06.10
PRAISE HIM
Hello, harlots of all genders. I bring your attention to an anime from the year of our lord 2016, Mayoiga. It is not a good anime, but it is an inspiring one. Watching merely one episode will affirm all of your life decisions, for as bad as any of them could possibly be, at least they aren’t as thoughtless as what the characters in this show are doing. No matter what horrible acts you’re committing while reading this, at least you’re not a Mitsumune, or a Nyanta, or a Driver. You have a full non-Mayoiga life ahead of you. A better life, but most certainly a duller life, now anyway, let’s begin.
Within the realms of Mayoiga, thirty children and manchildren decide to give up their former lives to go reside in an abandoned village and start anew. One of them named Mitsumune is especially damaged and engages in this journey with zest. This ritual begins with their leader singing songs and asking how they would commit suicide. I know this sounds very cult-like, but trust me, cults are more linear than this. A cult has an endgame. A cult has a semblance of purpose. This group just wants to go live in an abandoned village that only government officials and conspiracy theorists have heard about, like it’s no bigger to chill where there’s probably unmarked graves and political dissidents. No worries there. Unsurprisingly, things aren’t what they seem in Nanaki Village. Crops are grown but with no farmers. Houses are unattended to. Attempts to navigate this place devolve into running in circles. It’s madness, but not horror madness. Horror madness happens to characters you like. In horror madness, the horror is seeing people you care about get tortured both physically and mentally. But I don’t like anybody in Mayoiga, so it’s not horror madness. It’s comedy of errors madness, where characters you either loathe, pity, or just want to see die already get caught up in monstrous situations. And who doesn’t like a good comedy of errors madness? 70% of modern horror is about a bunch of assholes fucking each other over, and you all eat it up as if your metabolisms can’t function without 20 Nightmare on Elm Street movies in your mental stomach. You love seeing idiots revel in their madness, and that’s why they persevere. That’s why they keep making them. That is why we have Mayoiga!
Day after day, the adherents of the 4chan meme post thousands of words relating to this show, some about Maimai’s cock, most about Lovepon’s insanity, but always about speculation. Speculation as to what will happen next. Who will punch who? Who will seduce who? And how did Driver get that bus out of the trenches? Director Tsutomu Mizushima is renowned for being a master in the nonsensical, as his prior works Blood-C and Another can attest. Allied with the maniacal Mari Okada, he has crafted yet another work of chaos and delusion. Not one where the chaos lies within the intent, but one where you go “What the fuck is this?” Perhaps Mr. Mizushima and Ms. Okada are intentionally trying to craft another Another. Maybe they intended a giant penguin appearing in the middle of a forest to be comedic, just like the giant breast implant walking on spider legs, or the awkward cinematography that always shoots near the characters’ legs, or the rapping black character who tries to rape one of the girls before finding God and giving up his lecherous goals. I don’t speak the modern Japanese tongue, so I have limited information as to whether that be the case, but look between the lines and tell me if these moments are well-intentioned goofs, happy accidents, or the creators simply laughing at their viewer while raking in their dozens of yen from lukewarm sales.
But then you get the suspicion that arises from every crazy show, the one that tingles in the back of your mind, making you think you could be an accomplished writer too if you actually had the work ethic to write 15000-word scripts a week for an anime. You start to believe… that they’re making this shit up as they’re going along. Characters get killed off only to be brought back with flimsy excuses. Like that one character who was found floating by the river face-down? He was just swimming. That’s how people swim in Japan, don’tcha know? Or the giant Mitsumune? That was just a demon pretending to be a giant person of someone else who happened to resemble Mitsumune. If you have small shoes and want your feet to breathe some more, go to Mayoiga because it’s nothing but flip-flops. Could it be that after finding about the profound overseas success of Mayoiga, that Mizushima gave up his original plans and decided to antagonize those foreigners for daring to enjoy his purely Nihonjin work? Or could Mizushima perhaps be in favor of international manlove? Nobody has died in the first ten episodes because he wants no country to dissipate or be destroyed. All countries should share the glory instead of be like Syria, because that’s the Diomedea Way.
But if love were his proposal, why are Speedstar and Mitsumune so dysfunctional? For weeks, patrons and purveyors thought their relationship to be sexual, despite Mitsumune’s failed pursuits for the Masaki cooch. Speedstar, otherwise going by his slave name Hayato, was meant to be the sane one. He was meant to stand there while everyone else went crazy and killed each other. Then out of thin air, Speedstar became unhinged and tried to stab his rivals. The coupling became volatile, and Mitsumune would never again accept his friend’s cock up his ass. And to twist the knife even further, Mizushima decided that Speedstar’s childhood had to be a paragon of poorly-thought-out melodrama. See, if you had never watched the show, Speedstar’s secret shame lie not in his desires for his childhood friend, but because he was locked in an attic with his grandma’s ghost for an indefinite amount of time! And he was such a rebel in his formative years that, that he refused to hold fish or watch televisuals his parents enjoyed! Speedstar was truly a menace to society, so much that he needed to vent out his anger at the world within one person, one person in particular. And it had to be his dear Mitsumune, also abused by his parents for odd reasons. Speedstar may have seen himself within Mitsumune, and wanted to dominate him as a symbol of crushing his past self into dust. Or pretend that Mitsumune was his horrible mom while he fucked him until he bled. In short, I’m just saying their relationship is bad and not the ship of the show. That’s the two gun nuts who everyone wants to be lovey-dovey for each other, because violence and romance are only a drop apart.
Speaking of violence, let’s talk Lovepon! Everyone loves Lovepon! Despite not appearing in the initial advertising, Lovepon’s become a mascot for the series thanks to her craving for executions. Try to imagine the show without Lovepon. Protip: You can’t. Even if she has little to do with the main plot, you still can’t, because that’s how much Lovepon’s cries for execution have enveloped the Mayoiga franchise. She’s like the Pikachu of the Mayoiga brand, with the vocabulary to match. Someone outside the viewer base might wonder why, but the answer lies clear in her catch phrase. The audience wants to see the characters get murdered in horribly graphic ways. The show does not deliver on that promise, making the audience sad and angry. Then Lovepon appears and acts as their surrogate, demanding what those at home are ravenous for. And don’t get all pacifist at me, acting like you watch this show for the intrigue. You’re just waiting to see when Wank gets stabbed or if Valkana gets beheaded. That’s what you want, and that’s what Lovepon wants. We’re all Sympatico.
Just as Lovepon represents the viewer’s drive to get this over with, Masaki is the roadblock preventing our dear characters from further uncovering the truth. Notice how she insists on not calling the police and doesn’t tell the rest of the cast how she visited the village years ago. Contrary actions would have definitely aided them in understanding just what the Hell Nanaki Village is, but she doesn’t explain. Answers seldom come out of her mouth. Only puke. That’s why people nicknamed her “Puke Girl”. She doesn’t follow the rules but plays her own games, and the instruction manual’s lined with her oral excretions. But she doesn’t have the flair or the charm of Lovepon or even Maimai. Narna has a bigger fandom than her, and her only character is that she wears a beanie. Part of why Masaki sucks as a character is rooted in why some people think Mayoiga sucks, because the show itself will never explain things unless forced into a corner. And those few times it does try to answer some questions, it leads to further and often more obtuse questions that don’t drive the plot at all.
For instance, take a gander at everybody’s Nanaki. They’re supposed to be the monsters or the Ghoulies or whatever the fuck you call your bogeymen of the show. Like the Bogarts from Harry Potter, they represent what each character fears the most, but it’s not exactly that. It’s more like an abstract image from what they fear, like a shadow from a traumatic event. Some make sense, like Mitsumune’s Nanaki being his toy penguin from when his twin brother died? That’s okay. Nyanta’s being a wasp because bullies dropped a wasp’s nest on her? All right. Valkana’s being a gooey Shuma-Gorath ripoff that vaguely resembles the table he was at when he got fired? Um, interesting? Then as the show progresses, you wonder if the Nanaki really do anything besides remind everyone of their past. They just chase the characters. They don’t even embody the center of their fears, but a fragment like they swung and missed their intended target. What’s meant to be a psychological confrontation feels like something out of a subpar Scooby-Doo incarnation.
And maybe that’s what this show is. Just a dumber Scooby-Doo where Shaggy’s a filthy beta in a red shirt. Again. But if that’s what the creators intended, that’s certainly not what the audience has turned it into. They’ve taken it away from Japanese hands and made it a transcendental phenomenon, a show that will remembered by the people like other classics Samurai Flamenco and Aku no Hana. Those shows bombed just as horribly, but their words live on in memes and the darkest corners of our subconscious. They’ve achieved a special kind of immortality only a few shows are privileged to have. Surely, Mayoiga has become… Our-oiga.