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.