Deconstruction Monogatari —Part Two— Fanservice
Michael Lee
Processing Hachikuji database elements. | SHAFT/Kōsaten
Deconstructionmonogatari.
—NisiOisiN Palindrome—
其ノ貳
(Part Two)
*In this series of articles we will examine key aspects of the SHAFT adaptation of NisiOisiN's dialogue-heavy Monogatari series of light novels. The anime is helmed by Akiyuki Shinbō, a director with a very distinct style, and the pairing of Shinbō and NisiOisin created something of a perfect storm of postmodernity.*
Fanservice for the [Post]Modern Age
Anime without fanservice is like a desert without sand. There are certainly anime projects that eschew using fanservice, just as there are deserts that are dry, barren plains without a grain of sand to be found. However, many anime cannot resist a little pandering and at some point during a series run a character will be introduced, or a scene set up, that has been added purely to titillate the audience. The practice is so ubiquitous, it is seen as an anomaly when a show doesn't feature any fanservice. Monogatari is not one of those shows. In fact, it puts on a masterclass in fanservice, and gets to the postmodern heart of how fanservice works in today's anime industry.
In order to get at the effectiveness of fanservice, and its presence in anime, we need to examine a crucial theoretical piece of this puzzle. Postmodernity's destruction of the grand narrative, the supposed shared history and thinking that imply some kind of universal truths, has brought us to this moment. When that unifying core is brought into question, when it is put up for critique, the result is a fracturing of narrative into smaller, localized narratives that can connect, or can be completely disparate. Lyotard says "the narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements —narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive and so on."
Applied to anime and the like, what we get is a decreased focus on that greater overarching plot, the hero's journey comes to be seen as irrelevant, the history of the anime or manga world no longer matters. Instead, we break a piece of media down into its elements. The art, the character design, (and in the case of anime) the voice actor, the director. The fragments that once made up the whole, now become the focus. Fans perform a revaluation of these fragments, raising certain elements to a higher priority of importance, and others down to nearly inconsequential.
So when grand narratives break down, what emerges from the rubble? The character. With an intense immediacy driven by affect, the character commands the most attention. But why?
The Power of the Bishōjo
Looking first at bishōjo and eroge games, text-based narrative-driven games that focus on relationships, we encounter what is known as remediation. Remediation is the representation of one medium in another, which Bolter and Grusin note as being a "defining characteristic of new digital media." Bishōjo games are meant to simulate a computer interface, and do so with an interactive text box in the bottom third of the screen, and an image in the upper two thirds, framed in such a way that the player is aware that they must play the game as if it were a computer interface. This aspect of remediation is known as hypermediacy, which essentially wants the player to be aware of the mediation at work, "yes this is supposed to be a game, but to play it, you must operate it like it's a computer interface." The other side of remediation is that of immediacy, wherein the mediation at work is meant to be hidden or transparent, to allow the media object to be seen and felt as if it were the original medium. This acts on the player through the appealing artwork. It is meant to evoke feeling and emotion, and in a sense breaks free of the other remediation at work—the game and its hypermediacy—and appeal directly to player as a work of art. All the window dressings that make up the game fall away, and you're left with the image and your relationship to that image. This intense feeling is tied directly to the character in the image. It gives characters a great deal of power.
Bishōjo games are a great starting point for our discussion on the fanservice in Monogatari, as the beautiful girls featured in bishōjo games are framed similarly to the heroines in Monogatari. There is a great deal of scholarship that focuses on the male gaze, and the idea that female characters have an inherent "to-be-looked-at-ness" though there is debate on whether this is a case of the female characters being mere playthings, or if there is some level of agency to these characters. Despite being "looked at," female characters are often looking back at the viewer. And doing so with a great level of intensity. With only a few images used per scene, there are prolonged periods where the character is intently looking at the viewer. It plays with the notion of spectatorship, who is it that is invoking the gaze, and who is being watched?
Patrick Galbraith argues that despite the male avatar being the protagonist, the game's emotional core rests with the female characters. The male avatar of a bishōjo game—and even more so in an eroge—is more often than not a faceless, expressionless character that may as well just be a camera on a stick set to take pictures every so often as girls talk to it. If the player character does appear, they often are obscured from view and are certainly never the focus of an image. By having the girls of the game carry the emotional weight, it is more difficult for the player to fully control or dominate the girls, as the player may resonate emotionally with the girls instead of identifying with the faceless avatar. This power reversal most certainly plays out in Monogatari, as Araragi Koyomi is very rarely able to get the upper hand on any of the girls he encounters. While he may act inappropriate towards them, often in a sexual manner, Koyomi comes off as emotionally weaker in almost all cases. He is essentially the player behind the nameless/faceless avatar, the unrestrained id of the otaku viewer brought to life on screen, yet still lacking in power due to the emotionally strong female characters.
With the breakdown of grand narratives, the emergence of character, and the intense immediacy of the character, it is clear that this is the piece of the media object that carries the most power. So as with almost everything in postmodernity, the next step is to break this down too. How do we take a character and break them down into elements? We dig into their physical traits and their behavioral tropes.
Living in the Database
If we subscribe to Azuma Hiroki's musings on characters, he describes the character at the center of this character-driven world as "a simulacrum, derived from the database of Moé elements." An amalgam of established "cute" traits, compiled into a character to be consumed. Postmodernity drives us towards compartmentalizing elements of a media object, breaking something down to the smallest unit, and then rebuilding from there to suit our specific, highly curated, highly individualized desires. The Monogatari series does this for every character, with the intention to create a range of characters that, on some level, will resonate with every fan. Stock characters exist in all media, defined by a set of narrow traits that act as shorthand from which we can glean a basic understanding of what the character is like. However, Monogatari fetishizes nearly every aspect of every character to captivate the viewer. Take for example Hachikuji Mayoi, the poor ghost girl who can't find her way home. While she may appear to be just an elementary school-aged girl, Azuma's "database consumption" approach to media would have us look closer at the elements that make up Hachikuji. She is school-aged, and looks it, which makes her a "Loli" character (a Japanese slang for a girl who appears young, taken from "lolita" based on the Nabokov novel), she has twin ponytails, wears a school uniform—with cherries on it to imply her shōjo purity— has a band-aid on her left knee, and is often shown with the moé fang, or snaggletooth. All of these elements (and I'm sure others I haven't considered here) have been brought together, plucked from the database, to form a character that has a variety of charm points —yes even the band-aid is a charm point— that might strike a chord with fans. Placed in the hands of a unique talent like Shinbō Akiyuki and his team of character designers and animators, when Hachikuji is brought to life on screen, the director makes certain that we, the viewer, are given ample time to focus in on these character traits.
The dialog-heavy nature of the series means that often our characters are shown in POV and subjective shots (from Koyomi's perspective), or in conversation through first-person shot-reverse shot framing. Shinbō will often use low-angles, obliques, and other unusual shots to play up a character's traits as well.
For Your Eyes Only
Curation drives the consumption of our current moment, as evidenced by the 3500 subscription box services operating right now. And inside each of those boxes is a collection of goods from the "database" that makes up that category of good. If it's clothing, you get pieces that make up a look. If it's food you get the ingredients to make a meal. By curating these goods, organizing them into what is essentially a narrative, it feels as if each box has been personalized for each consumer. This is what we see with fanservice in anime, particularly when it is executed well. Characters made up of elements from the moé database, curated for your consumption.
The Monogatari series does this better than most, creating characters that affect viewers with their emotional immediacy. Taking cues from bishōjo games with long, lingering shots of the character gazing back at the viewer, Shinbō Akiyuki's direction creates scenes where characters not only excite the viewer—as they are give more time to absorb all the curated moé elements— but also gives the character more power, as their fixed gaze into the camera controls the emotion of the scene and drives forward our involvement and attachment to the series. The abundant fanservice on display weakens Koyomi in the story, often times unable to act with authority due to his libido, and weakens us the viewer, as we too spend time gazing all the while giving already strong characters even more power.
Fanservice is often injected into an anime to pander to the crowd, draw in viewers, and hopefully have them empty their wallets in the form of Blu-Ray sales or associated merchandise. However, when fanservice aspires to be more—as we see in Monogatari—it can become a powerful tool in the hands of the right creative team. The finely curated characters of Monogatari not only offer maximum charm with their carefully selected attributes, they also gain the power to control their own narratives, turning the gaze back on the viewer and driving their story in the process.
Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and is currently pursuing research on Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media.
