This is my entry to the r/anime essay competition. Me!Me!Me! was the third short produced for the Japan Animator Expo. It is extremely sexual and definitely NSFW. Please watch it before reading this essay as it is only 7 minutes long and, in my opinion, an absolute masterpiece. It was the only thing I've ever seen where I finished it and thought to myself "I need to write a 2000 word essay analysing the message and imagery in this". So here you are. I have not marked anything as a spoiler since, given the length of the video, I can't honestly say that I consider anything I've said a spoiler.Foreword and other InformationThe consensus I've seen regarding ME!ME!ME! is that it's a criticism of the otaku shut-in lifestyle and the way they live on the internet, and how this is damaging, with a particular focus on porn, as well as drugs and false reality, with false reality in this instance being represented through video games. With this notion in mind, I've developed some of my own thoughts on the topic; mostly that this is a video about the protagonist Shuu’s warped view of women and addiction to porn, the way addiction prevents him from getting back to a more morally correct standpoint, and the way addiction is eating him .The four girls each represent something. The blue dancing Memes represent porn. The four eyed Fallen Hana represents the protagonist’s warped view of women. The girl beneath the four eyed face represents addiction (who has no official name and I shall therefore dub Monstrous Hana). And finally, his actual ex-girlfriend Hana represents his past view of women.First Act: Dancing GirlThe first and main component of the message is the denunciation of pornography and the way it both portrays and conditions people to view women in a certain derogatory way. This is shown through Shuu being alone in his room in bed with posters of girls around him. The video begins with the voluptuous dancing Meme representing porn.Immediately they show a heart that transforms to reveal a plump booty with a striped blue and white g-string on, drawing attention to and condemning porn as making sex more important than love.The palette is nice and warm, making excellent use of soft pastel colours. The girl makes a heart over her chest with her hands, with the camera zooming in through the heart to her boobs; again, raw sexual lust in the place where love should be.This event shows his warped view of women, that in the place of love is sex, that women aren't individuals to love they're just a pair of boobs. Suddenly the soft pastel palette quickly shifts to black and red and the Memes change appearance showing how porn has skewed his view of what women are and how he thinks that when they aren't having the sexy times they're beasts.The use of the colour red here and the women as monsters could be representative of menstruation, and how society shuns it as something primal and grotesque and, in stark contrast to the prior girl, unattractive. As Fallen Hana emerges from atop her throne and walks forwards it shows quick shots of images of Shuu that flicker, showing how his new view of girls as violently sexual monsters (as well as the cigarette he’s smoking) is destructive to himself and will make his sense of self unstable. The queen of the monster girls, Fallen Hana personifies both his new perspective on women, and the addiction that caused it.Fallen Hana struts up and squishes the main characters head in her boobs, crushing his skull and killing him. This awakens him from his dream. The fact that the physical manifestation of his new warped view of women was shown to be harmful to him speaks for itself. It shows that if Shuu keeps acting so misogynistically it will be extremely destructive towards him.Second Act: MemoriesBack in his room, the girl appears out of the TV, turning his female icons and his new idolised concept of women as objects of desire against him (shown through the Evangelion figures of Rei, Asuka and Misato awakening with their red eyes and crawling over him like spiders).The girl takes off her face like a mask. The four eyed monstrous face represents Shuu’s new view of women, and the face beneath it represents the addiction that causes him to feel like that. I’ll speak more on the girl underneath the mask as representing addiction later on. She then vomits into his mouth, possibly symbolically showing how his new vision of the beastly female sexual identity is drowning him. However, the transition after this occurs where the shot psychedelically fades away, combined with the fact it showed him smoking at the start of the video, makes me think that this scene could be denouncing drug use as something that will burn away your sense of reality (represented as his reality fading away and his memories arising).This psychedelic drug trip sequence has a lot of symbolism. It begins by showing the purity of his girlfriend Hana getting stripped away leaving just her bones, female purity is dead to him. The camera then flies up the naked body of a giant woman showing Shuu standing atop her nipple, dazed as if he was lost in a desert. This shows how he feels lost and helpless in the question of female sexuality. After it pans into his eye, it shows Monstrous Hana upside down with her tongue out sexually like “wassup yo dude imma lick you”,then it zooms even further in along her hair revealing the original Hana at the bottom of it, representing how in regards to women his addiction has caused his old concept of love to be drowned out by his new concept of sex.The spinning boobs showcase that now his new sexual image of girls is infinite to him, since a circle never ends. After the boobs it shows what could be interpreted as an eyeball, but when you think about the rest of the imagery it's pretty clear it's a vagina. The vagina opens up revealing a third eye inside. It then shows an image of his pornstar girl from the start in inverted colours which fades away into a regular colour image of him with his ex-girlfriend Hana.This seems to suggest he is beginning to regret his breakup and he wants to get back to the innocence of his old concept of femininity, the images then fade away through his eye into his mind, into his memories.The camera spins around above showing the current Shuu witnessing the memory of him breaking up with Hana, reflecting on his memories, further suggesting he is beginning to question if he did the right thing and has the right view.His memories are in greyscale and he is in full colour, the use of colour here is important. When memory Shuu walks away the real Shuu feels it hit him all over again and he reaches out desperately trying to get back to his memory of Hana, to his past view of women.Too bad for him though, the girl from beneath the monster’s mask, Monstrous Hana herself who is the girl representing addiction, descends and begins to devour him. He tries to go back but his addiction won’t let him. The addiction eats away at him and prevents him from getting back to the past. After the breakup he is shown bloody and dismembered, with the Monstrous Hana (his addiction and consequent current concept of what a female is) eating him like a beast. The old girl cries and reaches for him as if to say "that's not who I am". In this memory we see the instant his view of females became so warped. After leaving his girlfriend (prior to the start of the video) he began seeing them as monsters and it can be assumed he stopped interacting with real girls and turned to porn which ties into the setting of the start of the video. What happens next is interesting, the old Hana from the memory comes forward still crying for him, but this time she's in full colour and she kisses him as if to say "everything is alright just come back to me I can fix you". That scene is a bit odd, as it seems to suggest that the current Hana herself still has feelings for him and still wants to be with the current Shuu even though his world view is broken and in pieces, yet it occurs in his own subconscious so how could he know that. Perhaps it is him bringing her into his present reality (colour) because he wants to get back to that woman instead of his current monstrous sexual woman. Once she kisses him he remembers how he used to think about women shown through his flashbacks of his time with his ex-girlfriend. Hana is taken away by his almost fully awakened monster-woman Fallen Hana, and he cries out as he decides to fight back against the monster in order to try and get back his old self and old outlook. Even though the flashbacks and his subsequent “awakening” action show that the protagonist wants to go back to how he saw women before, she is taken away by the new woman. She is taken away by the image of women he created by porn, the image created by addiction. Even though he wants to go back, addiction won’t let him.Third Act: False RealityTo save himself from his pain and begin fighting against it, he becomes a hero and dives into a first person shooter. At first glance it's innocent and in character enough with the rest of the video, but if you take a second to think about it, why would it suddenly change styles to a FPS videogame? To begin with, what is a video game? A video game is a false reality, it's an escape where even the most mundane member of humanity can just jump into the role of a powerful action hero, the all-important chosen one that the world needs in order to survive. Inside this false reality Shuu begins hunting down the girl from the beginning (representing porn and his new concept of woman). However, this isn't something he needs to deal with in false reality, it's something he needs to deal with in his actual reality. A cherry blossom from Hana's hairpiece floats down, resembling a pale pink vaginal shape, representing the pure femininity he used to view women with, as opposed to the prior vaginal third eye of deceit and monstrosity. This imagery further confirms my theory that his ex-girlfriend Hana is symbolic of his past embracement of women as people. His false reality is shattered when a vision of Hana flashes before him (a reminder of his true reality) and he falls even lower.The fact his old girlfriend shattered the false reality could be indicative of the fact that although he was hunting his new sexual monster women and therefore trying to conquer his addiction to porn and subsequent dehumanisation of women, he still hadn't full embraced his old view of women as people, because when he is exposed to it instead of being stable it shatters his world.He tries to grasp Hana and the old view of women that she represents back, but he still can't reach her. She falls into the abyss and is swept away by Fallen Hana.Final Act: Vagina DentataNow onwards to the climax. The stage of the final battle, the final stage: vagina dentata. Vagina dentata is an old myth about women having teeth on their vaginas, a component of the old-world concept of the monstrous feminine. At first glance the stage just looks like a creatures mouth but when it shows inside of it, the imagery of the stage looks like vagina walls leading up to the cervix at the end of the vaginal canal. With that knowledge the stage can be seen as a toothed vagina.There are four significant sequential shots here: One shows a speaker, which together with all the pornstar Memes in the vagina, shows that thanks to porn he has begun to see female sexuality as something of glamour and spectacle. Immediately after that it shows the glowing cervix at the end of the stage, this has significance when contrasted to the immediate next shot of the four eyes of Fallen Hana, that she is the beast at the end of female sexuality (Fallen Hana is standing at the cervix which is at the end of the vagina). Finally, it shows Hana, the girl that Shuu is trying to get back to, the girl behind the monster that he’s made.The kidnapped Hana then gets completely absorbed by Fallen Hana. The image of him with his ex-girlfriend in love shatters, he has lost the chance get back to that past away from the current sexual beasts he sees girls as, his addiction is too strong for him to get away.Shuu fights back, because he truly wants to get back to his old self, back before his warped view of females began afflicting him, but the current monstrous view is too strong and he gets dismembered by the Meme's titty cannons. The titty cannons are his ideal sexual female identity (porn) attacking him (his sense of self) to try and destroy him.The monstrous feminine stands atop the vagina dentata. He created her so he cannot destroy her. She is the addiction perspective that will govern the animalistic way he views women.The effects of porn on his world-view were too strong and destroyed him in the end. In the apex of his destruction, the pornstar Memes fly up and entangle him so that he cannot escape from him, and Fallen Hana floats up to him. The girls representing porn and the subsequent girl representing his warped view of woman work in tandem to destroy him.Fallen Hana takes off her face mask, revealing the Monstrous Hana underneath once more, the girl representing his addiction, and kisses him as he blushes and enjoys it. The porn (Memes) calls forth his addiction (Monstrous Hana) to the protagonist and he falls to it, embracing his addiction despite the harm it does to him. He no longer recognises her as a monster that will destroy him, he recognises her as the true form of what females are to him. He has lost his battle to regain the former innocent view of women as people (as opposed to sexual objects/monsters) that he once had, he can no longer recognise the old woman under the brutal violent sexuality of the new monster woman that kisses him as he gives in, powerless before his addiction (Monstrous Hana and the pornstar Memes) as he enjoys it and blushes.His mutilated head floats ever gently down.He dies from his self-destructive obsessions with porn, addiction to drugs and aversion of reality. He opens his eyes from the inner battle of the unconscious dream, for better or worse, this is his true reality.If only my assignments were this easy. http://ift.tt/1ME1EgZ
No comments:
Post a Comment