Takopi’s Original Sin – Episode 1

Content Warning: Extremely graphic depictions of child suicide, bullying, depression, child abuse, child neglect, stereotypical treatment of sex work, implied animal cruelty and death

What’s it about? Takopi is an alien from the Planet Happy! They crash landed here on Earth hoping to bring happiness to children with their “magic gadgets.” The first child they encounter though, fourth grader Shizuka, definitely seems in need of their help. Why does she always come home from school with a mark on her face? What happened to her school supplies? And where is her mom?

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I’m going to be blunt: you should not watch this if you do not want to see depictions of suicide. Takopi’s Original Sin’s extended premiere starts with a content warning, and not just for the English localization, but for the Japanese viewers too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen before, and it is not there without cause. Takopi’s Original Sin is extremely graphic, lingering on Shizuka’s body hanging from Takopi’s “Happy Ribbon” for close to a minute before it falls to the floor. 

When I chose this show for my slate of reviews, I knew that it was going to be grotesque–Vrai had described it to me as a popular “guromoe” manga. Guromoe is an aesthetic term coined by editor Vrai that is a portmanteau of “guro” and “moe.” It describes media which embrace both grotesque depictions of suffering and body horror–guro–alongside cute, or “moe” aesthetics, often centering children. The example readers are probably familiar with is Made in Abyss, which represents to me both the problems and promise of guromoe–its penchant for exploitative, pointless, borderline fetishistic depictions of children suffering, and its possibilities for depicting the disturbing realities of the powerlessness of childhood.

The comparison is also relevant because the director and writer of Takopi’s Original Sin, Iino Shinya, cut his teeth as the Assistant Director on Made in Abyss. It shows. Takopi, like Abyss, is gorgeous to look at, with dynamic, nuanced character animation, vibrant use of color, and an eye for unconventional stagings with oblique camera angles. Its animation style in particular is exceedingly rare for a TV production, most reminiscent of Oshiyama’s directing style in Look Back, with its rough lines, flexibility with character models, and flashes of fluid camera movement. 

This complements the story well, because it gives us a sense of what the world looks like through Takopi’s eyes. When they first arrive on earth, they see Shizuka with all of the signs that we, as viewers, can easily read as indicating bullying–her backpack with the word “die” scrawled on it, her face bruised, her writing board having “gone missing.” Takopi has no frame of reference for this, coming from a world of literal sunshine and rainbows, where the worst fights that could ever happen are over scraps of magic paper, and any disagreement can be easily made up. 

I was ready for Takopi themself to be intensely annoying. I felt dread throughout the first part of the episode, because anybody who has seen the content warning and seen what is happening to Shizuka could see the writing on the wall. Yet the music continued to play into this naivety, with comforting, playful melodies, creating a sense of dissonance between our perception of the situation and how Takopi is perceiving it. As the episode went on, I began to understand the purpose behind Takopi’s naivety–they are not, necessarily, the butt of the joke. We are, for creating a society that allows such cruel things to happen to children.

The show is relentless in its critique of society, presenting all of the circumstances that led to Shizuka’s suicide in their relationship to societal violence–Shizuka’s family lives in poverty because of her father disappearing under mysterious circumstances. She is bullied for this poverty, with the children destroying her school supplies and saying she can “buy new ones with welfare money.” But the most complicated aspect of the narrative is how Shizuka’s bullying is almost entirely the result of the stigma and violence faced by sex workers: the bully’s father is a John, and Shizuka has to be punished for her mother’s allegedly destroying his family.

The show’s treatment of sex workers is interesting in our current anime landscape, especially when contrasted with more positive depictions in shows like The Apothecary Diaries and Dan Da Dan. In Dan Da Dan, similar to Takopi, the effects of sex worker stigma on their children is dramatized, but the sex worker herself is centered and represented with empathy, care, and nuance. Acrobatic Silky’s love for her daughter in Dan Da Dan is never called into question, leading to one of the most meaningful depictions of sex work in anime. By contrast, we never see Shizuka with her mother–and it is heavily implied her mother is profoundly neglectful. The show seems to goad the viewer into asking: “why would a mother continue to do work that leads her child to be bullied and neglected?” 

It is hard to assess the representation of a character whose only presence is the hole she leaves in the protagonist’s life and the violence the stigma attached to her job puts on her kid. But it is not the most promising start, given it reinforces the stigmatization of sex work it is critiquing through the bullying narrative. Representation of sex work will be something we keep an eye on, given its importance to the narrative. After all, not only is Shizuka’s life being torn apart by the stigma of sex work, but her bully, too, is being abused by her mother because of the mother’s jealousy over her father being a John. Much will ride on who is blamed by the narrative for Marina’s home life–Shizuka’s neglectful, sex worker mother, Marina’s cheating John father, or Marina’s abusive mother.

By the time the episode ended, I was left with a sense that this show had used its suicide imagery with good intentions, though good intentions don’t always lead to good outcomes. The treatment of suicide in media is a complicated one, especially given the social contagion aspect of suicide, leaving one wondering whether youth seeing such a graphic depiction could lead to major harm. This question has led to important debates over shows like 13 Reasons Why, and 13 Reasons Why left a bad taste in my mouth largely because of its premise, that those around a person who has died by suicide should blame themselves for that death and the conclusion the show seems to bring the audience to: that suicide is effective revenge for societal wrongdoings. 

While that pitfall is thankfully dodged here, it is hard to fully separate Takopi’s premise from the formula it follows, established by shoujo manga Orange (2012), then continued in the brilliant Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede-Destruction. (Takopi seems to owe a lot to Asano Inio, in fact—Goodnight Punpun is also a story about a small, adorable child-creature that suffers due to brutal child abuse). The story goes: a person dies by suicide, and those around them time travel to try to figure out how they could have protected that person. 

It is a natural reaction when somebody you love dies suffering to wonder what you could have done differently, how you could have been a better support, even to wonder at the feeling of insurmountability of the structural violence that often leads people to suffer. I have hopes for Takopi’s Original Sin. It is addressing themes that are both important, deeply personal, and little discussed in East Asian culture, where, speaking as a Chinese American myself, mental illness and bullying are often treated as individual problems to be overcome silently rather than structural problems society needs to contend with. While I am not sure that Takopi will be able to handle its sensitive themes or will WEGG out, as we now like to say, I am glad to see it exists, and will be reporting back on how it does. In the meantime, if you want to find series that explore similar themes in thoughtful ways that we know land in a good place, I highly recommend Blood on the Tracks, Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction, and Penguindrum.

If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please reach out immediately to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or your national Suicide Hotline.