line, to echo Ringo's own maxim: "nothing in this world is pointless." I'm sure nothing will come of this in future episodes.

• Ringo recapitulates her speech about fate, as if she's trying to wrap it around the new revelations she's experienced. Everything must happen for a reason, she insists, as we see a flashback of the Takakura children, just as the pain of realization floods through them, when

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they learn that their parents were the terrorists responsible for the famous attack on Tokyo.

Episode 14: Princess of Lies

• My favorite part of the series, this sort of 3rd section, running into the 4th act. The filmmakers have dropped this huge revelation––only foreshadowed in the tiniest ways––and they seem to have tied up almost all the strands of plot remaining in the story. Now the filmmakers will start to let slip havoc, with some pretty surprising new movements of the plot. What has this show been about? In the coming movements of the plot, I think it starts to become clear.

• Yuri Tokikago ends a long-standing affair with her opera co-star. The world is a curtain of lies. She longs to see "the only one who told me I was beautiful." Who does she mean?

• Ringo is bright, cheery, upbeat. She doesn't seem to miss the diary. Now she's really into Shouma. It seems the trauma she's shared with Shouma and Himari has flipped a switch and turned her into a more normal person. Shouma, meanwhile, now rejects her. He's come to realize his family is responsible for Ringo's loss. He can't handle the guilt, and he leaves Ringo in tears.

• Himari has been knitting scarves for the members of Double H. But she discards them, thinking no one would want to receive a hand-knitted anything from her. The sense is that Himari seems to be preparing for death, preparing to disappear from people's thoughts in the future.

• We're starting to get at what I think is sort of the point of the series, and it comes from the mouth of the series' most annoying character, of all people. Sanetoshi teases Kanba with demands. Kanba's brought him money, he says now it isn't enough. It's Sanetoshi's justification for this that seems most relevant: "Every day, the market sorts the lives of children around the world into those who are saved and those who aren't."

• Yuri had a first love of her own, she reveals. She was abandoned by them "one day, leaving me all alone, without telling me."

• Natsume tells Kanba he is standing on the edge of an iceberg––referring to the way Kanba seems to be getting money from

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the agents of his parents' organization.

On the screens in the train, Double H insists "It only takes one word for the seeds of misconduct to spread like a wheel." The wheel is, presumably, the wheel of fate. The dialogue implies Kanba is risking everything for Himari. Of course, character comes first in this series, and it's notable that throughout all of this, Kanba remains the calmest we've seen him since the early part of the series. Making this kind of sacrifice, for love, for the family he has chosen for himself––mortgaging his own soul––this kind of sacrifice comes naturally to him.

• Natsume is the same sort of loser that Kanba appears to be. This is sealed when she begs Kanba to give up loving Himari and look at her instead. "Why aren't I enough?" she asks, in the same way Kanba did when the kami rejected the sacrifice of his soul.

• Zounds!

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Yuri Tikikago knew Momoka Oginome. I wonder where this is going. Sh*t, I know where this is going, and I love it. Where could these ideas have come from? Yuri says Ringo has the same scent as her sister.

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Yuri says Momoka changed her world. Sanetoshi says he loved Momoka and realized they were two of an entirely rarified kind (where does the kami in the hat fit into all of this? it isn't the same kind of creature as Sanetoshi, apparently). Tabuki loved Momoka.

Just to put all this in perspective, Momoka is depicted as being about 8 when tragedy strikes. This is a lot to put on an 8-year-old.

Eventually, Yuri blurts out that everything about Ringo is a carbon copy of Momoka (I guess nobody saw Momoka's pink hair as pink––presumably, they don't see Sanetoshi's hair as pink, either).

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Yuri wants Momoka to live again. She's stolen Momoka's diary––she's about to do to Ringo just what Ringo has been doing to Tabuki for the whole series so far––but Yuri is so much more capable, that she comes very close to achieving her aim.

• Incidentally, the hot springs "girls night" Yuri takes Ringo on is a common trope in a lot of yuri manga titles. And Yuri seems to be using the hot springs trip in the same way that the girls of a "girls love" yuri story might: this is a place two girls can go without setting of any knee-jerk prejudices, where sensual seduction is the norm, and they can play––these springs usually have private rooms for groups or pairs of guests––in as romantic a way as possible. The series features a lot of BL (Boys' Love, gay romance titles) tropes between the "brothers," And this episode seems determined to tease out all the ways Yuri might have been a very "on-the-nose" name for Tokikago. Of course, this is still about Yuri re-living her one-sided romance with an 8-year-old (she was the same age, but still).


Episode 15: Saving the World

• The second theme song, along with the new credits sequence, debuts this episode. Ah, for the days when most shows had this delightful change of pace and tone, and a whole second season to develop ideas set up in the first season. How disappointing this is hardly a thing any longer in adult-oriented anime like this one; nowadays, a single season is all most shows can hope to get, with the carrot of a second season extended vaguely sometimes.

• Ringo tells Shouma she's going to transcend childhood essentially, by making love to Yuri. Ikuhara's previous anime, Rdvolutionary Girl Utena, and it's revisionist follow-up film, Adolescence of Utena, were early yuri texts in animation, taking the promise Rose of Versailles teased at nearly all the way to the finish-line. The love between Utena and Anthy the Rose Bride is especially explicated in the movie, where Utena becomes a racing car and Anthy "drives" her to freedom. Ikuhara's next series, Yurikuma Arashi, was explicitly yuri, taken from a text by well-known yuri author Morishima Akiko. But it's notable that Ikuhara's lesbian love stories––with the exception of Adolescence of Utena, and the secondary couple in Sailor Moon––end with unhappiness, or at least a lack of fulfillment. In the series, Utena appears to be punished at the end for trying to be a prince, rather than a princess. In Yurikuma Arashi, the humans and bears fail to live together in harmony, with the main characters only holding out vague hope of reconciliation in the future.

The happy ending in yuri romance is a topic with a backstory; in the past, lesbian romance texts tended to end in tragedy (there are exceptions, such as Djuna Barnes' "Nightwood," but popular publishing demanded this tragedy in many cases, and in some cases, like Vin Packer's "Spring Fire," a refutation of lesbianism on the part of one of the characters was forced on the text). Early yuri stories were no exception, with most of them ending in the suicide of one of the girls, or in a graduation from school or a marriage ending the romantic relationship. So in lesbian romance fiction in general, when it became possible to have happy endings for these stories, this tended to be the preferred mode, for both writers and readers. There are still some exceptions, and I bring this up with Ikuhara in particular, because often-times, filmmakers who are not lesbian themselves tend to still tack towards the tragic ending. And more than half the time, Ikuhara has gone in that direction himself. It makes me wonder how integrated into the milieu of this material Ikuhara really is. And is the nature of his investment in it more about him being different, or does his exploration of yuri material come from a place of honesty?

I feel like this is important to query, because Yuri in Penguindrum is given a very bleak storyline and motivation for her lesbianism. We see here a crazy flashback to a childhood of abuse––her father essentially turns her away from men for good (he is the most reprehensible character in a story that includes indiscriminate terrorist bombers and selfish gods playing with peoples' fates). So there's a pathology to Yuri's pursuit of love which is disappointingly retrograde. And Shouma's "rescue" of Ringo, trying to save her virginity from Yuri's "trespass," plays kinda grossly to me today (it is hilarious that Shouma has by happenstance ended up in the same hot springs as Yuri and Ringo, so he can effect this rescue), with Shouma practically making the sign of the cross to protect him from this lesbian seductress of his virginal Ringo. But I'm conflicted, because the story that comes out of this, where Momoka changes Yuri's fate, is fascinating, and key to the crazy, evolving narrative of the show. I wouldn't say it's impossible to read Yuri's story as being more specific than it is emblematic, but then, of course, Yuri's lesbian co-star is also mocked by the show, with Yuri giving her the brush-off in the crassest way possible. All of this plays into Yuri's outlook on the world as essentially bleak, full of untrustworthy people.

• "Don't you think families are a sort of fantasy, a curse of sorts? Think about it. Just how many children suffer because they're bound to their family?" Sanetoshi starts needling Kanba

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––does he need his makeshift family? Could he cut loose of them? Kanba will never do it.

But Sanetoshi is talking about everyone in this episode, really––except for one person. We see a child looking like Ringo, and a father letting go of her hand. We're getting a faceful this episode of Yuri's family, with the worst father in all of history. But there's one figure in the episode Sanetoshi can't include in this theory, though we don't know it yet, and that's Himari. Himari is abandoned in the Child Broiler when Shouma finds her and invites her into the Takakura family. And one feels that if she had it to do over again, Himari––knowing just what she would suffer with her siblings––would be happy to return to them. Living together is, as she says in the first episode, her idea of heaven. In the next few episodes, family will come to seem like a curse to Shouma and Kanba––and family has always been a curse to Ringo and to Yuri. But family is the defining feature of Himari's life, the one she clings to no matter what. In fact, maybe Episode 09: Frozen World has such a disturbing tone to it, with a stranger, slightly edgier Himari, is because she is separated from her family for the whole of it?

Come to think of it, Himari meets Sanetoshi in that episode, and distrusts him significantly. Yet in this episode, she acknowledges Sanetoshi as her doctor without making the connection to the slimy character from her dream.

• "Saving the world," as postulated in the title of this episode is presented in the first of a series of wrenching, galvanizing possibilities. Here, we learn how Momoka proposed to save the world. She cast spells to set certain people she cared about on track for a different fate (Momoka consciously refers to this as "like changing tracks on a train"––a metaphor that the series has been building up to the whole time. Every time she does the spell, however, there is a cost, and Momoka pays that cost, physically, each time.

And in a minor way, Sanetoshi "saves the world" in this episode, taking the scarves Himari has knitted for Double H out of the trash where Himari discarded them (when she lost faith in herself) and sending them to the Double H girls. Himari sees them on TV wearing the scarves, and her faith in herself seems to be restored.

So what distinguishes Momoka from Sanetoshi? In the next episode, we'll learn that Sanetoshi has a plan to save the world as well–which seems to place the burden of sacrifice on the shoulders of others. Is this the disagreement that means they can never be allies? The kami wants a "Survival Strategy," which proposes to change fate as well, like what Momoka and Sanetoshi do––but energy is needed to effect this, the energy of a sacrifice.

[feihong]

These couple of episodes appear relatively light compared to the most recent ones, and especially light compared to the ones immediately following. There is in both episodes a weird preoccupation with characters eating seafood. Events move forward a little slower than in other episodes, and suspense is built slowly––especially in Episode 17.


Episode 16: Immortal Man

• This episode, which finally gives us Natsume's origin story, is very much like all of Natsume's other appearances: showy, goofy, pretty hilarious––but also not holding up especially well under scrutiny. In particular, I never feel that Natsume's story really lines up with the other stories we get in the show so cleanly. There is a parallel missing here, or just misaligned in a strange way, which makes her material feel relatively insubstantial next to the the other stories we encounter in the series. I like Natsume for the way she is able to stand up to the adult characters in the story on a one-to-one basis––neither the Takakuras nor Ringo ever quite attempt something so brazen––and so I admire Natsume's brio. But there is the persistent feeling that what she does in the show is less emotionally meaningful than what Ringo and the Takakuras wrestle with. It will be hilarious to watch her in the next episode, however, when she has her rematch with Yuri Tokikago.

• The idea is, ultimately, that Natsume plans to kill her domineering grandfather, in order that her father––who has been excommunicated from the family––can return to her. But when she finally kills the grandfather, he comes back as a spirit, possessing the body of her younger brother, Mario. Since all the other characters are doubles of each other––another way to say it is that telling parallels are drawn between many of them, which help us distinguish their different motivations and themes from one another––I want to look for such parallels in order to illuminate what Natsume is doing in the show. I suppose the clearest line that can be drawn is between Natsume and another character is Kanba––who also dreams of having his father return (or, inversely, dreams of taking his missing father's place in the family). Natsume replaces the grandfather, accidentally replaces her own father, and ultimately is made guilty when the grandfather's spirit possesses Mario. The grandfather threatens to kill Mario, and Natsume realizes she will have to sacrifice herself to save him.

• The presence of Kanba in the episode is very hard to unpack. I always remembered Kanba being the biological brother of Natsume, but now I'm having doubts. It looks like he wanders very purposefully into Natsume's garden to see her and offer her help. But ultimately, Natsume kills her grandfather by herself. Now I'm wondering if I remembered this right at all, or whether Kanba is actually Shouma's twin brother, as Shouma seems like he could be suggesting back in episode 12. And yet, they only announce Shouma's birth in the flashback in episode 12. Anyways, the appearance of Shouma in episode 16 is very dreamlike, and it's hard to pinpoint just what relationship Natsume has had to him in the past.

• I feel like this is a character who could be made just a mite clearer in terms of her motivations, especially. Why does she want Kanba? What does she think Kanba can do for her? Of course, she wants the diary because she's working for Sanetoshi Watase, and he wants it. Meanwhile, what is Mario doing with a penguin hat and a kami possession, if the grandfather has already possessed him? I don't recall any of this getting a satisfactory explanation.


Episode 17: Those Who Cannot Be Forgiven

• A deceptively tranquil episode, where the brothers hang out with Himari. Himari disappears, starting a low-key crisis. In fact, she's making sweaters for her brothers, in an effort to express something to them. What is it she wants to express?

• The incredible, well-deserved showdown between two relatively obsequious characters––Natsume and Yuri Tokikago. So funny when they start taking digs at one another. "Thank you for a lovely evening, where you didn't sing off-key." "I never sing off-key." "You're the only one who thinks that." I love Natsume's penguin scattering roses for the showdown.

• Natsume takes Yuri away from what is basically another attempt to do something for Momoka. If Yuri can't resurrect her, then she'll take her revenge on the Takakura daughter. This is the first time it really registered with me that Himari is a double for Momoka in the show. Himari has clung to the life Momoka apparently sacrificed––committing a trespass Yuri can't abide. But who else can't abide by it?

• The delicious twist at the end of the episode belies all the lower-key buildup around Yuri's revenge;

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Tabuki, who told Yuri revenge is pointless, suddenly steps in and steals Yuri's revenge from her.

[feihong]

Episode 18: So, I Want You to Be Here for My Sake

• The sh*t really hits the fan in this episode, upping the general stakes of the show's central drama and making the stakes much clearer than in the past. Characters we previously thought were really f*cking cool are revealed to barely be holding their sh*t together. To me this has seemed the darkest episode of the show––though the show is generally increasingly dark after this episode, and there are, I believe, bleaker episodes to come. But one of the things that strikes me about this episode is the helplessness the Takakura children ultimately live under––they can't defend themselves against a single adult with a grudge. It's very chilling, and the melodrama factor grows several times more powerful as the children struggle under the testing pain of the trap set for them here. I think at this point when I first watched the show, it became clear to me what the ultimate structure of the series was, the structure that had seemed so elusive up until this point. We are challenged to watch a sort of gothic melodrama of suffering. The Takakura children suffer more and more, bearing increasingly tragic pains. We hope there is a way to keep them from having to suffer so––I think Ringo feels this by the end of the episode, too––but things do not look good. There is a Japanese subgenre of fiction called "cruel stories." I haven't seen evidence it exists outside of film, but I think it probably does. In film, the era in which it most takes hold is the 70s, where a lot of mainstream pictures start displaying the traits of the genre. These are stories which offer no hope for their principal characters––they are doomed from the start. So where is the suspense in stories like this? You're invited to watch, rather than a triumph of resistance, instead a figure struggling against their fate. The films keep teasing you with the idea that maybe the protagonists will make it, maybe they'll be able to beat the odds; but of course, they ultimately don't, because––and this is the ending conclusion of a lot of the "cruel story" movies, especially in the 60s and 70s––this society we live in is so rotten to the core. It needs total renovation if people are going to be able to thrive. That's essential what we're seeing here.The world is wrong (more evidence quickly forthcoming), and until it is made right through a sort of renovation or revolution, every story within this world will turn out to be cruel. And the Takakura's story is one where we watch not action so much as beautific suffering; instead of action scenes, we watch the Takakura children bear ever-increasing pain with increasingly deep reserves of humanity. Well...sort of. More to come.

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• Tabuki's scarred hand––a self-inflicted wound. "Witness the meaning of my life in how I take revenge on the Takakuras." Tabuki wants his life to have meaning, he wants to write that meaning––but he's trapped by the way Momoka––his salvation––was taken away from him. Therefore the meaning of Tabuki's life––cruel torture and violent revenge––has been warped by the violence of his loss of innocence. We can mostly see that things are turning tragically for the Takakuras––I don't think it's easy to imagine a happy ending for all of this––not after this episode ends, at least. So the question will be, what way is there to lose the thing that is precious to you, but still have a strong, worthwhile meaning to your life? Will the Takakura children be able to transcend the damage done Tabuki and Yuri when they face their own tragedy? The wound on the outside of Tabuki's hand will end up replicated on the inside of Kanba's fingers, suggesting dark days ahead.

• Ringo's transformation into a fundamentally sympathetic character is complete––she feels sympathy for the Takakuras, and she is capable of engendering sympathy. This is almost in inverse with her former target of

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fake ardor, Tabuki. He no longer engenders the sympathy he projects when Ringo is stalking him, or when he reveals to Ringo the loss of Momoka. I think the episode does a good job of showing how he is in pain, but it's hard to really sympathize with the premeditation of his plan––a little like it was hard to sympathize with Ringo at the start of the show, here Tabuki is carrying out his own idea of things "as they were written." He has written this revenge for himself, and he means to carry it out.

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• The Child Broiler appears again, this time with no demure––as if it had always been an element of the story before now. Tabuki is abandoned by his mother, but Momoka rescues him from the Broiler. The Broiler is made tortuously specific in its operation: there's a conveyor belt, a shredder, one feels the circulation of hot air.

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• When I first watched the show, I assumed as hints were dropped about the Child Broiler that it was meant to be a metaphorical device, a kind of symbolic children's prison out of Dickens for the unwanted children the series is constantly talking about. But that's not exactly true to what the series presents; we come to realize over this episode and later ones, that this is a kind of quasi-real setting, with surrealistic properties.

• This is probably my favorite episode, for the sheer surprise of

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Tabuki's sinister-*ss plan, and the unexpectedness of Tabuki's heel-turn. This time around, what I realize makes it richer and crazier is the way Ringo witnesses it, but can't intervene––and the irony of the way her own illegal activity surrounding Tabuki is something that Tabuki has been doing in turn to the Takakura family.

Then there's Kanba, and the nature of Kanba's sacrifice––which I find genuinely moving. The show seems to be an intrigue, a mystery, a romance, a melodrama––but at it's center, there's this all-inclusive notion of sacrifice, in all its parameters.

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• Tabuki: "The one standing here is the monster that has consumed me from inside." Tabuki apologizes to Ringo for the way he must seem to her. "Ringo-chan, don't grow up to be like me." Ringo has been pursuing a monster, but one that was never looking her way. Her way of bringing back Momoka was never going to work. But neither is Tabuki's revenge, or Yuri's spell.

• We get a little bit of a look at Momoka's "fate diary's" cover. The diary shows two snakes, entwined around a heart––a representative image for Tabuki and Yuri, intertwined around the heart that was Momoka––but now the symbol stands for the Takakura family, with Shouma and Kanba the intertwining snakes, and Himari the heart.

• Himari: "Kan, stop making sacrifices for me. You've done enough." Why are the Takakuras the heroes of this series? They sacrifice for one another, nobly, again and again––and the show is about watching that sacrifice unfold, heading towards an ultimate moment where...what happens? Is it a point where no sacrifices will be necessary, or possible?

• Shouma's line, which has been ringing in my ears ever since I first saw the show: "Why did this happen? We didn't even want anything." But the series isn't content with this justification. The Takakuras have trespassed on the natural order of things, perhaps? They are responsible, somehow, for their parents' crimes.

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Soon we'll see a scene––made a little bit complicated by the point-of-view from which it's delivered––where the Takakura parents justify their terrorist action, using the Child Broiler as an example of what they hoped to tear down.

But the deaths they caused have clearly broken many more people.

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The false union of Tabuki and Yuri

is proof of that––as is the pain that has been driving Ringo.

The Takakura children think they don't want anything. But they've been perpetuating a sort of extended childhood idyll for themselves in their childlike little house––their slice of heaven––while the victims of their parents suffered in their own painful, warped lives. The Takakura children have labored to find the penguindrum, in order to stave off death. There is the sense that the Takakuras are cheating the way things are meant to work, prolonging them past the point of a natural progression to another state. It's the nature of the drama of the show to call upon them to sacrifice bigger and bigger things as the series progresses, moving from sacrificing convenience to dignity to morals, and now, potentially, sacrificing their health, their well-being, their lives for one another. Things have gotten incredibly serious. The ending title card here––which shows an unconscious Kanba and Himari in Shouma's arms––has the text: "Survival Strategy: I'm Still Fine." But the fact that Himari's still fine is maybe the dramatic problem being presented in the series at this point? Momoka is a character depicted as aware of and willing to pay the price for the way she works against fate. Himari, her sidelong double, the girl who lives almost in Momoka's place (that's certainly how Yuri and Tabuki see it until the end of this episode) is actively cheating fate. And she seems happy to do it, right up until the end of the episode, where it becomes clear Kanba will trade his own life for hers. So Himari is "still fine"––but only because Tabuki couldn't ultimately live with what he was doing to the children. Another way of saying it? Maybe he saw their nobility––their willingness to die for one another––and realized how pathetic he looked in the face of that. But either way, the continuing life of Himari is becoming the central problem the Takakuras are having to face.

• Ringo: "I'm not like him. I believe things must happen for a reason." But Ringo's beliefs have been modified a bit here, and she is struggling to maintain her certainty, and her identity (which is that of a person who is certain). In view of the wreck Tabuki has become, can Ringo really still insist that nothing in life is wasted? This is another element the show has characters repeatedly insist upon, but which it seems the show itself is determined to take apart. In a way, saying "nothing is wasted" is talking about fate. But it seems like Ikuhara is not convinced that's what fate means, because the random hurt and brokenness of Tabuki and Yuri––

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children saved from horrible fates by Momoka, but left lost and suffering after her death

––flies directly in the face of that insistence that within the idea of fate, there is a purpose to everything.

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At this point, if memory serves me right, Yuri and Tabuki are out of the show, going their separate ways, alone with their pain. They won't be saved, they won't be happy (and Momoka's not coming back).

But the Takakura children can still be saved, the series seems to be insisting––if only Himari doesn't die. So, well, we'll see how that shakes out.

[feihong]

Episode 19: My Fated Person

The obvious theme of the episode is the breakup of family units. Himari returns home, but there doesn't seem to be a place for her anymore. She sees Shou and Ringo becoming closer, getting a vision of what might happen when she dies. Tabuki leaves Yuri. Trios are turning into duos. Shou and Ringo. Double H appears on the TV, successful without Himari. Yuri resolves to resurrect Momoka and be with her as a duo, without Tabuki (nothing comes of this). The diary is ripped in two. There's a curious sense Ikuhara fosters in the story that pairs of characters are fundamentally unstable, risky, volatile––while trios are imperiled, but more of an ideal––and yet fated not to work. The two serpents on the diary, coiled around a heart.

Probably the duo most crucial in the story is that of the Takakura parents––who seem to remain together, severed from their children. They are invisible, but crucial––and their instability is dangerous for the nation, or the world. Dangerous, in a way Shou and Kanba would be, without Himari?

• The secret Kanba "can't reveal." "I hid it until the end." Is it that he loves Himari? Himari seems to know this about Kanba already.

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• "The usual, for my son." So, has Kanba held out this whole time? He speaks to the Takakura's missing parents, coordinates with them? I mean, I know the answer. But I think it's a very nice surprise at this juncture.

• It never seemed clear to me that Shou and Kanba were both in Tabuki's class, but here they are, attending class together.

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Whether or not Kanba and Shou are actual siblings is something I still can't quite keep straight. I remember them not being so, with Shouma the only biological child of the Takakuras. I distinctly remember Natsume and Mario being Kanba's biological siblings. But that hasn't been revealed in the story so far. Where did I get that from? And Kanba looks strikingly like the Takakura father. But when Mr. Takakura gets the announcement his wife has had a child, it's just the one child, and it's Shouma. Yet, here are Shouma and Kanba, attending the same high school class together, presumably the same age. So where does Kanba fit into this equation? So far, they have never been referred to as twins––though, of course the filmmakers treat them as doubles, two sides of the same coin.

• "We can start pretending at first. But eventually, we'll become a real family." Kind of incredible foreshadowing. Yuri and Tabuki make a fake family trio,

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with the two of them joined by the memory of a third, Momoka. This makes them a trio idential to the Takakuras, a trio held together most likely without biological bonds, desperately willing themselves into being a family.

• "No truth can be borne from lies!" Natsumi shows up to reason with Himari, getting Kanba back from her. Himari is drawn a little strangely in this episode––but Natsumi looks incredible. "I'm here to take back my love...my past! My truth!" The perils of the Takakura family come into sharper focus here. More intensive suffering, putting them through hardships and pain until they...what? Stop being a family? This seems to be the gist of it. There is a sense that the Takakuras have crossed a line,

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pretending to be a family, and that their sham can't be allowed to exist––thus they have to suffer for it, again and again.

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• The Child Broiler reappears. No child seems to know what it is before they end up there, none of them seem to suspect they ever could end up there. Himari in the Child Broiler: "Goodbye, myself; who never amounted to anything." Himari is rescued, as Momoka rescues Tabuki. The promise of family is made. "Let's share the fruit of fate!" Shouma is revealed as the one who rescues Himari from the Child Broiler. Shouma––kinder, more generous, more sensitive––he ignites the firestorm of fate, struggling to correct itself.

• The final card: "Survival Strategy: Playboy." Himari decides Shou is her fated person, the one who saved her. Now Kanba's past as a playboy seems to be putting HImari in danger. But throughout the episode we keep seeing Kanba's bandaged hand, the wound he received saving Himari. Shouma was too late to aid in the rescue.The series is starting to drive a wedge between the two brothers. Which brother does what is starting to matter.


Episode 20: Thank You for Choosing Me

This episode focuses on the permeable nature of the Takakura family, the permeability of their bond. Natsumi won't accept their family. Shouma insists upon it––yet later on wants all the punishments fate demands for the family, on the grounds that

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he's the only biological Takakura.

Ringo argues the sins of the parent aren't the sins of the child. In a sense, this is the series made around this question.

• "This is our Survival Strategy!" The phrase gets what seems to be its initial coinage,

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coming from the Takakura's father. After an Antarctic expedition, he seems to have formed a cult of...who? Radical environmentalists seems a good guess––since the core group seems to have come from this expedition. But the rhetoric from Mr. Takakura is more abstract than that, describing a world of invisible hierarchies which create stagnation. "This is already a frozen world." So survival in this "frozen world" seems to need to be enough heat to break us out of our entropy. There is a structure to society, a set of rules never fully sketched out in the series, but which the Takakuras are set against. That this structure is never fully elucidated makes it very slippery and interesting as a coating for everything in this drama. Are the Takakura children oppressed by the "frozen world?" Were Yuri and Tabuki in their abusive childhoods? Then there's the Child Broiler, which Mr. Takakura will reference directly in either this episode or one coming soon, which he sites as a reason for their intended revolution. So there's a group of slippery ideas connected together here, that make up what the Survival Strategy is all about.

Thinking about the Survival Strategy here...it's a kind of intense proposition of change. Kenji Miyazawa's thesis on the problems of the world in Night on Galactic Railroad is that suffering for others, mutely accepting the hardships of the world, bring about a kind of essential humanity and religious transcendence. Miyazawa emphasizes the dignity in the act of suffering. What the Survival Strategists believe is suffering can be ended with radical human engineering. The Takakuras practice this on a political level, but on a personal one as well,

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making their family not out of what is biologically prescribed, but out of an ideal in human minds.

• "Who cares if your heart freezes over" You get to kiss." Sanetoshi seems to be talking about living in the way of the Takakuras, or living in the way of the "frozen world." As happens constantly in this series, juxtaposition leads to this kind of slippery switching of sides. Himari, who, along with the other Takakura children, are defying fate, chooses to remain chaste in order to do so. Can she give her heart to Shou,

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who rescued her from the Child Broiler,

or Kanba, who

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rescued her from death at Tabuki's hands

? By refusing to decide, Himari hopes to preserve the family she has––coded as "unnatural" and "against fate." Sanetoshi advocates for committing, as the Takakura parents did, to a life of action. Commit to one brother, and Himari will have the romance she might secretly desire.

• "If there's a punishment for the Takakuras, it should only fall on me."

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Shouma must be the only biological Takakura to talk this way. He wants to shoulder all the suffering.

• "The Flame of Hope burning in our hearts cannot easily be extinguished!"

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Finally! We see Kanba is the brother of Natsumi. I knew I was right about this. We finally see the origins of the Takakura family. Shou and Kanba are part of the terrorist organization. Himari lives in the same apartment building. In this scene, the Child Broiler is clearly being treated as a metaphor, rather than an actuality. Shouma plays out his offer to "share the fruit of fate" by offering an abandoned Himari an apple. But what's this "Flame of Hope" stuff? This will probably turn out to be a reference to Night on Galactic Railroad. Then immediately afterwards, the Child Broiler is treated as a real thing again. Himari has been sent there.

• A "No Pets Allowed" sign in a hallway, with a scolding line below it: "Somebody broke the rule!" seems to be a code for the world of Mawaru Penguindrum. A world with arbitrary, cruel rules of existence, with punishments meted out seemingly at random––what child Himari says about there only being those chosen and those unchosen.

Here we get Mr. Takakura's diatribe against the society of the story.

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The Child Broiler.

"Many children are disappearing as we speak." He implies this is why the Takakura parents have evoked the Survival Strategy. "We cannot forgive the world for allowing this to happen."

Shouma and Himari's story mirrors the biblical story of Adam & Eve in the garden. But there's this very deliberate understanding of choice happening here. Shouma defies the natural order by choosing Himari to be his sister.

• Second season, the ending credits song keeps changing. These are all tunes from an album made for the series, featuring all the Double H songs.

• Haven't mentioned this yet, but the versions of the characters drawn by Lily Hoshino for the ending title cards look significantly less "cute" and "wholesome" than the ones the character designers have gone with for the show. I kind of wonder what would happen to the show if it featured more of Hoshino's exaggerated style, with these young men who all look like voracious ladykillers, and women who look pained to be alive?


Episode 21: The Door of Fate We Choose

Last episode, the Takakura siblings refused to come apart by self-evident insistence that they should on the part of Natsumi. This episode, the siblings will be tested by secrets revealed, by challenges to the lies and compromises that they've undergone to preserve the illusion of family. Ikuhara is very harsh in this regard; one feels there's something genuinely against the natural order in the family the Takakura siblings. This reminds me very much of the conclusion of the Utena TV series, where Utena is blatantly punished for the hubris of trying to become a prince, when she wasn't biologically suited to it.

This conservatism in Ikuhara's mindset became much more concrete to me after seeing Flip-Flappers, Studio 3Hz's vibrantly queer series, in which the "trespass against the natural order" argument is simply blown away by the self-evidence that the protagonists/lovers, Cocona and Papika are simply right to be together. In that story, Papika is, we learn, the childhood friend of Cocona's mother. But in order to be a friend to Cocona, Papika essentially wills herself to reverse-age and become a child of Cocona's age. This is exactly the kind of "trespass" Ikuhara would build into a tragic ending––just like the trespass of Utena, the trespass of the Takakura "fake" siblings, and the trespass of the bears who love humans in Yurikuma Arashi. But in Flip–Flappers, such a "trespass" has no natural, moral dimension. Ikuhara is often on the forefront of counterculture social stuff in animation––Utena specifically is a sort of gay icon of anime; but Ikuhara can't seem to stop himself from punishing his darlings––even as he excoriates the world that makes it so they can't be. In the past I think it would have made sense, understanding the societal pressures against Ikuhara going any farther. But I can't help but feel that this is the way Ikuhara really feels––not as a dliberate sort of program; just that his outlook on all these social outcasts whose adventures he evokes is that their Pinocchio-like ambitions to be real are simply, tragically, doomed. It makes for staggeringly effective storytelling––the ending to Utena is devastating, and the Takakura parents in Penguindrum come across initially as enormously sinister for going against the status quo. But it becomes problematic when Ikuhara forces the superb champions of difference he creates to knuckle under to a morose attempt to show "reality."

• Since the failure of Ringo's plans to

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resurrect her sister,

she has become the clear audience identification character, the innocent figure who leads us into the darkness at the center of the Takakura siblings' bond. She's become a sympathetic witness to their suffering, and a their fierce defender. A creepy tabloid reporter wants Ringo to speak against them, and she stands up to the reporter with a vicious, public rebuke.

• Sanetoshi, like

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the Child Broiler,

like Momoka, gets placed in the diegetic world of the drama.

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He was a research assistant to the doctor taking care of Himari. He organized and led the "cult" the Takakura parents operated. He says he almost succeeded in toppling the existing order, but that Momoka got in his way. Sanetoshi calls himself a ghost, and a curse, and announces his attempt to remake the world again. he says very specifically that the children of his former collaborators will inherit the mantle of their parents and help him.

• Kanba and Shouma come apart over the ideological differences sketched out over the last few episodes.

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Turns out Kanba's been talking to a phantom of the Takakura's father––who has been dead for years, it turns out. Kanba, working with the remnants of the parents' organization, arranges a hit to take out the newspaper reporter investigating the family.

Cards on the table, I like Kanba. By far my favorite character, the boy who sacrifices everything meaningful to him to cheat death––all for love. Personally, I have no problem with anything he does in the series––though the filmmakers want to condemn his revolutionary desires as some kind of slide into craziness. The series is light on particulars, but I think it's clear the world of the series is a horrible place to live, punishing children for desiring love and closeness in their lives. In general, the world of the series is cold and cruel (though the filmmakers are saving a trick here that will make this play out a little differently than we might imagine). A violent revolution to unseat the status quo seems wholly merited––and is something which, in the real world, happens frequently enough to be considered not so much of an aberration. And, I mean, come on. The Child Broiler. The thing has to be taken down. Heads should roll over this.


Episode 22: Beautiful Casket

Two people this episode seem to sacrifice themselves for others––even though they had no intention of doing it before. So we see Tabuki shield Yuri from murder, as if he loved her, and then, in the finale of the episode, Natsumi seems to go down in a Peckinpah-esque blaze of glory to help Kanba escape the police. Himari attempts to get Kanba to stop sacrificing for her, but he refuses.

• Double H finally shows up in the flesh! Ringo confronts them, defending Himari, before realizing their true, gentle, benign intentions.

• It occurs to me the dominatrix kami in the penguin hat hasn't appeared in a long time. What side was she ever on in all of this? What was her actual goal? I don't remember this part of the story at all.

• Himari thinks that if she stayed dead at the aquarium, Kanba wouldn't have gone down this path, and she seems to be right. At the time, Kanba was merely making preparations for her funeral. Now he's doing terrorist stuff, determined to burn the world down. Kanba was a realist when Himari died the first time. Now he's a flagrant fantasist, believing he'll remake the world and save Himari at the same time.

• Himari tries to get Kanba not to go through with the terrorist plot, but Kan won't back down. "I won't forgive this world if you die." Bravo, Kan. Well said. Unfortunately, Himari's attempt to pull Kanba back from the brink fails. Kan talks about what Himari gave him on the day they became a family. I love this aspect of the show––the way in which every primal scene is revisited again and again from different characters perspectives, adding detail to scenes we'd already seen, recontextualizing them.

• Yuri's operetta co-star shows up again to close off the Yuri/Tabuki storyline. I love the way the show brings back all these stories again and again. Ringo's philosophy is the philosophy used in writing the show: "nothing is wasted."

• Sorry, but Kanba is just awesome in this episode, outsmarting the police, blowing sh*t up. Go, Kanba! I approve. At the end of the day I don't really sympathize with the show's desperate need to preserve the status quo. Another element of Flip-Flappers I admire is the way in which the status quo isn't how the show ends up––in that show, characters like Cocona and her mother constantly demand a return to the status quo. In the end, Cocona moves on to be with Papika, and everyone just has to learn to deal with their new reality. I know there's no real way this show could conclude similarly––in fact, there is a weird kind of compromise achieved in this show, but the reinvention of the world doesn't come together in the way Kanba and I want.

• The machine-gun bullets of the police shatter these underground glass windows, and the filmmakers dwell on the image of the shards of glass flying through the air in slow motion.

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This is the same image the filmmakers used an episode or so ago for the children being disappeared in the Child Broiler. So without getting any more specific, the filmmakers are tightening the circle around the idea of the status quo, the Child Broiler, and the constricting nature of the series' fictional society.

Episode 23: Fate's Destination


• In Sanetoshi's view of the world, the people in the subway are all individuated.

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Sanetoshi and Momoka curse one another, and we get the whole origin of the mystical aspects of the show. Momoka's spell to save the city from Sanetoshi's attack is only half cast. Both she and Sanetoshi are cut in two. Sanetoshi becomes the two black rabbits we've seen him with; Momoka seems to become the two penguin hats. The divided nature of every aspect of the show comes round to the story's origin.

Everything in the show is split into two. Even the trios the show celebrates as a kind of ideal; Shou and Kan both have separate relationships with Himari, qualitatively different ones. Nothing is quite the stable tripod it should be, because everything is divided in two.

• "The world and fate cannot be altered by Houdini's magic." Natsumi can't convince Kanba that Sanetoshi is lying to him. But...it's really impossible to believe differently than Kanba does, right? We've seen Sanetoshi and the penguin hat restore life so many times.

• Shou and Himari recall a time in their childhoods when they lost HImari and found her again. There are so many different memories of the trio as children together, that they seem to superimpose over one another in impossible ways. Himari tasks Shouma with finding the "lost" Kanba. The mission finally becomes clear to Shouma. He's not finding the "penguindrum." He's finding Kanba's lost heart.

• "The world is on the wrong track. You must have noticed." This is a great line, because it is possible to watch the series superficially, not making connections, and feel like the world we're presented is fundamentally "normal." There's a way in which this is the whole structure of the series, with important material unfolding primarily in the background, while disconnected mania unfolds in the foreground. We go nearly half the series before the curse of the Takakura children is revealed to us. Until then, the series seems to be about Ringo and her plan to marry the brothers' high school teacher.

• Ringo is just hanging out at the Takakuras house now, waiting for any of them to come home. Kanba comes to "team up" with her, but his voice sounds suspiciously like Sanetoshi's. The show has been getting precipitously creepier as it goes along. The meeting scene between Ringo and Sanetoshi is genuinely creepy. So at this point Sanetoshi is just the bad guy, since he tries to kill Ringo. I guess he's got to do something I might not approve of, or he'll seem too much like...I dunno...like Killmonger.

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So, the diary is now ash. There had been the palpable suspicion throughout the show that the diary––Ringo's prized possession––was the titular "penguindrum." But with the diary destroyed, the penguindrum has to be different than that.

• We're told the Black Bunny––Santetoshi––is now a singular creature, trying to destroy the world.

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By destroying the diary,

Sanetoshi is somehow freed. Momoka seems whole now as well, speaking in her own voice instead of in the dominatrix voice (this is very redolent of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in which protagonist Toru's wife appears as two different people––one a kind of randy seductress, the other a more realistic woman, who exists outside of the main character's desires, as a whole person, in spite of her problems––in that novel, the seductress version of the woman exists as a kind of fantasy projection of Toru's wife, and he can't recognize who she is until the end of the book). Momoka speaks in her own level, centered voice, through the penguin hat, telling Shouma that he and Kanba have to work together to stop the world from ending, and find their penguindrum.


Episode 24: I Love You


So the conflict in the show comes down to this: a conflict between the two brothers, Shouma and Kanba, the red oni and blue oni Mr. Sausage referenced in the first episode. But the conflict between them is explained in a sort of an odd way. Momoka, through the penguin hat, characterizes the conflict between them as a collaboration against Sanetoshi, the "black bunny" who aims to destroy the world. Sanetoshi and Momoka have been made whole by the destruction of the diary. But the brothers remain two individuals, driven by different impulses. Shouma wanted to include Himari in his family, open up the world to her. Kanba wanted to envelope and protect Himari from the world.

The initial scenes of this episode portray something eerily similar to the Aum subway gas attack, with Kanba's agents leaving teddy bear bombs all over the subway. The train we see is called the "train of fate" by Momoka, referencing Miyazawa's Galactic Railroad.

• Ringo arrives on the train car, ready to transfer fate. All the principal characters are brought together, around the fate of the world, forced to sacrifice one way or another to save Himari, to save the world, to save the ones they love. Who is who, which is which?

• "As it turns out, living was a punishment. I've been punished in small ways every day for being a member of the Takakuras." The Takakuras are shown walking through suspended shards of glass. "We took all the punishments, no matter how small and trivial. They're all precious memories." Kanba: "but I still haven't given you a thing yet!" I've seen a reading of the series that posits that Kanba sacrifices in the "wrong way," and that Shouma does it the right way. But in this essential confrontation scene, the Takakuras fall all over each other to sacrifice for one another.

• "This is the penguindrum."

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The penguindrum is an apple, made from both Kanba and Shouma's hearts. At the same time, it's an apple they share together as children, in cages together, vowing to share the fruit of fate.

• "The scorpion fire." Ringo transfers fate, is set afire. The Scorpion Fire, which appears on the "next destination" sign on the train, is a story from Miyazawa's Night on Galactic Railroad. The idea is of a creature, a scorpion, who preys on others, but which ultimately sacrifices itself for another, and discovers that true meaning in life was hidden from it until it had given its own life for another.

• "Shouma, I have achieved pure light." Momoka, the dominatrix in the penguin hat, has defeated Sanetoshi again, sealing him in the library in the hole in the sky. Shouma and Kanba evaporate, sacrificing themselves for Ringo and Himari. But everyone seems restored by the brothers' sacrifice. Natsumi and Mario are reunited, Tabuki and Yuri realize that they need to move on from Momoka together. Himari is close to her friend, Ringo, and speaks with her uncle. Double H aren't Himari's friends; she's just a fan. Himari's house is plain, unadorned by brilliant color. Reality has been completely overwritten? Well, not completely. The brothers are there, as the two boys analyzing Night on Galactic Railroad together. They seem to walk off into the galaxy, with no idea of their destination. They have been disconnected from their tragedy, but left with none of their joy, either. Their only solace, I suppose, is that they remain separate, and one another's companions. There's a very Buddhist sense of at the end of this, which is redolent of a lot of anime productions, where the world is essentially "reset" at the end of the story, by the sacrifice or by the extraordinary ability of one character. In this case, we have the two brothers, making the true sacrifice by which fate is transferred. They are obliterated by that sacrifice, but reborn, maybe to try again? They have taken the sadness away from their small corner of the world.

I seem to have missed the part where all the people represented by "walk" signs turn around and are revealed as fully-animated characters. I thought it happened in this last episode, or maybe it was the one before it? I remember this very vividly, but I just didn't see it this time around.

Pairs rule the day at the end of this show. Everyone is left with a pairing, once Shouma and Kanba realize that they are ultimately the pair in their family. Ringo and Himari get to pair up as friends, which seems good for them both. At the end, one wonders if the penguindrum––the divided heart of the two brothers, is the heart represented on the back of Momoka's diary, with Shou and Kan as the twin snakes wrapping around it? I assumed the heart was Himari. The series suggests otherwise, and that this world only works when the brothers sacrifice their true heart, the penguindrum that they share.

Conclusion:

This is the third time I've watched the show, I think? My opinion of it did not change, and a lot of the same things worked for me that worked for me in the past. But I don't feel as if I understand the show that much better. The central thematic material remains a little elusive. There is definitely an attempt to digest the messages and themes of Kenji Miyazawa's Night on Galactic Railroad. But there's also so much of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the show as well––more than I ever previously realized. One of the things I most appreciate about the show is that way in which it approaches meaning, by superimposing different, almost randomly-selected influences over the top of one another and mashing things together. So we have a story of mute acceptance of suffering and sacrifice (Galactic Railroad) and another story where a man changes his sorry fate by understanding the people around him better––both narrative influences fighting for control, almost the way in which Shouma and Kanba fight for dominance in their erstwhile family.

Things I really appreciate about the show:

• I really appreciate the constant, porous transfer between actuality and metaphorical significance that permeates the show. The characters all have symbolic associations that once in a while cross into the literal space of the action (Ringo is portrayed as fire in the opening credits, then bursts into flame when she initiates the fate transfer; the brothers share a heart, and by joining it transcend the story that they're in). Settings have metaphorical significance, and actual substance (the Child Broiler is a metaphor for a world that chews up and discards those cast away by fate, and it's an actual location characters go to at several points). Plot setups have thematic meanings, but also carry forward into further plot developments (as when Yuri's costar, set up to show Yuri's callousness and coldness, knifes Tabuki near the end of the series).

• The ranginess of influences referenced throughout is dazzling. This is a show that––like FlCl––really attempts to take in a great deal of the real world around the creators. One aspect of that is that the Aum subway gas attack gets lent a kind of literary interpretation. But then Takarazuka appears to lend a skein of theatricality to the proceedings.

• By the same token, the proliferation of material and the amount of secrets the show holds back means that it remains consistently surprising, right up until the end. It's very hard to predict where it will end up going even an episode or two out from wherever you are in it. And yet, the character development is consistent and plausible, and compelling.

• Like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Penguindrum is a mystery, in which you have to work hard to distinguish clues in a surreal setting, which will unlock a kind of almost non-diegetic source of plot and meaning in the series––the way the series moves from one idea to the next, the way it slips in and out of the real, the surreal, and the purely metafictional. Penguindrum becomes a detective story in which decoding diverse clues achieves blatantly constructed meanings in a world which is built out of cards, always threatening to tip over at the slightest gust of wind. This is just an approach to fiction I quite admire, a kind of existentialist detective story.

• The Dickensian sufferings of the Takakura siblings still move me to tears. Centering the show around their suffering is so much more moving than the way so many anime base their meaning around action scenes. Not that I hate that––action scenes define FlCL and The Big O, two other favorites of mine. But structurally, it is entertaining enough following the constant peril of the makeshift family, struggling to stay together. First time I saw the series, the split of the family at the end left me depressed for the better part of a week. Now that I'm older, I find what sticks out to me more prominently is the refreshing way the show looks at life in general as a series of losses and deprivations, of having things taken away from us, and yet the show still finds places worth lingering, situations worth celebrating. When Himari says in the first episode that the Takakura's house after lunch is her idea of heaven, surrounded by her two brothers, I know just what she means.

• I love the music. Not just the pop songs, the Double H material, or the Takarazuka parody songs. The incidental music in this show is gorgeous and unusual, and it gets better as the show goes on.

What I think it all means: I'm still not sure, but I want to muse here on some elements of the show which stick out very noticeably.

First is the Aum subway gas attack, which is the real-world motivation for the entire series. I think it's possible to read the series as a way of interpreting the gas attack, through the eyes of the children who emerged from this cult. Their parents sacrifice is awful, but not alien to them, and the show is, in a way about how the children understand their lives in the wake of the attack. They define meaning after the attack around each other––their constructed relationships take the place of any more prescribed ones, and in the end of the series, even though those constructed relationships are undone by the cosmos, "corrected," in a sense––they're also validated. The brothers are true brothers, sharing the same heart, sacrificing for the same goal. They share the fruit of fate and pay their price together, as they always agreed to do. There's a little ambiguity here about whether or not the Takakuras are part of a cult. The organization is couched by Sanetoshi as an agent of his desire to destroy everything, but the Takakura parents have genuine, real-world reasons for wanting to disrupt the status quo. They don't appear to believe in anything crazy; the world of the series is just as terrible as they say it is, full of random suffering and with a giant mincing factory in the sky called the Child Broiler, ready to evaporate any kid who's just unlucky or unloved. I have trouble viewing the Takakuras organization as a cult, per se. The actual Aum Shinrikyo cult is a significantly more disgusting and less reasonable organization. They didn't really make "good points," per se––they just shared a sense of alienation. In Haruki Murakami's book, a lot of the bombers interviewed talk about the sense of belonging they felt in the cult, which was threatened to be severed if they didn't go along with the bombing project. To me it simply seems that the Takakuras and their cohorts are seeing the world as it is, and are trying to change it. That the series keeps their aims hidden in the background means it's hard to really tell why they're after what they're after in the way they're after it.

Second is the idea of kids suffering for the sins of their parents. The show leans into this concept hard, constantly running variations on what this concept could mean. The Takakura siblings consider their life together some sort of "heaven," but they've really learned to settle. In another way, they're in hell, isolated from their society, secretly surrounded by people who actually want to maybe kill them (in the case of the brothers' homeroom teacher, for instance), or who want them to pay. As the series begins, there is a sort of hush around the Takakuras; the siblings are downplayed, ignored, dismissed. They are almost invisible––they are presented as living in a space where other humans are inaccessible symbols parading in front of them. Every manifestation of the Takakura's family unit is them paying for the sins of their parents. And it only gets worse as the series goes on.

Something I asked a student the other day stuck with me here. My student is writing a story, and was having trouble figuring out what the events of her story might come to mean, and I asked her "what is wrong with the world in your story, that your protagonists might try to fix?" I think it's useful to try and apply it to Penguindrum. What is wrong in the world of Penguindrum, which gets fixed in the end? The answer doesn't come easily, but I think what is wrong in the world has to do with the apparent stratification in the society we see in the film, and the way in which the unwritten rules of its function cleave people into the valuable and the valueless. The Child Broiler is a device which exists to separate these characters. There is a sense that wrong in the story is represented with a cleaving, that pairs exist in a sense of permanent imbalance. As the Takakuras struggle to maintain their ideal trio, the duos in the series all exist in a state of precariousness. Ringo and her sister are permanently unreconciled; Tabuki and Yuri's love story is a total facade; Momoka and Sanetoshi are permanent rivals, each split in two again. Ringo's parents are divorced, and she feels they no longer lover her because of their grief at Momoka's death. And then, as the trio of the Takakura siblings is broken up at the end, duos gain a sense of stability, while trios are essentially nullified. Himari isn't even friends with the members of Double H anymore. It's hard to figure out just what the number rules mean to Penguindrum, beyond that. It seems to me that a faint sense of orthodoxy descends as the pairings are all rendered harmonious by the brothers' sacrifice.

In a way, I wonder if the world is wrong in Mawaru Penguindrum because the children are expected to pay for the sins of their parents? The series is constantly working our senses of outrage at the suffering of the Takakura siblings. Children are abandoned left and right in the series; there's the sense of a society cannibalizing its own children to preserve an unhappy status quo. In that case, then the brothers' sacrifice remakes all this pain. But the brothers pay the price so that everyone else can be happier, being cruelly erased from the world, or perhaps abstracted from it. They march away from reality with the penguins at the end. And I think it's meaningful that the world they leave is less colorful, less striking, than the one they lived in. When they walk away into fantasy, that fantasy is bursting with the color and detail the previous version of the world was filled with.

I don't know. I don't have a great conclusion here. It's a series I love largely for its approach, its aesthetics, its surface melodramas, and its engagement with the world and with fiction. I love the design of the series, the design of the characters––I buy very deeply into their melodrama. I eventually come to care about Ringo. I hate Sanetoshi. I love Kanba. I think it's fascinating that the action of the story basically hinges around the Takakura children trying not to do anything for the longest time––they really don't want anything to change, they don't want anything to break apart their fantasy existence. The action is all undertaken in order for the children to preserve their family unit––something I admire. I love having to put together the story and themes out of a patchwork of cultural clues.

If I had a larger criticism, it's that the themes of the series––while unquestionably present––are far from clear. "Fate" is just a hard idea to unpack for me. I don't know what it serves as in the "real world" of the film. The real-life elements of the story don't always seem to link up quite to the rest of the series in clearly meaningful ways. It's hard to link up the idea of the suffering of the children to the whole idea of the Aum cult. But at the end of the day, I admire the ambition of this thing so much that it overrides any objections. And the aesthetics are really engaging. That's all I got for now! Hope people enjoy the series.