The Five Stages of Katanagatari

Going to a film school, you end up peer reviewing a lot of bad papers written by sleep deprived 20-somethings that have only half formed ideas about what they are writing about (side note, I am deeply sorry to everyone that had to read my awful Patlabor 2 essays in college). Psychology students, in my experience, tended to be double majors that would try and apply what they had learned in psych classes to film, with varying degrees of success. Despite this, the Kübler-Ross model, also known as the five stages of grief, wasn’t something I saw people applying to art. For those that need a refresher without Googling, the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The ending of Katanagatari set me on a course to experience each stage in record time, ruining everything good about the show in the process.

As a rule, I try and avoid Nisio Isin’s work. I read Death Note Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases after devouring the Death Note manga over a long weekend, which was bad enough to turn me off of the author and light novels as a medium. Bakemonogatari and its sequels have made me constantly wonder what people, whose opinions I generally respect, see in it for almost a decade now. I started watching Katanagatari not knowing of Nisio Isin’s involvement. It’s better I didn’t know, because otherwise I wouldn’t have allowed myself to enjoy any of it. Katanagatari uses the monster-of-the-week format to show the exploits of Togame, a Machiavellian strategist, and Shichika, an air headed martial arts master, on their quest to collect 12 katana that act as MacGuffins. A clan of Ninja Scroll rejects and some ronin that couldn’t get their own light novel series try and stop them. It’s a fairly standard plot, but early on the show was addressing and subverting genre conventions in a way that had me hopeful that Katanagatari would stand out from other series. Shichika pledges himself to Togame in the first episode, both to help her in her quest and to fall in love with her. It was incredibly refreshing to see two characters in their mid-20s sleep together, bathe together, and become increasingly intimate with each other. As an adult, I don’t get anything out of seeing the build up to confessing your feelings to the popular girl in class. I need more, and Katanagatari was giving me that. Togame was opening up to and wanting to further things with Shichika, who in turn was starting to develop more nuanced feelings for Togame. Episode 10 of Katanagatari is about both characters reflecting on their place in the world, their motivations, and what the other means to them, all of which was tarnished by the ending.

Source: NIS America http://www.nisamerica.com/anime/katanagatari-vol-1-2

After collecting 11 of the 12 MacGuffin swords, a character Togame and Shichika interacted with about 3 times previously shows up and shoots Togame (the last katana is two guns, and I was willing to overlook that at this point). She dies, and spends about 15 minutes out of an hour long episode going back and forth about how she was only using Shichika, how she really loved him, how her real love was part of her plot, how she… you get the idea. Shichika then changes costumes and becomes the 2008 idea of edgy anime man, goes off to kill the shogun or die, then ends up making a map of Japan with Togame’s arch nemesis. In one episode Katanagatari destroyed everything that it had been working towards and even directly addressing just two episodes prior. Character motivation meant nothing anymore. Real, sincere moments were thrown out in favor of cheap shock value. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing as it happened, and when the credit song played I was livid.

Bakemonogatari isn’t the only popular thing I have contrarian opinions about; I also hate Twin Peaks. But in Twin Peaks’ defense, the majority of the second season is so awful that the ending doesn’t matter. Nothing was going to make up for the James plotline. But Katanagatari is great for 11 out of 12 episodes. The ending hurt. A lukewarm, predictable, ‘happily ever after’ ending would have been better. I found myself looking at forum archives from years ago trying to find a justification for the ending. Maybe things played out differently in the books. Maybe someone’s hot take from MyAnimeList would cause me to rethink everything and come to love the end. But there was nothing. Katanagatari quickly went from being something I wanted to champion as a hidden gem and proselytize to becoming something I needed to get over.

Endings are hard to write. The ending you are currently reading isn’t that good. I’m not going to get a Pulitzer for saying that writing this blog-article-essay thing has led me to acceptance. At least I’m staying true to the last 92% of what I’ve written, unlike Katanagatari.

Okami Is The Reason I Should Play Games From My Pile Of Shame

Like you, my backlog of media is huge. I need to read Slaughterhouse Five and Gravity’s Rainbow. I should watch Alien and The Godfather at some point. I still haven’t started The Wire. But out of everything I need to get to, games are the most daunting task. I could easily set aside 2 hours for a movie, but the 80 hours I need to beat something like Fallout: New Vegas, or the amount of time I would need to have a deep understanding of the mechanics of Company of Heroes, are far greater than the chunk of my life that would evaporate by binge watching a bad Netflix original show over a weekend. That said, getting to the games I’ve been putting off playing for years brings its own feeling of accomplishment that I can’t get from watching something that I will only engage with for a fraction of the time. And out of the games I’ve been meaning to get to, Okami was relatively high on the list.

Source: Capcom Unity Twitter https://twitter.com/Capcom_Unity/status/941450499596812288

I  had been planning on buying Okami for the PlayStation 2 after it came out in 2006, then again on the Wii where I thought the motion controls would enhance the experience (rather than hinder it), and a third time on the PlayStation 3. The fourth release on the PlayStation 4 has come out at a “right place, right time” for me. Okami has you play as Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess. Amaterasu’s current vessel is that of a wolf, although she still has the ability to wield traditional weapons as well as the Celestial Brush, a calligraphy brush that writes on the physical world. I was enjoying my time going on small quests for people in the world or clearing The Legend of Zelda style dungeons, but it wasn’t until after the boss fight with Orochi, the eight headed serpent Amaterasu had fought against 100 years ago, that I came to really start picking up what Okami was laying down.  

After a short cutscene following Orochi’s defeat, your bug sized companion Issun tells you to head back to Kamiki Village, the game’s starting location, for a festival being held to celebrate Orochi’s current defeat and his loss from a century prior. You regain control of Amaterasu in Kamiki Village just after the cutscene ends. Teleporting you here is such a smart way to handle the situation too, because it doesn’t give the player the chance to miss the festival. Okami takes you by the hand and says, “Hey, take a break. You earned it.” The brilliance of the festival scene is in its sincerity. The inhabitants of Kamiki aren’t getting drunk, playing with their pets, and setting off fireworks so that you might get a new weapon or learn more about the story through a text dump. They are celebrating for themselves, and so that you might be able to relax and feel you’ve accomplished something.  What Okami does here to recognize the player’s efforts is so much more powerful than an achievement unlocking or a pop up saying you’ve leveled up.

Okami genuinely wants the player to feel at peace. The night sky being lit up by fireworks in the shape of Amaterasu and Issun is something that should make anyone laugh at the game, not with it. In this respect, the Kamiki Festival is not unlike a lot of Okami director Hideki Kamiya’s output (including Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, and Bayonetta). Kamiya is a man that truly feels a dude named after a 14^th century poet, wearing an ankle length leather duster sans shirt, wielding two guns AND a sword is the coolest cool dude that shoots lava spider demons in the face. Kamiya’s games (and Twitter account) reveal him to be a man devoid of irony. His sincerity in crafting both a sexy witch that uses her hair to send demons back to Hell and a small annual celebration of good’s triumph over evil is what sells me on his games despite how goofy they are at a cursory glance.  Kamiya’s games are cool and stylish for the sake of being cool and stylish. When he wants you to feel you have made life better for a small village in ancient Japan, you honestly feel the respite from everyday life you have provided for these people is real.

The villagers only see Amaterasu as a wolf, not “that which is good and motherly to all”. No one directly thanks you. Instead, you get the privilege to see everyone enjoying themselves, carefree, without the burden of having to bow down to their savoir and shower them with upgrade points or healing items. You have the satisfaction of knowing you altruistically gave them this time of rest and comfort. Okami is a game where you literally use art to make the world a better place. Because the game so honestly wants you to feel a pure sense of joy during the Kamiki Festival, Okami manages to mirror your in-game actions and becomes a brushstroke that enriches the lives of anyone that it comes in contact with. Don’t wait any longer to play this if you haven’t yet. Strike Okami from your backlog as fast as you can.