Bakemonogatari E1: “Hitagi Crab, part 2”

Fast forward to what I suppose is that evening, with Senjyo having brought Araragi back to her place and Araragi having followed her in for some emotionally damaged reason. Then again, if I'm right about him having other vampiric powers left over besides just the healing, he may just be luring her into a false sense of security. Anyway, while she showers and the camera shows some gratuitous underaged ass shots intermixed with sensitive, artsy angles of the surrounding apartment. Thank you Boko Haram, I really needed that, putting your best foot forward at the start of the episode once again.

After some long moody silence and soft piano music that the random jailbait softcore REALLY doesn't jive with even in a satiric way, Senjyo starts telling Araragi her life story through the bathroom door. Her family was, in fact, very wealthy. However, during her prepubescence her mother got involved in a cult and gave their entire fortune to it, leaving them in massive debt that they had to sell their property to get out of. Her parents divorced and her father got custody of her just last year, and now the two of them live in this modest apartment.

Dramatic, but less inane than pretty much anything in the previous half of the two-part pilot. Cults really are a social boogeyman in Japan, aren't they? Anyway, cue OP, staplers and all. At the end, there's another rush of captions that shoots by too fast for me to catch and that has too many frames to be worth pausing for all of. Then the episode proper starts with a slight flashback to the end of their meeting with Oshino.

Oshino ended up telling Senjyo that while she's going to have to be the one who reverses her condition, but that he can guide and assist her through the process. She must return here at midnight, after having immersed herself in cold water and changed into a fresh set of clothes. It's been a long time since I studied comparative religion, but I'm pretty sure I recall this being a fixture of Shinto purification rituals, so pretty pedestrian for Japanese mysticism. She finally asks him what he wants in return, and implies that she thinks he's going to try and sleep with her.

She's really trigger happy about people trying to exploit her sexually, totally aside from the general paranoia and malice. Makes me wonder if there's even more fucked up stuff in her background that she hasn't yet shared with Araragi. Or not. This is surrealist comedy, after all.

Oshino just wants money, as it turns out. 100,000 yen, which in mid two thousands currency would have equaled somewhere around $900. Pretty damned reasonable for a life changing ritual, assuming it actually works. Araragi is indignant at this, because apparently Oshino charged him five million yen (around 45K in USD, basically enough money for a four year undergrad program) to cure his vampirism. Oshino assures him that curing his condition really was fifty times more difficult and dangerous than solving Senjyo's problem should be, but Araragi isn't buying it. Apparently because Oshino has been using that to explain away way too many things in his and Araragi's interactions. Hmm.

Jump back ahead to Senjyo's apartment, with her coming out of the bathroom. Naked. Without making any attempts to hide her body from Araragi. And with the animators making her breasts grow two cup sizes just for a few specific shots.

Panicking and averting his eyes, Araragi asks her why she came out naked. She explains that she forgot to bring her clothes. He asks why she didn't wrap a towel around herself. She irritably informs him that towels are for poor people, and despite her family's recent losses she refuses to demean herself like that.

One minute, she's freaking out at literally everyone around her for allegedly wanting to rape her. The next, this.

Araragi, facing the corner and sweating, realizes that this is his first time seeing a naked woman in person. Aw, her tiddies grew just for this special occasion, how considerate of them. He sweats harder still when she asks a very menacing question.

Then, um. She tells him to turn back around, and he sees her poised coquettishly on all fours in a see-through bra and panties. This, she explains, is a reward for the help he's been giving her. Not sex. Just the view.

What follows is one of the most uncomfortable sexual torment scenes I've seen in anything. To this show's credit, the discomfort seems to be at least partly deliberate, but I'm not sure to what degree.

In similar scenes in "Chainsaw Man," it was pretty explicit that Makima is a villain and that Denji is only being strung along out of extreme naivete and desperation. This is more like unironic femdom porn, only it's all emotional abuse without any physical contact. And I also don't have anywhere near a good enough grasp of who Araragi is to like...understand his reactions to any of the crazy shit she says and does. She goes on this bizarrely long tangent making fun of him for being a virgin (which she correctly guessed, though his reactions to her nudity might have helped her there), asserts that he always WILL be one, and randomly insists that he's stupid as well despite there being no evidence of this so far. All while changing into outfit after outfit right there in front of him and just daring him to stare.

I guess this is a further riff on how "tsundere" women are sometimes written. It's soooomewhat less on point with that than the stapler incident, since I feel like the more archetypal reaction would be to violently throw Araragi out the window on his head for daring to look at her when she deliberately strode out in front of him naked. This has some elements of that, but overall it feels more...well, like I said, I'm reminded of those scenes in Chainsaw Man.

However, there's another layer to this as well, and it's a much more interesting one at least for me.

For all her malice and ingratitude, I get the impression that Senjyo actually is experiencing a novel, transgressive thrill herself in this, seeing his reactions to her and testing the limits of the power that gives her. Novel in the way that it can only be for a teenager. So, while she's obviously a terrible person and I have no idea why he keeps trying to be nice to her, the fact that there seems to be an element of sexual self-discovery, insecurity, and earnest desire for validation in her behavior is an important bit of nuance. So, while this scene is partly just a satire of stupid anime tropes and partly fanservice, it DOES have a bit more going on in it as well.

It would have helped a bit more if the male gaze shots only started after she left the shower, instead of before. Still, it has at least some merit to it despite the tackiness.

One of the less uncomfortable subjects that gets raised is Araragi's relationship with Tsubasa, that also cathartically has Araragi verbally defeating Senjyo at least briefly. Senjyo seems to have been under the impression that Araragi and Tsubasa are an item, or at least that he has a crush on her, but nope, he seems totally confident and unconcerned when he denies it. She then guesses that Tsubasa is also a former or current "patient" of Mr. Oshino's, at which Araragi simply shakes his head and says that if that were the case he'd be sworn to confidentiality. Interesting. Wonder what that history is.

Senjyo also says something about her repeated dressing and undressing that I think is at least mostly genuine.

Hmm, yeah, that tracks. Even if she doesn't seem to be weak for her size, just having to constantly expend even a small amount of effort to not be weight down or pulled off balance by the weight of your clothing has got to be hellish. The wintertime especially must be awful for her.

As she finally chooses a set of fresh clothes to wear for her return trip to Oshino, Senjyo explains again why she's so ambivalent about this alleged miracle worker after so many others turned out to be frauds. Guess she's really had bad luck trying to cure her condition. Has she tried that "Spirits and Such" place yet? The guy who runs it seems to really know his stuff, I'll bet he could have helped her at least as well as Oshino. She also asks Araragi about a comment he made to Oshino during their meeting earlier that I thought nothing of at the time, but now seems fairly significant. Araragi said something about the phases of the moon when Oshino was blathering about the stone god crab rabbit woman perspective shift. Apparently, what he was referring to was that the alternate forms of the Weight Crab - a rabbit, a woman, etc - are all associated with the "man in the moon" illusion. In Japan, they say that the pattern of light and darkness on the full moon looks like a rabbit. In some other countries, a crab. In still others, a woman in profile.

HUH. I probably should have caught that connection at the time myself. Especially with how the camera kept panning up to the moon during Oshino's rambling.

And he talked about how what happened to Senjyo's weight was "a shift in perspective." The crab, rabbit, and woman shapes on the moon are all down to different perspectives in different parts of the world. If he was just speaking in riddles back there, then...is this...actually going to make some kind of sense? Insane troll logic wordplay sense, sure, but madness with some kind of method to it?

That would be kind of hilarious if this really is meant to be a Type Moon parody. Satire!Touko's explanations for magical stuff are actually less nonsensical than the original's.

Somehow, she turns this insightful point of Araragi's into another snide remark about his intelligence. He asks her if she knows the meaning of the words "verbal abuse." She tells him that if he has such a problem with it, he should just call the verbal police.

This would be kinda cute and romantic belligerent flirting if not for her behavior leading up to this scene.

After going back and forth with a math joke about IQ that I didn't fully understand (the translations for this part feel slightly off, though I'm bad enough at math that it could also just be my personal ignorance at work), she does a 180 and tells him that if the treatment works she's going to treat him to a crab dinner in Hokkaido.

He's very wary at any offers coming from Senjyo, for obvious reasons. Which she naturally takes offense at, because of course she does.

Come midnight, Araragi bikes her back to Oshino's ruin. The weird cinematography and captions call attention to the many, many "warning," "keep out," and "condemned" signs directed them away from it. When they finally alive, Oshino is waiting for them dressed as a Shinto priest. Which he apparently was training to be at one point, before being kicked out for reasons he avoids going into.

He leads them upstairs, asking if Senjyo has showered in cold water as he instructed, and being weirdly petty toward Araragi. Between one thing and another, I'm getting the impression that Araragi is a debt-slave to Oshino. The extremely high price he charged to de-vampirize him, the way he acts toward him, and also Araragi's insistence on bringing Senjyo to him even after she mutilated and threatened to kill him. All adds up to him working to pay off his fee, and being desperate to find Oshino more customers for that reason.

Also, Oshino mentions the cure he gave Tsubasa in passing.

N...nymphomaniac cat?

Do all curses in this world come from animals with idiosyncratic characteristics?

*looks at the following episode titles*

Ah. Well. Okay then.

As they ascend the stairs, Araragi asks Oshino is he's sure defeating this crab will be so easy. Oshino chides him for being so violent minded. The Weight Crab Rabbit Woman is a god. They can't fight the kani-kami. They're going to have to appease it.

Hence the priestly attire.

He brings them to a room that he either just turned into a candle-filled shrine in the last few hours, or that he kept this way all along. He has them bow to the altar, step toward it in unison, and then has them drink some holy sake.

Senjyo resists a bit, on account of herself being a minor (thanks for reminding us of that, show :/), but he assures her that she only needs to take a small sip for the ritual to work. She does so, he instructs her to close her eyes, and then he seems to hypnotize her, somehow. Maybe the sake was drugged, or maybe it's just magic.

He asks her a series of questions. Name, age, school, primary school, etc. She still resists answering any embarrassing questions, like what she's most ashamed of or who was the first boy she had a crush on, but everything else she answers almost robotically. Oshino eventually gets to "what is your most painful memory?", and while she hesitates a bit he only has to repeat it once before she tells him about her mother's conversion to that cult that ruined her fortune and her marriage.

With a bit more prompting, she also admits that right when it was at it's worst, her mother brought one of the cult leaders over to their house, where he raped Senjyo with her mother's full knowledge and permission.

From banana peel gags to...man, I don't know *what* this show wants me to feel.

She clarifies a moment later that he didn't quite get to rape her, because she panicked and impaled him with a "spike" nearby. I'm guessing this is why she has such an affinity for needles and knives nowadays, on top of her rape paranoia. I'm assuming that "spike" is a poor translation of "needle" or "nail" or something, but the image of there just having been a random railroad spike laying around in their house is an amusing one. Whatever she stabbed him with, the cult imposed a massive financial penalty on her mother for allowing this to happen. Her family's financial ruin was largely a result of this.

And she's been silently blaming herself for it ever since. Seemingly without her father ever finding out about the incident.

Well. That doesn't excuse the sadism. But you can see how a person might have reacted to all this by becoming a sadistic monster. A stronger person wouldn't have, but not everyone is strong.

Oshino tells her that she needs to confront these feelings of shame and guilt instead of bottling them up, and then tells her to open her eyes. She does so, and sees the large, translucent crab spirit standing on the altar at Oshino's side.

She's the only one who can see it, apparently. Oshino and Araragi can't.

Oshino takes this in stride, and asks her if perhaps there's something she thinks she should say to the entity. She doesn't understand. Her not understanding seems to anger the kani kami, because a moment later it lunges forward and throws her into the back wall hard enough to crack the cement.

Impatient crab.

Oshino reluctantly agrees that Araragi might have had the right idea about how to deal with this particular entity, and...judo throws the giant invisible crab monster off of her and stomps on it.

So much for "you can only appease the gods, not fight them."

The crab momentarily flashes white when it suffers injury, so Araragi and Oshino both see glimpses of it as the latter literally bootnecks it (not that crabs have necks, but close enough) into the floor. Holy fuck how strong is Oshino? When Araragi asks, Oshino clarifies that he might also have a small bias of his own against crabs in addition to responding to this one's violent behavior.

Um...legit, I guess?

Killing the crab, he says, will only be a temporary solution. The stone weight crab rabbit moon woman is immortal and eternal, and destroying this avatar will mean little in the long run. And it certainly won't help solve Senjyo's weight problem.

Senjyo picks herself up, seemingly uninjured by being thrown into the wall. Is it just me, or did her impacts against the wall and floor have a lot more weight to them than they shouls? Is she already healed? Maybe. In any case, she tells Oshino to wait before doing any more violence. She walks over to the restrained crab demon, bows before it, thanks it, and begs its forgiveness.

Starting to look like there was a lot more to this story than the crab just showing up and taking her weight in the wake of the sexual assault.

She tells the crab that it was wrong of her to try to give up the weight she was bearing, and that the pain of losing her mother as a parent and protector is something she needed to deal with on her own. She thanks it again for offering her the Faustian bargain that it did, and apologizes for wanting to renege on it, but please, give her back her love for her mother and the more tortured emotions that it had morphed into.

Cue short, stylized flashback. Narrated by Araragi, for some reason.

Senjyo's sickliness that Tsubasa mentioned previously was in fact a real thing, separate from the weightlessness that followed it. It struck toward the end of her gradeschool years, and for a time it seemed likely that her parents would lose her. Her mother joining the cult was at least in large part a coping mechanism for this. A difficult operation saved Senjyo's life, but that only drove her mother deeper into the cult's clutches.

The disease she had sounds like it might have been leukemia. Occurs in children, life threatening, can sometimes be cured via complicated surgery, pretty sure it fits.

Reading between the lines, and continuing along the theme of Faustian bargains, it seems likely that the cult leader claimed to have used his divine powers to ensure Senjyo's recovery. That would explain why her mother fell deeper under his thrall after the surgery's success. It also, perhaps, might be that the cult leader demanded sex with Senjyo as payment for having "healed" her.

So, Senjyo feels doubly responsible for the destruction of her family. Her disease caused her mother to join the cult. Her recovery from the disease pushed her further into its grasp. Then, her resistance to the sexual assault led to financial ruin and divorce.

It was immediately in the wake of this that the kani kami appeared to Senjyo, and offered to take the weight of these feelings away from her. She just didn't realize that it would be taking the lion's share of her literal body weight along with it.

She no longer feels anything about her mother, one way or the other. But the cost took most of her substance.

Okay, yeah, this is DEFINITELY a parody of Kara no Kyoukai, at least among other things. The explanations are both word salad-y in exactly the way Touko's are, AND also more deliberately silly and wordplay-y despite the dark subject matter. And of course there's the sort of doofy teenaged sidekick with an affinity for psycho girls with messed up curses or powers and...yeah, it can't not be.

And yet, it also handles the same sort of dark themes that KnK tried to tackle with much more maturity and insight. While ALSO making more sense even through the word salad metaphysics. And while taking the piss out of the original and itself.

Granted, the horny bits where the camera is perving on Senjyo more than Araragi himself is becomes worse in context. If Senjyo's...Senjyo-ness...is the behavior of an emotionally damaged teenager trying to take back some control of her sexuality despite part of her soul being missing, then the porny shoots are outright counterproductive as well as skeevy. They send the opposite message of what it seems like the scene was supposed to be communicating. If the bathroom scene just had some different camera angles for most of its cuts, reserving the porny ones for Araragi's POV shots as she teased him with her body, this would have worked a lot better for me.

The crab vanishes. It's not totally clear if Senjyo has her weight back or not, but in any case this seems to have been at least temporary progress. She also does another personality wheely and says that if nothing else, she's glad to have made a friend like Araragi out of this.

She apologizes for everything she said and did to him. Seemingly in earnest.

The stapled cheek incident, not to mention threatening to murder his little sisters, isn't something that you can just apologize for imo. Buuut...if I'm understanding this correctly, Senjyo's agency in those things isn't clear cut. If the crab had removed a big part of her emotional being in order to relieve her from the "weight," perhaps that included the brunt of her empathy and self-awareness? So, yeah, not sure how responsible you can hold her for those actions. Again, if I'm interpreting it correctly. If so, then she seems to have gotten at least part of her empathy back during this ritual.

...a friend just pointed out to me that there might be a little bit of multilingual wordplay going on with this whole crab thing, also. If Senjyo actually did have leukemia, which is a form of cancer, well...cancer. crab. lol. Maybe just a coincidence.

Araragi seems very happy to be Senjyo's friend henceforth. Maybe just because he's hoping of it becoming more than just friendship, maybe not. In any case, we cut ahead to Araragi's little sisters waking him up the next morning. He's fairly resistant to this, due to how late he was out the last night.

His body feels heavy, and every move exhausts him further. As he gets out of bed, he remembers another thing that Oshino mentioned in passing that didn't seem super important to me at the time, about how from a god's perspective it's hard to tell the difference between individual humans, or to even notice the effects that soul-manipulation might have on physical body weight.

Uh oh.

He goes into the bathroom to weigh himself, and yep, Senjyo's missing body weight has been added to his own.

End episode with another "to be continued." Next adventure I suppose will be about finding a way to shift the weight back to her. Or else he'll just have to deal with it for an ep or two until they manage to do so. Either way, he doesn't seem to have gotten her emotional weight, just the physical, so that's good at least.


Weird show. Very, very weird show. Not just in terms of subject matter (JJBA, Utena, and Chainsaw Man all beat it easily on that front), but tonally. The slapstick humor, silly wordplay, and parody elements are all just completely intertwined with the really dark and serious stuff, and then the horny bits juxtaposed against both of those just make it...hard to keep up with. It's a clashing tonal gumbo that surprisingly works in some ways, but there are a few floating kernels in it whose taste does clash.

Still, my OVERALL assessment of the show so far, based on the Hitagi Crab two-parter, is positive. Not by a very big degree, but its merits in totality outweigh its flaws. Hopefully that'll continue to be the case, because there's a bunch more of these queued up.