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.
• "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.
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,
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,
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.
• 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
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,
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,
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,
who rescued her from the Child Broiler,
or Kanba, who
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."
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!"
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.
"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
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
like Momoka, gets placed in the diegetic world of the drama.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.