Bakemonogatari E8: “Suruga Monkey, part 3”

Alright, time to wrap up the third story arc of this show! Time to get the monkey rain arm demon out of the mind, soul, and limb of what might be the strangest of Oshino's patients thus far.


Begin with what I think is a flashback, featuring Suruga opening a pointlessly extravagant series of sliding doors in her family's mansion to access her closet, where she has the monkey paw hidden in a shoebox. A voiceover informs us that this monkey-but-actually-demon paw was entrusted to her by her mother, and that she's used it judiciously since then. The first time was in elementary school, shortly after the deaths of her parents. We're averaging about 0.67 parents per character in this show. Anyway, her wish was that she could run fast, beginning her apparently completely fraudulent athletic career.

She was depressed, isolated, in a new school, and made fun of for being weak and slow. She thought winning first place in an upcoming race would turn everything around for herself.

The paw may have made her somewhat better at running, if she was able to make it onto the team in the first place. She doesn't specify. In either case though, it also caused her to put on the hooded raincoat and sneak into the houses of the four other kids who could have potentially still beaten her and murder them in her sleep.

She hoped it was a prophetic nightmare, at first. But then she researched her little heirloom and ended up reading the WW Jacobs story that her mother apparently plucked this thing out of using Pagemaster or something. I'm not sure if the story that the monkey's paw concept actually comes from existing in-universe just adds to the charming weirdness, or if it's stupid and cringey. I'm leaning a little toward the latter, which might be somewhat uncharitable of me, but in my defense Araragi is a pedophile. Anyway, Suruga wanted to use her second wish to take back the first one, but she was afraid of what it might do to corrupt that wish. More vampires, maybe? Anyway, she decided against that, and also - for fear that her first wish might still be active - resolved to both never enter another footrace as long as she lived, and to train every spare moment of her life to become as fast as possible. So that if she did somehow end up in something that could be interpreted as a footrace, there'd be no need for murder to ensure her victory.

So she's not a total fraud. Not even mostly. It's 90% actual training, if not 100%.

Basketball was a sport that didn't involve too much direct speed-versus-speed competition, so she joined that team with positive results. It was shortly after she made her name for herself in the school as a basketball player that she befriended Senjyo, who at that time was the captain of the track team and was scouting out new recruits.

Senjyo asked her to run a 100 meter dash against her, just to see how fast she really was. Unofficial. No waiting for a scheduled time, so the paw probably wouldn't have time to do anything. But, Suruga still couldn't take the risk, and declined Senjyo's challenge. Seeming intrigued by her excessively polite disinterest, Senjyo pursued a friendship with the slightly younger girl, and it soon became a best friendship. The sort of friendship that Suruga really needed right then, with all the stress she was under from both her identity issues and the mass involuntary manslaughter she was made to perform and might still be at risk of repeating.

It was the beginning of a new, happy era for Suruga, at least as much as her conscience could allow for.

She was tempted several more times over the coming years to use the paw. When she had bad fights with her friends. When she feared losing her edge on the basketball court, which she still felt was her sole source of social capital deep inside. And, of course, when Senjyo's personality changed, and Suruga found out about her weight problem, resulting in her being driven off via weaponized office supplies. In each case, she resisted the temptation, for fear of how the wish might be granted. She never felt tempted to use the paw to improve something about the world beyond her own life? Christ, even when I was in middle school I wasn't *that* self-absorbed.

...hell, even within the context of purely selfish desires, why wouldn't she have used that first wish to revive her damned parents? Like, before she ever thought to make the "run fast like sanic" wish and learned about the consequences of using the paw, why would that have not been the first thing that came to mind to wish for? Or maybe that actually WAS her first wish, and her parents came back as the vampires who eventually turned Shinobu who eventually turned Araragi, I don't know, if not something like that then it's kinda wei...

...

.......

Oh.

Shit.

She fucking killed her parents, didn't she?

Maybe she had good reasons for wanting them dead. Maybe not. But yeah. There's precedent in the show for the patient telling part of their secret backstory early on, but keeping important contextualizing information a secret until much later out of shame or guilt. And this would fill in so many of the blanks and justify a lot of the seemingly irrelevant details in the story Suruga's been telling us.

I'm guessing that was her first wish, then. And it seemed to work perfectly that time, so she had few reservations about making a second.

Well, that's my theory for now, anyway.

...

She also, somehow, determined that her mother had entrusted that paw to her in order for her to learn self-reliance and how to find her own solutions to problems. Now THAT right there is some parenting.Sounds like her mom was a bigtime believer in "With Firm Paws: a Practical Guide to Childrearing" by Dr. Shou Tucker. No wonder she wanted her parents dead, lol.

Suruga backed away from Senjyo entirely, until a year and a half later, when the time of the show came around. She saw Senjyo's personality start to change, and saw it changing as she entered her relationship with Araragi.

Cue visuals of Suruga being surrounded and tormented in their school hallways by a crowd of one-eyed shadow demons that all have Araragi's stupid hair-spike.

Anime in general tends to do weird stylistic things with flashback sequences, but with Shaft it's always the same TYPE of weirdness, and it's pretty unique to them.

Suruga claims to not remember deciding to use the paw again. Or even going to the closet to do so. She just recalls noticing that the paw had mysteriously grown to include a full forearm rather than just ending at the wrist like it had before. And then, a moment later, having a monkey's forearm in place of her own.

Roll OP. Took a while to get to it this time.

I'd express shock at Suruga using the paw in this case, knowing how it goes about granting wishes. Even for a middle schooler, that's fucked up. Even for a depressed, desperate, emotionally damaged middle schooler, that's a really fucked up thing to do. Attempted murder right there. But then, if she's already committed deliberate, premeditated murder years ago, this wouldn't be much of a shock at all, would it.

...she did seem to be earnestly remorseful about the deaths of her middle school classmates, when she made the running wish. But...well, regardless of whether or not I'm right about her killing her parents, she evidently IS okay with killing innocent people for selfish reasons in some contexts.

.....unless she knew that Araragi was a child molestor, of course. Then her decision looks a little bit more justifiable. Not actually justifiable, but much closer to it. If her parents were horribly abusive as well, then Suruga still comes off looking relatively innocent even after all this.

After the intro, Oshino finishes hearing Suruga's story, and muses over it. He tells her that while he has considerable knowledge of supernatural matters and experience in the lifting of curses, this looks like a particularly tricky case.

He also makes what might be an incredibly tasteless pun, but also might be an important part of the solution. Since his magic is wordplay-powered or whatever.

Oshino says that at this point, the only way to terminate the wish and stop the rain demon from possessing Suruga and trying to kill Araragi again is to amputate the arm and then dispose of it. Doing this will not return Suruga to how she was previously. She will need to recover from this like any limb amputation, and she will be missing an arm for the rest of her life. But that's the only way to exorcise the demon at this late stage.

Suruga says that this would be "inconvenient" for her, and asks if there could possibly be another way. For the first time, Oshino looks like he might be actively disgusted by someone as he asks her if she'd really rather keep her arm than avoid murdering another person after all the ones she already killed in middle school.

I wonder if perhaps Oshino is starting to suspect the same thing that I've been suspecting.

Perhaps he knows that it's only after the third wish, not the second, that the rain demon's hand will actually fuse with the wisher? In which case Suruga is very deliberately omitting part of the story?

Araragi interjects here that there might be a better way for all involved. If Suruga's wish was to be reunited with Senjyo, then maybe they can just bring her over here and try to mend the friendship. Explain the situation to both of them, and convince Senjyo to try to mend rather than abandon the relationships she had before the crab. That should satisfy the parameters of the wish and end the wanting-to-kill-Araragi thing, right?

Oshino just wheels on Araragi, and drops...well, not exactly the bomb I was expecting, but a not-too-different one.

Suruga has been lying throughout her entire story.

The rain demon doesn't just grant any wish you make on it. It's a violent spirit, and it knows only violence. Unlike the monkey paw it tries to pass its limbs off as, it doesn't corrupt or subvert wishes. It just only grants the ones that lend themselves to its skillset and nature in the first place. Which answers my earlier question of "why didn't she try wishing for her parents back, or for climate change to be set back half a century, or whatever." Maybe she did. The arm just didn't listen to wishes that it couldn't grant, or to ones that it didn't feel like granting.

She didn't wish to be the fastest runner in her class. She wished to beat the competition, filled with misdirected spite toward those who outcompeted her physically while she was mocked for her slowness.

Also, in fairness to her, the phrasing here makes it sound like she just beat up and possibly crippled those other kids, rather than actually killing them. The phrasing and visuals were ambiguous before, and since murder was already on the table for something the paw might do I assumed the worst. But okay, she and the paw haven't actually killed anyone yet, unless she actually did murder her parents. Just assault and battery, possibly with longterm disability as a result.

Anyway, moving on.

When she laid her hands on the paw this second time, she may have wished for herself and Senjyo to be together. However, she was ALSO - verbally or otherwise - wishing she could kill Araragi. And that was the wish the rain demon was willing and able to act on.

Oshino also reveals a key detail of how the rain demon's hand works. It's not really "wish-granting" at all. It's forging a covenant to fight alongside the rain demon against a specific enemy, until said enemy is defeated to whatever extent you asked for. This is not the first time the hand has fused with Suruga's body. That's the other part she didn't tell before. When she wanted to beat up her competitors, the hand melded itself onto her own hand up to the wrist, and the two of them went hunting together. After the mission was completed successfully, the hand separated itself from her again, leaving her with a normal human hand. However, that was also when the paw grew to become an entire forearm; it had taken a piece of her soul as payment for the violent work she hired it to do. When it completes this second mission - the killing of Araragi - it will take more, and grow larger still. When and if she uses it a third time, it will consume her entirely, replacing her entire body and mind and keeping them.

These violent wishes may not have been entirely deliberate. Suruga probably really was asking the arm for something like "make me win the race" or "make Senjyo like me again" when it fused with her both times. However, she was also THINKING something else alongside those. And since the arm did exactly what she was thinking and not saying the first time, she should have known that that's what it would do if she tried to use it again. In her deepest of hearts, she probably did know.

So, that arm needs to come off. And it's really as much as Suruga deserves.

The intense music here while Oshino says all this, bearing down on the face-hiding Suruga like an angel of judgement on a sinner, makes for a really powerful effect. It's the same track that played during Mayoi's snail "reveal" in the previous arc, but it's much more fitting here.

...hmm. There may be something that can overcome the demon's hold on Suruga when it's possessing her, come to think of it. When she/they attacked him the other night, why did they just leave him for dead on the tracks instead of verifying the kill, after the toughness he'd just demonstrated? Maybe they assumed the deed was done and that he'd finish bleeding out in minutes, but that doesn't seem like the way this demon operates. They withdrew just as Senjyo was catching up to them and Araragi, it seemed. Not wanting Senjyo to see her like this might be a strong enough motive for Suruga to overcome the possession for a little while? Maybe? It makes as much sense as anything else, for what happened that night.

Anyway, we then we cut to a...flashback, I assume...of Shinobu sucking blood out of Araragi's neck. Both of them are half naked, and Araragi's arms are wrapped around her.

Thanks show. That's very nice of you to show me.

It also reminds me of my previous question; did he become a pedo due to vampire imprinting on a little girl sire, or was he a pedo who approached what turned out to be a vampire?

He tells her that "that should be good," and pats her shoulder to signal her to withdraw her fangs from his flesh. They stare into each others eyes like lovers, and Araragi gives her a misty, faraway smile. It's okay though because she's actually thirty thousand years old or whatever, also it's just Japanese culture so stop being racist, also also men are the real victims. He then woozily walks downstairs to where Oshino is waiting, and they discuss Araragi's prospects in his coming duel with the rain demon now that Shinobu has powered up his latent vampire abilities through renewed feeding.

Araragi says that this might not be quite enough, but too little is better than too much. The alternative could have very deleterious effects on both himself and on Shinobu.

Okay, so. I guess Oshino didn't completely de-vampirize Shinobu after all. She's still kinda sorta a vampire, to a much greater extent than Araragi still is. De-powered and domesticated, but still more vampire than not.

On one hand, I like the inversion of the usual, with vampire feeding empowering the fed upon rather than the feeder. It fits the general Faustian nature that most or all supernatural beings in Boko Haram seem to share.

On the other...pedo.

Come to think of it, when those are the two things you're weighing against each other, pedo outweighs pretty much any positives.

They discuss their plan. The only recourse they could think of to either chopping the arm off or killing one of the two of them is for Araragi to demonstrate to the demon that it is not capable of killing him. Defeat the possessed Suruga in combat, and hopefully the contract it made with her will be nullified. It's a real longshot, though. Even letting Shinobu drain him up to the safety limit (the risk of going past that limit is unspoken. Presumably either killing Araragi through blood loss, or causing one or both of them to go full vamp again), he won't have more than a fraction of the power he wielded as a full vampire back during spring break. Okay, he was a vampire for just a spring break, noted. Still, Araragi insists on trying this.

Oshino shrugs and tells him to leave his backpack (which is said to contain "valuables") with him before going to confront his opponent. The implication being that Araragi does still owe Oshino money, and if he dies now Oshino wants to be able to collect on it as much as still possible. Oshino is still kind of a prick.

Also, this kind of...well, my point about Araragi's alleged altruism in bringing these people to Oshino so he can charge them for cures? Yeah. Yeaaaaaah.

To be fair, this very episode has Araragi doing the first REALLY altruistic and self-sacrificing thing of the show so far. Putting his life on the line instead of costing Suruga an arm, and so forth. But...well, I'll get back to this at the end of the review.

Oshino tries to talk sense into Araragi one last time before the duel.

Suruga might not have deliberately wished for the hand to kill Araragi. But she did at least strongly suspect that that's what it would try to do. And some part of her legitimately does want him dead, under all the performative fawning and deference. Hell, hiding that hatred is probably WHY she's been acting that way toward him. Anyway, why stick his neck out for her arm?

Araragi simply replies that he can't hold it against her for loving Senjyo. Really, that's all she's guilty of, right?

Um...well, that's Araragi's interpretation I guess.

Oshino leads him to a room that looks like it may have been meant as a bomb shelter or something in the basement of the building. Heavy vault doors. Reinforced walls. Suruga and her passenger are waiting for him in there, and Oshino reminds him that once he goes in there, Oshino will be locking the door and not opening it until the situation is resolved one way or another. Araragi thanks him, and steps inside.

Like seemingly every other room of Oshino's ruin, the bomb shelter appears to be half-filled with old chairs and tables. Hmm...is this abandoned building a former school? That would actually make a lot of sense, with all the open spaces and overabundant chairs and desks. Also in the room is Suruga. That hooded raincoat has appeared over her body again (or else she dug one up in the basement somewhere and put it on), she's standing in a hunched, simian posture, and the hairy, demonic paw is trembling with rage and excitement at the end of her arm. The demon's primal, drumbeat-and-wind-chime-filled theme music starts playing again. The only thing missing is the HP column.

Araragi tries talking to Suruga, to see if she can understand him in her current state. If she can, she chooses not to credit him with a response. Or at least, not a verbal one. The room flashes a stylized animu battle white, and the possessed girl dashes at almost unbelievable speed, zigzagging back and forth to send tables and chairs flying in a storm of debris to distract and throw her target off.

She reaches Araragi, and it's just brutal. The attack at the train tracks is tame compared to this.

Once again, the way that the possessed Suruga is drawn and animated is like very few things I've seen in animation before. There's really just no better word to describe it than "monstrous." It's just violence incarnate, a frenzy of animalistic rage, only malevolent in a way that I've never seen an actual animal appear. Araragi gets speedblitzed before he can even react, taking the first few blows that knock him around and almost out. He manages to recover, blocking the monstrous arm's next stroke with his own and actually managing to hold it off for a moment before its strength overwhelms his, and Suruga grabs his own arm and gruesomely breaks it all the way through the bone. Apologizing out loud for this as he does it (hmmm...eh, I'll wait for the conclusion to talk about this detail...), Araragi uses his leg and other arm to land a flurry of his own attacks as Suruga grapples him. The impacts hurt her, but not enough. She spins around his body and uses her knee to cave in his jaw, and then throws him across the room hard enough to break half a dozen chairs with the impact of his body.

I'm not showing screenshots of this fight scene because it's NSFW. No nudity or anything, the violence is actually just that graphic.

Araragi, coughing up blood and struggling to get back up despite his broken bones, furiously thinks to himself that he was only expecting the one limb of hers to be making the attacks. The demon has more control of her body as a whole than he bargained for. Or else, Oshino was more right than either of them realized about how much she actually, consciously wants Araragi dead, and she's just voluntarily working with the demon to make it so.

Flash back a couple of hours back to the conversation with her and Oshino, when Oshino had just cut through the bullshit and made his accusation. Suruga, almost-but-not-quite in tears, has given in and is telling Oshino to cut the arm off. Araragi intercedes, and reminds her that she'll never be able to play basketball again without both arms. She and Oshino ask him what the fuck is wrong with him that he thinks basketball is more important than getting rid of the murderous demon. Araragi insists that he doesn't want to ruin her life just to save himself.

O...kay. Araragi's characterization just...well, I'll wait for the end.

Oshino volunteers that amputating the limb should be relatively simple, assuming the cooperation of his adoptive daughter. Really, this probably is the way to go, despite Araragi's insistence to the contrary.

"Shinobu's blade." Does this mean that she was a magic knife, or does he just mean that she's strong enough that any old blade is effectively a lightsaber when she's the one swinging it? Could be either. Oshino follows this up with "even as Shinobu is now," which I think suggests the latter. IE, she's not as superhumanly strong as she was at the height of her power, before Oshino did whatever he did to weaken and get her under control, but she's still strong enough to cleave through bone like it was Styrofoam.

Araragi continues to insist that Suruga is ultimately innocent, and Oshino continues to tell him that he's frankly just being delusional at this point. Araragi then asks Suruga if she still wants to be friends (even if more is impossible) with Senjyo, and Suruga just sadly says that she's giving up. She's giving up on everything. It's not explicit that she's contemplating suicide, but it's sort of implied.

Flash back to the present. Araragi tries pleading with her to stop.

She finally speaks in reply, but in a voice so high pitched it's unrecognizable as hers, and just screams the words "hate you hate you hate you hate hate hate" over and over again in an ever-escalating train whistle of an auditory assault. While hammering him across the room. Through the furniture. Against the walls, hard enough to send him rebounding clear to the other side of the shelter. No pause, not a millisecond's rest between landing one attack and lunging into the next. The colors go phantasmagoric in a way that suggests Araragi suffering brain damage. His own blood flashing hot pink, deep blue, banana yellow, the room strobing like a disco that's been set on fire. His arms and legs break in multiple places and swing around like rubber tails. His face caves in. At one point, she grabs him by his broken limbs and puts her foot through his torso.

And then grabs him by his exposed intestines and swings him around before they snap and send him smashing into the wall again. I don't think human intestines have that kind of tensile strength to last even that long, but with Araragi currently souped up on vampire power, who knows.

All this while Suruga is screaming in a way that human voices should not scream, and the room and its contents flash neon-pastel colors one after the next.

The music goes quiet. Araragi is dying. Suruga is standing over him, her demonic ape-arm even more grotesquely oversized than before, as if feeding on the violence it performs.

The lights and colors fade. The room becomes realistically dark again, and painted all over with deep brownish crimson. Then, Senjyo's voice pierces the silence, getting both the raging Suruga and the dying Araragi's attention.

Araragi, brain slowly knitting itself back together under vampiric healing power, realizes that when Oshino took the bag with his "valuables" in it, he'd also gotten his phone. Which he must have immediately used to call Senjyo, if she was able to get here this quickly. I guess he had a backup backup plan for the all too likely event that Araragi couldn't beat the demon.

Sounding very upset at, and not really all that concerned for, him, Senjyo asks him why the hell he lied to her about what happened to him the other night.

THANK YOU, SENJYO, TOOK THE WORDS RIGHT THE FUCK OUT OF MY MOUTH JUST AN EPISODE LATE. Seriously, why the fuck would he lie about that? Hell, that was potentially endangering Senjyo as well as himself, not telling her about the possessed crazy person who was running around there literally less than a minute ago. Senjyo doesn't raise that particular point here, but it occurred to me at the time and never stopped bugging me.

She tells him she has half a mind to just let Suruga kill him for that. Especially after he made her take that solemn vow that he and her would always communicate, especially regarding strange things that seem potentially supernatural. Yes, seriously, what the fuck. Why did Araragi not live up to the promise HE demanded the two make to each other? Seriously, why the fuck did he not say anything? If it was a matter of not wanting her to know Suruga was involved, he could have just said "I was attacked by a monster" and left his suspicions about its identity quiet for the moment, right? Seriously, I'm just at a loss to explain what he could have been thinking there.

When Senjyo says he really deserves whatever happens to him after he pulled that shit, Suruga seems to snap out of it a little and gasp in surprise. When Senjyo follows that up with the statement that Araragi has already endured what looks like enough damage to have killed a normal person many times over and so she'll forgive him just this once, though, Suruga sinks back into the rage and charges at the prone Araragi again.

Until Senjyo steps in between them.

Just like before. Suruga's obsession with Senjyo is the only thing strong enough for her to override the demon's urging.

As Suruga scrambles back away and withdraws into a corner, making gasping sounds that are half human and half not, Senjyo continues speaking. She tells Araragi that it seems like he got the idea that his life is worth nothing, and that by spending it he could solve everyone else's problems. In truth, letting Suruga and her friend on the other side kill him wouldn't have even made Suruga's life better. And not just because said friend would get another piece of her soul.

Ah ah ah Senjyo, using Suruga's first name? You know that that's an eyeball-stabbing offense!

If Araragi just did stupid shit like this - confronting people like Suruga, or even her pre-ritual self after she stapled his face - because he knew he was nearly impossible to kill, that would be one thing. She won't begrudge him using his unholy regeneration powers to do Jackass But With Monsters stunts. But tonight, he went into it knowing that the limits of his healing would likely be exceeded. And, honestly, she gets the impression that he would have done this even if he didn't have any healing powers at all.

Araragi's internal narration takes over here. Senjyo's presence here have driven too much of a wedge between Suruga and the rain devil. Suruga's wish for Senjyo's affection and her wish to kill Araragi are now in so much conflict that its hold on her is unreliable. Furthermore, Senjyo has just said that if Araragi dies, Suruga will die too, and Suruga doesn't seem inclined to use the paw a third time to fight back against Senjyo. Which means that the demon has already lost. It's never going to get a third summoning from Suruga. She'll die before she can do that. It's not getting her soul anyway, so there's no point in continuing to waste its efforts here.

So, this thing is intelligent and calculating, not just reactive or instinct-driven.

Senjyo kneels over the prone and trembling Suruga now, putting one hand on her blood-and-bile slick right hand and the other on her hairy, oversized left one. She says she's glad that things didn't go even worse for her than they already seem to have. She leans further over her, and Suruga seems to fully come out of it now.

Crying, Suruga tells Senjyo that she loves her. Senjyo tells her that she knows that, and that she doesn't love her back (and, implicitly, *cannot* love her back in the way that she wants her too, on account of not swinging that way). However, just as she told Araragi that removing himself from the situation would make things worse instead of better, Senjyo realizes now that ignoring her old relationships is just making the damage worse instead of giving her a fresh slate. So, she'd like to be friends again. If Suruga will have her as one.

Watching this scene resolve itself, Araragi thinks about how irritating it is that Oshino would use him as a punching bag for his plan to heal Suruga. Um, Araragi, I'm sorry but this one is entirely on you. This was Oshino salvaging YOUR stupid idea after you'd already shot down a much safer one. Oshino's still a dick, but the blame for this one specifically is at least 90% on you. Anyway, looking at this happy-ish resolution of him inserting himself and trying to help in situations where he clearly shouldn't, Senjyo being possessive and violent, and Suruga being at least arguably guilty of attempted murder, he concludes that there's something like an uplifting message to be gleaned from this all.

Ooooof. Show. Show, why do you do this? I...there's enough that I like about you that I really don't WANT to dislike you, but you're determined to not give me a choice.

Roll outro. Stinger has Araragi's little sisters waking him up yet again, and then Suruga meeting him outside to help carry his things to school for him. Gratitude, I guess. Did Oshino also charge her? No payment was discussed, but there was some jumping around temporally, so it might have been offscreen. Suruga's arm is still bandaged; the demon left her, she explains, but it wasn't exactly going to be polite enough to restore her arm after itself. So, that's probably the end of her sports career anyhow; can't play basketball with a bandaged arm without people getting too curious for comfort. End Suruga Monkey.


Someone described Bakemonogatari to me as all the best and all the worst of anime rolled into one. That seems to me an accurate assessment, at this point.

It also seems like it at least thinks it's self aware, and cognizant of being all of those things. I'm not sure if it actually does know itself nearly as well as it thinks it does, but that's beside the point. If you're consciously including the worst as well as the best of the medium/genre, but also not doing anything to redeem those bad points, well...at that point it's just self-sabotage. It's not saying anything. It's not proving anything. It's just making the story worse when it doesn't need to be.

On the other hand, there's also what I said in Mayoi Snail. For at least a significant portion of the target audience, the flaws aren't actually flaws at all, but active selling points. I'm not just talking about the pedo shit here, though obviously that's the part that calls the most attention to itself. Almost everything about Araragi and his treatment by the story is a problem, and the problems all relate to otaku appeal.

We're told that Araragi is determined to help those in need, no matter who, no matter how. And in some cases, like in this last episode, we see that he really is extremely altruistic (albeit this time it seemed like it came from low self-worth as much as desire to do good). But when he receives praise for it, he's as often as not doing completely mundane acts of charity that almost anyone else would do in his place (ie, walking Mayoi to her mother's old address once he already knew how to solve the puzzle and there was literally no cost besides a little more walking to do it). Fulfilling the same fantasy of unearned heroism that we see in every shitty isekai series made in the past twenty years. But with a character who actually does do praiseworthy things at other times, which is just...huh?

We see Araragi apologizing profusely to the possessed Suruga every time he lands a blow during their duel, at least in the first half when his attacks seemed to be having some effect. But then, just an arc ago, we saw him gleefully initiate physical violence against a fucking child, just to get her to acknowledge him, and only apologizing for it insincerely and after literal arm-twisting. This isn't necessarily inconsistent character writing. A total coward who lives in fear of rejection by his peers, obsequiously and slavishly deferring to and trying to please them, and then takes it out on helpless children who have no perceived social power over him is certainly realistic. But I don't think the show means for Araragi to be that kind of coward. Flawed, certainly, but not flawed in that particular way. Just...give him manchild episodes, but then don't acknowledge them as such when it comes to his character as a whole.

Then there's the harem aspect, and oh god is this one a doozy. It sometimes feels like the show is chomping at the bit trying NOT to be a harem anime. Sometimes. Other times, it just embraces the conventions without a second thought. Suruga is the strangest example of the three girls he's collected so far. Right out the door, she seems like a total subversion. She's in love with the MC's girlfriend, not with the MC. Her motives and life story are, if not her own, then at least Senjyo's rather than harem protagonist Araragi's, and her conflict with him is almost incidental. But then what the fuck is THIS shit supposed to be?

I was waiting for the story to get back to this. For it to explain that she was trying to get him to cheat on Senjyo so that Senjyo would break up with him, or for it to be a character test for him, or something like that. But, it came out of nowhere and went nowhere. Nothing like that was ever hinted at, ultimately. You could maybe read this as her just having a random breakdown and desperately trying to get sexual validation from someone, somehow, but that really doesn't work either. She knows other people. Presumably, some of them are people who she doesn't have a burning, jealous hatred for. Why the hell would she be fishing for heterosexual attraction from Araragi instead of literally any other boy in their class?

Because this is a harem show, so there needs to be some kind of sexy scene between the protag and each of the girls. And - again because this is a harem show - there are no other boys in Suruga's high school. It's just Araragi and a sea of attractive teenaged girls. And a few pre-teen ones imported from the playground out back. Otakus like that.

Which of course gets back to the problem of how altruistic he CAN be, when his entire world consists of people he wants to fuck, and Oshino (who helps him ingratiate himself to them). How do you even judge a person's motives in a scenario like this one?

Then there's basic things like Araragi having this neet framing, where he's supposed to be this disappointing underachiever. Maybe this is just supposed to be erroneous self-perception on his part, and if this turns out to be the case I'll eat these words. But like. He's eighteen. He's still in school. He may not be doing very well in school, but he hasn't dropped out, and at least during the time of the show he seems to be working hard trying to ensure that he graduates with the rest of his classmates. Well-regarded, high-achieving schoolmates like Tsubasa seem to like him, and her interactions with him definitely DON'T come across as her just feeling like she owes him kindness for him helping her with her cat problem or whatever. Senjyo mocks him for not having any interests or curiosity, and the framing suggests that she's supposed to be correct in this assessment of him. But...he spends all his free time fighting monsters and lifting curses. He has knowledge of a kind that most people lack, and he's never failed to express curiosity or a desire to learn more about the weird things when they present themselves (aside from the one weird outlier with him ignoring Mayoi's literal explanation of the snail thing). It's like this character is trying his hardest to be relatable to neet manchildren despite not really being anything like one. Like he's trying to get unearned rewards while also earning them. Oh, I just thought of a perfect example! When he sneakily got Senjyo's phone number when he could have just as easily traded numbers aboveboard because she was already in the process of throwing herself at him. What the fuck kind of characterization was that supposed to be read as?

I don't even hate Araragi. It's like there's nothing there to feel emotions toward. I'm not sure what I can even tell you about this character. For me to NOT hate a child molester takes a very rare combination of factors, and this story hits it, but not the way it's trying to.

In context, this episode's ending message, about all of us being perverse and depraved, but finding redemption in our uniform sinfulness, is honestly kind of sickening. What is being said to whom, exactly? And also, like...saying that everyone is just as bad as everyone else when one of the characters has sexually assaulted a ten year old onscreen and the others haven't is just a gigantic NO.

There's so much I love about this show. The banter. The whacky what-the-fuck value of the wordplay based monsters and curses. The silly juxtaposition of gloomy, moody atmosphere with self-aware (as opposed to unintentional: looking right the fuck at you, KnK) silliness. The way it delves into really dark and grounded personal trauma and manages to wed it with the aforementioned supernatural silliness without it feeling disrespectful to the former.

And my god, the production values! I don't normally fixate much on style over script, but Bakemonogatari is just such an exceptional case. The soundtrack is amazing. The art style is Shaft Shafting at its absolute otherworldly best. The voice actors are uniformly excellent, with Araragi's in particular doing an incredibly valiant job of making me believe that there's an actual character he's voicing. I think one of the first comments I ever made about the first episode of this show was about how good Araragi's VA was, and that remains the case throughout. I've gushed enough about how great a job the animation and direction did with possessed!Suruga, but it's hard to overstate this. I've seen quite a few monster fights in anime at this point, including some really memorable ones (the proxies in Ergo Proxie, Photoshop Envy in FMA:B, etc), and this one was hands down the best. And possibly the scariest.

But despite all this...how the hell am I expected to recommend this show to anyone?

If you paint the Mona Lisa and then smear it with shit, you just have a shit-smeared canvass.


There's plenty of episodes to go. I strongly suspect that I'll be saying the same thing when I finish the season that I am now, because the merits and unfortunate flaws of this series seem to be very deeply ingrained. But, we shall see. If it turns out that Araragi undergoes real character growth and the story starts framing him sensibly, then I will be very glad to have been wrong.