Kasimasi ~Girl Meets Girl~ - 02

It should be obvious that popular media tends to exalt the dominant social group. Consider, for example, how much of, say Hollywood filmmaking, or American science fiction, is about how cool white males are. (Sometimes white males are dopey but lovable instead. Those movies are dismissed as "chick flicks.")

Anime, though, is an exception to the rule. The dominant figure of anime is not, as you'd expect, the Japanese man (although, yes, anime is generally pretty nice to Japanese men) but rather the Japanese schoolgirl. It's schoolgirls who are most often placed on a pedestal; ask me to name anime girls who have achieved "legendary character" status and I can rattle off Rei Ayanami, Madoka Ayukawa, Lum, etc., etc. Ask me about anime boys and I have more trouble.

There's a disconnect here, in which the audience of these shows are not the demographic that the shows lavish their attention on. It gets even stronger once you start looking at shows aimed at the most avid anime fans; Air was positively worshipful of its female characters. Actually, I suspect what's going on here is some sort of heavily sexualized version of the sacred feminine - but that's a topic for another day.

The usual reaction of a writer, on deciding that some group isn't adequately represented in their medium or genre of choice, is to write the Earthsea novels, or something similar. Address the problem directly.

But Satoru Akahori would have had a lot of trouble pulling that off. Based simply on the covers of his manga, he clearly likes young girls, and likes having them star in his stories. I don't think he would enjoy writing conspicuously and exclusively male characters. But I have a feeling he's very aware that he is not a young girl, and never will be.

(I was previously fairly confident that the mythologization of schoolgirls was having an effect on Japanese young people, but my major evidence was the advanced self-absorption of certain well-publicized young girls. I hadn't considered the effect on high school boys of combining the usual adolescent body-mortification with hyper-awareness of one's failure to be female. It's probably not tremendously common; in fact, in a male-dominated society, the reverse is probably much more common, but the fact that it's even a possibility is really strikingly new.)

Anyway, there's a long and glorious history of gender-changing in anime - but in every previous instance I've ever seen, the condition of femininity was a central problem for the male hero, and its resolution was his main goal. This is not true of Kasimasi. It's something else. There's no hint of social commentary here; it's pure fantasy.

What Kasimasi does instead, which I don't believe has been done in anime intended for mass consumption before (no, this doesn't count,) is offer admission to the privileged tribe.

Now, there's a bit of a sticky wicket here. Japan remains a patriarchal society, and patriarchys have a principle that I've heard called "It's a lot easier to get a woman to wear pants than to get a man to wear a skirt." If you start with the assumption that men are superior to women, it's perfectly logical that women would want to do supposedly "male" things, like wear suits, get jobs, play basketball, etc., and it's usually treated with indulgent condescension as long as they don't do as well as men. But a man wanting to do "feminine" things is immediately threatening. This is why Ranma and Megumi Amatsuka reacted with horror at any suggestion that they might have a feminine bone in their bodies.

It's therefore expected - a convention of the gender-switching genre - that a boy changed into a girl should immediately devote his full energies to regaining his former body. Hazumu doesn't. He only perfunctorily considers the idea. (It's no excuse that a restoration is declared impossible; that didn't stop Megumi.) And Kasimasi rejects the idea. In fact, it seems to reject the idea uncritically, which is even more interesting. It doesn't challenge the idea that Hazumu should want to be a boy, and it doesn't make arguments in favor of being a girl. It takes as a fait accompli that Hazumu should be female.

There's actually this cute little dodge in there to avoid actually arguing the point.. Normally, sex change recipients have to deal with a tremendous social stigma - but, in Hazumu's case, that's loudly removed from consideration. If you're wondering why the aliens declared themselves and apologized to the world, it's so that Hazumu only has to declare "Sho ga nai yo" - nothing I can do - whenever he's challenged on his enthusiastic acceptance of femininity (and then get back to charming the guys with his newly-granted moe.)

In fact, watch how fast the day-to-day problems Hazumu's condition seems to present are taken care of in the second episode - and how much the manner in which they're taken care of resembles initiation into a tribe. I don't think the buying-the-first-bra scene was idle fanservice, even though it was drawn that way. The writing goes too deeply into the technical details of wearing a bra. That, along with wearing-seifuku-for-the-first-time, are classical rites of passage for young girls. Going into the girls' locker room is blatantly symbolic of acceptance into the formerly forbidden society. The reporters (an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of the aliens thing) are apparently dispatched without any difficulty.

And best of all, the one really big problem of womanhood - having to deal with yucky penises - is solved. Hazumu's beloved just happens to be a lesbian.

The word "primitive" has a particular meaning in the jargon of film theory - it means that the motivating allegories of a story are obvious and central.

Kasimasi ~Girl Meets Girl~ is one of the most - maybe the most - primitive shows I've ever seen.

The reason the word "primitive" is attached to that sort of style? Because it's characteristic of the earliest examples of a new genre.

Now there's a scary thought.