Chatty AF 227: Monogatari Watchalong Part 4 – Nisemonogatari (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

VRAI: So, the toothbrush scene is embarrassing. I’d call the toothbrush scene embarrassing, because it’s loud, it’s over the top, it’s almost kind of funny in how overly dedicated to being horny it is, because you’ve got a lot— It’s the scene you think of when you’re like, “Oh, no, my parents are gonna walk in while I’m watching anime and think I’m watching porn.” And it’s kind of fun to share it around and shock people with it because, oh, no, the horny anime girl is being horny, and we’re just blazing past the fact that we’re all deadened to the fact that sexually explicit images of 15-year-olds are just a thing.

[Introductory musical theme]

TONY: Hello, everybody! Welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. My name is Tony. I’m a contributing editor here at Anime Feminist. You can find me on all social media @poetpedagogue. And with me are Vrai and Peter!

VRAI: Hey, I’m Vrai. I’m the daily operations manager at AniFem. You can find me sometimes on Bluesky @writervrai.

PETER: And I’m Peter Fobian, I’m an editor at Anime Feminist, and I’m @peterfobian on Bluesky.

TONY: Alright, so, I have gathered you both here together to continue our absolutely riveting watchalong of Monogatari.

VRAI: Just say you’re concerned about my oral hygiene, girl.

PETER: The ambush came quick. [Chuckles]

TONY: [Laughs] Listen, we can address that later.

[Chuckling]

TONY: We can address all the things. But I wanted to tell the listeners we already have gone through all of Bakemonogatari in a previous set of watchalongs, so I highly recommend that you both watch Bakemonogatari and watch Nise before you listen to this; or alternatively, you can listen to this if you want to know what on Earth you’re getting yourself into. But the point is we’re picking up at the beginning of Nisemonogatari, going all the way through it this episode, in all of its bizarre, fanservicey, horrifying glory. So, um—

VRAI: Wait, wait, tell the people why we’ve embarked on this project, because if they haven’t listened to previous podcasts, which they should, this is kind of your baby. So…

TONY: Yes, okay, so, the reason that we’re doing a watchalong of Monogatari is because I think that there’s not been a lot of discourse about Monogatari from a really nuanced and interesting feminist perspective. It is a very personal show to me. It is a show that has gotten me through a lot of hard times and has really helped me to think through how to navigate intimacy, but is also a show that is very messy and very thematically rich and has a lot to talk about, both good and bad. We talked a lot about… Some of the major themes that we talked about in previous episodes were things like survivorship and how do survivors create community, how do people use romantic relationships to substitute for their self-worth. There’s many different avenues to go down with Monogatari and, of course, depictions of LGBT people.

Unfortunately, we’ve gotten to Nisemonogatari. So, y’all, what did you think of Nisemonogatari? If you had to sum it up in maybe just a few sentences, what were some of your thoughts?

VRAI: I just need you to promise me that this is actually the nadir of the franchise. I just so need to know this.

TONY: [Laughs] Yes, I promise you that.

VRAI: I know, I know. From other Monogatari enjoyers who are friends of mine, this is the one that even the diehards have nothing nice to say about. So, I know that this is about as bad as it gets. But we’re through it. We did it. It was bad.

PETER: I know this is kind of like common parlance in the community, but I don’t think I’ve ever been watching something and thought, “Anime is a mistake,” before. And definitely— I mean, I knew the toothbrush scene was coming. It’s famous—or infamous, I should say. So, it was at that moment where I really kinda… I felt the expression with my whole heart.

TONY: And I mean, you watch a lot of anime, Peter, so this is—

PETER: Yeah, a lot of bad anime, too. So, yeah.

TONY: Right?

VRAI: You’ve definitely watched worse things than Nise. I’m gonna go ahead and say that as a fact!

PETER: Oh, I mean, yes, although that scene is particularly condensed version of bad stuff. I mean, there’s definitely other moments… Like, I think it was… Is it A Sister Is All You Need where somebody hand-feeds a girl an egg that she fellates? Which I think is probably more disgusting.

TONY: What? [Laughs]

PETER: It is funny because I was just looking at our Discord chat and I saw Vrai sharing that… the girl getting fed the chicken nugget…

VRAI: [Chuckles]

TONY: Karaage, yes.

PETER: And I even remembered, when I thought of that, I was like, “Oh, I’ve seen worse than that.” [Chuckles] I guess I could send it to you two at some point during the podcast. You will know they received it when there’s just loud screams coming out of nowhere, I guess.

TONY: [Chuckles] My body is ready, Peter.

PETER: Okay, if you’re ready.

TONY: Yeah, my general feelings are… Karen Bee is fine. I appreciate that it takes up 7 episodes of the 11 that we watched, and I think it has plenty of perfectly serviceable and enjoyable dialogues between the girls. But then Tsukihi Phoenix is probably some of the worst episodes of anime I’ve ever seen in my life! [Chuckles] At the very least, the most uncomfortable and unpleasant episodes of anime I’ve ever seen in my life. Ooh, boy!

VRAI: I do definitely see now why you insisted we had to just do it all as a block.

PETER: Yeah, just rush through it.

TONY: Yeah, it’s just not really worth— There is stuff to Karen Bee that we could have a full episode on each. But why would we? I don’t know. Oh, no.

VRAI: I feel the vibes—

TONY: [crosstalk] Vrai! Peter! How dare you! What the fuck is this? [Chuckles]

VRAI: [crosstalk] Yo! This is bad to see with my eyes! Why would you do that?

TONY: [Laughs]

PETER: Not [obscured by laughter] actually in a televised anime.

VRAI: Yeah, no, I reviewed the premiere for this. I— Oh, Jesus, God, Peter!

PETER: Mm-hm.

TONY: The look on the girl behind her’s face…

VRAI: She’s all of us.

TONY: It’s like— [Chuckles] She truly is all of us. Wow.

VRAI: Oh, God!

TONY: I am gonna try to pry my eyes off of that.

VRAI: We have to move on. We simply must.

TONY: [crosstalk] It is an infinite loop.

PETER: Yeah.

TONY: Okay. So, yeah, knowing that it was rough, who was our best girl of the season, who got us through? Because it was definitely not Araragi.

VRAI: No, although I will say that I think, just in self-defense, I’ve decided to believe the Araragi egg fan theories.

TONY: Oh, I absolutely believe it.

VRAI: But no, really, it was Senjougahara, who was ancillary for a lot of this until she isn’t, which we’ll come back around to. But I genuinely, no caveats, really enjoy the scenes of her relationship with Araragi. Considering how often the script likes to name-drop her being a tsundere, I much more readily believe that this is a honest-to-God BDSM relationship and they are both getting something out of it, and I love that for them. I think a lot of it comes down to vocal performance, honestly.

TONY: Yeah, Chiwa Saito’s performances are always amazing. I mean, she’s Senjougahara, she’s Homura, she’s Yona in Yona of the Dawn.

PETER: Oh, I didn’t know that.

TONY: Yeah. And I feel like it’s just lovely to see her fully embracing this slightly edgelordy dom girl. Like, watching her put her feet in Araragi’s face and just enjoy every second of him writhing around is—

VRAI: But he’s into it, too. Like, there are definitely shows where the… You know, there are so many harem animes where, like, the girl is mean to this guy and is kind of just physically abusing him, but it’s a girl so it’s fine— No, I fully believe that this is consensual and y’all are both into this weird, weird dynamic you have going on, and good for you. It’s astonishing how well it lands.

PETER: [crosstalk] It seems he could’ve broken those handcuffs at any time, right? But yeah, he didn’t. Nobody had said the safeword yet, so…

VRAI: [crosstalk] Yeah, yeah, he could clearly snap them instantly.

PETER: [Chuckles] Yeah.

TONY: Yeah, for people who haven’t seen it, the first whole section of the series, to the point where the OP features Senjougahara for the first two episodes, is just Senjougahara having handcuffed Araragi to a bunch of tables and then taunting him and physically torturing him. Or I don’t know about physically torturing, but certainly pretending to psychologically torture him and taking just exquisite pleasure in the whole thing, but not in a way that feels lurid, either. It feels very sweet. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Yeah! I liked it. And I have my problems with the climax of Karen Bee insofar as, like with Tsubasa Cat, it ends up being that the character the arc is named for isn’t there for the ultimate climactic confrontation and it’s actually about closing off the arc of an entirely different character. So, you know, Karen isn’t actually there for the end of Karen Bee. But Senjougahara is, and for her, it’s a really nice coda to her story about getting closure about these past experiences of hers with con artists that had been kind of alluded to but not really dug into. And, yeah, I was really pleased by how that turned out. I didn’t love the— You know, I see why they did the dialogue about, like, would she have fallen in love with anybody who saved her, did she fall in love with these guys who [she] thought could save her, which means this much, much older man? But also, it’s a trope that makes me tired.

PETER: Instantly falling in love with your savior?

VRAI: Specifically the, like… Monogatari has this problem with “Can we talk about any relationship with a man and a woman that doesn’t include some kind of sexual component?” and I guess that’s here, too. But for the most part, I really, really liked how that scene played out for her.

PETER: Yeah, it came kind of borderline to me where she said, “Maybe I fell in love with you because you saved me,” but following it up with “I’m glad it was you, though, that saved me.” It was just like, okay, so there is actual, real personal connection here, which, I agree, softened it a lot. I think she was also kind of the shining light of this arc, and having her be with Araragi when he confronted Kaiki at the end was a pretty welcome surprise, I agree.

TONY: Yeah, if anything, she was really the one driving that interaction, too. Right? It was her confrontation more than it was Araragi’s.

VRAI: Yeah, he’s kinda just there to hold her beer.

TONY: Yeah. Which makes it so satisfying. And we’re starting… I think we’re starting to see the shift away from Araragi being the driver of the narrative towards the girls—in Nise, paradoxically.

VRAI: Like, yes and no. Right? Because with Senjougahara, he is really just there as support, but also, in order to make Senjougahara the focus of that confrontation, Karen’s entire deal has to be railroaded into a scene where… We get a cool fight scene between her and Araragi, but in order to make the ending happen like it does, the end result has to be “No. Stop trying to solve your problem! I, your brother, will be solving your problem! Go lay down!” And then it’s— Yeah.

TONY: “Also, we are in love, physically, sexually.”

VRAI: Yep. And then Tsukihi sleeps through her arc.

PETER: They were talking so much during that fight, and I feel like they were trying to really— I don’t know, maybe I misunderstood it. It felt like he was really trying to emphasize something about trust over even liking each other, like the nobility of trust between siblings, but—

VRAI: Yeah, yeah, you don’t have to like your family because you love them, that sort of old canard.

PETER: Okay, is that what they were going for? I was just kind of sitting there going like, “What the fuck are you trying to say while you let your sister beat your ass? And it’s obviously just gonna come to him having to do it by himself because she’s sick, I guess, even though she’s capable of smashing your head through a highway overpass.” Honestly, it kind of does seem like she would’ve killed Kaiki. I’m not quite sure what that scene was supposed to show me.

VRAI: I mean, to its credit, at least we did get a scene of Karen in isolation earlier, like the confrontation between her and Kaiki where she gets cursed. But then, there’s not… she doesn’t get closure on it outside of that fight scene. I don’t know, it feels like a weak writing decision born of he wanted to do this more interesting thing with Senjougahara and you can’t have them both there because those two storylines are then going to be in conflict.

PETER: Yeah. I was really interested to see what the deal with his sisters were, and essentially they each got an arc where they just stay at home and he fixes their problem.

TONY: Pretty much. Alright, so, Peter, who is your best girl who got you through this season?

PETER: I’m also going with Senjougahara.

TONY: [Chuckles]

PETER: Yeah, I thought Kanbaru might get a bit more in this season, especially when Araragi was gonna introduce Karen to him—

VRAI: [crosstalk] I’m mad about that.

PETER: —because there was so much lead-up to that, just for him to leave? Yeah, I’m almost glad we don’t know what happens. I’m just gonna assume they’re good friends now.

VRAI: [deadpan] They seem like good friends.

PETER: Yeah, they seem like…

TONY: [Laughs]

PETER: But, uh, yeah, Kanbaru didn’t get much stuff after that. And then Senjougahara… like Vrai, I thought the scene with her standoff with Kaiki was great.

TONY: Yeah. I know you wanted to talk about Hanekawa, though. What was your thinking around her?

PETER: Well, both of you were speaking pretty positively in our little chat before we started recording, and, I don’t know, my kind of takeaway from her this season was a little sinister. Maybe I was misreading. But the first kind of taste you get is when— Or I guess I’m mixing up the chronological time with the time that it’s shown us. She is the one who basically encouraged his sisters to kind of peek into the supernatural that ultimately got Karen hurt, and then she kind of insisted that Araragi not be upset at any of them and fix the problem. She kind of— Something weird is going on with her and Senjougahara, obviously, with Senjou referring to her as “sama” or whatever. And then you’re also let in on a little bit that she’s been spying on Araragi or is watching him in some way, because she knew that… what did… she knew that he and Karen were on their way to Kanbaru’s, I think, without him saying that. So, I’m getting this weird spy–slash–“involving herself in his sister’s lives to their detriment”–slash–“messing with Senjougahara” vibe in the rare moments that she appears.

TONY: Yeah, well, I will say her and Senjougahara get plenty of very, very fun scenes in Neko White. So, we’re gonna see where that goes.

VRAI: They definitely have something going on, yeah, but… you were saying.

PETER: [crosstalk] Yeah, they felt like setup.

TONY: I think that— I like their relationship in this. This has kind of turned into us just basically checking in on all the side characters before we get into the real meat of the episode.

VRAI: Pretty much.

TONY: I like their stuff. I think that their relationship feels pretty healthy. I think that she’s— A lot of her relationship with the sisters often feels like it has parallels to her relationship with Araragi, like what you said about her encouraging the sisters to peek into the supernatural. I mean, that is her whole deal, right? Like, she was, in Kizu, like, “I want to see a vampire! [Giggles] Great idea!”

VRAI: Yeah. Like, I wouldn’t be surprised— I mean, this is me filling in, but to Monogatari’s credit, this feels like a thing it could plausibly go back to later and not “The narrative forgot to talk about this so I have to pull some reasoning out of my ass.” So, I will tip my hat that much. I can see Hanekawa as seeing herself a little bit in the Fire Sisters. Like, they very much want to be special, which was her entire driving thing through Kizu and what was tormenting her in Bake. So, she has decided to make herself kind of their guardian, sort of mentor, in that field, and then she’s the one to also go to Araragi and say, “Don’t be mad. Let them make these mistakes and help them,” whereas his inclination is clearly to treat them as his little sisters who can’t do anything and who he needs to do everything for because he thinks of them as children except when he’s sexually harassing them. [Sighs briefly] So, I sort of—

TONY: [Sighs]

VRAI: I liked that. I kind of wanted to see more of that, because it sort of seems that she’s taken on sort of a mentorly, sisterly role to them, and I thought that was kind of sweet.

TONY: Speaking of sexually harassing children, Mayoi. So—

VRAI: Scream!

TONY: I have to admit, I actually really like her sequences in this arc. Oh, God.

PETER: [crosstalk] I mean, once they get to talking, I like their relationship a lot and the way she messes with him. It’s just the opener for each of those interactions is, you know, him just rushing up and assaulting her. Speaking of which, after he gets assaulted by Kanbaru and decides that he’s like, “Oh, this is horrible to experience on the receiving end. I’m not going to do this to Mayoi anymore,” and he doesn’t…

VRAI: And then I had a brief moment of hope.

PETER: … and then she gets upset and I, ugh, lost my mind.

TONY: Oh, Lord, that sequence is so bad!

VRAI: [crosstalk] That made me really mad!

TONY: [Chuckles] And it’s so frustrating because they have this lovely— I find their “courage to” interaction hilarious, and then that happens…

PETER: Mm-hm. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought that was— I was really enjoying that sequence up until the very end, too, where she’s just kinda like, “Yeah, you can add courage to the end of anything and it sounds awesome.” And he’s like, “Damn, you’re right.”

VRAI: It’s true. That was a really good bit of wordplay.

PETER: He was losing.

VRAI: The especially nice thing about that one is that it crossed language a lot better than I think some of their patters do, because it’s about wordplay but not in a way that’s specifically about characters and reading, so it translated a little bit more smoothly to me as an English audience, which I sort of talked about last time with their bits, is that sometimes Mayoi’s segments especially can feel a little bit impenetrable to a non-fluent speaker.

But, yeah, then they pull out the “No doesn’t actually mean no” shit, and I had to stop and walk around my room and scream into a pillow for a little while, specifically my adorable Bill Cipher pillow, which helped me a lot. It’s one of those things that just simply doesn’t feel like a character beat. It feels so insidiously built into the entire framework of this show, and that makes it hard to just… because there are lines in this that you can kind of cope off as Araragi being a dumbass, and then there are things like that where, no, this is just so manifestly evident in everything that goes on that you’re making a comment About the Genders (TM). 

And the thing about it is, when observations come up in—often, but not always—in works by cis dudes for a presumed cis dude audience… Like, there is a conversation, right, about coquettishness, and, you know, we do the “Baby, it’s cold outside” discourse every year and it’s exhausting, about, like, yeah, sometimes women say no because they want to be pursued, and then nobody talks about… Then that gets extrapolated out to “And that’s a thing that women do, because they’re duplicitous and secretive,” and nobody talks about why that might have come about, because if a woman is shown to be too eager, you know, she’s a slut and no longer an object worth pursuing, which endangers both her social value and potentially her physical safety. You know, these are never about looking into why these traits come about, which is an interesting conversation to have, about why kinks and sexual interests and social behaviors happen. But that’s not what’s happening here. It’s about how it’s actually okay to keep pressing when a woman says no and sexually harass her because probably she’s just waiting for you to do it the right way.

PETER: Mm. I could kind of feel Mayoi turning into, like, a bullhorn for Nisio Isin to just say his own opinion in that moment, rather than a real character.

VRAI: It bummed me out.

TONY: It’s not great, yeah. And it’s really strange to me. I mean, I think on one hand, the most charitable reading would be that she’s trolling him. Right? That’s the most charitable reading, that she’s just trolling him and trying to kind of piss him off a bit. Or, like, her entire goal always is just to troll him, right? And this is just the one thing that she could think of in that moment that would make sense with his behavior. But that doesn’t make it— But then, when you put it in the context of the rest of the season and all of its dubious consent at all times, beyond dubious consent, all the way to no consent, “You are fucking sexually assaulting your sister!” then it stops being funny very quickly and starts being just really gross. Speaking of which, we should get into the meat of the conversation and talk about the real problem with these arcs, which is how they treat sisters as fantasies of sexual availability and romanticize sexual assault and harassment. So—

VRAI: Tony, you’re being very brave. I mean this genuinely.

PETER: [Chuckles]

TONY: What did you say? [Laughs]

VRAI: You’re being very brave about the worst part of your fave.

TONY: I know, but, I mean, this is what I hate about it, too, so, you know, I’ll say that. Yeah, so, I don’t know about y’all, but maybe we should just go ahead and say what our least favorite part of this season was, and explain why. Maybe that could be a good way to start this!

VRAI: Alright. So, everybody’s waiting for us to talk about the toothbrush scene, right? Which is not, by the way, my least favorite part of the season, and I’m about to tell you why.

TONY: [crosstalk] Nor is it mine. Okay, yeah. Yes.

VRAI: Alright, so, the toothbrush scene, right? Everybody remembers it as the infamously bad part of Monogatari. And that’s, having seen it now, really interesting to me, genuinely, that that’s… because there’s a much worse scene and it’s the one where… The ostensible plot reason that this happens is that Araragi is checking to see that Tsukihi had this scar on her chest and it’s not there anymore. And how he does that is he does the famous cultural shorthand for sexual assault and ravishment in that he pulls off her obi and then proceeds to open her kimono and then to squish her boobs with his foot while she yells at him to stop. That’s not what people talk about as the worst scene in Nisemonogatari.

Let me start again. So, the toothbrush scene is embarrassing. I’d call the toothbrush scene embarrassing, because it’s loud, it’s over the top, it’s almost kind of funny in how overly dedicated to being horny it is, because you’ve got a lot— It’s the scene you think of when you’re like, “Oh, no, my parents are gonna walk in while I’m watching anime and think I’m watching porn.” And it’s kind of fun to share it around and shock people with it because, oh, no, the horny anime girl is being horny, and we’re just blazing past the fact that we’re all deadened to the fact that sexually explicit images of 15-year-olds are just a thing that are just normalized in a lot of the medium, and we’re putting a pin in that for today. 

But like you said when we were chatting about it, Tony, the thing that strikes you about it is that this is consensual. These are two characters who are kind of basically playing a game of chicken with each other, where, you know, she has to survive five minutes of him brushing her teeth, and that’s such an unreasonably intimate act that actually even though you haven’t thought about it, you wouldn’t be able to stand it. And then it turns into, you know… it’s an erogenous zone. It’s a big erogenous zone, and now it’s a sex scene, and they almost fuck until Tsukihi walks in. So, yeah, I get why this is memorable as… Like, it’s gross, it’s incest kink, which I was going to— There’s a whole aside there about incest kink and when it’s just going to be porn versus a series that purports itself as having greater things to say about art and all of that, and probably cut this, Peter, because I’m not making this point cogently. 

But, so, I see why this has become emblematic. But to me, it’s more emblematic of the things that anime fans of a certain type take notice of, right? Because this is memorable because someone would make fun of you for watching it. And the scene that disturbs me the most in Nise, the Tsukihi groping scene, isn’t fun to talk about. She’s having a bad time, she’s visibly upset by Araragi touching her, it’s gross and demeaning, and she’s asking him to stop, and it’s just normalized sexual assault. And then she gets up and she has this line about how, you know, “Why are girls allowed to have pure relationships with boyfriends but they have to have a physical relationship with their brothers?” which kind of encapsulates what you introduced this topic with, Tony, that the idea of a sister as a fetish archetype is that she’s reliant on you, she can’t leave you, you are sort of responsible to teach her so she looks up to you, whether or not she’s bratty about it or adoring about it, and you have unspoken access to her body regardless of what she says, by virtue of time and place and authority of intimacy. And that scene is fucking horrific.

TONY: [crosstalk] And it doesn’t count because we’re blood related.

VRAI: [Restrains an exclamation] Except— [Groans urgently] Monogatari did the thing again, Tony! It did the thing again, where it kind of did a thing I almost respected for a hot second. Listeners, if you want to go back to our discussion in Kizumonogatari, I talked about the groping scene where Hanekawa offers to let Araragi grope her boobs and he’s thinking through the whole thing with, like, over-the-top porn dialogue and then can’t actually do it when he’s faced with a real human girl, and that’s cool in theory, except for all the times you’ve just done fanservice. Well, Nise has a scene like that where he goes and kisses Tsukihi while she’s sleeping and is like, “Oh, man, I didn’t feel anything, because it doesn’t matter if we’re blood related or not; she’s my sister and we grew up together, and that level of bond and intimacy over the years is what makes our relationship familial.” And then that comes after the scene where he touches her boobs and has that fun little throwaway line about how it’s so hot to have your sister who’s not blood related living under the same roof as you. And then I wanted to die, Tony. Tony, I wanted to die.

TONY: It’s horrible. It is truly disgusting. And it’s especially frustrating to me because there are some scenes with Tsukihi that are actually good in the series.

VRAI: Yeah! I was genuinely really disappointed because the archetype of the femme who’s had to put on this very calculating mask as a way to protect herself is an archetype that I adore. And she’s just not that here. We’re told that’s what she’s gonna be, but she’s not. She’s asleep.

TONY: Yeah, no, I mean, the whole thing is Araragi’s gonna protect her from this knowledge. She doesn’t even know that she’s a fake, right? And he’s gonna do everything that he can to protect her from that knowledge. And he’s going to take on the mantle of being the fake, the false, so that he can take that from her, which is like, oh, my fucking god. Kill me. Okay, Peter, what pissed you off?

VRAI: [Chuckles]

PETER: I think Vrai summed it up pretty well in regards to those two scenes. I did think the toothbrushing scene was kinda just like… [Sighs] The only thing that came to my mind was it was kind of 4chan-core, like a competition to see who can make something mundane become the most degenerate thing possible, like kinda just showing off your prowess as somebody who can take anything and ruin it, whereas, yeah, with the Tsukihi scene, he’s got her wrist tied, he’s holding them down, and every time he blinks, it’s got the sound of a freaking camera shutter, as he just looks everywhere, right? It felt really gross. And, yeah, it also just came out of nowhere, too, because you don’t even know why he did it until he’s just like, “Hey, you don’t have scars,” which just felt like Nisio Isin had just come up with the idea that maybe she was the phoenix at that point or something.

VRAI: It is weird because she should have never had a scar, theoretically, based on the lore of this creature.

PETER: Yeah, a very convenient time to notice that, and why the fuck did you do that at all, rather than, I don’t know, asking or something? Yeah, it doesn’t— Yeah, and I agree with you again, Vrai. It feels like Nisio Isin gets to the brink of having a really interesting idea. It’s kinda like, you know, when a conservative is talking about how pissed off they are about something and they talk about how a problem can be solved with capitalism and they basically describe a social service and get right up to the brink of just basically describing socialism, and then say, like, “See? Capitalism can solve your problem.” It’s like, oh, no, you don’t know what you’re talking about, do you? But you sure do come close.

VRAI: At least, we’re 15 years back, right? So, like, I do believe you, Tony, when you say it gets better from here, but Jesus fuck.

PETER: Been a lot of time.

TONY: Yeah… It does get better. It really does. This is the worst.

VRAI: Can I also give a small shoutout to Kanbaru in Nise, mostly because it kept dangling fun things for me and then it took them away? Because I do— I think I said this before in Bake, so I won’t linger on it too long, but Kanbaru being naked in her convos with Araragi is like the heaven and hell of “Oh, man. I really enjoy these two trolling each other. But also, she is so the early 2010s portrait of the lesbian as a character that’s acceptable so long as she remains, in some ways, potentially sexually available to the male characters.”

TONY: Right. Right, right. Like as long as she’s somebody who will, like, walk around with Araragi, holding him like he’s her boyfriend and snuggling up with him and sexually harassing him…

VRAI: And then we didn’t even get to see her hang out with Karen, and I’m fully prepared to ship this!

TONY: Yeah, that would have been nice. I did want to address something about the toothbrush scene that I find interesting but also deeply disturbing.

VRAI: Please do.

TONY: I think one of the things that really disconcerts me about the toothbrush scene is something much more subtle. Shortly before this toothbrush scene, Karen talks about how Araragi’s bullying early in their relationship drove her to suicidal ideation.

PETER: Mm-hm. I did catch that, yes.

VRAI: Yeah, that’s a—

TONY: [crosstalk] And I would like—

VRAI: Mm.

TONY: You were saying, Vrai?

VRAI: No, please. Please. I’m just agreeing with you.

TONY: And I find that deeply disconcerting because it’s just… on one hand, it’s like, well, I can see why, given how he treats Tsukihi! Like, fuck! That would probably drive me off my rocker too, you know, having to put up with that piece of shit all day. And so, on one hand, it’s really deeply disconcerting, because it’s like here’s something that actually really, really seems really important to understanding their relationship but is really treated as kind of a throwaway line, almost.

PETER: Well, and he’s just still doing the thing that she was just describing at the end of the day, right? Like, she said, “You bullied me until I had suicidal ideation,” and then they follow that up with a bunch of… I mean, basically the rest of this season is him taking advantage of them, getting into physical altercations with them. Yeah, so, it’s like, oh, is anything different from when they were kids, really?

VRAI: Yeah, I—

TONY: Well, I think the one thing that’s different— Well, Vrai, what were you gonna say? Because I—

VRAI: No, I was just gonna say that I feel so shut out from Karen and Tsukihi as characters when ostensibly this should have been my chance to learn about them.

PETER: Yeah, yeah! That’s what I was thinking the whole time. I was like, “Oh, now we get to learn about his sisters,” but then [Chuckles] they were just victims of both arcs while it focused on other characters.

TONY: I think the difference between— I think that the thing that makes it a little different between them is that Karen actually is able to go toe to toe with Araragi for the most part during her arc and even during the toothbrush scene. It feels like part of the reason that she brings it up is also to say, “And now we are more on a level playing field than we were back then, and I can feel like I can safely be intimate with you in this way,” right?

VRAI: Yeah, I can see that. Sure.

TONY: That’s a charitable reading, of course.

VRAI: No, but it’s a more plausible charitable reading, I would say, than with Mayoi. Like, I think you’re right, it drops the ball with introducing something as big as suicidality and then using that as a throwaway line, but there is a weird… It’s almost like that scene in A Christmas Story, right, where she lies about him getting in a fight, and it’s like, “The relationship between my mother and I was different after that.” And then there’s an almost identical line at the end of the toothbrush scene, and it kind of made me laugh.

[Chuckling]

TONY: But that’s the thing, right? That sexual intimacy is kind of framed as the solution, right, to their relationship, which is… ugh, so icky in its implications, right? And just generally, there’s a lot going on there, and… I don’t know. God. The other thing I wanted to flag as a scene that is not my favorite scene in the show… And I want to get to this because I do want us to get to talking about some of the thematic ideas in the show, but what the fuck was going on in the Shinobu bath scene? Like, if you looked at the dialogue itself… the dialogue itself—

PETER: Yeah, I was gonna say that. I loved the conversation. It’s just she chose one hell of a… well, a crazy gorgeous bathroom, but why a bathroom and a bath to have that conversation, right?

VRAI: I think we had this talk, just when we were chatting about it, while I was watching it, that there are definitely… it’s this interesting back-and-forth with the show, where there are moments where you’re like, oh, yeah, well, you know, this is the director putting some stink on this, especially with the prepubescent girl shit in particular, just adding that sexualizing camera onto dialogue that is perfectly nice and thoughtful. I really like the conversation they had here, especially since we watched Kizu beforehand. I thought it was really nice as a way for them to come to an accord, and it was satisfying for those two characters. So, it’s very tempting to say, “Well, it’s not the source material. It’s just the adaptation that’s horny.” And then you have other dialogue that’s like, “Isn’t it hot to live with your sister who’s not your sister?” and “Women say no when they really don’t actually mean no,” and it’s like an interesting push and pull, right? And, like, yeah, yeah, I—

TONY: Of where the mess is coming from. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Uh-huh. And, yeah, because there are parts of this scene that know how to use the idea of non-specific nudity as a visual marker for intimacy and vulnerability. When they actually get into the bathtub, I feel like that part of the scene mostly works. Unfortunately, we’ve spent half of the scene up to that point with loving shots of this girl, who we’re explicitly told multiple times is physically eight, washing between her toes and arching her back while nude and just lots of shiny, shiny, glistening close-ups.

TONY: Yeah. And it’s very frustrating to me because I think the thing that I really like about that scene is that it’s where she’s forcing Araragi to kind of confront the power dynamic in their relationship and the degree to which she’s been kind of diminished by it.

VRAI: Because he would not let her die. He took her agency away.

TONY: I found that really satisfying. And I think it’s really interesting to me how she kind of… If I remember right, she purposefully addresses him frequently as, like, Master. And the way that she does it almost feels like she’s trying to get him to acknowledge this power dynamic in their relationship and kind of force him to look at it, right. If I’m remembering this properly. And correct me if I’m wrong.

VRAI: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s my memory of it.

PETER: Well, I think there’s also kind of an implicit threat there that you’re the master right now, because she talks about the fact— Well, she sort of brings up the fact that he may be mortal or immortal and over the course of time, their relationship could change or she might get tired of it and be put into a place where their roles are reversed. You know?

TONY: I don’t know, Shinobu is such a complicated character for me because I think that I really do love so much of her dynamic with Araragi and how her relationship slowly evolves, and many of my favorite scenes of the entire show revolve around her.

PETER: Oh, yeah. I mean, she was great for the rest of the season.

TONY: Oh, yeah. Like, all of those fucking fights? Mm. I just love… Yeah. I love—love—watching her kind of team up with Araragi. And while he’s, like, literally getting the shit kicked out of him—his superpower is how much shit can he get kicked out of him—she’s just wiping the floor with fucking Ononoki, poor thing.

PETER: Yeah, and I do think—

VRAI: Yeah, we got to see her be grown up for a hot second, and I was like, yay!

PETER: I wonder how long that’ll last. But I do think, yeah, there’s—

VRAI: Presumably she pops back to small size.

PETER: —kind of an interesting relationship going on with what you brought up, how the toothbrushing scene kind of created an intimacy between Araragi and Karen, which was explicitly sexual. But then, finding out Tsukihi is not actually his sister, he decides that their biological differences are irrelevant because he considers him his sister, which means he is not sexually attracted to her, which is… I mean, all evidence to the contrary. And then Shinobu appears. And I feel like the sacrifice that he makes for Tsukihi at the end is trying to become a sin-eater for her in the same way that he did for Shinobu, with whom he has a very… should I call it implicitly sexual relationship?

TONY: Oh, definitely.

PETER: There’s a lot of erotic elements to it. So, there’s a lot of theming and patterns, but I don’t think they quite match up to his treatment of Tsukihi or Karen in this arc.

TONY: It’s just so extreme that it’s impossible to make coherent, right?

PETER: Yes. [Chuckles] Yeah.

VRAI: Yeah, which is interesting— Part of the other thing that makes this feel weaker than Bake is that it is so in love with its own central idea. And far be it from me, Tony. You and I have an accord that we both love pretentious bullshit. We just love slightly different pretentious bullshit. You know, I cannot stand here and say that I am not a fan of Anne Rice and Mike Flanagan and Bryan Fuller. So, it is from that place that I say, if I took a drink every time this story hammered down the fact that it’s about fakes, I would be dead.

TONY: [Chuckles] I suppose we should talk about that now, yeah. So, what did y’all think of fan-favorite best girl Kaiki? Did you… did you like him? Did you like what he had to say about fakes? What’d you… what’d you think?

VRAI: He’s just the “I think we should improve society somewhat” comic.

PETER: Okay, during their confrontation, it was really just… It seems like he was just trying to cast doubt on Senjougahara, kinda tear her convictions down, and didn’t really have any… explicitly didn’t have any underlying philosophy. But then you have… I thought it was somewhat more interesting after his connection to Oshino and… I don’t remember, what was her name?

TONY: Kagenui.

PETER: Kagenui? Yeah, with his kind of— I mean, [Chuckles] I assume we’re gonna find out more later about this guy, but the concept of him saying that good kind of has more worth because it’s not real and it’s something that people have to decide to make against their own nature, according to his personal philosophy, which kind of made him somewhat interesting, although I don’t really know if it is really reflected in any of the actions he takes whatsoever.

TONY: It becomes reflected in the actions that he takes in later seasons. Yeah, because he becomes a pretty central character in Second Season. Um… Yeah…

PETER: I do kind of like what a bastard he is, how he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll leave,” and then you just see him at a donut shop later. He has not left whatsoever. Everything just… It seems like he doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t care if people believe him. He’s willing to lie. I mean, and all of that just kind of makes him… oh, and him scamming children for money. He’s just kinda—

TONY: [Chuckles] Which is hilarious.

PETER: Yeah. I mean, yeah, he’s half this really big-time grifter who’s in touch with the supernatural, but at the same time, yeah, he’s literally taking lunch money from children.

TONY: He’s fucking pathetic.

PETER: Yeah, he’s a pathetic piece of shit. The one thing that really strikes me as villainous about him was him, I guess, just telling Kagenui about Tsukihi out of… I mean, there was just… I guess, pure… him trying to get revenge against Araragi perhaps. That seemed out of character almost, because it’s just like he otherwise doesn’t give a fuck, and he had to nothing to gain out of it, right? But in isolation with the other stuff, I do appreciate what a miserable piece of shit he is. I like that.

VRAI: Yeah, it surprised me 0% when you told me that this was a fan favorite character, because this is a wet cat of a man who I presume is obsessed with money because he’s sending it home to an orphanage of grandma kittens in his hometown or something.

TONY: [Laughs]

VRAI: I don’t know if I’m super fond of him yet, but I can see how I would become so, as a fan of wet cat middle-aged men. You know, I’m from Tumblr, what can you do? I will say, I do think it’s interesting that— So I mentioned, right, that—

TONY: I feel like he’s gonna become a Tumblr sexyman one day if he’s not already.

PETER: A Once-ler type.

VRAI: No, the Tumblr sexyman is dead. Long live the Tumblr sexyman. They’re all about, like, sad middle-aged men now.

TONY: Oh, really?

VRAI: Mm-hm. Oh, yeah. Oh, girl, yeah.

[Chuckling]

TONY: The things I learn on the AniFem podcast, wow.

VRAI: [Chuckles] But the most interesting thing to me is that, as I frequently got annoyed with how often the dialogue wanted to talk about how this is a false and this is a fake and these are dualities and… when actually, the part that I thought was the most subtle usage of that theme is the one time they don’t call it out, which is that the conversation Kaiki has with Karen is a false equivalence, right, where he tells her, like, “You know, you say that you’re a pursuant of justice, but…” You know, “You say that Twitter is bad, but you have an iPhone.” So, he’s created and is controlling the conversational framing that he has, right, where, like, “Yeah, you say money is bad, but you bought things with money, so clearly you’re complicit in the problem,” as though that these two things are equal and opposite. And because she’s a child, those are the only people he can have actual thematic arguments with, because he’s a sad, pathetic loser.

PETER: Yeah, he did the “Oh, aren’t you doing justice just to satisfy your own self-image?” or something like that, which is like, wow. My thought was “I’ve heard this before, and, oh, no, is this why everybody writes this now?”

VRAI: I would not even need to bet you money that there are a lot of people who just took that conversation as deep.

TONY: Yeah. I’ll also say that— I would say the scene with Karen is really chilling. It’s one of the… I would say there’s a few scenes in Monogatari as a whole that are incredibly disturbing or incredibly chilling. Like, there’s this one, there’s a scene in some of the first episodes of Owari that is one of the most disturbing episodes of anime I’ve ever seen…

PETER: Yeah. And I think the atmosphere was very unnerving, and even though his argument sucked, it was obvious she didn’t know how to respond to it and it was having an effect on her. So, I agree with you, it was affecting like that, yeah.

VRAI: Yeah, it’s a great scene.

TONY: [crosstalk] It’s almost reminiscent of the way that Akio, towards the end of Utena, starts taunting Utena. And, you know, very similar kinds of arguments, I think.

VRAI: They’ve put him in a Gendo desk in the weird, infinite room. And it’s a scene that’s scary without a sense of sexual menace. So, like, golf clap. Nise, I didn’t think you could do that.

TONY: Right? [Chuckles]

PETER: Oh, yeah, I did like— His scenes are great. I loved when he was facing off against Senjougahara and they kept changing the perspective so the distance between them was extremely uncertain. I liked that bit of directing.

VRAI: This Shinbo’s last… his last turn as director of Monogatari, right?

TONY: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So, Oishi did Bake and Kizu. And then this is actually Itamura’s first outing as director. I guess we should talk about that! What do y’all think of Itamura as a director?

VRAI: Didn’t care for it, sir!

TONY: Which is so interesting. It’s really fascinating to me because… you know the episode that he personally storyboarded? You want to know which one it was?

PETER: Oh, no. Okay.

TONY: It was the toothbrush episode.

PETER: [Chuckles] “Yeah, I gotta do this one, for sure.”

VRAI: Oh, no, he’s got more!

PETER: [deadpan] How could he pass up the opportunity?

TONY: Yeah, so, Itamura directed all of Monogatari after— We’re gonna get back to this idea of falseness, because I have some more things to say, but I think it’s worth kind of going on this tangent. Itamura directed basically the rest of Monogatari until we get to Zoku Owari, and then a female director, Midori Yoshizawa, takes over for Monster Season and Off Season, which I’m very, very happy about. She’s fantastic.

VRAI: Oh, yeah, I see here that Shinbo’s listed as chief director and Itamura as, like, co-director, basically, which can mean a lot of different things depending on—

TONY: Yeah, but everyone knows it’s— Sorry.

VRAI: No, it can mean different things based on production, but, yeah, usually that means, like, oversight by the chief direction but the other person’s doing most of the shit.

TONY: Yeah. I’ll be really honest: I really, really love Oishi’s style. Like, when I go back to Bake, I always am very, very happy with the storyboarding and framing and stuff. I know that it’s very pretentious in many ways, but I really dig it. Like, the scenes that you hate, Vrai, in Bake are the ones that I’m just eating up like candy. It’s like, “Give me more. Give me more, please!”

PETER: I’m with Tony on this one, yeah.

VRAI: I will say, Itamura has a way with framing horniness. It’s just that— And I have seen him use this power for good, because Case Study of Vanitas was fucking excellent. But apparently, he mostly chooses to use this power for evil.

TONY: [Laughs]

VRAI: Because I like the Call of the Night manga and don’t care for the anime at all. At all!

TONY: I will say, I do really love his visual direction of a lot of Owari especially and of Second Season. I think once we get to a lot of Neko Black, the things that are good about him become really good. We’ll get to that when we get to it. I want to bring it back to this whole— I want to close on talking about this, giving a little bit of what I think is really interesting about this idea of falseness.

VRAI: Please do.

TONY: So, in defense of this, I think it’s interesting from a Buddhist perspective, because in Buddhism we talk a lot about the idea of mental formations, right? And we’re kind of taught that we should be a little suspicious of placing too much attachment on certain mental formations, like justice, like love, like all these different things, right, like these concepts, because ultimately concepts are actually empty of form, right? And this gets back to this idea of emptiness, because emptiness is about the sense that when we search for this platonic ideal of these different things, we come up empty, right? It’s just like, it’s not to be found. 

And I think this really comes up in the conversation that Tsukihi has with Araragi midway through the season, where she talks about, like, “I don’t know if I’m gonna keep doing the Fire Sisters, because I don’t even know what the hell justice is. I feel like a fake because I don’t know what justice is.” And I think that the show comes down on the side that it’s not a bad thing to necessarily question that and to recognize the emptiness of these ideas and the way that we have to construct them, right, and that just because something is empty of form doesn’t mean it’s empty of substance, right? And Araragi is able to kind of reaffirm his— I forget whether it’s Araragi who says that he kind of believes in them. Right? But, you know, there’s this kind of performativity to it, right, performativity in the sense that when you say something, when you describe something, when you enact things, they become, to an extent, real, right? We create them together.

PETER: That was the whole premise behind the sisterhood with Tsukihi Phoenix, right?

TONY: Yeah. Exactly, right? Like, by claiming her as a sister, she becomes his sister. That being said, there is this kind of problem there because there’s certain absences in the narrative that are really jarring, right? Like, what about Tsukihi’s mother having alien baby, you know? I don’t know how I would feel if I was having a kid and I discovered that’s not my kid.

VRAI: Yeah, it’s interesting that that’s treated as like… and I think probably we’ll just have to come around to… oh, I like her but I’ve already forgotten her name again… the other… yeah, the other practitioner. The core of her argument is the idea of this potential crime that Tsukihi has done to her mother. But their mom doesn’t exist.

TONY: [Laughs]

VRAI: And to be fair, parents only really exist as ideas in this show, but it does kind of—

TONY: Oh, they come back. They appear. Oh, goodness.

VRAI: Okay. And, you know, I will—

TONY: They do exist, and, oh, my God. I’ll just leave it at that.

VRAI: Oh, dear. I will say, I do actually find that idea of “The fake is realer than the real thing because it has put more effort into attaining the thing” … I do find that rather sweet and profound. I will tip my hat to that.

TONY: I do, too.

VRAI: As much as I’ve been needling on this is as a lot of these parts of the script being kind of overwritten to its detriment, that big speech… I found it touching. I did.

TONY: I really relate to it as an autistic person, because every single bit of the way that I interact with people is constructed. Like, every single thing that I do. Not necessarily calculated, but I am consciously thinking about every single social interaction and forming rules and forming structures of thought in my head that are entirely from conscious thought, right? [Chuckles]

VRAI: Mm-hm. Yeah, for sure.

TONY: And what other people have to come to through just kind of natural, intuitive socializing, I have to explicitly think out and map out in my head. And I think that there’s something really profound to me about that idea that there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, that that could mean that the kindness that you’re showing is even realer, right, because it is something that you’ve had to create and construct from emptiness, right?

PETER: Mm-hm. It’s intentionality, yeah.

VRAI: Yeah, there is something to that, in a way that I think is worth acknowledging. And this is so interesting, because I sort of assumed that the reason that Monogatari fans say that you don’t just say, “Oh, no, don’t watch this one,” is that Kaiki is an important character more than anything else, because I do think there— Or is that why? I guess I should ask. Is that…?

PETER: [Chuckles]

TONY: Uh… I can’t speak for everybody. [Chuckles]

PETER: Yeah, may have very different intentions coming into this one—or takeaways. But I mean, it seems obvious Kaiki and Kagenui are both going to come back, so it might be a little out of left field, although the series doesn’t seem very afraid of things coming out of left fields in general. So, yeah, I would say that this does seem like the takeaway, because this also kind of feels like it’s been kind of left hanging, this philosophical quandary, and will be something that the series itself returns to. I don’t feel like Nisio Isin was really done with this idea and wanted to bring it back and, I assume, will bring it back, at least when Kaiki returns.

TONY: Oh, absolutely, yes. Definitely.

VRAI: Yeah, I think where I was going with that before I trailed off is that I think that there are some nice thematic ideas being explored in this, but not to the point where I would say, “Oh, yeah, this felt like it was worth watching it except that I had to to get to the other stuff.”

TONY: I think if I had to say how I feel about this, I would say that for listeners… dear listeners, if you are considering doing a Monogatari watch, if somehow you’ve gotten to this point in the episode and you’ve not decided whether you’re gonna watch Nise or not, watch Karen Bee, skip Tsukihi Phoenix. You’ll be fine. [Chuckles] I feel like that’s how I feel about it.

VRAI: That feels fair.

TONY: It’s just— Tsukihi Phoenix is— You can watch the toothbrush episode. It won’t horrify you. It won’t disgust you. It’ll just be embarrassing, if you really want to watch the toothbrush episode. But the rest of it is just so bad. Oh, my fucking God.

PETER: Really accurate calling it the toothbrush episode, because that was almost the entire episode, was that scene.

VRAI: It’s a very long scene.

TONY: [Chuckles] Any thoughts on Ononoki? Because I feel like we’ve completely not even touched her at all.

VRAI: I think she’s cool but I’m waiting for her to be a character.

PETER: [amused] Yeah.

VRAI: Like, there simply was not time for her to have anything but a cool fight scene, but I do automatically like her for beating the crap out of Araragi.

PETER: Yeah. I also appreciated her talking a ton of shit to Shinobu and then you finally see what’s up in their room, and she’s got her back broken over a piece of furniture. [Chuckles]

TONY: [Chuckles] She’s very fun. She does narrate a future arc, so that’s nice, but you have to wait a long time for it. I like her. I like Ononoki. She’s a favorite of mine. Any last thoughts on Nise before we wrap up?

VRAI: Are Karen and Tsukihi like major characters at any point in the future, or is this just a sad cul-de-sac and we mourn that they’re kind of wasted?

TONY: [Sighs softly] You know the answer to that, Vrai.

PETER: [crosstalk] Deafening silence. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Uh-oh. Sorry, Tony.

TONY: [Chuckles] They are mostly people for Araragi to bounce ideas off of.

VRAI: Aw. Bummer.

TONY: Which, I mean, is what a lot of the girls do a lot of the time, right?

VRAI: Yeah, that’s kind of… You’ve also kind of described Mayoi’s entire purpose.

TONY: Yeah, although Mayoi is interesting because she does kind of act as this weirdly sage mentor figure to Araragi at times.

VRAI: It’s true.

TONY: Okay, that’s one thing I wanted to address. I love the end of their conversation in the first… I believe it’s the first episode where he’s trying to decide how much she’s going to involve his sisters in the situation and she kind of gives him some really frickin’ good advice. And it just feels so genuine. Like, you can tell how much these two characters care about each other. I love that moment.

PETER: Yeah. I mean, I definitely… As I said, I love all of their conversations once we make it past the first part, basically.

VRAI: Yeah.

PETER: Yeah.

TONY: [crosstalk] Fucking first part, Jesus Christ. Any other last thoughts on Nise before we wrap up?

VRAI: I’m glad to be shot of it.

PETER: Mm. I feel like there’s some interesting stuff coming up with Hanekawa, which I am looking forward to. I’m interested to see if it’s as nefarious as I think or not, although I’m somewhat doubting it since, Tony, you were very positive about it. So, we’ll see, though.

TONY: Well, I’ll say it is very satisfying. I love Hanekawa’s arcs in Monogatari. So, with that in mind, the next episode of the watchalong, we are going to be focusing on Nekomonogatari, which is Hanekawa’s kind of big arc. So, that’s gonna be Neko Black, which is… Please note: that is not part of Second Season. That is a separate little OVA, four episodes on Crunchyroll. You just search Nekomonogatari Black, and it’ll pop right up. And then Nekomonogatari White, which is the first four episodes or maybe five episodes, I believe, of Second Season. So, if you’re following along at home, that is what we’re going to watch next, and hopefully we’ll be out with that soon.

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Anime Feminist is on all socials @animefeminist. We are, I believe, on— I don’t know if we still update… Do we still have [obscured by crosstalk] …

VRAI: Oh, so, yeah, you can find all the places where we’re on socials by going to our, um…

TONY: Our Linktree, yes.

VRAI: Yes, linktr.ee/animefeminist. And that will tell you where all the things are.

TONY: Yes, you sure can. And with that, stay safe, free Palestine, and…

[Closing music theme]

TONY: … have a lovely rest of your evening.

VRAI: Try mouthwash next time.

PETER: Ah, there it is. When you said, “Stay safe,” I thought it was gonna be [Chuckles] about, like, Araragi assaulting you in the middle of the street or something.

[Chuckling]

TONY: Please keep this in the recording, Peter.