#hollycore

            Well… no! Part of what has puzzled me for so long since watching the show is that the anime itself is really, really enjoyable. The characters are all endearingly weird, rendered colorfully and written to all have annoyingly sharp edges in their personalities. It’s a fun cast! You have Hajime Tenga, the jock himbo who is somewhat of a douchebag and a sensitive, caring dude at the same time. Katsuhira Agata, the flat, dull protagonist who is literally numb to physical pain and almost as equally disconnected from his emotions. Chidori Takashiro, the emotional childhood friend of Katsuhira’s, whose unresolved feelings end up triggering the climax of the show. Niko Niiyama, the spacey and lonely attention-seeking girl driven by seemingly boundless optimism. Honoka Maki, the aloof and antisocial girl who seems to dislike everyone around her. Tsuguhito Yuga, the dazzlingly handsome and popular boy who seems to have no friends whatsoever. Yoshiharu Hisomu, the masochist who is perhaps the most emotionally mature person in the cast. All brought together by the mysterious and somewhat frightening Noriko Sonozaki, the ringleader of a conspiracy that involves all of them.

            The setup here is pretty straightforward. All seven of the characters are rounded up (read: kidnapped) by Sonozaki and her researcher accomplices, implanted with a mysterious Kizna device, and then set loose upon a series of “challenges” set to run over the course of a summer vacation. I really like this setup, honestly, because it is so reminiscent of other works in the burgeoning “vaguely denpa-y puzzle scenarios” genre of anime and games. It evokes a little bit of Durarara, a pinch of Danganronpa, a little bit of the spice of something like Zero Escape. These things were having a bit of a moment in the 2010s (or maybe they just had an outsized impact on me and the weebs I hung out with back then), so it makes sense that Kiznaiver opts to hijack a lot of the imagery and conspiratorial background plots of these kinds of works. However, unlike Battle Royale and the other death games the Kizna System is clearly meant to evoke, the goal of Sonozaki’s project is made abundantly clear: somehow, over the course of the summer, these newly-christened Kiznaivers will participate in an experiment with the goal of solving world peace. This is the moment that the show steps out of the shadow of the works it’s emulating, by shifting the focus away from “survive at any cost” to “cooperation at any cost.”

The purpose of the Kizna system, as Sonozaki explains, is to literally share in the pain the other Kiznaivers feel. The setup is clear: if you get hurt, everyone will feel it. Hurt yourself? Everyone gets zapped. Hit a fellow Kiznaiver out of anger? Everyone feels it. Can’t feel pain? Everyone else is getting zapped. Sonozaki explains that each time the seven feel pain, it is one seventh of the pain that individual would have felt; an egalitarian division of harm. The first challenge in this odd death-game conspiracy? Introduce yourself by sharing something with the group you have never shared before. It’s awesome! It’s one giant “get along t-shirt” for a bunch of people who explicitly have nothing in common and who all seem to want absolutely nothing to do with each other.

            The fact that the death game framework is quickly abandoned in favor of thrusting these awkward, squabbling teenagers into emotionally compromising situations is perhaps the greatest strength of Kiznaiver. Trigger usually like to try and make emotional stories with quirky, bizarre frameworks or plots, and I think in general they miss the mark more often than not. Here, though, because the show is so focused on understanding the characters’ flaws and pain and how they interact with the flaws and pains of everyone else, I think Trigger gets as close as they ever have to hitting the right balance of emotional impact and colorful charm. The characters are a joy to watch; they’re grounded in reality but also bouncing all over the place, putting the studio’s action budgets to use ensuring that each character interaction is smooth and bouncy and well-detailed in the ways that matter. Tenga bounds across the frame, gangly and huge. Katsuhira and Hisomu are more reserved, the former watching with flat expressions and the other lazing around and smiling at the chaos. It’s the perfect mix of big and small personalities, of characters with intense emotional baggage and characters who simply carry the baggage of living on the fringes of high school society. They fight a lot, they struggle to open up and trust each other, and as the show goes on they eventually begin to feel more than just the physical pains of their compatriots. Soon, the project advances to the next stages, and the characters feel each other’s intense emotional pain as well. This leads to the climax, as the unstable web of emotional entanglements they find themselves ensnared in contracts, sending them all into a recursive loop of heartache that leaves them all nearly catatonic and swearing to avoid each other at all costs.

            This, of course, coincides with the end of the Kizna project, though the show actually has more to say after this. The characters navigate the harsh malaise of isolation and loneliness once again, though inevitably they drift back together, feeling each other’s pains and heartaches despite not actually being connected in that way anymore. The project engenders literal empathy in its participants, and even if they don’t get along or have anything in common, the end of the show leaves us with a picture of a weird little community of people willing to support each other until the bitter end. The fact that their sharp edges rub up against each other or their hearts put them into fraught, vulnerable positions in relation to their peers doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, they can understand each other in a way that makes cooperation and coexistence possible.

            The story follows Lufria, a severe wolf who teaches law school and has the reputation of being the most extreme hardass professor possible. The book establishes very quickly that this is just a front, telling us extremely quickly that this guy has a specific fetish: watching people eat, which goes so far as to become a sexual fascination with being eaten. He is both extremely ashamed of this fetish as well as totally unable to control it. Something Nagabe does is to carefully never condemn Lufria for his predilection; even if he’s got a legitimate traumatic reason for this sexual obsession, it’s not ever seen as something disgusting or inherently immoral. It is, however, extremely inconvenient for our protagonist, spending his life dominated by his fascination. Eventually, however, he ends up being bitten by a student, the spacey goat Gulla, who just so happens to possess an obsession with eating that has become centered on the noble professor. In secret the two begin to enter a strange dynamic, their obsessions tugging them past mere sadomasochistic intimacy and towards the inevitable death and murder involved with eating a person.

Nagabe’s writing is knife-sharp throughout, the art perfectly capturing both Lufria’s overeager death drive and Gulla’s hapless inability to control his brutal urge to devour the wolf. The two characters have an absurd size difference, which made me very happy; Gulla is massive, easily overpowering and dominating the whip-thin Lufria. There’s some fantastic sequences here that made the masochist in me extremely happy, as well as some sequences that made the sadist in me clap with glee. I know what it’s like to be Lufria, to want to abandon control while also feeling the reticence associated with opening oneself up to such incredible pain. I also know what it’s like to be Gulla, to love someone so much that I just want to grab them and tear them apart with my teeth. The two characters are constantly teetering on the edge of complete mutual destruction, be it professional, personal, or terminal. Halfway through the narrative, a character re-enters Lufria’s life, which has the effect of pouring gasoline on the newly lit fire that is Lufria’s fetish.. This is Liza, the fox that bit and nearly killed Lufria when they were both in junior high. Liza seems friendly enough now, but clearly relishes being the person that “broke” Lufria’s sexuality, taking pleasure in tormenting the man and further accelerating Lufria’s obsession and need to be torn apart and eaten. The story is dark, and somewhat grim in how it ends; there is no happy retribution for Lufria, no comeuppance for Liza. Gulla is too compatible, too willing to eat him; Lufria ends the series accepting his fate and entering into a relationship with the goat, on the terms that someday he will have to make good and kill Lufria by eating him. The ending is sweet, but that’s tempered by the fact that we seem to have careened completely over the cliff. Lufria embraces his masochistic need for Gulla and is forced to discard his life as a professor, all in pursuit of his sexually charged death drive.

While aesthetically this story recalls Beastars, the overall tone of the work is a lot grimier. While Lufria is certainly never disembowelled or truly disfigured during the course of the story, the claustrophobic experience of living in this person’s head feels really slimy. I found myself reminded most of the novella Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca, in which two women enter into a fetish-based bdsm contract that quickly spirals out of control. Eat is much less gross in its pursuit of this, but by holding the audience so closely inside the head of the fetish-bound protagonist, we are essentially strapped in for the ride as he makes bad decisions about his personal wellbeing and livelihood in pursuit of fulfilling the overriding fantasy of his life. His work doesn’t matter anymore, his reputation doesn’t matter anymore, all that matters is getting to experience the feeling of being bitten, of being eaten one more time. This is the intense, kind of scary thing about fetishes (to me, at least): if you let them run rampant, you can easily reach a point where you can no longer distinguish good feelings from bad.

When Liza reunites with him, the fox immediately puts his jaws on Lufria, casually remarking that although the man might claim to have forgotten the experience, his body hasn’t, tail wagging and face blushing despite the clear and pressing danger his original assaulter presents. It’s not that he doesn’t feel fear, necessarily, but that he isn’t able to separate the fear from the excitement. One of the great pleasures of masochism is this moment of “oh shit oh fuck, this hurts” paired with the heady, delirious joy from acting out a fantasy. I do not want to be hit, generally. However, if my girlfriend was to get up out of their chair and grab and slap me right now, I can practically guarantee that my body will respond… incorrectly. A key part of the masochistic urge is that if you are with someone whom you share just enough intimacy, the violence and fear is no longer overriding and thus the actual masochistic impulse can be pulled to the forefront of an experience. It’s how nasty little masochists (like myself, for example) can take a bit of a beating and still remain aroused; the body is simply all too willing, once the right wires are crossed in your brain. And so in Eat Lufria remains lucid during Gulla’s attacks, always slightly panicked over the pain he is in but totally powerless to either stop the assault. An thus, he is totally powerless to stop himself from succumbing to the adrenaline rush of fear and pain that it causes. That’s masochism, baby! That’s what makes it so good! But maybe Lufria should slow down a little, and stop pressuring this college student into making a huge mistake by killing his delusional professor in the name of sexual ecstasy.

This is one of the best things about the book, in my opinion. As Gulla falls for the professor, Lufria remains aloof and distant, trying to cling to his reputation and his career. Professor vs. student has an entirely presumed different power dynamic than dom vs. sub. Lufria knows that pressuring Gulla is wrong. And yet Gulla is also compelled by his fetishistic desire to consume the wolf, and willingly accepts Lufria’s terms throughout the series. Partly because of his crush on the professor, but also partly because he is also getting what he wants. When the two finally have sex, it’s implied that Gulla is the one who took the lead, violently pushing himself on the professor, catching Lufria in a vulnerable moment. Their dynamic is never cut and dried; the story manages not just to invert the presumed predator/prey dichotomy, but almost remove it from the equation entirely. In a furry manga, no less! It’s fantastic, it gives Gulla a lot of depth despite his rather limited and shallow-seeming character, and in the wake of this sex scene he is at his most human, completely lucid and chatty, a kind and bearish gay dude politely making small talk after fucking Lufria within an inch of his life. It becomes clear that part of what draws him to Lufria is his own overriding need to eat someone. He is a mirror image of Lufria’s intensely over-analyzed sadism, a simplistic sadism that is the perfect match. They’re delightfully compatible, in their beautiful and fucked up ways. It’s adorable! I love Gulla. I love that Lufria continually remarks that he isn’t gay, that this isn’t romantic for him. It’s twisted, and I think it runs the risk of coming off mean-spirited, but I do feel that it’s the right decision. Where there would be a traditional BL romance is instead a relationship predicated entirely on sadomasochistic sexual compatibility, and that’s just sooo delicious to me. It’s kinda fucked up! These two dudes agree to violently fuck each other totally platonically!! That’s awesome!!!

           Firstly, let me just say that I generally avoid CGI anime. Not out on any real principle but because I think it usually looks pretty bad. A few studios have been pioneering more fluid, dynamic animation with 3D workflows, like Studio Orange (though I lowkey detest their Trigun remake), and I wouldn’t consider it to be like, a surefire sign of a bad anime. That said, I have never seen a studio use their CGI workflows in a way that prioritizes this amount of subtle dynamism. Expressions are endlessly charming and constantly changing. Characters move believably as they emote around the scenes. It’s bouncy and fluid and expensive looking; by committing to fully CGI work, there’s no real dissonance between 2D animation and 3D. 2D animation exists, here, though it’s relegated entirely to flashbacks, which I think is a cute touch that emphasizes a wonderful sense of presence to the characters and their interactions. Mocap sequences for the concerts also slot nicely into the style, ensuring the entire thing is visually cohesive in a way that very few studios have really managed. That Toei has been able to capture the real magic of 2D expression in such a vibrant CGI style is truly insane, and I just loved watching this show.

            A big part of that is the storytelling and setting; Girls Band Cry is slice of life, though unlike most other “girls with bands” anime this one is set in a much higher age bracket. The girls don’t meet up in an afterschool club, or really even attend school at all; Subaru is really the only girl committed to regularly attending school. Thus the story plays out across dingy apartments, shitty rental houses, a cheap fast food restaurant, and public practice spaces paid for hour by hour. The characters (excepting Subaru) are various degrees of poor, all of whom having walked away from nicer lives in pursuit of artistic integrity. A lot of scenes take place after dark, across empty streets and cold winter evenings. The town they live in isn’t even really Tokyo! It’s a small, kind of shitty outer suburb that is seen as just one step above rural small-town living by the characters. In this, the show feels muted and small-scale, something that I absolutely adore. The streets aren’t bustling, and these jobs aren’t exciting. The characters struggle to find purpose in such a bland, small world. Nina’s goal of taking the band pro feels so lofty and complex, and that hits extra hard when we see her living in an unfurnished studio apartment that lacks even a single overhead light. From the start, we are constantly told that our characters are outcasts or exiles, girls who have turned away from the established norms of everyday life. There’s a refreshing lack of the ubiquitous middle-class-ness that pervades modern anime slice of life. Momoka, the mentor figure of the group, is a poor part-time worker who busks on the street for extra cash. Rupa, the oldest member, works with her sidekick (and, to an idiot lesbian like me, her lover) Tomo at a beef bowl place; we meet the two early in the show as background characters in this location. Nina is a runaway pursuing cram school who collides with Momoka on her first night in town, whose terrible living situation leads directly to her friendship and place in the band. Subaru is the only character with a relatively “stable” life, attending an acting school and living alone in an expensive apartment paid for by her grandmother (whom she is effectively hiding from, the band becoming something she keeps closeted). These characters are all adrift and unfulfilled in some way, seeking meaning and escape in the music, and when they do all collide it isn’t perfect or rosy. The path of the musician is hard!

            The girls argue a lot. Nina is delightfully unstable, a girl with a chip on her shoulder and a genuine anger management problem, something that makes her a joy to watch. She plays off Momoka exceptionally well, her frustrated and angry optimism contrasting with the older woman’s pessimistic and depressive worldview as they both seek to develop the band into something sustainable. Subaru just adds to the conflict, and eventually Tomo becomes yet another match tossed into the fire. This can be a headache sometimes, for sure. The show is angsty and down-to-earth, but I can totally see people tapping out after a couple episodes of straight arguing and cross-perspective fighting. I love it, however. I love that the girls don’t really get along, and argue intensely about everything. I love that Momoka and Rupa are alcoholics and messy drunks. I love that Nina can’t go two episodes without yelling at someone. Girls Band Cry is such a fantastic name for this show; there will be crying. The girls are essentially making emo music- this is the core premise, after all! Their music is “real” and meaningful and nothing like traditional j-rock (though, to me, it still sounds mostly like standard j-rock). That the girls argue and fight and act out in their small and shitty lives is immensely in the spirit of the band they’re trying to form, as well as the music they want to champion. It’s clever! It works extremely well, and it really drew me into the petty bullshit. Nina sucks! Momoka sucks! They’re absolutely perfect for each other, and so when they finally admit that they love each other despite all their conflict, it feels deeply rewarding and cathartic. They come from all walks of life, but at the end of the day that frustration, that anger, and ultimately that hope for something better is what ties them together. It’s so, so good. Compared to other works like K-On or Bocchi the Rock, the serious angst of Girls Band Cry is intense and crucial to the plot. Even if I didn’t love the family reconciliation arc Nina goes through (due to my own baggage), the fact that it reaches such an intense point feels really good. It’s a show about feeling bad, and then yelling about it. Put your middle fingers up!! Rock and Roll!! This is what I really love about emo music, about hardcore sound, and getting to see an anime lavishly make this point with such well-realized characters is such a treat. Even if the music isn’t strictly emo music, the intent is there, and I think it’s such a gloriously vitalizing experience nonetheless.