Chatty AF 234: The Summer Hikaru Died Retrospective (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

ALEX: Hello and welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. I am an ancient, nameless, eldritch being and today I’m possessing Alex, who is one of the editors at AniFem and a scholar of queer genre fiction. I’ve absorbed a lot of Alex’s memories and feelings, so I am very excited today to talk about The Summer Hikaru Died with my (?)… with Alex’s colleagues, Vrai and Tony.

VRAI: ‘Ey! I’m Vrai. I am the daily operations manager at AniFem. You can find me being sad about vampires sometimes on Bluesky @writervrai.

TONY: And I’m Tony. I am a contributing editor here at Anime Feminist. You can find me @empty-visions.bsky.social on Bluesky.

ALEX: Wonderful. And I am, as I mentioned before, an ancient, nameless, eldritch being, so I am bad at using social media. [Chuckles]

So, folks, it’s the middle of the fall season right now, but we’ve been dreaming of summertime. And specifically, we are dreaming of The Summer Hikaru Died, which was a very anticipated anime series, and I’m probably going to go out on a limb here and say it didn’t disappoint. It’s probably going to be one of our best of the year. You know, maybe too early to tell, but, hey, let’s just throw that in the bag.

We are going to be talking about the anime series today. We might talk about the manga very briefly for comparison’s sake, but they cover the same material. There’s five volumes out in English currently, time of recording, and the anime basically ends bang on the end of volume 5, which means I’ve been left on the same cliffhanger twice in two different mediums, which is a funny problem to have but also means there’s not, like, extra story spoilers that we’re going to get into. We are going to be talking about the anime all the way through, though, so this is your spoiler warning for that and, of course, your recommendation to go and check the series out if it sounds like your kind of thing.

So, [The] Summer Hikaru Died, adapted from the manga by Mokumokuren, is the story—just a classic coming-of-age story—about a boy and the ancient, nameless, eldritch being who is currently residing in the body of his best friend and what they are going to do about that and how they’re going to live their lives. Did you folks want to talk about your experience with the series very briefly?

VRAI: Um, yeah. So, I’m an anime-only viewer because I don’t have too much of a manga budget. I’ve had my eye on it basically since the first volume came out in English and there was some rumblings on it of, like, “Hey, this is body horror, and it’s maybe kind of gay?” But I was putting it off, hoping my library would get it, and then the anime got announced, and I thought, “Ah, well, I’ll just wait and watch the anime so that I can… do that.” And, yeah, it is…incredible. 

I still haven’t read the manga. I am pleased to know that the mangaka has a plan for ten volumes. Love to hear that for a horror series, because there are good, long-running horror but it is tough to maintain that level of tension for that long. And, yeah, this series is pretty much directly targeted at me in that body horror is my favorite subgenre of horror, I love gay shit, I love things about being queer in small towns, I like stories wherein an ancient, eldritch being of unknowable morality becomes obsessed with one human meatbag. So, yeah, this is for me.

ALEX: This was laser-targeted at you. [Chuckles]

TONY: All of them!

VRAI: Thank you, Star Trek. Hey, Q!

TONY: We love Q in this household. So, Summer Hikaru Died for me is a manga that has a long and storied history for me that I can get into. I first read it when I was on my way home from Otakon, and I distinctly remember, as I was reading it, I was texting my friend with screenshots of one very particular moment in the manga…

VRAI: Was it [the] raw chicken?

TONY: Yes, it was the raw chicken moment. And I’m like, “If you’ve ever wondered what certain things feel like, it’s true.” [Laughs]

ALEX: Ah. [Laughs] A very useful educational…

VRAI: [crosstalk] Good. Yes.

TONY: [crosstalk] Certain things are not meant to be touched. I’ll just leave it at that. But it was not just the raw chicken. It was specifically the constellation of the Mandelbrot sequence that was behind it, and I’m like, yeah! It does feel like touching the Mandelbrot sequence. Yes! Thank you for giving me this language. I appreciate this. Thank you.

So, you know, for me, I felt like Summer Hikaru Died gave me…was really…I was very shocked to see certain aspects of my own identity and experience reflected that I just hadn’t really seen reflected in manga before, albeit in a way that was very strange and unexpected. Like, I don’t normally send screenshots of manga to my friends, and I’m like, “Oh, no, it’s me!” At least not BL, because I often find BL very alienating, in the sense that I just don’t really often very much identify with the characters. 

But [The] Summer Hikaru Died is really special in how it treats its characters and its setting, in a way that feels extremely specific and like these are characters who actually exist within a queer world, in a similar way, I think, actually, to Shimanami Tasogare (localized as Our Dreams at Dusk), in terms of just very grounded psychologies, very messy characters who are just trying to navigate their everyday lives. And I really appreciate that about it. And getting to watch the series for the first time… I kind of put off reading the rest of the manga when I heard that there was a series that was going to be made, especially by the director who made it, because I really love his directorial style and I knew it was probably gonna be good, especially with the person they got on the Dororo animation, Masanobu Hiraoka.

VRAI: And a shout-out to them.

ALEX: Good to have industry specialists in the eldritch weirdness. That’s cool.

TONY: [crosstalk] Yeah. And it looks like their other credits—you know, they’ve done some really, truly amazing stuff—are the ending animation of Made in Abyss season 2, “The Golden City of the Scorching Sun,” which is, I think, one of the most beautiful ending sequences of any anime ever, both musically and visually—

VRAI: [crosstalk] Looks nice! Yeah.

TONY: They also were involved with the ending animation for… Oh! They did animation on Little Witch Academia’s ending theme and ending nine for Chainsaw Man because that anime has way too many endings. JK, it has all the endings it needs.

VRAI: It has an amount of endings.

TONY: And animation in the OP of Gundam: Witch from Mercury? Very cool. Season 2.

VRAI: Yeah. I definitely think that’s one of the special… I mean, many things are special about this show. I got to go to the panel at Otakon with Hikaru’s voice actor, and it was wonderful just in how clearly a labor of love this project is. 

But I think that the horror is a notable part of it because I’ve watched a lot of horror anime, I’ve watched a lot of horror generally, and it is a very difficult thing to be scary in animation, I feel like, because you’ve already the separation of a passive experience and then you have the additional separation from live action to animation, and so it can be hard to get to that… Despite the fact that animation is incredible and can do things that you can’t really do in live action, it can also, I find, be difficult to be scary and unsettling rather than interesting but silly and not viscerally affecting. 

And this got me, in a way that I haven’t been upset since I watched Akira at like 15. It’s really unsettling and good and subtle. It uses CG smartly and not too much, mixed with 2D animation. I wish that they had gotten this animator on Otherside Picnic because that is what that series needed.

TONY: Oh, yeah, it needed that juice. It really did.

ALEX: I have the absolute tiniest quibbles with some changes the adaptation made, but it is so fantastic. It looks great. It has a real cinematic quality. They are obviously taking… Because the manga is fantastic because it is so atmospheric and so creepy. And notoriously, somewhat, especially in cases of artists like Junji Ito, making the translation from horror manga to horror animation, that can be a bit trickier and you lose some of the pacing and the tension and the creepy factor that you can get with still images and that stark black and white. 

But for this show, I feel like they really threaded the needle fantastically because it’s like they have taken a lot of the elements from the comic and said, “Okay, well, how can we get that same effect with the tools we are currently using? We’re not just gonna use the panels [or] the storyboard. We’re going to get that same effect across but with cinematic language and the tools that we have and the use of color and the use of sound and just…” [Blowing a kiss] Mwah!!! Really, really good. And the…

Yeah. I’m just going into ramblings now because it is just delightful. And genuinely, this is worth celebrating not just because, you know, it looks good, it was a fun time because this is a piece of queer genre fiction, it is a piece of queer genre fiction, and it’s rare to get that in the first place, and then to see it get this massive swathe of resources, and to have all this labor of love behind it, and to get… You know? It’s got special editions, it’s got big posters, it’s on Netflix and it’s being advertised on the front page. That’s pretty huge for a piece of queer pop culture.

VRAI: I’m very curious about the Netflix of it all because this… I’m sure… Folks listening at home, in case you didn’t know, it got a second season, which, at the pace that the first season went, means it should get to adapt the whole series. And anyone who knows about the one-season yuri curse knows how rare that is. 

But it does make me very curious, because on the one hand I feel like it really got success here, in America at least, because it was on Netflix’s ecosystem, which, when you get into Anime by the Numbers shows some very interesting charts regarding anime viewership and how much of a boost it gets when it gets put on Netflix and it’s in that closed ecosystem versus something like Crunchyroll or, God forbid, something like HIDIVE! Poor HIDIVE. They do their best, and thank god they’re there. 

But at the same time, I remember back several years ago there were some interesting discussions with the fact that… Financially-wise, directors were talking about being a Netflix co-pro and working in that way as sort of a fraught proposition, depending on resource needs and if you were… Oh, I’m phrasing it poorly. But in terms of, like… It was sort of a gamble working with Netflix, depending on whether… If your series was a massive success, you’re probably coming away from it a little on the poorer… getting the short end of the stick, versus, if you made this small, weird, little indie title, money- and resource-wise it might benefit you a little more.

TONY: Well, there’s a long history, of course, of studios getting screwed over… Well, there’s a very specific history with getting screwed over doing BL in genres that are not BL, you know, with the most obvious example being YuriI!! on ICE, right?

VRAI: [pensive] Yeah.

TONY: It’s hard to wonder if the failure of Yuri!! on ICE in terms of how the production committee just [so] bungled every aspect of making money off of it [Chuckles] and basically gave all the money to Crunchyroll—on accident, if I understand it right, because of signing away certain rights—led to there being a cooling…

VRAI: [crosstalk] Burying it out of spite?

TONY: Yeah, burying it out of spite, obviously, and then a cooling of the possibility for art like [The] Summer Hikaru Died or other radical, queer work that involves gay men but is not BL to be produced.

VRAI: I mean, I don’t think it’s just… because even Blue Lynx, the film studio that made the Given movies and was making Twittering Birds Never Fly…they shut down. I think that there is a larger issue going behind the scenes than we have a grasp of. And I think what happened to Sayo Yamamoto and Kubo is definitely part of it, and certainly we’ve watched, like, the Fairy Ranmaru character designer disappearing off of Twitter and Kunihiko Ikuhara having to make his own studio after being gone from the industry for almost ten years. Like, this goes back and back, and I think it’s bigger than we have access to.

ALEX: So, Hikaru obviously exists, then, in this kind of queer media context. And I’ll tell my anecdote about how I came across this series real quick, because how I came across it was I saw people talking about it on Tumblr a few years ago, and what I picked up from it was the art was really pretty, people having a lot of feelings about it, and it was a queer series, and it called The Summer Hikaru Died. 

So my immediate kneejerk reaction—assumption, rather—was “Oh, this is like a moving coming-of-age story about grief and yearning, unfulfilled love.” And it is that. It’s just also a supernatural body horror extravaganza, which was a pleasant surprise to me when I actually looked it up.

So, I think that’s as good a segue as any to talk about—which we kind of already are talking about—the way that this show exists in the context of queer manga and queer storytelling in BL, but also it’s a genre piece, which means that it can play with or play against some of the normal tropes you might expect from queer media. Tony, I’m gonna throw to you because you have a note in our notes here that you would like to talk about BL and genre, which I am very interested to hear about with regards to this series and its history that it exists in.

TONY: This is a topic that I feel probably not as qualified as I wish I was to discuss. But in general, in the universe of shows, it is very uncommon—and this is something I’ve noted many times—to see gay men represented in series that are not just about them being gay. It’s like gay male relationships are kind of segregated into this fantasy universe in which they can exist and then other… if that makes sense, right?

VRAI: Mm-hm. Right, the denigrated genre problem.

TONY: Yeah, exactly. Whereas increasingly lately, there’s much…I mean, maybe…there is more of an appetite for, in just a random show, like a show as random as…what’s the one about the lazy boy?

VRAI: Are you talking about Aharen-san?

TONY: No.

VRAI: Or are you thinking of…?

TONY: Well, yes, that one, too. I mean, that—

VRAI: Tada’s [sic] Always Listless.

TONY: Both of them have these lesbians like the lesbian… [Laughs] The bullet lesbian! It’s…

ALEX: Oh, really? Good for them.

TONY: Yeah. Tanaka-kun Is Always Listless.

VRAI: Yeah, Aharen actually had a bi male character in the ensemble cast.

TONY: And so we’re—Yeah, we’re starting to see…and that undermines what I’m saying because we’re starting to see more, I think, of an opening up of queer male characters within these non-BL works.

VRAI: Yeah, no, I think you bring up a good point in that there is a long history that you are more likely to find… in terms of works that are considered quote-unquote “normal,” works that are not specifically from the romance subgenre and marketed as BL or yuri, I think it is much more common to see F/F, lesbian or sapphic relationships as secondary elements of broader shows than it is relationships between queer men. And I think…I…That is long and complicated. I think that if I were to be very reductive about it, you know, there is certainly an element of “Lesbians hot.” And—

TONY: Exactly. It’s always a fetishistic way of looking at lesbians. And the gay men who do exist in these shows are often pathologized and made to be… I’m thinking about, like, Leroy [sic; character’s name is Lio] in Promare, right? You know, it’s like…

VRAI: Right, exactly. They’re the funny punch side character. And even characters like Fire Emblem in Tiger & Bunny, who I think really became a wonderfully written, beautifully, affectionately written queer, genderfluid character, their first introduction is still feeling up one of their male coworkers’s ass.

TONY: Or even Yuri!! on ICE has that. It’s like it’s obligatory that one of the characters has to be like that. I mean, Chris in Yuri!! on ICE, right? And it’s so gross because I’ve existed in gay male spaces; never once have I had any of my friends feel my ass without my permission. And it’s bananas to me, you know, that they think that that is just how gay men are. You know?

And so, to see a manga that’s actually investigating…I know we’re just talking about it as an existing piece of media, but the existence of [The] Summer Hikaru Died sometimes feels a little bit like a miracle. It’s just like, how does this exist? [Laughs] You know?

VRAI: Mm-hmm. I will say that it is worth bringing up the gay ‘90s, because, as we all know, BL spun off from originally just being classed as part of shoujo, and there was definitely a period in the late ‘80s and into the ’90s where BL kind of really boomed separately with broad-shouldered men and Ai no Kusabi and stuff in the ‘90s, but there was also quite a run of shoujo that did queer secondary characters. Hana-Kimi—which, God help us, is getting a 2026 anime adaptation, which will be interesting—has a secondary gay character in addition to being sort of about wacky genderbent gay panic stuff. 

And there are series like Angel Sanctuary. I read all of the quote-unquote “forbidden romance” titles in the ’90s and 2000s, readers, and a lot of gothic fiction of the era would throw in a queer as part of making transgressive fiction, so they would pop up there now and again. And of course you’ve got… famously Cardcaptor Sakura is, I think, what people still think of as the watermark. And Zoisite and Kunzite in Sailor Moon…

So, this did happen, and then it kind of went away because we put all… I don’t… I would just be guessing as to why it went away, right? I am sure that there are broader elements of chilling and marketing effects and the fact that BL did sort of explode post-Gravitation as its own viable market so we can just sort of put all the queers over there! But yeah, it definitely went away for a while, and I do remember things like—and of course this is talking about English-speaking fandoms—when Shin Sekai Yori came out, From the New World, Reddit pitched a goddamn fit that there was one episode where two of the male characters kissed. And a lot of “I’m fuckin’ droppin’ the show!” and I’m like, “Well, I’m sorry, you’re weak.”

TONY: Gays in non-quote-unquote-“BL” have been around since some pretty foundational manga, right? So, we should not erase that even as we’re talking about Summer Hikaru Died as what it is.

VRAI: It’s important. I think that can be true and it’s still important.

ALEX: [crosstalk] Well, it’s cool because it— Yeah, it’s building on…it’s standing on the shoulders, the… If I want to make a tasteless joke, it’s standing on the very, very broad shoulders and pointy chins of the queer representations, nuanced or otherwise, that have come before. And, you know, it’s drawing on some of that gothic, like you were saying, Vrai, even. And it’s also… I don’t know, it’s interesting to me because much more recently the context we’ve seen is that we have had… not heaps, obviously. 

Like, it’s not a very big spike considering that we’re counting up from zero, but we have had things like Given and things like Sasaki and Miyano, and even Cherry Magic obviously had that supernatural element, but that was basically just a love story between two guys living in the real world. So, you know, there’s a lot of discussion to be had in various media spaces about how representations of love stories, of teenage coming-out, of self-actualization and first love and figuring your identity…These stories are all really, really important and have a great normalizing quality, and I absolutely think that is true.

And I think it is interesting that we’ve had kind of a few of those and now maybe they’ve kind of held the door open for this adaptation of Hikaru, which is doing all of that, like I said, but also it is genre, it is horror, it’s folk horror, it’s got all these fantastical elements. And, I mean, pared down to its heart, to get on to our next subject, this is a horror story about being gay in a small town. Never mind all the eldritch stuff going on. [Chuckles] 

Vrai, you kind of brought this element up when you did your three-episode check-in. Did you want to speak to it at all and the impact of this sort of storytelling?

VRAI: Yeah, no, I love… I feel like this element of the series is part of what makes it so extra special to me, because I did grow up in… not the smallest town. It was like 50,000 people, but it’s also a city that has… you have to drive two hours in any direction to get to another major town. So, yeah, I think that the way it— It is very touching to me that what this series is doing is so relatable. Right? 

The fact that… Small towns are known for being insular—that’s often true—people generation on generation, and they might be nice to you if you come from out of town, but you don’t really belong there unless you’ve had four generations of family who grew up and died there. And so, the fact that I could watch scenes like where Yoshiki is at the supermarket and the checkout clerk is just chattering at him things that are natural to her, but she knows all his business but she doesn’t know him at all, it’s this feeling of alienation and scrutiny, where the person means warmth but there’s just a carelessness there and a thoughtlessness in a way that makes him feel so trapped.

TONY: Well, when you already have this idea that’s been constructed about yourself through rumor, through gossip, through everything, it both erases you completely but it also means that you’re being looked at through stereotypes. Right? People can only see him as like the poor kid of a broken household. And who is more affected by stereotypes, right, than a little queer kid?

VRAI: Yeah. Yeah.

ALEX: Well, exactly. That’s what I was gonna say, because if he has this watchful presence in this claustrophobic, small town, it’s like no wonder he is hiding so deeply in his version of the closet, because of course that’s a very impactful scene sort of early on, a flashback of him talking to actual Hikaru and they’re like, “Oh, you know, so-and-so’s son, he’s ill. He’s leaving town.” And they go, “He’s not sick; he’s a homosexual.” Yoshiki brings that up and is very kind of [crosstalk] about it.

VRAI: [crosstalk] [Sighs] The pathologized use of “homosexual.”

ALEX: And it sort of breezes—

TONY: [crosstalk] Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

ALEX: Yeah! Exactly, yeah. I think that that localization choice is deliberate because it is very like—It’s a bit old-fashioned and, yeah, it is a bit clinical. It’s like, he’s this thing.

TONY: [crosstalk] And then, doesn’t Hikaru also correct him to the more politically correct term, if I remember right? [Chuckles] Or originally used the more politically correct…

ALEX: I don’t remember that specifically.

TONY: [crosstalk] I don’t… Do you remember, Vrai?

VRAI: I don’t remember, but I could see that being… It feels plausible, shall I say.

ALEX: The bit that I remember from that scene, which seems very interesting and very telling because you get these two perspectives on the situation, is that Yoshiki obviously… They’re showing, not telling. The writing and the visual language in this show is so cool, because there is never actually a point where it’s like, “Hey, audience! Did you know that Yoshiki is queer and feels very trapped in this small, conservative town where everyone knows him? And also, he’s kinda yearning and attracted to his best friend and doesn’t know what to do with that and is keeping that on lock.” 

It never says that to you outright. It trusts you to pick it up. Which, I worry on one hand that that may be subtle a representation for some people, just in terms of the strain of fandom you can have where they’ve been burned by queerbait shows too many times in the mid-2000s, so they’re kinda like, “If these characters don’t kiss on the mouth and look into the camera and say ‘I am gay’ in English, it doesn’t count.” [Laughs] That’s not universal, of course, but… [Chuckles]

TONY: Then you’re just catering to whoever’s the most homophobic in the audience. We’re not writing to whoever’s most homophobic. We are writing to queer people, right?

ALEX: Yeah, who will pick up on that shared language or will pick up on the subtext, which, again, this show does really, really frickin’ well.

VRAI: I do understand the frustration on the other side a little bit, just because of years of what the production—not the production staff, they were champs—what Bandai tried to do with Witch from Mercury before people pitched an absolute shitfit.

TONY: [crosstalk] Okay, here’s the difference, though: Witch from Mercury feels like it has very little to do with the lived experience of being a queer woman. Almost nothing to do with it. They are queer women, yes, but within…In any case, Summer Hikaru Died is intimately about what it’s like to be a queer person in a very specific place, in a very specific time. You know? And to me, that matters. 

That really matters, because… because all the themes are just so clear, so immersive about that. And so, for me, I have a lot more patience with a show, honestly, that is so… And at the end of the season, Yoshiki basically comes out to Hikaru, right?

VRAI: Uh-huh. Yeah.

TONY: Like, to whatever extent he… Like, he says, “Why am I having to hide everything about myself? I hate this. I hate having to hide everything about myself.” You know. What is he hiding? What else could it be? There is no other thing that he would have to hide.

ALEX: Yeah. But it trusts… the writing and the characterization trusts you to pick up on that subtly. And it shows you this contrast, as well, with moments like them playing by the river, he says all this stuff and Hikaru kind of… obviously maybe coming from a slightly different perspective, is like, “Oh, well, don’t run away to Tokyo. You can come to my house and just hang out whenever you feel a bit stressed out,” which, whether or not he knows this, is such an incredible olive branch and such a… I don’t know. You can… I think there’s— I don’t know. It’s heartbreaking stuff, but… I forget where I was going with that. 

That scene’s really good. It’s peppered through with great scenes where you get just enough of pre-possessed Hikaru’s personality and characterization to understand how it’s different and to understand how it’s the same and to understand why Yoshiki has this weird, grieving, obsessed intimacy with, I guess, “Hikaru” in quotation marks, the new version, because it is; it’s a story about queer grief. It’s a story about this fascinating, bizarre question of “Okay, well, this person that you love, they’re gone. But this person who looks like them and talks like them and thinks like them, except for the part where they don’t understand the value of human life… Whatever. We can look past that, because you have them back.” And so… I mean, do you guys want to talk about some raw chicken? Because… [Laughs]

VRAI: Which they ate.

ALEX: Because I think this is…

TONY: [crosstalk] Well, it— I just want to add one more thing to that, because I think also it’s really important that Hikaru, knowing that he’s Yoshiki’s probably only refuge in this town for his queerness… Right? Hikaru is not dumb. [Chuckles] I don’t think Hikaru didn’t pick up on the fact that Yoshiki is gay. I think it’s pretty obvious. And Hikaru chose to say, “I do not want him to be alone. If there’s one last dying wish, it’s that my best friend have somebody who he can trust about this aspect of his life.” And that was his dying wish, right?

ALEX: “And I want someone to protect him.” Yeah, which is so… My one… I don’t know. I go back and forth because you get that flashback from Hikaru’s perspective of him dying and making that dying wish, saying into the universe, “I want someone to take care of Yoshiki.” And this being, this creature… It’s a plot point that we don’t know what it is. The thing.

VRAI: Mm-hm. Das Ding.

ALEX: Not John Carpenter’s The Thing but Mokumokuren’s The Thing. It listens to that, and so this whole situation comes about out of love, whether that’s platonic or otherwise. And so, it’s a story about weird intimacy, which I love, because obviously you have things like the… I just keep calling it the raw chicken scene, because obviously, you know, there’s an eroticism to that. You can’t get around the fact that he puts his whole hand inside his best friend’s body and they’re both like, “Oh, that’s kinda good.”

TONY: [Laughs]

ALEX: But also, it kinda goes beyond that. It’s not just couched in an analogue for sexuality and sort of innuendo, for want of a better word. It’s about weird sexual intimacy. It’s about weird emotional intimacy because they’re keeping these secrets for each other and they are the only ones in this town that understand each other and they’re kinda stuck together. And I don’t know where this series is gonna go, but I can only assume it’s gonna get more and more tangled and weird and codependent and monstrous. And we’re along for the ride because we love it, you know? Raw chicken and intimacy. Any thoughts? [Laughs]

VRAI: [crosstalk] It’s a very Cronenbergian series. And I feel like a lot of people would use that because, especially after Rick and Morty, Cronenberg is just shorthand for “thing that has a lot of body horror.” But as somebody who is obsessed with the man’s oeuvre, there is a lot of gender in David Cronenberg’s films!

TONY: Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

VRAI: Lots of stories about bodies and penetrations and fears of penetration and breaching the boundary between self and the other. And, like… Yeah. This is a very Cronenbergian series!

TONY: Honestly, actually, in a little bit of [relation] to [this] I was watching The Substance recently, and this… Substance also has doppelgängers in it and uses doppelgängers as this kind of way of approaching conversations around self-hatred and the alienation from the self that comes through looking at yourself through somebody else’s eyes. And I think that in a sense… There is a sense with body horror and body double shows of when somebody reveals a secret, it almost all the time… Say you’re coming out as transgender to your parents. A very frequent reaction is “You’re not the child I knew,” right, or “You’re not the daughter I had” or… 

This sense that you are a doppelgänger who’s replaced the person who was there before, right? Now, obviously, Hikaru is not the one who’s queer— We don’t know if he’s the one who’s queer, right, but probably not. It’s heavily implied not, right? But the imagery of doppelgängers and the imagery of that uncanniness is a significant feature of the coming-out story. Right? And the sense that… I think there’s this fear, especially with, I don’t know, queer male sexuality, of almost this transformation of the body. And by “body,” I don’t just mean the physical appearance of somebody, although Lord knows a lot of gay men go on steroids and shit so that they can look a particular way. 

But if we think of the body also in terms of the way that it’s styled, the way that gay men move, the way that gay men act and sound and… I think within… like, certainly for me, I remember when I was growing up, I would listen to recordings of myself and I would just be so horrified that my voice was so feminine, right? [Chuckles]

VRAI: There’s that whole documentary Do I Sound Gay?

TONY: Yeah, right, and this kind of… And there’s a sense of horror at recognizing this alienated image of oneself, like “Oh, this is what I sound like? This is what I look like?” It’s like a doppelgänger appears and you’re like, “Oh, shit, what the fuck?”  Right? And so, this kind of encounter with this alien other that is also reflecting these parts of yourself that you’re uncomfortable with… because Hikaru, the alien Hikaru, is fucking gay. Or basically gay.

ALEX: [Chuckles] Yeah, well, that’s the interesting thing, is that, yeah, he says that he’s like, “Oh, I…” What does he say?

VRAI: “I’m not really built like that.”

ALEX: [crosstalk] He’s like, “I really care about you, I really like you,” yeah, “but I don’t know quite know what that means, but I have these strong feelings for you, and I am a being from the beyond, and so I don’t have any internalized homophobia that a lot of humans do,” which gives you that interesting… The queer monster or the supernatural element kind of lets you unhinge [Chuckles] the character and the storytelling. It gives Yoshiki a different avenue that he hasn’t considered with this otherworldly thing.

TONY: I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that there is this intense body horror to the encounter with one’s queer sexuality, specifically the way that one’s body transforms as one grows into their queerness.

VRAI: I mean, I think that’s why people react so viscerally to how they did what they did to Kanji, at the risk of bringing the ghost of the world’s worst discourse, because, yeah, this is such a potent imagery, that double, the othered self and the specter of the self as an inevitable social pariah coming to eat you.

TONY: Which character are you referring to? Kanji?

VRAI: Yeah, in Persona 4.

TONY: Oh, okay.

VRAI: It’s such a powerful individual story, but I also really like how the second half starts getting into the town backstory and the idea that this is a generational thing, specifically going back to the wronging of vulnerable parties like the wronging of women and then that leading into other marginalized identities and how that… You know, my favorite type of ghost story is stuff soaked into the earth so much that the place is just wrong now. I think Guillermo del Toro’s [El espinazo] del diablo (Vrai is referencing the title El espinazo de diablo) is maybe one of the best examples of that. The Haunting of Bly Manor, I think, is another really relevant example, especially since the bit in the last episode, the “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” is a pretty poignant motif in that series. So, yeah, I think that that is… I think it’s so cool that… This would still be a really good story if it was about an individual struggle, but the fact that it is about a system of a small town really means something to me.

TONY: And it’s heavily implied…

ALEX: Yeah, and their interaction with that, with…

TONY: Wasn’t it heavily implied that all of the sacrifices were also useless and pointless? Or…

VRAI: [hesitant] Ye—

ALEX: We don’t know. I think the mystery is still unfolding.

VRAI: That seems like a very plausible outcome, but yeah. I guess we don’t know for sure yet.

ALEX: So, if I’m—Yeah, I do like the mystery aspect, and if I… This is very silly and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but one of the quibbles I had with the adaptation is that they show you the map really early, whereas the part in the manga… like, you discover that with the boys. You are in their perspective and you are kind of with them on this journey trying to solve this mystery. And I can’t even articulate why, but that sequence is just so fucking creepy with them looking through the library and being like, “Oh! Right, the villages had different names historically, so that’s why the research is difficult. Oh, hey, this one uses the character for ‘leg.’ That’s weird. Oh, this one uses the character for ‘arm.’” 

And then you turn the page, and they’ve laid all the maps out on the table like Exodia, and it makes the shape of a person, but like a weird, wiggly, yucky… [Laughs] And I was sitting on a park bench in broad daylight when I read that, and I got the biggest shiver. I can’t even tell you why. Maybe it’s because I’m just… I love horror for all its themes, but I am fundamentally a big weenie.

Anyway, you’re right, though, because it starts as this individual story. It’s about this relationship between Yoshiki and Hikaru-not-Hikaru and this question of “What are they gonna do about this? How are they gonna keep the secret? How does Yoshiki feel about him?” And then it gradually unfolds into this broader mystery about, like, “Well, what are you? And what is wrong with us? And what is wrong with this place?” And then you get gradually the adults encroaching on them and trying to, I don’t know, restore order on their relationship, as it were, either symbolically or through cutting Hikaru’s head off that one time.

VRAI: Yeah, I think it’s pretty significant that most of the sympathetic adult characters or sympathetic ensemble characters in general are women, whereas… not even… antagonistic, I guess… a lot of the antagonistic forces of order are adult men in this series. Is it subtle? No. Fuck you; subtlety is for cowards! [Chuckles]

ALEX: Well, yeah, you know. Yeah, subtlety… sometimes you don’t need it. You know, there’s that great scene towards the end. Yoshiki has a flashback to hanging out with his dad, and he’s playing with toys, which one of them, I guess, is like royalty-free Godzilla. And he’s like, “I don’t know, I just always relate more to the monster.” I’m like, “Thank you.” [Chuckles] “Thank you for spelling out the themes. Queer people love monsters. We relate to the monster.”

But on your point, yes, it’s about the dads. It’s about the crotchety old men and this mysterious sunglasses man who is able to… he has this capacity to investigate and destroy. It’s all, yeah, the family patriarchs and these physically strong… I’m not gonna say “more macho,” but, you know, he leans more towards traditionally in that he’s got weapons, he’s got cleverness, he’s this mysterious agent.

VRAI: But he’s also sort of in an in-between place as a disabled character. He seems like he could be an ally, but we don’t know.

ALEX: We don’t know yet, which is why that ending cliffhanger where he’s about to tell them something and they’re going to have a conversation… I have no idea what’s gonna happen next. Volume 6 comes out from Yen Press at the end of October, and then I will know peace. Except I won’t, because they’ll probably drop another cliffhanger on me, which is interesting in and of itself, because this is a horror story. And horror stories can have all sorts of plot structures, and they are not beholden to the rules of “Oh, well, the good characters have to have a happy ending. This needs to happen in this way.” They can kind of wiggle free of some of that structure you would get in other genres.

TONY: Half of what makes them so enjoyable is you have no idea whether the characters will actually get a happy ending because a lot of them end really sadly.

VRAI: I’m still betting on Venom ending.

TONY: What’s the Venom ending?

ALEX: A Venom ending? [Laughs]

VRAI: My guess is that this series ends with not-Hikaru and Yoshiki sharing a body and transcending into whatever space, Yurikuma-style.

TONY: Oh, god.

ALEX: Ah. Going beyond Severance. Is that what…? Yes, that is what [obscured by crosstalk].

TONY: [crosstalk] You see, now it’s really giving The Substance.

[Chuckling]

ALEX: Yeah, they have got plenty of space to get weird with it.

TONY: Oh, but I don’t want that! I don’t want that for them. That’s gross.

ALEX: Well, it’s interesting, right, because I have… There’s a great essay by Leah Thomas, which I believe we linked back in the day when it first came out. They have a quote talking about it, “You can’t bury your gays if the gays are already undead,” which I think is an interesting, snappy little way to be like, this story’s obviously engaging with tragedy and grief and queer loss, but it’s also not necessarily beholden to the traditional historical tropes that we expect over the portrayal of queer characters in media, because it’s horror, it’s genre, it’s doing all this extra weird stuff. So, maybe we could somehow find a version of a happy ending for these two. We kind of don’t know. And that’s tantalizing.

VRAI: Tony, I’m picturing the ending of Welcome Back, Alice, but, you know, it’s a horror series so we’re literal about it.

TONY: Oh, God. I love the ending of Welcome Back, Alice. It’s probably one of my favorite…

VRAI: Exactly.

TONY: That is one of my favorite endings in all— Have we done a pod on that one yet? We need to do a pod on that. Okay, anyways.

VRAI: We should.

TONY: We should do a pod on that. I want to do a Retrospective on all that mangaka’s work.

But anyways, yeah, I also wanted to shout-out Steve Jones, who… she also had a really interesting observation that she thinks that the exchange of the piece of Hikaru with Yoshiki has a lot of parallels with Penguindrum and the exchange of the fruit in Penguindrum, and this idea that Hikaru—well, not-Hikaru—and Yoshiki’s fates are kind of linked together and that the choice of true companionship for them is to recognize that one cannot thrive without the other’s coming up, too, right? Sharing the fruit of destiny is what it’s called in Penguindrum. 

And, I don’t know, I really love that observation because when I think about visions of queer solidarity… I don’t know. As we think about our relationship with the small towns that we grow up in, often we kind of grow apart from the people in… Yoshiki starts the series wanting to escape to Tokyo, and Hikaru’s kinda like, “Well, we’re connected, you know? We can stay here.” And this kind of promise that they’re going to remain connected…

VRAI: Yeah. Like, the image of the piece as the willingness to wound oneself or open oneself to suffering for the sake… to form a connection of trust with you. I think that’s really beautiful.

ALEX: Yeah, I mean, talk about weird intimacies. He literally pulls off a piece of himself [Chuckles], after they’ve variously tried to eat and/or stab each other, which is just, I don’t know, normal. [Chuckles] Normal romantic shit.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Was it also Steve who called that, like, the Old Yeller episode? Because I think I died! [Chuckles]

TONY: Wait, yes.

ALEX: [Laughs]

TONY: Wait, wait, say that again?

ALEX: This is a joke you made on, like, the mid-season podcast where it’s like, yeah, he’s taking his dog out for one last nice day before he shoots him behind the barn.

TONY: Yes. Yes, yes. Wait, wait, wait, who called it that? Did you call it that? Did…?

VRAI: No, I think it was Steve on Bluesky.

TONY: She’s very funny, yes. But yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I think that that was…

VRAI: “I can’t kill the part of myself that’s gay, so I guess I have to live with it.”

TONY: No, no, literally, yeah, right. Right, like “I can’t kill this part of myself. I also can’t kill the possibility of acceptance in this small town, even if that acceptance is looked on by society as monstrous or gross.” Right?

ALEX: That’s kind of the arc. It’s what makes… Obviously it’s a big “To be continued” sign, but the endpoint that the anime—season 1, rather—hits is you get this great emotional arc where he’s like… yeah, like you say, Tony, it’s kind of a coming-out scene. It’s kind of a confession of love where he is like, “Look, let’s be monsters together. I’m gonna take care of you. I don’t care if everyone on Earth wants to destroy you or exorcise you or whatever. They also want to destroy or exorcise me, so I feel this sense of solidarity. We’re in it together. Please don’t leave me.”

VRAI: And then they go over the cliff together.

ALEX: And then they start fighting, and it parallels the scene, the flashback to when they’re kids and they’re goofing around and beating each other up [obscured by crosstalk], and it’s like oh, my God. [Chuckles]

TONY: [crosstalk] Well, it’s also foreshadowed earlier in the series where they’re drowning each other in the bathtub.

ALEX: True, true! It’s a return to that drowning imagery, but, like, positive this time. [Chuckles]

TONY: Yeah, and I mean… I don’t know whether water has the same symbolism in Japan as it has in, you know, American cultures, but Christianity comes up again and again in the series. Presumably this series is partially about persecuted implied Christians in Japan, and so the imagery of baptism as being a possibility… I don’t know. I’m just spitballing here.

VRAI: No, I think that’s very plausible.

ALEX: Right, because that’s part of the village backstory, is that there’s no churches in this town, but there are a bunch elsewhere, so what does that mean?

Speaking of the broader community, though, do we want to take a chance to talk about the female characters? Because obviously we need to champion the queer boys—that is huge—but it’s worth taking a look at the ladies, as well. Do you want to start with…? Let’s start at the start with… is it Asako, the slightly psychic or slightly supernaturally attuned classmate? How do we feel about her? Because she’s sort of stepping, inching closer and closer to being a main character? I don’t know.

VRAI: Yeah, I feel like we’re sort of waiting on the precipice for her to do what she gets to do. It’s a lot of setup for her right now, but I like her a lot. It was very charming to me that at the Hikaru panel at Otakon, the director and Yoshiki’s actor and Mokumokuren picked clips that they liked, and the ones that Mokumokuren picked were Asako scenes, where they were just so charmed and delighted by seeing her in motion and being cool.

TONY: Oh, my God, I love it! Even just the little moment where one of the characters is showing the rest of them his fireworks dance… Ah!

VRAI: Mm-hm!

ALEX: Yes. [Chuckles] There’s a lot of great little, normal moments that make the world feel very lived in and make it feel like, oh, this is just a goofy group of kids that are occasionally touched by the horrors in ways they either do or do not perceive. Especially with— And I appreciate, as well, that Asako… she has this… Yeah, she’s sort of slightly attuned to yokai or anything else, so she picks up that there’s something weird with Hikaru. And it could go absolutely terribly. 

This could be the moment where it’s like, oh, he just kills her, because he doesn’t understand the value of human life, and then, you know, into the… not “into the fridge she goes.” That seems a bit reductive. But it feels interesting and telling to me that they took that opportunity to keep her around and be like, no, no. Maybe she’s actually kinda gonna be a friend. Maybe she’s gonna be an ally rather than an antagonistic force. Maybe they can come to understand each other. She’s not antagonistic and she’s not just killed off for convenience’s sake, which a lesser or more cliché story would have done.

TONY: [crosstalk] Remind me. I feel like there was a moment in the last few episodes where she realizes again that he’s not real or she reveals that she knows he’s not really Hikaru?

VRAI: Yeah. And it’s very like the kind of coming-out where they’ve put it together and you can’t avoid talking about it anymore.

TONY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ALEX: But with more of the, you know, ectoplasmic spiral stuff. [Chuckles] He’s like, “How did you know?” She’s like, “I saw your weird monster form the whole way. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but I did see your weird spiraling monster form the whole way!”

VRAI: Yeah, she’s really the most… I almost worry— Not “worry.” I almost wonder if she’s… She feels like she’s being set up as like… Well, obviously she’s a foil to Rie, but also to Hamster Man as this positive-force medium, and potentially, I wonder, is there a way to do this that isn’t deeply bodily self-destructive? There’s a lot of potential in her, but I’m just not sure what it is yet.

ALEX: Which, again, interesting that she’s the young person. The other sort of mediums we see are Rie, as you mentioned, who is the widow and… uh, yeah, let’s just keep calling him Hamster Man. Yeah, again, they are both adults. They are both older. They are much more entrenched, either in the town and its traditions or in the world of, for want of a better word, demon-hunting. But, yeah, she’s younger, she’s one of the kids, she’s one of the teens. She has this new perspective, and she sees Hikaru’s sort of… not humanity because he literally isn’t human, but she’s like, “Maybe we can make this work.” She’s the one coming up with the new ideas, which, you know, ties nicely into some of those themes from earlier.

Did we want to touch on Rie, our ally-not-ally? [Chuckles]

VRAI: I like her. She reminds me of my mom and so many adults from my hometown, in that she is…She has this tragedy that understandably informs her and her initial approach to Yoshiki in a way that she truly means well and it hurts him, but it’s not really anybody’s fault how that goes, but then once she actually meets Hikaru, she grows and she changes, and I choked up a little bit. I think that that subplot is really beautiful, in this— Because when you grow up someplace small, some people, they need to, for their own safety, completely cut off, go away, never come back. 

But if you want to… if you’re trying to preserve some of that connection, it can mean so much to see the older people in your life make an effort. Even if they screw up and even if they don’t entirely get it, the fact that they are constantly making little strides forward and putting it together, the fact that when you see people do that, it gives you hope for, like, “Oh, I can become a better person about things I’m not great for right now,” and… I don’t know, it just… And it’s so… It’s nice to see a character like her, too, in terms of I feel like there are often small-town stories that either romanticize, Hallmark-style, “I’m gonna go back to my small town and everything’s gonna be great and idyllic there,” or “Fuck my small town! It is a place of violence and I need to get away from there.” 

And so, I love her as this symbol of that fraught warmth and safety and why people try to preserve it. Same as the fireworks scene. I think Hikaru is really good at depicting why there are things that it would be sad to lose about your small town.

ALEX: Because, again, of course, Yoshiki can’t run away to Tokyo, because he presumably can’t bring not-Hikaru with him, because he (it?) [is] this creature who is now inhabiting his best friend who he’s in love with, who, as I said, their connection is just getting more and more tangled, they are like a part of that place and a part of the mystery and the history and the tragedy of that place. 

So, he’s gotta… You know? Is he digging himself further in the dirt now when at one point he would’ve preferred to just leave? Dunno. Or could he ever really leave if it meant leaving Hikaru behind in the first place? And that’s just been exacerbated now by the supernatural element. Dunno. All these interesting things. But yeah.

TONY: The “running away to Tokyo” thing is interesting to me in what you were saying, Vrai, dealing with the many adults in your life who maybe tried their best but didn’t quite do it right. Rie definitely reminds me of many of those people, the sort of people who maybe either lived in a different time and so they experienced a much more grim vision of what it means to be a queer person, and so, the way that they talk to you is informed by that, right, and is accidentally actually kind of harmful; alternatively… Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of what it reminds me the most of. But it’s also complicated. I don’t know. Her whole plot really definitely complicates any one-to-one allegory, I think, with queerness and monstrosity, because her husband is just a creepy yokai monster thing that harms her kid, right?

VRAI: Yeah. It’s interesting because, yeah, I don’t think that she’s like… She’s not really an allegory for the queer who assimilated to make it through and that’s what we had to do in our generation. It’s more like—to get a little personal—a story that my mom… It must have really stuck to her because she told it to me several times. And I think it was in her head when I came out to her as trans, is that she was… She’s a retired cancer nurse. And one of her patients who passed was a trans woman who had to stop taking her hormones because of the chemotherapy. And my mom, just watching over her and just watching other people treat her and how she suffered when her hair came back and stuff… And I think that level of sorrow and tragedy was maybe informing her when she had sort of a hard time at first for me, not in an angry way but in a “Oh, no, you’re going to be so miserable” way. And so, that’s…

TONY: [crosstalk] No, and that’s the exact reaction that I’ve asked my dad about, his reaction when I was gay, and he said, like, “Oh. Well, I was really worried you were gonna have a really hard life,” right? And that reaction is, in its own way… it’s well meaning, but it is hurtful on some level, of being unable to imagine what the steps would be to create a world in which you wouldn’t have a hard life and work with you to make that world possible. Right?

And to me, what you were describing about the chemo and the body hair coming back… I mean, to me, that speaks a little bit to why sometimes there’s a connection between—not to bring it full circle—queerness and body horror. For me, I have a very personal connection with that because I’ve lived my entire life with severe chronic pain, right? And so, when I see series like [The] Summer Hikaru Died or Devilman Crybaby engaging with queerness and the horror of having a body and not knowing what that body’s gonna do, it feels very personal in that way, just to have series that can imagine the specific ways in which one’s queer body can be a site of horror, but not because, necessarily, of one’s queerness but because of one’s queerness being… I don’t want to say “invalidated,” because that’s not the term but like…mons—

ALEX: [crosstalk] The queerness being perceived as being horrifying.

TONY: [crosstalk] Being perceived as being horrifying or even being almost stolen from you. But, yeah, I don’t know how to describe it. Okay, here’s…! Okay, here’s another example. The ending of I Saw the TV Glow, right? The horror at the end of that, yeah, is the horror of one’s queerness being stolen by a society that cannot accept it. Or the horror of losing this one friend who represents the possibility of you having [accepted] community in this hometown. Without Hikaru, Yoshiki would probably bury that part of himself forever, right?

VRAI: Right. Yeah. Well, and someone like Yoshiki… My problem with the “run away to the city” narratives have always been “How many people like Yoshiki are gonna thrive in the club kid scenario?” Like, some of us queers are simply not meant for the city. [Chuckles] And what do we do? Fuck off, I guess.

TONY: Well, I have a lot of friends in New York who are not club kids. So I’ll say there’s plenty of room for every kind of person in the city.

VRAI: [crosstalk] That’s fair. That’s fair.

ALEX: I totally see your point, though, right, because it’s like that narrative of… Every country has an equivalent. Here, it’s like, “Oh, get to Sydney or Melbourne, and then you’ll be fine. Everything will work out for you fine.” Obviously in the U.S. it’s like, “Get to L.A. or New York.” And for Yoshiki it’s like, “Get to Tokyo.” You know, your designated big city where obviously you just need to get there and then everything will be fine. There are so many more nuances to that narrative. And, like you say, yeah, that won’t necessarily work for everyone, because it depends what you’re looking for, depends what you’re stifled by.

VRAI: [crosstalk] And I shouldn’t have gone to clubbing, because that’s not a fair comparison. What I should’ve said is like, someone like Yoshiki or someone like me forming connections in a new place can be very hard, and depending on how much you struggle finding the community, it’s not… It’s a more complicated narrative that I think it was sold, is all. This is probably a digression we don’t need.

ALEX: Mm-hm. Mm-hm. There are many, many interesting writings about this which I will not get into. [Chuckles]

I think… One last thing that I want to touch on is this idea that maybe the entity that is currently Hikaru… maybe it’s not evil. Like, I think it is— Maybe it’s not horrifying. Obviously, part of the plot and the mystery is that we don’t quite know what this thing is or how it ties into everything. But I think it’s interesting a suggestion that it is just part of nature, it is part of the mountain, it’s just a thing that exists, and it is human perception and society’s norms that render this thing horrifying. So, is there something in that, as well? 

From a different perspective, Yoshiki comes to quite like this thing, comes to love it. Part of that obviously is, you know, hey, you are wearing the face and memories of my best friend, who I’m grieving. But by the end of the first season, again, he has that big confession. He’s like, “You—you, as you are now—I want to keep you. I don’t want to lose you.” So, it’s again that connection between… Okay, well, I am actually a perfectly neutral thing. You know, being gay is a perfectly value-neutral element of being a person, but the social factors around you render it monstrous, and maybe the same thing has happened to this entity. Or at least, you know, you can certainly see how you would draw those comparisons. I don’t know. 

It’s an interesting sort of throughline, and maybe that will change with the deep lore we actually get behind what Hikaru is, but it’s an interesting… a thing that runs through it, the suggestion that, like, well, he’s fine now, because I guess he’s passing as human and as a normal high school boy. But maybe they could find some sort of happiness if he didn’t have to do that, if they could both be themselves in this different kind of space, which they are striving for with that big confession in the ocean at the end of series. Is that about to be completely spoiled or helped along by Sunglasses Man? Don’t know. Again: left on the same cliffhanger twice. I’m suffering. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Yeah, I mean, we made a lot of jokes in our house—I’ve been watching this series with my partner—about “Oh, man. You should see the fucked-up shit that’s happening at the village down the road, because…”

TONY: [Laughs]

ALEX: [Laughs]

VRAI: But in truth, Yoshiki’s village is… This is a different story from Higurashi, in that Higurashi is about a town that is fucked because of adults and child abuse and the chronic refusal to care for children. But, yeah, it is [specifically about] an external and, in many ways, man-made malevolent force; whereas, yeah, this is much more about, in addition to other factors… Vague spoilers, I guess. But, yeah, this is much more about: yeah, there are forces in the world, and the parameters that humanity placed on it for selfish, patriarchal gain have wielded it in a way that was grievously wounding, and the rituals humans built around it then continued to perpetuate that harm. Something something religion!

ALEX: [Chuckles] It is interesting to me, as well, that we’re kind of setting up these three parallel… “love stories” is the wrong word, but we have— As far as the mythology goes, as far as we know, the original instance was someone trying to bring their wife back from the dead and going, “I don’t care what happens to everybody else; just do this,” and it went terribly. And then we have Rie, who kept her husband around as, I guess, a ghost, a spiritual force of some kind, and was like, “This is gonna be fine. I love him. I want to keep him around,” and it went terribly. And so now are pointing towards Yoshiki and Hikaru, who… you know, Yoshiki is looking at this monster, as society would put it, this creature, this thing from the beyond, is going, “Well, I want to keep this around. I kind of don’t care…” I guess this is the question he’s building up to, is like is it gonna be a thing of: do you care? Is it gonna go terribly? What’s gonna happen? What are you gonna sacrifice for this happiness? 

And I don’t know. I don’t know quite where we’re pointing towards with that, but it feels like an intentional parallel to have these… And, again, interesting that two of them are straight couples, and now we have this queer couple, so maybe they’re gonna be the ones to break the cycle. Who knows, but…

VRAI: [crosstalk] A shoujo tradition. Thank you, Earthian.

ALEX: [crosstalk] …they are trapped in a cycle, for sure. What was that, sorry?

VRAI: [crosstalk] Oh, no, it’s just that’s… that’s such a shoujo tradition. Earthian is a favorite of mine, and it definitely does that, with, like, “Look at our gays! And look at those straights over there.” But, yeah, no, I think it is significant that part of Yoshiki’s arc that not-Hikaru is a separate, individual person and that differentiates him from these previous cases. That ability to change and cope and process grief is an important part of it.

ALEX: Gah, this story is about so much. I think we could keep talking. We may have to start wrapping it up for the good people at home. Do you guys have any final thoughts you want to share about this series?

TONY: It’s good. [Chuckles]

ALEX: Sure is! [Laughs]

TONY: [crosstalk] It’s hard for me to talk about, because, yeah, it’s just very personal in some ways. But, yeah, and it’s nice to have an anime that feels deeply personal in this way. It’s actually not that common. So, hats off to Mokumokuren for creating something that’s so specific but also so tied to an experience of queerness that is actually recognizable rather than feeling like it’s an alien heard an interview with a human who was studying gay people and then wrote an anime about gay people, which is often how it feels when I see representations of gay people. So, hats off to you, Mokumokuren.

VRAI: Yeah, I…

ALEX: Any final thoughts from you, Vrai?

VRAI: It’s good. I do want to take this opportunity to lowkey recommend a manga that I think flies under the radar. If you liked this and you want to read a story about being gay in a small town that’s just slice-of-life romance fiction, there’s a really, really touching one that I think does that small-town dynamic: “Oh, you’re relatives are trying, but it’s kind of like small needles in your guts every day, but you have to be there. And how do you find another person who helps you cope?” And also it has a happy ending. It’s called Restart After Coming Back Home. This man has to come back to the city to help take over his family business because his parents are getting old. And he’s not back in the closet, but not not in the closet… kind of deal. It’s a very interesting and subtle exploration of small-town queerness, I think. It doesn’t have an anime. It’s only one volume, but I believe it was made into a live-action film, and I think it has a sequel one-shot, too. But it’s just a really, really good and underrated series and I wish more people would read it. So, go do that, please.

ALEX: See? It’s good. Variety is the spice of life. We need the grounded slice-of-life stuff, we need the high drama, we need the horror, we need the fantasy, everything. There are so many ways that queer experience can be expressed and queer themes can be explored and… ah! It’s good. We love it. We love it.

So, this has been an episode of Chatty AF. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, we do of course have our website, animefeminist.com. We have more podcasts, reviews, articles, personal essays, everything under that umbrella.

If you really like what you heard, we have a Patreon, where you can support us and help the lights on. That is patreon.com/animefeminist.

And if you want to find us on social media, all of that is in a nice, neat pile at our Linktree, which is…

VRAI: Linktr.ee/animefeminist.

ALEX: Thank you, Vrai. I will hand the microphone to you.

[Laughter]

ALEX: So, yeah, take care out there. It’s a strange time to be a human, but we’re doing our best.

[Chuckles]

ALEX: So, we will catch you in the next one. Cheers.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Stay gay.

TONY: Stay gay!