Death by Swords

This piece spoils the endings of Revolutionary Girl Utena, One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island, Fate/Stay Night, Penguindrum and Zenshu. Proceed at your own risk.

Revolutionary Girl Utena is a show with motifs. Roses, coffins, eggs, you name them. So it’s easy to lose track of swords in the midst of all that. A sword’s a sword, right? You fight with them in duels, you pull them out of the chest of the Rose Bride. Phallic imagery plain and simple. You label it, set it aside and move onto harder questions like “why is there a cat,” “where did that car come from” or “is anything that happens in this show real?”  

Then the series pulls a trick on you in the finale by revealing the swords were even more central than you thought. As the villainous Akio strides forwards to open the Rose Gate, thousands and thousands of swords fly from the heavens to impale his cursed sister Anthy in his place. She is stabbed over and over to the despairing wails of JA Seazer’s “Missing Link.” Only when the heroic Utena finds her second wind, pushes Akio out of the way and opens the Gate herself with love is Anthy granted relief. But there is always a cost, and so the swords that once transformed Anthy into a human pincushion turn on Utena instead.

Anthy’s death by swords is one of the most cruel, visceral sequences in a series full of them. Yet it’s also one of the most memorialized. So many Utena AMVs include it, perhaps because it resolves (as Utena takes Anthy’s hand, and trades places) in a supernova of catharsis. Not unlike how the climax of the film End of Evangelion is so omnipresent in anime fan culture that the image of a giant floating head in the ocean might be better known than anything in the TV series itself.

You might not know this, but that last episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena was storyboarded by Mamoru Hosada under a pseudonym. Hosada would go on to become a famous anime film director; before that, though, he did a run on Toei properties. His Digimon films are beloved and served as the prototype for his later work. But it’s his One Piece film, the infamous Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island, that’s most relevant to our sword discussion today.

The story has been told many times as to how the film channeled Hosada’s frustration with being ejected from the Ghibli movie Howl’s Moving Castle. Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island ends happily, but not before taking a detour through some of the scariest imagery to ever appear in One Piece. A giant, alien plant explodes into so many arrows that they blot out the sky and turn the sun red. Just like Utena’s swords, these arrows freeze in the air, turn their points to fix on our hero Luffy, and fall down, down, into his flesh. 

Why reuse this motif? It could be as simple as that Hosada always repurposes bits and pieces of his earlier work in his later films. His blockbuster Summer Wars after all is just an expansion of his Digimon movie Our War Game. What sticks out to me is that Hosada leaves no ambiguity as to what this scene signifies. “Every single one of these arrows,” the villain says, “symbolizes a day of loneliness I endured after that storm!” That’s what death by swords meant in Hosada’s world at that time: loneliness.

Aside from Utena’s former creative staff, there were also fans of the series who were inspired to create their own take on the show’s imagery. One of those fans was Kinoko Nasu, the writer of the popular 2004 visual novel Fate/Stay Night. That game comes with not just one but two sources of infinite swords. One comes via its villain Gilgamesh (yes, the mythological figure) who owns so many legendary weapons that he can simply shoot them at his enemies through portals in the sky. The other comes via Shirou, the protagonist, whose special power “Unlimited Blade Works” lets him replicate any existing sword he can imagine. The raw terror of Anthy’s impaling is thus transfigured into a maximalist special attack.

What I find fascinating is that Utena’s director, Kunihiko Ikuhara, never again returned to swords as a motif. Instead he turned to another kind of prolonged, agonizing erasure. His 2011 anime series Penguindrum features a horrible place called the Child Broiler where abandoned children are ground up into glass. He’d return to this idea again in Sarazanmai (2019) where those who “love” (as opposed to those who “desire”) are fed into a giant shredder.

In retrospect I don’t think it mattered that the swords in Utena’s climax were swords per se.  What was important was the slow and excruciating pain they inflicted on their victims. It’s why the Utena film replaces the sword rain with locusts and black cars. What’s important isn’t the single moment of being stabbed but death by a thousand cuts.

That’s why (for better or worse) the most faithful imagery to Utena in Fate/Stay Night isn’t the swords. It’s that Shinji’s friend Sakura, the secret heir of a powerful mage family, is munched on daily by evil worms and nobody notices or cares. It’s Omelas as reinterpreted by nerds who love tabletop and epic fantasy, and it is portrayed in such a lascivious way that it barely works as commentary. But the intent is there: if the cost of magic is that one person must always suffer, it’s better to just tear everything to the ground and start over.

The worst thing about death by swords isn’t the blood or the degree to which it hurts. It’s the consistency. Every day a part of you disappears. You don’t know when it will end or how much more of yourself will remain. Sooner or later you cross the invisible line and become a reverse Ship of Theseus, less than the sum of your parts.

What was your death by swords? Working at a job you didn’t like? The disapproval of strangers? Or mental illness, bullying, a bad relationship. A gradual death, both physical and personal. That’s what it means to be crushed, to be sent to the Child Broiler, to be shot to death by students, to be sent to the desert, or whatever metaphor the artist has chosen to represent this specific, asphyxiating pain.

Zenshu, an original anime that aired this year directed by former Ikuhara colleague Mitsue Yamazaki, once again ends with a death by swords. The former hero Luke is corrupted by anguish and becomes the Ultimate Void. Hundreds of giant swords descend on the Last Town and melt everything into black sludge. The heroine Natsuko, a skilled animator, draws a hundred Lukes with her powers and each Luke wields a sword against the darkness. One by one they are turned back until the last one, the one who once admitted he loved her, purifies the Ultimate Void with all-consuming light.

At first I found it arbitrary that Natsuko could just draw Luke after Luke until she found the one that worked. Wasn’t that too easy? In retrospect though it’s exactly right. The only thing that can beat a hundred falling swords is a hundred swords of your own. Another hundred swords fall, so you need more swords. It goes on and on until you run out of swords, or thoughts, and pain consumes you and then you forget yourself. You become “black sludge,” as Zenshu puts it.

It’s exhausting, repetitive work. Not particularly flashy or creative. But difficult problems don’t always require complex solutions. Sometimes the solution is simple but inconvenient. Eating three meals every day, doing laundry, taking your dog out for a walk. There are times in life when it can be very painful to make yourself do those things. Yet everything goes to hell if you don’t.

Life is not a heroic fantasy. One great act will rarely save you. What will save you are the hundred small acts you do every day for yourself and for your friends. Not to mention what your friends do for you. That’s what it takes to stave off death by swords. It’s not much, but it’s something. 

Bookmarks

• I’ve been enjoying the visual novel Spring Gothic, about two folks in a long-distance relationship who meet in London. Very earnest work about how people bond over the internet and how physical and/or virtual space affects that bond.
• Pyroxene Scans translated Legend of the Sacred Stone, an early film by the famous Pili studio of Taiwanese puppeteers. Great news for fans of their later work Thunderbolt Fantasy.
• Erica Friedman reviewed Eike Exner’s Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics, which (as you’d expect from the title) aims to turn the English language history of manga on its head.
• David Cabera wrote a typically entertaining article about the extraordinarily bad anime series Momentary Lily.
• If you have the stamina, I recommend reading this Guardian article about comics artist Rebecca Burke and her experience of being detained by ICE in the United States for three weeks.

What I Wrote

• For Comics Beat, I reviewed the first episode of the new Chinese animated series To Be Hero X together with writer Hilary Leung.
• For startmenu, I covered the fan game Sonic Robo Blast 2 and why “canon” is a lie.
• At Unpacking the Shelf, I took my friend Alex on a journey into the world of ROM hacks, featuring Fire Emblem: The Morrow’s Golden Country.

AMV of the Week

Here's "Coin Laundry" by sharnii.