Erin watches Penguindrum, episodes 19-24 (the end)

[erinptah]

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(screencap: the splash image at the end of the final episode)

…So, that sure was an anime that got made, huh?

Final reactions under the cut! Lots of spoilers, although if you haven’t watched the thing in the first place, a lot of them will probably be incomprehensible anyway.

 

First, the things I brought up last time:

• The good: There’s not a specific Himari-centric episode, but there’s a fair amount of good Himari content. Including a real-world conversation with the Ominous Pastel-Haired Man, which I think boiled down to him saying “all romances are doomed to be abusive and toxic” and Himari saying “nope”
• The bad: The guy Ringo drugged and assaulted never does find out about any of it, he just gets murdered by his wife’s angry Takarazuka-partner ex, and that’s the end of both their arcs!

Overall thoughts:

One of the elements of this show that stood out in the first…half, maybe?…was how grounded it was. Sure, there was a magic penguin hat possessing Himari to order her brothers around, but that was a surprise intrusion on a realistic world with realistic problems. Himari has a brain tumor, her brothers are struggling to afford to keep their house, they’re all coping with the stigma and emotional scarring of their parents being involved in a mass murder that’s closely modeled on a specific real-world terrorist attack. One of the brothers brings the penguin hat to the hospital and asks Himari’s doctor to scan it! (He gets laughed off, unfortunately, but at least he tried.)

Ringo’s problems are also realistic — divorced and emotionally-unavailable parents, family grief from the death of an older sister she was too young to remember, a self-assigned sense of responsibility that she has to heal her parents’ grief by personally filling in the void Momoka left. She’s also pursuing a fantastical magic solution, but it wasn’t assigned to her by an actual magic hat — it’s just that she’s a little deranged, and there was nobody in her life caring/attentive enough to go “whoa there, that’s not how things work” before she went completely off-the-rails with it.

(This is “concerning, but potentially funny and endearing” until she gets to the drugging-and-assault part.)

…And then it turns out, Momoka was literally magic? And her diary was magic, just in a completely different way from the one Ringo made up in her head? And some of the people who seemed to be grounded adults, trying to deal with their grief and move on in realistic ways, were actually toxically obsessed with Momoka this whole time? And she died in the terrorist attack, but not as a coincidental victim of the random cruelty that life hands out sometimes, no, she was trying to use her magic powers to stop it? Also, unwanted children get sent to a warehouse with a conveyor belt that feeds them into an industrial crusher, and at first this looks like a heartbreaking visual metaphor for how it feels to be unwanted, but then characters start talking about it like it’s just a real thing that exists? And the terrorists say their attack was supposed to (magically?) remake the world into one without child-crushing conveyor belts, except you’d think they would try just bombing that building instead of bombing trains? One of the few people we see actually rescuing a kid from the conveyor belt is Momoka, and the terrorists turn her into a pair of penguin hats?

I just. What?

(Magic Penguin Hat #2 possesses/promises to cure a whole other sick child, a little brother whose big sister is seeking the Penguindrum to save him. There are a million unanswered questions about this side of the plot — including how this poor kid feels about any of it. I’m not sure he has any spoken lines until he gets a cameo in the denouement. He’s basically a cute, sad prop.)

Also, a bunch of the kids presented as siblings were secretly adopted, so I guess the weirdly-sexual scenes between them were supposed to be fine? And the kids presented as dramatic exes were secretly by-blood siblings this whole time. It’s incest all the way down.

I keep doing Utena comparisons in my head, because of course. There’s a fair number of things that worked in Utena, get repeated/echoed in Penguindrum, and don’t work in Penguindrum. I don’t know how much of that is “Ikuhara thinks that’s what his fans want, and he’s trying to play the hits” and “these are the only kinds of scenes Ikuhara can/wants to write, and he had the prescience and/or luck to make Utena the kind of story where they work.”

Touga making a dramatic speech about how “the world is an egg and we’re going to smash the world’s shell” works because (a) he’s a melodramatic teenager, and (b) as we find out, he’s repeating things he was told by Akio in the process of manipulating him, there’s no reason to think they’re true or meaningful at all.

Ominous Pastel-Haired Penguindrum Man making a dramatic speech about how “the world is a set of boxes that everyone crams themselves into, I’m the special person who will break out of my box and destroy the world” falls flat because (a) he’s an adult, monologuing to himself, it’s not dramatic nonsense he’s making up to mess with a teenager, and (b) these aren’t his motives for some liminal fairytale metaphor-act that’s going to be up to the viewer’s interpretation, they’re his motives for orchestrating a mass murder of people who are definitely real in-universe, based on a mass murder of people who were real in…you know…reality.

Yeah.

So that was Mawaru Penguindrum! (Nobody in-universe ever did a Project Mawaru.)

I…don’t think I liked it. And, look, obviously it did get me emotionally-invested enough to write four whole blog posts about how frustrating it was, which is more than I can say for a lot of other shows I didn’t like. But in the end, really unsatisfying. Dropped a lot of threads, did not stick the landing.

Would still recommend that you watch/listen to those Triple H songs from the last post! Maybe don’t bother with the rest of the show.