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| Taichi to Ai Narata, on a male fan |
Warning: Not only does this contain spoilers for Kageki Shoujo!!, but it touches on subjects which are both sensitive and disturbing. I ask that they be treated as such.
I learned something from Kageki Shoujo!! in Episode 3. I did not expect to; I picked the series up on a whim because a friend kept saying it was her favorite of the season, and I like to have something to talk to people about. It would be something to wind down to at the end of the day. And indeed it started off that way.
Enter the setting of an elite competitive girl group with friendships and dramas just waiting to play themselves out. It’ll have its highs and its lows, and in order for us to bond with the characters they’d better be given quirks. You know, those personality traits that let them stand out easily from each other like their technicolor hair, bar-coded for our convenience. Ai Narata’s hook is that she doesn’t like guys; when they get close to her she turns blue with fright and it’s funny, like an inverse version of
Girls Bravo. It’s also conveniently the motivation for our main character to apply to Kouka Revue and the reason the plot is happening at all. Great, two birds with one stone.
Well, anybody reading this has likely seen Kageki Shoujo!! so you know where I’m going.
Prisoner in your own home
“The words ‘you’re so pretty!’ and ‘what a cutie!’ have always meant ‘hello’ to me.” - Ai Narata
The first hint otherwise was the line above being spoken with the image of a teddy bear on the screen. A child is talking. Debating whether at such an age she would be formulating her thoughts the way she was is another topic, but they convey an aware innocence. She doesn’t blindly value being called pretty because that’s just what everybody says, and indeed takes little joy in it because it has not given her what she desires: her mother’s love. Which is the innocent part; she is a child with a child’s wants, and has no comprehension at this stage as to what being an attractive young female means beyond the words that sycophantic relatives shower on her. She just knows that her mother is pretty and an actress and likes that other people find her pretty too.
Of course, she had worrisome indications as we did. Having a mother for an actress it’s not possible to avoid others seeing and having an opinion on her mother’s looks…
and other aspects… as well. Boys will notice these things. Again, though, while Ai feels shame, it is a public shame, the sort that comes from knowing people are talking about something they shouldn’t, and that it reflects poorly on her mother. She does not know
why it is shameful beyond the taboo, just that if she reacts it will only make it worse. So she swallows the feeling and it sits there, undigested. She just needs to keep being a good girl and it will work out.
Then her mother’s new boyfriend.
From the moment he is introduced we know there is something wrong. We know the future, we know how Ai feels, and the last few minutes have been too real to any longer believe that this flashback will treat it lightly. With foreknowledge the series has situated us perfectly, neither insulting our intelligence that we do not see it coming nor mining the situation for cheap emotional stimulation. For the latter is what makes this episode remarkable: a child in palpable danger is an easy sell, but to convey
her sense of the situation is something else entirely.
If Ai had been blithely unaware that something was wrong, this episode would have been an insult to good taste. It would have been an attempt to use a traumatic event in a child’s life to generate pathos, hinging on her overwhelming innocence to make us feel bad for her. Make
us feel bad. But this is not
Kageki Shoujo!!’s goal. Rather, it has mirrored in us a small piece of what she is feeling. We know something awful is approaching, but we do not know what it is, and that ignorance is ominous. Ai knows something is wrong with the situation, but she does not know what it is either, or why he is doing this, but that doesn’t prevent her from feeling increasingly cornered too.
In similar restraint, we are shown little of the events. We never see the boyfriend’s face; he is an everyman, a presence that stands for something else. His particular characteristics don’t matter. Similarly, the moments where he waits by the door to her room or the shower, we never see these. There is a scene where Ai is sitting at her desk, the camera angle wide to include her door, mentioning that he does this, and… it doesn’t happen. But we strain for a moment to listen for it, to listen for that telltale creak that lets us know he is there, just like she does. That we do not hear it is little relief, because that means it might happen when we do not anticipate it instead. That is even worse.
Then mother goes out of town and we know something is coming. The magical barrier that kept Ai protected from the monster is dispelled and she’s left to face it alone. She tries to avoid it by staying at friends’ houses, but eventually she must go home, and of course he is waiting.
Prisoner in your own body
“My cute little Ai-chan. You’re such a good girl.” - Boyfriend
Until that moment, Ai had never connected her being pretty with the way he was acting toward her. Her dread was instinctual, her explanation of it wanting. That is the essence of what follows.
We do not see his lips meet hers, for such things are beneath being portrayed. We do not know that he placed his tongue in her mouth until she says it later, and until we are past the action and into the reaction. There needs to be distance that way; too much horror would interfere as much as too little would. For this isn’t about him, or about us, but about Ai. In the moment her eyes go wide, her hand spasms, and that is all we need to know. Ai is being violated. She doesn’t know why or how, just like she doesn’t know the connections between attractiveness and sex, between his being in her mouth and coitus. Only that something in her has revolted so much that life will never be the same again.
She begins to throw up.
Rather, she tries to throw up. Disgust is a basic human emotion, a primeval sense that guards us from all that might be toxic or contaminating; fear keeps us safe from lions, disgust from feces and rotten meat. What is less well known is that physical and moral disgust are linked; the same neuronal circuits activate, and we instinctively shy away from people of whom we fundamentally disapprove. It is as though, just like with disease, their dirtiness could rub off on us. It is remarkable that even in this day and age, if people are asked whether they’d be comfortable wearing the jacket of a serial killer, the answer is almost universally “no”.
But Ai doesn’t know this either, and intellectualizing is precisely what Kageki Shoujo!! bypasses. All she can feel is that he has made her dirty. Outside dirt can be washed off but inside sick cannot. It must be expelled. She has to somehow remove that rottenness he made her swallow. So she throws up, as though emptying the body in painful convulsion will empty the mind as well.
Only then, though, only then does she start to think on why she feels this way. The memories come to her, the flashbacks of people talking that might give her some explanation… but these are after the fact. Before the word “slut” had no meaning; it was just a naughty subject like her mother’s breasts, and she had no more context than that. Now she has a feeling, a grotesque sickening feeling that demands a word even as it seeps into and pollutes her. She seizes on it; this is what “slut” means. This is what she is now, and no amount of throwing up will make her clean again.
Then the shame comes.
Not only is she dirty but she thinks she might be pregnant; then her belly will swell up and everybody else will know she is a slut. It will be a public shame of a magnitude she cannot imagine, and she begins to realize that what she is experiencing will not end soon. That a kiss cannot get her pregnant doesn't lessen the impact; rather, it is all the more awful for it cuts through rational (and anesthetizing) explanations to the feelings that lie underneath. In her panicked and misguided attempt to bind herself tight we know more clearly the essence of her emotions than if she knew the truth; suffering caused by ignorance is none the less for it, and often all the more.
The night ends with Ai cutting her own hair. She no longer wants to be pretty.
Afterward
After this scene Kageki Shoujo!! doesn’t try to milk it. We’ve seen enough. The Ai of the present calmly relates that the boyfriend continued to live there for years, and though she now had a lock on her door it was not something she was allowed to forget.
This was not a pleasant essay to write, but it insisted; I think I had to get something out of me too. To say this episode taught me that what the boyfriend did was creepy and disturbing and qualified as sexual assault does not convey it. I knew that already, or at least knew the words and the appropriate responses to give. But there is more to it. The artistry of the episode gave me a glimpse of what that experience would be like, transcribing it in some small measure into my own firsthand feeling. I wasn’t entertained, I wasn’t even “moved.” I was just a little sickened. And tired.
People often get into the weeds when arguing over whether an art is justified, about whether some things are portrayed for shock value or for necessity. I won’t try to resolve that here, especially right at the end. But I will say that I do think there is a difference, and that it is telling that in a show full of attractive young females, often in skintight outfits, there is never once the sense they are being ogled by the camera. After the third episode, I’m glad they don’t have to worry about that.
