Chatty AF 204: Bakemonogatari Watchalong – Episodes 1-8 (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

TONI: Welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast! My name is Toni. I am a contributing editor here at Anime Feminist. You can find me on Twitter… well, not really on Twitter anymore but on various platforms @poetpedagogue. And with me are Vrai and Peter!

VRAI: Hey! I’m Vrai. I’m the daily operations manager here at AniFem. You can find me by going to Bluesky, where my at is @writervrai.

PETER: And I’m Peter Fobian. I’m a manager of YouTube content strategy at Crunchyroll and I’m an editor here at Anime Feminist. I’m on Bluesky @peterfobian.

TONI: So, we are doing this week, without further ado, the beginning of something that I’ve been pushing for for a while and I’ve been dragging the AniFem team kicking and screaming towards, which is the beginning of a Monogatari watchalong. In all—

VRAI: I’m only here because I love and respect you, Toni.

TONI: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Sorry, carry on.

TONI: And listen, the reason I want to talk about this series, if I can explain… We’re probably not going to watch the whole thing because it’s a million bajillion episodes long, but we are probably going to watch, at the very least, through Kizu, and then we’ll see how much further we want to go. This is a show that… It’s definitely a fanservice show, but it has weirdly compelling narratives around girlhood and around surviving abuse and how abuse survivors cope and find community. And I was interested to bring Vrai and Peter along on this journey because, like them, I am encountering this series for the first time as an adult. I think many people encountered Monogatari as children for the first time or as teenagers. But I’m curious what it means to watch Monogatari as adults who are feminist minded and who are thinking through feminism from a survivor-centered perspective—or from any other feminist perspective for that matter, but that’s the perspective I come [to] it from. 

Yeah, I want to know, before I give my own thoughts on it, what did you all know about Monogatari before I dragged you kicking and screaming into this watchalong? What had you heard about its reputation? And did it end up living up to that reputation that you had heard—or living down to it, for that matter?

VRAI: Peter, you want to go first?

PETER: Sure, I can go first. So, ever since it first came out, I think it’s been kinda part of the anime fandom zeitgeist. I just never… I don’t know. I never felt compelled to watch it, especially since the fandom is kind of intense and there have been a couple select scenes that I believe have become kind of representative of the show in its entirety—

TONI: Oh, Lord, yes.

PETER: —which are not great. So, that kinda, I think, dissuades the average anime fan who isn’t hella into that kind of thing, to a—

TONI: [crosstalk] Do they involve a toothbrush, Peter?

PETER: Yes, there’s a toothbrush involved. So, I kinda knew it by that reputation, yes. But I’ve also heard a ton of good recommendations from it. I actually read the first volume of the manga, only because it’s illustrated by one of my favorite mangaka. So I thought that might end up getting me into the series before you brought up the possibility of this podcast. Yeah.

Oh, and I also watched— I’m kind of familiar with the effect it’s had on the anime, light novel, and manga industry since I think it sort of created its own subgenre of “Guy going around solving girls’ problems.” They have some sort of supernatural psychological issue that, if he can resolve some issue of their life, it will rid them of some sort of adjacent supernatural affliction that is also affecting them, and in doing so, the girl falls in love with him and he slowly accrues a harem, like Bunny Girl Senpai. 

I have to say, as far as how it’s lived up to its reputation, I definitely see a lot of the positive points people have described of it, and it is not, so far, nearly as… the negative aspects are not as intensely bad as the stuff I’ve come to expect based on my experience with the subgenre it’s created.

VRAI: I pledged to Toni before we started this, because I love and respect you, as a person and a critic…

TONI: [Chuckles]

PETER: [Amused] Jeez.

VRAI: … I am going to do my level best to give this show that you think highly of a fair shake. And I do come into this with some baggage because I really hate the genre that you described that this popularized, Peter, the “potato boy saves sad girls” subgenre, because I think a lot of the derivatives of Monogatari tend to fall into this pattern where it’s women who have Deep Psychological Issues (capital letters) but these shows conceive them in a very specific way where these girls exist in these isolated social bubbles that can only be considered interesting because protagonist audience-insert boy has taken an interest in them, he steps in and magically solves their issues, and then they have no further ambition in their life except to fall in love with him a lot of the time. 

Like you said, Bunny Girl Senpai is kind of the most popular right now Monogatari knockoff, descendant. 18if is a little bit more niche, was another one in the past couple of years. It’s a genre that really pisses me off because it nods toward paying attention to psychological depth among female characters but ultimately can only conceive of them in their role as love interests and thing that a male character can fix in order to get a win outcome that makes them into girlfriend. And that bothers me because it has the veneer of taking an interest in women but a more cynical underpinning to it.

And even just watching these eight episodes, one thing I want to say about Bakumonogatari [sic]… (That was a pronunciation. Anyway…) is that I think this is sort of a Madoka, and since, I mean, it is Shaft over… where Monogatari clearly has a lot of bullshit going on but it also has more genuine things going on where these women begin to form community with one another and have relationships outside of Araragi. So I think that I can already see that this is going to be a case where the people who tried to chase after Bakemonogatari’s success have increasingly filed off the more nuanced, less obvious details of what makes it compelling and come away with a more stock, tropified version that I loathe with every fiber of my being.

And also, you mentioned the fandom. That’s— So, what I knew about Monogatari before this, before Toni got really into it, is that it’s hella horny. That was most of it. It was hella horny and fans really want you to know that this is the fanservice anime that’s Deep Actually (capital letters). And people come to shows with deeper themes through a lot of ways, and I think that’s great, but I think what bothers me about Monogatari fans is that there is a certain subset of them, the particularly intense ones, and especially in the 2010s, who would love to tell you how deep and amazing and incredibly artistic Monogatari is and they would sooner pull out their own toenails than watch something like Belladonna of Sadness or The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. 

And it’s not Monogatari’s fault, but I do get really aggravated and annoyed that this kind of fanservice-centric story, because it has that element to it, gets to have six, seven entries across multiple mediums with these really talented directors who go on to be enormous names in the field. And we were just talking among ourselves the other day about how, conversely, joseimuke or transgressive queer artworks… you repeatedly see artists disappear off the map for trying to be truly transgressive that way, like Sayo Yamamoto being metaphorically locked in MAPPA’s basement for the last eight years or the Doukyusei director being nowhere to be found, the Fairy Ranmaru artists being really active and enthusiastic on social media immediately after that show aired and then just vanishing from social media altogether. 

It’s frustrating to me that— I don’t think that this show has nothing going on. I don’t think it deserves no accolades. In some ways I am bringing some baggage to it because of the factors that allowed it to rise to the height as this sort of iconoclastic auteur piece of genius that it’s known as and what shuts other shows and other artists out. And in some ways, that’s just what it’s emblematic of and not the show-qua-show’s fault, you know?

TONI: Yeah. I think, to what you said earlier about the girls who have no real relationships outside of their relationship with the main boy, in terms of the things that have come after it, I really, genuinely think that a lot of those shows model themselves on Bakemonogatari but then didn’t learn anything from Monogatari’s second season, which is where Araragi is literally written out of like 70% of the narrative and the girls just kind of get to know each other and solve their issues together and is really some of my favorite personal favorite parts of it.

As for my own knowledge of the show, I first was exposed to Monogatari because I had just watched Madoka, was really a baby anime fan, and I had just watched Madoka and I’d really loved Madoka, so I was like, “Okay, what else has Akiyuki Shinbo done that maybe I would like?” and so I thought, “Ooh! Monogatari. This looks interesting. It’s about supernatural things.” I turn it on, and the first ten seconds show, and it is like seven seconds of a girl’s panties. And I…

VRAI: Yup.

TONI: Just… I’m like, “What the fuck?” And I turn it off. And that was my entire impression of Monogatari for a while, until… I don’t know what possessed me to try to continue watching it. I think I was just very curious because, you know… I really have no idea why I decided to turn it back on and keep watching it. But I think the thing about my experience of Monogatari is that for me, it’s very much the show that there’s certain episodes that just have such profound ideas about the way that we build relationships and the way that we manage relationships and cope with trauma that I honestly feel like I’ve learned a lot from in terms of how I interact with people, which is a crazy thing to say; and then there’s other episodes that make me want to gouge my eyes out because I’m just so angry with why the fuck they decided that this was a good idea. And that roller coaster of emotions is kind of, I think, the exp— like, I don’t know about y’all, but I think that’s my experience of watching Monogatari and I think it’s a lot of people’s, probably, experience who have any kind of feminist leanings. You know? Speaking of which, do we want to talk about—

VRAI: I was—

TONI: What were you going to say, Vrai?

VRAI: Oh, no, I was glad you— I was trying right before we recorded to wrack my brains about how this all started, because I remember you one day being like, “I think I’m gonna give this another shot,” and then it was your life for four months. And I was trying to be like, “Why did they start this?” And I could not remember. It just ate your life one day.

TONI: Yeah, I think— Yeah. And I mean, I’ve talked on podcasts before about… I think for me, the reason that I kept going is that I watched the first two episodes and I was just so taken by Hitagi’s arc and Hitagi’s experiences and I felt such a kinship with Hitagi as a character as a fellow survivor of abuse. And I’ve talked about this on another podcast—I believe, our one about… maybe it was about Baldur’s Gate 3. But I’m just a huge… Characters like that really hit a nerve for me. Yeah. Did we want to talk about Hitagi now, or should we talk about the visual style and what it’s like to first immerse yourself in this show’s visual style?

PETER: I did want to— I had that written down as kind of… One of the reasons that I didn’t mention [for why] the show had always been on my list was it was produced by Shaft and I am definitely one of those people who loves the Shaft style, the Shinbo style, so it was kind of an inevitability that I was going to check it out. And I don’t know why but I just love this bullshit.

TONI: [Chuckles]

PETER: It’s hard to tell— At certain points, I’m almost like, man, were they limited in their budget? With the way that they cut in and out of just literally blank screens that [have] the name of the color they used, or it almost looks like “Animation for crying should go here” but they didn’t have time for it or something like that. It’s very… kinda daring, especially because at that point this wasn’t established Shaft, to my knowledge, so I think they didn’t know they could get away with this yet, but they certainly did. 

So I think it’s really great. I can see why somebody would think it’s obnoxious or even toxic to watch and they don’t want to see it, especially if you are not native Japanese speaker and are trying to read subtitles and the screen at the same time when it’s flashing walls of text that probably not even Japanese people can take in all at once, in the half-second that it appears on screen. So, a lot of interesting decisions were made. And I did like pausing the screen and finding out if what was flashing was actually even relevant to what I was watching at all. But I do think it’s kind of an interesting way of trying to create visual interest and incorporate some of the things that the characters are talking about into the screen and what you’re watching during some episodes, which are literally just 24 minutes of two characters talking to each other. So, that’s very interesting. 

And I do wonder how much Shaft’s visual style for this series ended up contributing to the empty world that a lot of Bakemonogatari’s copycats take on, where it’s just like nobody seems to exist except the main character and the girls that he runs into and talks to, despite the fact that hanging out in a park and talking to somebody without running into a single other person in Japan, Tokyo, is kind of ludicrous. But that’s something I’ve definitely noticed from copycats as well. So, it is interesting to think of how much of it is Shaft’s fault, because they’ve also done this… they’ve done this twice now with Bakemonogatari and Madoka, where they just kind of irrevocably changed the anime fandom. So, I guess that’s just a bunch of messy stuff I had to say about the visual style.

VRAI: Visually, I came around to this by the end of the stretch of episodes we were watching. I find the premiere kind of infuriating, and I had to continually remind myself as we were watching that I gotta be real careful what stones I throw because my favorite live-action American television show is Hannibal, which is full of characters sitting around, talking pretentiously at each other. Yeah, some of this is my fault because as a non-Japanese speaker I feel sort of inevitably shut out of ten-minute conversations about the radicals that characters use in the kanji to spell their names.

[Chuckling]

VRAI: And this is my fault. This is not on Bakemonogatari. This is because I can’t follow this and therefore it feels boring, which was sort of interesting to grapple with as someone who’s been watching anime for such a long, long time that I feel like I’m used to a lot of the more common wordplay and general conventions even in more out-there shows. But yeah, I find the first episode a little bit infuriating in that… To me, good visual trickery is something that, even if you have to stop to break it down and get more out of it later, you can sort of at least unconsciously take it in the first time around; you can sort of absorb it as you go. I think the later episodes accomplish that in interesting ways. 

My favorite parts of these episodes have been when the show pulls its thumb out and actually gets to the monster of the week, as it were, and then I feel like it really coalesces down into these thematically beautiful moments, like when it shifts into awkward CGI that really, really works for the crab or it has that fantastic fight sequence with neo-colored blood and rope-a-dope guts.

TONI: Oh, Vrai, you’re gonna love Kizumonogatari. I’ve told you multiple times—

VRAI: You have told me this more than once!

TONI: Vrai, you’re gonna love Kizu. I just know that that is gonna be something that tickles your interest. Anyways…

VRAI: Yeah! And even more broadly, I like all of the circular imagery in Mayoi’s arc. I think there’s a lot of interesting scenic visuals going on. I think that the staircase fall that’s sort of the romantic meet-cute between Hitagi and Araragi is really beautiful.

TONI: [crosstalk] Oh, my God. I fucking love it.

VRAI: Yeah, it’s beautiful! But I can’t truck with the onscreen inner monologue from the books because I think it’s— It is sort of Interesting to note that this was just before the advent of streaming for anime, so it’s possible it was conceived with the notion of, “Oh, well, folks will go frame by frame on the DVD.” But I don’t know. To me, a piece of on-screen text that you cannot actually just pause… You can’t pause the screen and read these. You have to click, click, frame by frame. And it’s really distracting and flashing to the eye and alienating in moments where I’m supposed to be feeling more intimate with the characters, and I wanted to shake it.

TONI: You see, for me, I actually have come to kind of like that, partially because I think that a lot of it is trying to capture the way that we aren’t always fully conscious of our thoughts and they’re almost subliminal. So you catch little glimpses of it, but then you’re not able to fully latch on to it. What you were saying, Peter, about the empty world, it’s really interesting because the person who really created the visual aesthetic of Monogatari in general… well, there’s two people, really, responsible for the visual aesthetic, at least of this season. Monogatari in general, the visual aesthetic of the backgrounds and of the world itself, comes from Nobuyuki Takeuchi, who actually went on to direct Sarazanmai, you know, our favorite “kappa pulling things out your butt” show.

VRAI: Love it.

TONI: I adore it. And so, you can see the trajectory from Bakemonogatari’s style when it comes to, say, the characters who are just stick figures in Sarazanmai, and then later on in Monogatari you’re gonna see characters who are just kind of represented as these construction worker–like bodies.

PETER: Yeah, yeah, yeah, during Kanbaru’s arc.

TONI: Yeah. And then the kind of ways that these extremely artificial environments, also, I think, are reminiscent then of Sarazanmai and what he’ll later do there or, for that matter, Penguindrum and my favorite episode of Penguindrum, which is Himari’s backstory arc episode in the ice castle, I think it’s called. The ice library. Anyways…

You know what’s funny, though, is that whenever I’ve shown this show to somebody, the first time that they watch it, when I show them Bakemonogatari… because I’ve learned to show people Kizumonogatari first because they’ll like that.

[Chuckling]

TONI: Whenever I show people the premiere of Bakemonogatari, they are always overwhelmed and disoriented and have absolutely no idea what’s going on and so confused. But for me, I’ve watched this premiere now about four times or five times, and each time I watch it I grow to love it a little bit more. There’s something about the way that Araragi’s perspective is captured that I think is just so interesting. I especially love the conversation at the beginning between him and Hanekawa as you get this first-person point of view perspective, as he’s kind of looking at his pencil to avoid looking at her face while also still looking in her direction.

PETER: Mm-hm. Yeah, that Hanekawa, all the time she’s in there, you’re just like, oh, man, she’s gonna have a really big story arc [Chuckles] with all of her… I like her as a character and her interjections. She’s used really well, I feel, in the first eight episodes.

VRAI: Yeah, I like her.

TONI: Yeah. You like her, Vrai?

PETER: [Chuckles]

VRAI: She strikes me as extremely manipulative (affectionate).

[Chuckling]

PETER: “Compliment” in parentheses? [Chuckles]

TONI: Well, it’s funny because in that first conversation, you can catch a glimpse of her trying to undermine Hitagi with Araragi until she catches the fact that he likes her, that he likes Hitagi. Well, actually, because she catches the fact that he kind of likes Hitagi, but before she realizes that his feelings are kind of cemented, she’s like, “Oh, yeah, she’s a sickly girl.” So she’s clearly doing something to try to undermine Hitagi in that first moment!

PETER: Yep. That cell phone call was great, too.

VRAI: I love bitchy, toxic femmes when they’re well written.

TONI: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Which is a huge caveat, but sometimes it happens!

PETER: Can definitely say— To bring the final thoughts way too far forward, I can say I’m looking forward to what… I mean, she’s going to have a story arc eventually, so whenever that happens, I’m excited for it.

TONI: Well, I will say, if we keep going, we’re gonna have three different episodes that are probably going to be devoted to Hanekawa, if we do what I want to, so we’re gonna have a lot of time to talk about her. So maybe we should talk— What were you going to say, Vrai? [Chuckles]

VRAI: Oh, no, I was just gonna say, speaking of framing and Araragi and Hitagi, I think it is really interesting how often the show likes to just use the top of his head to sort of visually trick the viewer into an unconscious POV shot, which I think is something that a lot of horny shows try to do. I think we here at AniFem have talked a lot about the delicate dance between making a show that’s about a horny character and making a show that’s a fanservice show, that is the third-person eye of the camera being horny just for fanservice purposes. 

And I sure— I think it wants in some places to do the former, but I think it’s also just comfortable with the fact that it’s doing the latter. So I see what you mean, talking about Hitagi’s character as this abuse survivor in abstract, right? I think it’s interesting that she’s developed this really prickly, sort of deliberately antagonistic… it’s not even necessarily a front; that’s also just kind of what she’s like, which I like. And I was surprised by how much I kind of like her developing relationship with Araragi. But I don’t know. To me, there’s such a difference between the fact that she has become deliberately provocative and weaponized being forward with her sexuality as this way to have control over herself and her environment and her relationship with others… I think that’s really interesting. 

But, boy, in an era where the phrase “male gaze” has become kind of fraught—because what does “gaze” mean when more people are making media and more people are behind the camera, and the industry is no longer quite so lockstep in the presumption that the most important viewer is a straight cis racial-majority male like it was when Mulvey was writing her essay—holy crap, this is just some Mulvey-ass male gaze in that bedroom scene, where it literally just dismembers, visually, Hitagi down into her boobs and her thighs and away from her face over and over again, except for the ass slap heard around the world. I did like that one.

TONI: Are we talking about the part where… just to be clear, after her shower?

PETER: Yes.

VRAI: Yeah, yeah. And it’s so frustrating to me, because I think that that statement, that tossed-off line she has, which I’m sure… It makes me wonder if some of this worked better in the novels, right, because you don’t have that visual element. Like, her line about having trouble choosing clothes because they feel heavy. That’s really evocative to me in a subtle way of… it’s becoming much more aware of how you dress yourself and your clothes and the fact that she’s gone forward living this very constructed life as a way to protect herself. I think that’s kind of beautifully subtle writing all of a sudden out of nowhere. 

But yeah, yeah, the fanservice in that scene I don’t think is empowering or her owning her sexuality by taunting him or whatever. I think it’s so thoroughly undermined by those repetitive fanservice cuts that are just talking and— It’s almost as bad as that infamous Frank Miller panel where Vicki Vale is talking about going on a date with Batman and it’s just focused on her ass the entire time.

PETER: Mm-hm. Yeah, I didn’t even really— I was like, why is this fanservice here right now? Because later on in the series, I think all the fanservice around Senjougahara makes sense because there’s this developing… as you said, she’s kind of weaponized the way she interacts with other people, and I think that becomes like a weapon in her tool— What am I trying to say? I’m gonna mix my metaphors here. It’s kinda like a tool in her kit when she’s interacting with Araragi because she actually has this developing attraction to him and she could sense that he’s interested in her as well. 

So, from that point on, it made sense, but in this scene in the bedroom, before the confrontation with the crab, I didn’t know why she was even supposed to be doing that. Was it just to throw him off? Was it because she was uncomfortable with what she knew was about to happen? I’m trying to give it the benefit of the doubt and think of an explanation for why it was happening. Although, I guess even though I see intention with the way Senjougahara purposefully uses her body later on, instances around other characters are not as purposeful, so maybe I’m just trying to give the series more of a benefit of the doubt than it deserves.

TONI: I’m thinking. I don’t… Is there a lot of fanservice of her after her arc?

PETER: Well, I guess not directly, but there is the scene at the train station where she says she’s gonna give him a service and she stands over him while wearing a dress. So, it’s not quite fanservice for us—

TONI: [crosstalk] I remember that, yeah.

VRAI: [crosstalk] I kind of liked that scene. Like, that’s not actually fanservice. That’s like horny flirting. I’m fine with that.

PETER: Yeah. But I guess from Araragi’s perspective, it’s her revealing part of her body to entice him, even though us as the audience, we did not see it that time, as opposed to the one that to me felt more out of place, before she resolved the— I think they’d known each other for like two hours at that point, and she was about to go back to getting a crab exorcized out of her, in which case I’m like, “Why is she…? What’s with all this power play stuff she’s doing in her apartment?”

TONI: Well, I think there’s a couple of ways of looking at it. I think on one hand… the way I read it originally is that she is… There’s multiple points where she implies that she is worried that the ritual that is going to excise the crab is going to be some kind of sexual violence against her. And I think on some level she genuinely thinks that Araragi is sexualizing her—because he is, right—but also in this very predatory way. And I think that she wants to have some amount of control over the way that she is being sexualized.

I also think, though, that the show is not necessarily representing that as empowering. I think the show is representing that as the coping mechanism of somebody who is hurting. And that is a complicated thing, because on one hand, you’re seeing this and you’re kind of seeing somebody pick at their own wound in that scene. And the question is, then, is watching this girl pick at her own wound or pick at her scab and then having that be, in itself, sexualized… Right? We’re watching a character do something deeply uncomfortable for them and for us, and it’s being sexualized. Is that inherently, necessarily…? Where do you draw the line with that, right? You know, because is that sexualizing a girl who’s in pain and really should be getting…? You get what I’m saying, right? Or is it representing honestly this aspect of how girls or how people—survivors—cope negatively with their own sexualities after assault? And honestly, like many things in Monogatari, I think it’s both.

VRAI: Yeah. Honest to God, watching Hitagi’s arc, I had a moment where I was like, “Did Mari Okada watch this arc, mad?” Because, yeah, to me so much of the Hitagi crab is straightforwardly doing the stuff that The Woman Called Fujiko Mine is commenting on in a meta sense, where that series also has… That series goes up to about 15 in terms of having so much nudity that it becomes mundane and trivialized and even sort of annoying in a very pointed and deliberate way. Yeah, I think that you’re right: this is Hitagi self-harming in that scene. I can totally see where you’re coming from, from that. I don’t think the framing pulls it off in terms of making it as uncomfortable as maybe it should be, because nobody in this series talks like a person, as it were. It’s all very heightened and dramatic and very hyperreal, so I don’t think it necessarily comes off as different from her regular dialogue, right? So instead it just becomes like, “Ah, man, this girl is damaged and that sad! And also kinda hot!”

TONI: Mm. It’s very interesting watching this show as somebody who has absolutely no attraction to women. [Chuckles] You know? Because a lot of that ends up almost going over my head because I’m just like, “I’m supposed to find this hot? I don’t. But okay.” [Chuckles] You know?

VRAI: It does nothing for me as somebody who has no attraction to children!

TONI: [Cackles]

VRAI: But I know how the theory of this works.

PETER: I think that’s a very interesting reading, though, regarding self-harm. I hadn’t thought of that, but it does, yeah, it kinda fits in, especially when you discover what the precipitating incident behind her supernatural crab problem was.

VRAI: That was the point where I thought, “Okay, this isn’t— I might do okay,” … is that I really liked the… like I said sort of meanly earlier, is when this show pulls its thumb out and actually gets to breaking down the girls’ issues and them getting to confront what’s going on with them, I think it has so far hit it out of the park every time. And I really liked the photo collage stuff in Hitagi’s flashback.

TONI: You know what’s so funny, Vrai, is that when you were first talking to me about that, right… like, we were talking off air and you were talking about this broken, dismembered girl imagery… I thought at the time you were referring to the photo collage stuff, because there’s an image, right, of a doll that has been broken into pieces!

VRAI: Yeah! Yeah, see, that I think is effective and deliberately alienating and, honestly, a really respectful way to visualize this experience of dissociated sexual assault. I like that entire sequence. I think that it’s sensitive and interesting and creative and artistic. And it makes me angry that there’s all this bullshit that comes before it!

TONI: Right! But I think the thing is that, like what you were saying earlier, there’s a parallel, right between the way that the camera is looking at these different parts of her body, right, in that sexualized scene, and then this dismembered body, because literally you used the same language to describe both. I’m not trying to play a gotcha here. But I do think that there’s something interesting about that.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Yeah. No, no, no, uh-huh. Right, whether—

TONI: Like this idea that she’s—

VRAI: Right, whether it’s— Mm-hm.

TONI: She’s come to view herself in terms of these disparate kind of parts of her body that she can then use and kind of try to maintain control, but she’s also deeply internalized this sense of being broken into these pieces by her experience, and she kinda needs to put herself back together. I don’t know. That’s so interesting, actually!

VRAI: No, it is. And I guess… Like, it is interesting and it is there, and maybe it’s the cynic in me that thinks that the average Bakemonogatari viewer of the era wouldn’t have picked up on that or necessarily cared. And maybe it’s the cynic in me that said, “This is the show that in another episode is going to create a continuity error just so it can show me a grade schooler’s panties.”

TONI: Speaking of which, should we talk about Mayoi?

VRAI: Yeah.

TONI: Oh, God.

PETER: Mm-hm.

VRAI: Yeah. Let’s get it over with. Again, I do want to say, before I get really angry, I do like the last scene of her arc. I think it’s sweet. I think the confrontation scene is sweet.

TONI: Me too.

PETER: Mayoi’s or Senjougahara’s?

TONI: [crosstalk] Mayoi.

PETER: Oh, okay.

VRAI: Mayoi’s, yeah.

PETER: Yeah, yeah. I like the conclusion.

TONI: [Laughs wryly]

VRAI: I like when it was over.

[Laughter]

TONI: Mayoi—

PETER: It was… [Sighs] some tragic stuff. I honestly—

TONI: [Chuckles]

PETER: When he gets in the argument with her and then it just devolves into a fistfight and he’s standing over her, going like, “Yeah, you fucking idiot for fighting me. Of course I win. I’m, like, The Ultimate Fighter” or something after he just beat up a school kid, I thought that was… The way it was framed, I thought, was genuinely funny. If they just hadn’t also had him molest her over the course of the fight, I thought that would have been a very funny scene.

VRAI: Yeah! Honestly, same.

PETER: And it served— It didn’t do anything.

TONI: The horniness towards children in Monogatari does nothing, thematically or anything! Why? It makes me so mad because it contributes absolutely nothing thematically to the show. Except for maybe Nadeko’s arc. There it’s actually interesting. But everywhere else, it is just completely thematically dead to me. There’s no reason it has to be there.

VRAI: Yeah, there’s the line early in the first Mayoi episode where Araragi talks about how siscon stuff is just made to appeal to dudes who’ve never actually had a real sister, and I’d love to give that line some credit, but I’ve heard about the toothbrush scene, Toni. I’ve heard about the toothbrush scene!

TONI: [Laughs] Yeah, no, no, no. We will get to Nise at some point if we get to it, and I am not looking forward to it. Oh, God.

VRAI: Yeah. Do we kinda want to skim over her so we have more time to talk about the better character who’s better, in the last 20 minutes here?

TONI: Yeah, I mean, the thing is there’s not a lot to talk about with Mayoi because, frankly, the really meaty stuff with Mayoi only comes when she starts being a side character in other arcs.

PETER: Yeah. I feel like that arc honestly did more for me in developing Hanekawa and the relationship between Araragi and Senjougahara more than anything with Mayoi herself. I was surprised it was so long. But yeah, definitely Kanbaru, I think, is the most important story arc.

TONI: I want to know: Vrai, what do you think of Kanbaru? We have not talked about this at all, I have no idea what you think, and you must tell me.

VRAI: Hey, Toni. Toni, did this show make the predatory lesbian a pedophile? Toni, did it do that?

TONI: [Laughs] Okay. [Laughs] Okay, say more about that, Vrai. Or do you want me to answer the question?

VRAI: No, I want you to answer the question, and then we can talk some more!

TONI: [Laughs] They certainly didn’t— It’s like, she’s certainly nowhere near as predatory as Araragi is.

[Chuckling]

VRAI: Yeah, the bar is in hell.

TONI: That’s true.

VRAI: [Chuckles] No, but… So, yeah, other than getting really, really fucking pissed about her casually creeping on the tiny background vampire, who I’m sure will be important later, because fuck you, Nisio Isin, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you… Yeah, no, I like her. I was also a little bit like, “Fuck you, you haven’t earned the right to use Utena’s stretch. Get off that level; you’re not on it. Get off! Out!”

TONI: Like the way that Kanbaru stretches is pulled directly from Utena?

VRAI: Yeah, that’s her… idle animation, if you will, you know, when she’s just sort of talking to characters and she does that, like… puts her hands on her knees and stretches out to either side. That’s totally Utena’s thing.

TONI: Oh, yes.

VRAI: But no, I think it’s… It’s an interesting thing to be watching this the season after I’m in Love with the Villainess aired, right? Because that show is messy! That novel is messy, but it’s written by a trans lesbian, right, trying to do a thing intimately about this issue of predatory lesbians in an anime. And I don’t know, I have a certain amount of… a deep compassion for that even as I get sort of frustrated, really frustrated with the early parts of that series. 

And then on the flip side, I do think that this series is doing a few interesting things with Kanbaru in terms of how it wants to address the fact that the whole “You know, I’m just happy if I can be near you and we don’t interact at all, and I’m definitely happy being unrequited and over here” is some bullshit that no real teenager has ever thought. That, I was on with. And also I laughed really hard when she was like, “I’m a lesbian. Oh, you’re a man. Hold on, let me rephrase this for you: I’m a yuri.” I laughed fucking hard! 

Although… But also, I don’t appreciate the fanservice getting in on it again, where it’s like, okay, so this character’s explicitly said that she’s a lesbian and she used the term “lez,” which was pretty much the community term in Japan, marked out for… you know. But she’s still gonna try to flirt with Araragi, though.

PETER: Yeah, oh, my God, that fucking scene.

VRAI: [crosstalk] And maybe, maybe, you can see it as her secretly testing his devotion to Hitagi. But the— Listen, I like Chasing Amy as much as the next guy, but this is somebody who’s loudly said that she is not interested in men but we do still need to have our harem protagonist have another woman throw herself at him, though. Do need an excuse for that.

PETER: [crosstalk] Are bike shorts… Do those qualify as underwear?

VRAI: I did laugh at that section.

TONI: You see, those are the moments with Kanbaru that I really love. I actually really love her… She has kind of this… But we’ll talk about it more later, but a lot of her dynamic with Araragi is “Am I more perverted or are you more perverted? Let’s have a competition.” And I honestly kind of enjoy that a lot actually. A lot of the jokes in those arcs honestly feel like they were written for me specifically, because a lot of—

PETER: I could get behind that. I think it was just riding on the conversation where she was… I think it was before or directly after the one where she basically said, like, “Well, I’ll just let you have sex with me and then you don’t need to get anywhere near Senjougahara.”

TONI: That was a weird moment. Even on rewatch, I didn’t quite— I still don’t quite understand that moment, because— We’ll talk more about her character moving forward, because there’s a lot going on there. But that moment… Mm. I feel like we’re gonna need to… Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, what was y’all’s impression of that moment? [Chuckles]

VRAI: Yeah, I hated it. That is specifically the moment I was talking about when I was like, “We have to have the lesbian throw herself at our character just to show how massively dick-swinging he is.” Even though, again, I think Araragi is more complex than a lot of horndog protagonists, that still feels like it fell into that for me. Honestly, the bike shorts convo, I kind of liked because the fanservice… the butt shots felt more silly and I liked them racing around, fucking about with each other. I can get behind that. But yeah, it is a little bit tainted by that moment to me.

PETER: Yeah, at least I felt like I could interpret a purpose behind it, which was either “Yeah, she was testing him” or to kind of begin to build this sort of unreliable narration that she had around herself since she had said, “Oh, yeah, I’ve kind of determined where I’m at with this. I want to respect Senjougahara’s boundaries. I’m in this unfortunate situation,” and then you kinda learn that what she’s saying is not really the truth of how she feels. So, I think it was supposed to tie into that, but yeah, of course it had to be in the context of her offering sex to the main character.

TONI: I think one thing that I really appreciate about Monogatari in general is that it’s really interested in the deep discontinuity between the lies that we have to tell ourselves to remain in good standing with the people who we care about and then the reality of our messy feelings.

PETER: Yeah. I think that was one of my favorite things about Kanbaru’s arc, where they’re just like, “Well, you actually just kinda wanted to beat him to death, didn’t you?” [Chuckles] And it’s like, “Oh, well.” And I also thought it was really cool of Araragi to go like, “I can empathize with that. Who hasn’t felt that way at one point in their life?” Like, damn. Respect.

TONI: I think that’s— [Obscured by crosstalk]

VRAI: I will say, I think—

TONI: Go ahead.

VRAI: No, no, please, you go ahead. I’m going to go off in a direction.

TONI: I think that’s part of what makes me a little bit more okay with the kind of predatory lesbian contours of her arc, because I think that in many ways the arc is trying to… not deconstruct the predatory lesbian because I really hate that term, “deconstruct,” because I think oftentimes it’s kind of overused and silly nowadays. But I think it is trying to question, like, “Okay, so there’s people who have crushes that are really hard…” and I think that, instead of being the thing that is removing the nuance from her storyline, is actually the thing that helps add more nuance to the storyline. I don’t know. I’ll get more into that later because I want to talk a little bit about the “chop off the arm” scene because I think that’s really interesting. But what were you gonna say, Vrai?

VRAI: Well, I do— Yeah, I think— Mm. I will say that there are moments in all these episodes where I feel just these powerful moments of empathy with these female characters, like when Hitagi is just sort of crying about her mom, and then with Kanbaru when she’s just sort of venting this anger that she would have done everything Araragi did, but she doesn’t have a dick, though, so it doesn’t count. And I was like, “Oh, girl, let me hug you, you sweet dumb fuck.”

TONI: [Chuckles]

VRAI: But as an aside, speaking of why that scene about her offering to have sex with Araragi is in there, I feel like it says something about the average Monogatari viewer that the Wikipedia entry with the character sections describes Kanbaru as “an admitted lesbian.”

TONI: [Groans]

VRAI: [Laughs]

TONI: Why “admitted”? Oh, my Lord!

PETER: I thought it was gonna be something like “Well, she said she’s a lesbian but she also offered Araragi sex, meaning she’s more likely to be bisexual.”

VRAI: Listen, no, would you like me to read the full sentence? Because it’s “She’s an admitted lesbian, although jokingly desires to be Koyomi’s mistress if he ever gets married.”

TONI: Oh, my Lord.

VRAI: [Laughs]

TONI: God, well, we’ll get there in a few episodes, I’m sure.

VRAI: I will give this a modicum of credit in that, because it was 2009 and this is a fanservice anime made for men, I did kind of expect to be waiting around for Episode 3 for it to reveal she was, [Deepens voice dramatically] thunderbolt, a lesbian, [Returns to normal voice] because that was the style of the time. So, it gets a few respect points for me, that it kind of tidied away that point at the beginning of Episode 2 and kind of moved forward with it, you know?

PETER: “I am in love with your girlfriend, but I kind of want to kill you.”

VRAI: Who can’t relate? But yeah, the arm scene.

TONI: I find that scene really interesting. I mean, my interpretation of it is that her wanting to chop off her arm is largely due to internalized homophobia, right? And kind of similar to Senjougahara asking the crab to take away her weight, Kanbaru wants to take away this level of desire that she has for Senjougahara, right, and whatever jealousy that she feels towards Araragi rather than actually dealing with it. And I think one thing that I really appreciate— And she also just lies to herself, right, that she doesn’t care about Senjougahara or that she’s over it, right? And that’s such an obvious lie. And yeah, I don’t know. Just… Yeah. So I’m curious what y’all made of that moment.

VRAI: Yeah, I think there is an interesting level to Kanbaru in the way that she plays off Hitagi in some ways. It’s like, man, it’s gotta suck having a crush on a girl like Hitagi!

TONI: Oh, my God.

VRAI: Because she’s kinda mean! Like, I really like her and I have incredible compassion for the way she is, but holy shit, if you’re not like the person, singular, she’s decided she wants to invest emotionally in, you’re gonna have a bad time. And that’s really hard when you’re also a teenage girl struggling with your own feelings and your own mess and the fact that she’s… She gives me the feeling that she always wanted to be a good girl. You know, she’s got a dead mom and she’s the standout star athlete who seems to be well regarded by her classmates, and so she just stuffs all these negative feelings down until she… She doesn’t just blow off some steam when she has a bad day and gets frustrated. She stuffs it down until she wants to beat her classmates to death. And I’m like, oh, girl, I relate to you.

PETER: I hadn’t thought of the arm-chopping scene in that perspective. I think it was kinda to show… I didn’t know if it was really necessary, but that she has these really dark feelings, and the show is absolutely trying to sympathize her and show that those feelings don’t determine what sort of person that she actually is, because at the end of the day she did say, “Well, I’d rather cut my arm off if keeping this arm means I’m going to harm someone else.” So, I think it was sort of trying to establish her actual moral position or her true morality as opposed to unavoidable feelings that not just her but all of us experience. She didn’t want to beat Araragi death because she’s a bad person. It’s just because she is a person who’s experiencing feelings that she would really like to not be feeling.

VRAI: Yeah, and it’s like… she seems to… It’s not spoken, but I think you can read— I don’t think necessarily that the show is entirely going here, but I think it is within the scope of the ambiguity of what it’s set up if that makes sense, this idea that she is painfully aware that there is this idea of… you know, she’s a teenage girl who would have grown up in the ‘90s if this is set contemporarily to when it was made. She grew up in the ‘90s and the early 2000s. She knows that the only lesbians she sees in her manga are predators, so she better fucking not show any violent or negative feelings and she better stand off here to the side even though she hates it and it sucks, and also she really does want to do the thing that we all know we’re supposed to do, which is, when somebody turns you down you respect their wishes and you don’t go near them, because you care about them as a person and you want to respect their boundaries, but also, you’re so full of feelings and it sucks!

PETER: Yeah. I thought she was definitely the most… Her arc was the most interesting to me of the three, or at least maybe the most easy for the average person to empathize with. I mean, not that Mayoi’s is weird, but… Yeah, I liked Kanbaru a lot.

TONI: I was just gonna ask y’all [about] the ending of it, where Senjougahara just kind of confronts Kanbaru and confronts Kanbaru’s emotions.

VRAI: I really liked that scene.

TONI: Oh, it’s so good, yeah. [Chuckles]

VRAI: It does— I’m gonna trust you that it’s going to go forward from here, right? Because I don’t know, to me, it’s like I want to read it positively as like they’ve sort of cleared the air and she got to confess and Hitagi got to turn her down, and so that kind of clears the air, as it were. It kind of reminded me of the last episode of O Maidens in Your Savage Season, which is a good anime that people should watch. But so, I want to believe that this is going to give them a chance to have closure and genuinely be friends and not lock Kanbaru into the position she was trying to avoid in the first place, which was sort of trying to be friends but actually just pining from afar.

PETER: The whole of the structure around the story arc, especially Senjougahara’s role, was pretty interesting to me because when Kanbaru was first brought up, she threatens to stab Araragi’s eye out as if he’s looking at other women, when she already knew that Kanbaru was a lesbian, so I don’t know why she got super defensive about it. I feel like she definitely should have known, also, that Kanbaru was the one who assaulted him on the train station. It didn’t seem like she was deceived that he had just crashed his bike, considering his bike was wrapped around a fucking building. 

So, it felt strange to me that… well, especially because he lied to her after explicitly saying, “I don’t want us to lie to each other.” It did end up wrapping around kind of nicely in the end, with her showing up as the only one who could possibly resolve this situation. So, I appreciated that Araragi was trying to solve the problem himself and it turned out that was impossible and that she said, “Basically, yeah, your getting beaten to death is kind of your comeuppance for lying to me in the first place.”

TONI: [Chuckles]

PETER: And just the way that it structured all of these— Yeah, I really like “You should die 10,000 times. But yeah, she basically killed you 10,000 times.” But the way all the wishes and promises, it sort of structured itself… Senjougahara… It being revealed that she was aware of the situation sort of made it impossible for the demon possessing Kanbaru’s arm to take action against Araragi and therefore kind of broke the contract. So I thought that was narratively pretty elegant, whereas before, I did not like that Senjougahara had gotten weirdly eliminated from the story. 

So all that, I felt, was great. But yeah, in the end, it’s just like, are we just stuck in the situation where Kanbaru… all she [gets] is she gets to be near Senjougahara like she wanted but not in the way that would actually deliver any sort of catharsis or satisfaction. I did think it was nice that Senjougahara’s like, “No, I see you,” and maybe this does mean that they can be closer, because before that their last interaction has just been Senjougahara saying, like, “Never fucking talk to me again now that you know my secret.” So, the clearing the air was nice, but yeah, as Vrai said, that was kind of the impression that I was left with, was “So is she just gonna be the pining lesbian for the rest of the series or not?”

TONI: Well, you all will find out.

PETER: [Chuckles]

VRAI: God.

PETER: Thanks for resolving all of our concerns.

VRAI: [Chuckles]

TONI: I will not say anything.

PETER: Okay.

TONI: I will say that I really do like Kanbaru as a character over the course of the whole show. She’s fantastic. And she is— One day, towards the end of our watchalong, I will do a tier list of… I think we can all do a tier list of our Monogatari side characters and who we think is a fun time and who we think it’s not a fun time.

VRAI: [Chuckles] I like that. That sounds fun.

TONI: Yeah. There are definitely concerns that y’all had about the show that I have had to keep silent about because I have thoughts, and we will find out about them. Yeah, so I think that just about wraps us up for this watchalong. Do you all have any final thoughts before we close this out?

VRAI: I will say, the kind of last thought is, aside from the shit with Mayoi, where I started to go, “Oh, no, I see it now,” I’m surprised by how much I did not hate Araragi as much as I was prepared to! Because besides “This show is horny,” the other thing that’s known about it is “The main character should be in jail,” which I’d say he’s earned just for the Mayoi stuff. But other than that, like I said, I like that he and Hitagi actually talk to each other and I see why they have this sort of fledgling, developing relationship where they’re both awkward. I like their dynamic, which really surprised me, honestly, and I kind of like that the show seems aware of the issues of this sort of savior complex he has, which, again, is not a thing that some of its later knockoffs have. So, yeah, I just wanted to give him that tentative thumbs-up except for the pedophilia.

TONI: [Laughs]

VRAI: Let me put a wish into the atmosphere where I say I hope Kanbaru gets a girlfriend of appropriate age. Okay, I’m done.

PETER: Mm. Well, how do I follow that up? Vrai already mentioned this, but yeah, since we sort of skipped over the Mayoi arc where a lot of that stuff happened with Senjougahara, I also really like the relationship between her and Araragi and the way that she kind of initially approached him and eventually changed strategies over the course of the Mayoi arc. I think Senjougahara is a great character. I really like the way she communicates and interacts with other people. And yeah, as Vrai said, I am more invested than I thought I would be in their relationship, for sure. So, definitely a lot of surprises into how kind of fun and interesting a lot of the characters are and how invested I am, actually, in maybe some of the relationships. So, that’s been a pleasant surprise.

TONI: Alright!

PETER: Yeah.

VRAI: And I’m looking forward to talking— I’m not necessarily looking forward to watching all of this, but I am looking forward to talking about it with you.

TONI: Yes, it’s very fun getting to get another perspective on this show. And—

VRAI: And I think it’s gonna— I’m sorry, I cut you off. I think it’s gonna end up like Kill la Kill, where that show pissed me off from basically beginning to end but in retrospect I have a lot of fondness for a lot of the characters and the bits of it that were more successful.

TONI: Yeah. Even if we don’t finish the whole show, Vrai, I would like you to watch Hanamonogatari, which is Kanbaru’s… the arc that she narrates, that she has five episodes that are really just kind of about her.

VRAI: Hell yeah!

TONI: I think you’ll [obscured by crosstalk].

PETER: [crosstalk] Sold! [Chuckles]

TONI: What?

PETER: Already sold. Already sold.

TONI: Yeah, no, it really bums me out that that second season, I think, is really where the show starts to escape Araragi’s perspective and we really, really get the girls’ point of view for a while, because I really think that that’s the arcs that y’all would get so much out of. But unfortunately— I mean, not unfortunately—

PETER: It’s encouraging just to hear that they have periods where they interact a lot, because I may be wrong or incorrectly remembering Bunny Girl Senpai, but it doesn’t really feel like a lot of the girls that he interacts with interact with each other; they just all sort of exist in isolation. And I think this is true of a lot of the copycats. So the fact that they can exist together without Araragi present is…

TONI: [Laughs]

PETER: That’s encouraging in and of itself.

TONI: It’s like the Bechdel test as a—

PETER: Yeah, yeah, I was trying to not say the Bechdel test. [Chuckles]

TONI: —a rule of the universe in some of these shows. Like the show must fail the Bechdel test. No, the second season, Araragi’s put on a bus and it’s just the girls talking to each other and having a good time for a lot of it.

PETER: Hell yeah.

TONI: So, I really do look forward to talking at least a little bit about the second season with y’all, if y’all stick with it.

VRAI: If folks want us to, I will watch the rest of it. Probably will end up taking a break because… you know, just for the folks who don’t want ten straight episodes of Monogatari. But I will say right now that if folks are interested in these discussions, I will watch as much as y’all want to hear about.

TONI: So let us know what you think! Alright. This has been Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. If you liked what you heard, make sure to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It helps us to get the word out. And if you really liked what you heard, make sure to share our podcast on social media and give us a buck or two on Patreon. If you pay $5 you can join our Discord and get access to our bonus episodes, which are really fun. You can hear… I don’t remember what our most recent bonus episode was. What did we talk about last?

VRAI: Well, you can hear Toni talk about Monogatari more and also Baldur’s Gate 3.

TONI: Yes. You can hear that stuff and lots of other stuff. And we are on various social media sites. You can look at our Linktree to find all of them.

VRAI: It is linktr.ee/animefeminist.

TONI: Yes. So go there and you will find all of the different sites that we’re on, all of our articles, our Patreon, and anything that you could want, including our shop link where you can buy merch. So, with that, thank you.