Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are returning to Monogatari’s Monster Season, as Araragi and his companions greet the newly revived Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicide-Master. Having journeyed across heaven and hell for an antidote to Deathtopia’s decrepitude, the party now prepares for a combined reunion and interrogation, with the vampire who gave Acerola her very identity now on trial for the attacks on Kanbaru’s old basketball team.
This arc has certainly offered Isin plenty of opportunities to indulge his love of ciphers and mysteries, while also serving as both a thematic reprise of Kizumonogatari and a referendum regarding Araragi and Shinobu’s growth over the past year. The prior sturdiness of their partnership was exemplified through how easily they’d banter about disowning each other; now, with Araragi facing aspects of Shinobu’s past he had never previously considered, it is an open question as to whether this single year of solidarity can measure up to a half-millennium of austere isolation.
Can a teenager just past the crest of adolescent identity-forming truly relate to an ageless vampire? Is their current happy collaboration a mere quirk of circumstance, or a reflection of how they have truly come to find consolation and community in each others’ presence? In truth, even their current fears speak to how well they understand each other, and it’s frankly gratifying to see them indulge in that most rare and precious of practices: honestly communicating their anxieties, that they might come to better understand and support each other. Now let’s see what Deathtopia makes of all this emotional growth as we get back to the Suruga estate!
Episode 13
We return to more shared demented laughter from our two vampires, who aren’t even doing the courtesy of matching their raucous noises to their lip flaps
Ooh, lovely shot looking up at the night sky. I like how this composition basically combines the show’s two current aesthetics – a flat overlay of gradient-colored tree limbs echoing the show’s austere roots, with an intricately detailed backing layer of more fully articulated trees representing this arc’s gestures towards photorealism
Gaen continues to show remarkable courtesy towards the apparitions, suggesting that she and Araragi step away so Shinobu and Deathtopia have some time to talk
She tells Araragi that the fifth victim’s belongings have been found at the school gym, but that her body is still missing
We keep flashing to an engraving of a monkey with its hands held over its ears, a clear embodiment of the “see no evil/hear no evil” motif. This image possesses obvious relevance for Kanbaru and this arc in general – Kanbaru herself is the monkey, and the “hear no evil” idea refers to her obliviousness regarding the events of the girls’ basketball team, how she considers herself largely blameless for an atmosphere that she accidentally helped create
Gaen offers a dire prediction: that the fact that this victim’s belongings were intentionally separated from their body implies their target has been receiving information regarding their investigation, and is thus altering their modus operandi in order to avoid being tracked down
Well, that certainly shortens our list of suspects! If you’re trying to hide your identity, your greatest weapon is anonymity – anything you do that confirms an association with your pursuers only tightens the noose. If Light had just ignored his pursuers and not relied on private police data, he could have been scribbling away in that Death Note for years
Gaen states that the vampiric genes extracted from the victims were “almost identical” to Deathtopia’s genes. That’s a pretty loaded “almost,” and one which naturally facilitates the question of “does becoming a vampire’s spawn mean you somehow echo its genetic data.” If so, Tropicalesque, Acerola, and Araragi himself are all potential suspects
Excellent work with the layouts here, emphasizing the creeping threat of their target. Earlier shots presented Araragi as trapped within a pinhole poked through the folding screen door, and now the shadows of an adjacent tree are projected against those doors like creeping arms stretching towards them
“Once you break a fasting diet, you tend to rebound at great momentum.” Gaen theorizing about Deathtopia, but in a way that also reflects Araragi’s concerns regarding Shinobu’s true nature
Deathtopia at last calls the humans to court. Kanbaru’s backyard is of course saturated in her colors by her presence, with the rocks of this garden now painted the same amber as Deathtopia’s throne back in the previous arc
Deathtopia offers formal thanks to Araragi for reviving her, and also for reviving Acerola before. I suppose he is the savior of this entire vampiric line
She furthermore reveals she came to Japan because she had heard Acerola was dead. If not for that, she would have remained in stasis
Deathtopia would like to see a demonstration of Araragi’s suitability as Acerola’s long-awaited prince. And Araragi counters with the key question, the lurking ambiguity that could be Deathtopia’s alibi – how she ended up drained and buried
She states she died of food poisoning after dining on high school girls. So that cold open wasn’t a lie, she really was munching on our victims
Some lovely stained glass images as Deathtopia explains her latest death
She also confirms Gaen’s theory that Deathtopia had been so diminished she wasn’t even worth being blocked by Mayoi’s barrier over the town
“I didn’t want a friend who I hadn’t seen for 600 years to worry. I didn’t want her to think ‘she’s changed.’” An amusing and thematically relevant concern from Deathtopia, given how Araragi has been worrying that Shinobu truly hasn’t changed, and that she’ll at some point revert to her prior vampiric persona. Both Araragi and Deathtopia hung up on the impermanence of identity, a concern that apparently remains relevant whether you’re eighteen or a thousand years old
It’s an understandable worry – when people say “I love you,” that can easily be interpreted as “I love the current fixed point of your identity.” Caring for someone as an ongoing practice implies coming to terms with the mutability of all individuals, of loving them for what changes and also loving them for what stays the same
“I didn’t want her to think ‘she’s the same as ever,’ either.” And of course, we know change is an inevitability and that growth is an eternal process, but how much change is too much change, and how can we be sure our growth is in a positive direction?
“I reached out for local foodstuffs.” Deathtopia’s referral to humans as “foodstuffs” is the clearest indication of her distant, monstrous nature. And crucially, it’s not an inherent physical quality of hers, it’s how she sees others around her
Deathtopia assumes her failure to adapt to local customs regarding meals was the reason she was punished with food poisoning. She has very unique, rigid ideas about propriety, which seems in keeping with her generally stubborn nature regarding her own declarations
Of course, if that event is what mummified Deathtopia, she couldn’t be responsible for the other victims. Which implies a new possibility: she actually did make a vampire of that first victim, and it was that first victim who drained the four others, before or after hiding her own belongings in the school gym. Given the atmosphere at the basketball club, and the presumed animosity towards Kanbaru and her fans that atmosphere would create, all of that seems quite possible
Gaen and Araragi swiftly come to the same conclusion
It does not escape my notice that the ciphers were entirely irrelevant to cracking this case, but I’m mature enough not to make a big deal out of that
“A vampire filled with the human touch. Committing a very human crime.” Oddities are as petty and human as the rest of us, largely because they are us
“How clever. So many little thoughts you have.” Some extremely Deathtopia praise for their investigation. The true sovereign leaves their thinking to others, but makes sure to praise their viziers for all the cute little thinking they do
Thus the race is on to invade Kanbaru’s sleepover, for entirely selfless reasons of course
And of course Araragi is immediately bullied by a gaggle of high school girls. Fantastic
And Done
Our killer has been discovered! Well, technically a quasi-killer, and to be fair Deathtopia also shares some blame in the whole kerfuffle, but we’re certainly racing towards our conclusion. In the meantime, this episode ended up resolving Araragi’s concerns regarding Shinobu’s “true nature” in the most natural, reassuring way possible – by emphasizing how even Deathtopia was mired in the same concerns, anxiously wondering if her friend would still recognize her, while simultaneously afraid she would actually be too recognizable, too static to remain of interest to her former companion. Though adolescence is the most aggressive and fast-paced crucible of identity-forming, the project of exploring, defining, and reshaping ourselves is an endless pursuit, and we must take comfort in the fact that everyone we know is similarly sculpting, revising, and obsessing over that process. Even after six hundred years, becoming happy is not a race!
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