03.07
Chinilingus.
I know the moment the episode began, all of you were focusing on the familial threesome. Don’t lie. You did. There was nowhere else to focus on. Even if you were a fundamentalist who whipped themselves every time the mere thought of sex occurs, you were focusing on this scene. But this scene offers more than Ragyo’s chin in Ryuko’s ass. Throughout the show, you have seen how any sort of affection Ragyo gives to her children has to be sexual or humiliating no matter what. Even her butlers sacrifice their essence in order to make their master happy. We have been through enough of the show to know that Ragyo has no idea of consensual, platonic love. And that’s interesting for being the head of a legion meant to cover all of humanity with clothing.
Aside from Aikuro’s posing, when has Nudist Beach shown anything as depraved as Ragyo’s actions? It’s interesting how clothing literally equates to carnal sin while nudity means being free from any malicious perversion. It’s a neat theme, falling back on how Orwellian societies would give their citizens dress codes that would penalize someone for even showing their collarbones. The theme goes into why nudist beaches in real life exist, to let people spread their wings in ways society would never let them do. That’s why you saw people dancing around naked back in Woodstock. Nudity meant not having to fear what other people thought of what you were wearing, because you had nothing to show them other than your own skin. It’s the element of humanity that both titillates and alienates, and will always be the first topic in the subconscious when order versus chaos is brought up. I’d say more, but then this will become an essay on 1960s counterculture than anything about Kill la Kill.
Still, society has defined clothing to such an extent that what we wear equates to what we are in a few psychological contexts. You can see that with Satsuki wearing Senketsu. Sure, she wears him the same as Ryuko does, but she’s more prone to falling back on the alternate modes like Senketsu Gale. And what’s more eye-opening is that they are modes created from Ryuko’s synchronization instead of Satsuki’s. Satsuki may be a master planner, but she doesn’t know how to improvise when being quite literally in another person’s shoes. She’s spent so long playing the villain that using the hero’s arsenal is like wearing a jacket made out of sandpaper.
Meanwhile, Ryuko’s no longer in perpetual rage like she was in the last few episodes. Instead, she’s more prone to talking down to her enemies in order to get in their heads. There’s no rousing speech about how she’s going to take down Satsuki and her army, because she’s already taken them down in her mind. In a sense, you could say that shift from being the challenger to becoming the dreaded weaves a more integral way to reverse the previous Ryuko vs Satsuki conflict we’ve seen so far. Satsuki hasn’t changed her ideals by a single bit, so you can’t say that any good or evil side has been flipped. Instead, it’s more on how chaos has been shifted from liberating into threatening, which gives us a hint as to what the show was like for Satsuki’s point of view instead of Ryuko’s. That’s the reason for all those insane field trips and challenges akin to Takeshi’s Castle, because she wanted to see if the oncoming storm would be crazy enough to overcome those tasks. And of course, she did.
…on a sidenote, I almost wish Mako died so I could do an entire article on that instead of ramble on vague moral concepts.