girl cartoons

2DT mentioned at the end of a great post on Tatami Galaxy a couple weeks back that he noticed some similarities between Tatami’s Akashi and Bakemonogatari’s Senjougahara. This made a few things click for me, as I hadn’t yet been able to get a grasp on what fascinated me so about Akashi.

The clearest and most obvious comparison is, as 2DT noted, their “inauthenticity”, their difficulty in expressing their feelings in a natural way. To coin an abominable neologism from one which has already lost almost all meaning, they seem to exhibit something of a “post-tsundere” archetype - they aren’t so much reluctant to admit their love to themselves as they are reluctant to be reluctant. Senjougahara expresses her feelings for Araragi in explicit, self-aware language, but with a tone so dry that it’s hard to believe she’s sincere. She hides her feelings in plain sight, pushing them out in front of her rather than attempting to bottle them up. Her affection is “tell, don’t show” carried to an absurd degree.

Akashi displays a similar inauthenticity - she never fawns over Watashi, but she follows him everywhere - even from episode to episode.

Episode 04 included some tacit confirmations that the series is linear in a more concrete sense than previously indicated - the ever-present fortune telling gag almost reached out and knocked on the fourth wall, and Watashi is displaying deja vu-esque recollections of the events of previous episodes. Episode 06 made it about as explicit as it could be. The show is most definitely progressing in a loosely-linear manner - from Watashi’s point of view.

But the rest of the characters still exist independently, which is where Akashi’s inauthenticity reveals itself. Assuming that, on each reset, Watashi consciously changes his choice of club, then the only way Akashi could “simply happen” to appear in each club - the film club, the cycling club and the disciplehood of an eccentric eighth-year student - is if her choice of club was made after, and in response to, Watashi’s own.

Episode 06 muddles this, with Akashi present only through implication at the very end of the episode, and various other consistency-violating ideas introduced to the episode’s romance: not only is the only love interest up to this point disregarded, she’s replaced with a love triangle (…plus one, perhaps) with two completely-new characters. But she does appear, and with strong implication that of the three choices Watashi has been debating throughout the episode, she, the fourth choice, is still the correct one.

I had been loathe to commit to the idea so far, as appealing as it was to my own tastes, but it’s fairly clear by now that Watashi getting together with Akashi is almost certainly the show’s destination.