In real life, molestation isn’t funny, so don’t think I’m condoning your trip to Japan whereupon you will hit the subways, so to speak. But in anime and manga, sexual molestation is used in service of humor as often as it’s an agent of personal horror, and there seems to exist an unspoken code governing the line between the two.

Don’t think this is all about cultural implications, either. Such narrative machinations as humor can be deliciously structural. Not that the examples I look at here are off the social hook, per se, but we’ll look at that on a case-by-case basis.

(Edit 9/8 — Let this comment serve as a brief addendum in answer to those parts of this post that weren’t thought through as well as perhaps they should’ve been.)

So, when in anime, manga, etc. is molestation used to serve humor, and how? Let’s try to establish some flexible guidelines. We may not agree on the specifics, but not to worry; you can usually count on me to be as noncommittal as possible.

In short, I mean to suggest that:

1. Molestation serves humor when it’s accidental.
2. Molestation serves humor when the molester is too young to appreciate it.
1. Molestation serves humor when the (male) victim is too young to appreciate it.
2. Given two young characters of similar age, refer to rule 1.
3. Molestation often serves humor when the victim is male.
1. Rule 3 is especially true of harem protagonists.
4. Molestation often serves humor when everyone involved is female.
5. Rape is never funny.

Whether any of these should or shouldn’t be the case isn’t my primary concern, but if anything along the way particularly bothers me, I’ll no doubt tell you.

1. Molestation serves humor when it’s accidental.

This is the case we see most often, probably, that tried-and-true recurring gag of comedic harem romance. Rarely the cream of the male crop, harem protagonists may be pitiable for other reasons, but their tendencies toward inadvertent groping and somehow always finding the best angles for upskirt views are the most physically evident of their failings, not lastly because they themselves often suffer physical retribution as a result.

Because I snagged the show and the OVA on the cheap recently, because I’ve been all about Ken Akamatsu lately, and because it’s basically harem canon by now, let’s turn our attentions to Love Hina. It’s very nearly all the exemplification we need here.

Responses to inadvertent gropes vary (as in real life), but for the most part this one’s easy to call. The molester didn’t mean it; he (or she) probably isn’t a certified creeper, and, if the victim spends enough time around said molester, she (or he) will normally come to her (or his) senses about it. Perhaps it makes light of a serious thing, but an accident’s an accident, and an accidental grope can really only go so far once the groper grasps the situation. No harm, no foul, shikata ga nai — after a megaton punch or a Shinmeiryuu secret technique relieves the heroine of her frustrations, at least.

I apologize for all the parenthetical gender confusion above; as you may well know, it’s normally safe to assume that the accidental molester in these situations is a straight male, so the resultant set of gender role assignments is what I tend toward in discussion. But I suppose it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t always the case, as Akamatsu reinforces in a certain later effort of his.

With that said, what makes accidental molesters funny? Or, even if you don’t find them funny, what makes them forces of humor?

Why, hello there, ironic mode! We’ve been seeing a lot of you lately. And that makes sense, this being (as I’ve seen one uncharacteristically entertaining Joyce critic put it) a veritable age of irony. Maybe that’s lamentable at times, but regardless, we’re talking about characters unusually prone to embarrassing situations and compromises of morality, who are in that regard lesser than average, and lesser-than-average is the bread and butter of ironic characters.

That’s not to say ironic characters (or the ironic mode) are doomed to be humorous¹; consider also the plot structure of those harem-laden shows which so commonly feature accidental molestation as a source of humor. In terms of Frye’s mythoi, we can usually call them comic (they end basically happily and indicate such all along, so we can be amused at them and not tense, and their societies are rather inclusive) or ironic (they fit familiar situations into unexpected schema, minus the comparatively clear goals of satire — and, given the ironic mode as well, we could call this “ironic irony,” however redundant that may be), and the ironic and comic mythoi (figuratively Winter and Spring respectively) are inexorably linked, so there’s generally something to laugh about even if the Mythos of Winter dominates.²

In short, the humor in accidental molestation (and in the inevitable reprisal of the molested) comes both from its unexpectedness and from our foreknowledge that everyone involved will probably shrug it off without suffering lasting trauma anyway. And it seems that both conditions must be met for a given event to contain humor potential; ef omits the latter, and I feel fairly confident in claiming that molestation in that franchise is most certainly not funny.

By extension, the humorous molestation in question likely must exist one or two removes from our experience of the reality of sexual harassment. Animation itself works through (and with) a layer of distortion, which helps, as do the trappings of the situations: the lack of ill intent, the often slapstick outcome, the pervasive comedic sense of well-being, and so on. Given too much familiarity, we move into the realm of horror, or tragedy (with which irony also shares a border, so to speak).³ I’ll cite ef again, though it probably belongs first and foremost beneath a heading that will show up later. Elfen Lied would work, too, provided you aren’t one of those who can’t tolerate it long enough to get to the part I’m thinking of.

2. Molestation serves humor when the molester is too young to appreciate it.

It’s widely acknowledged that sexual attraction isn’t a significant motivator of sexual assault (which is ultimately an assertion of power), and so we might say that the undercurrent of attraction in some animated acts of molestation sets them further apart from the viewer’s experience of reality. With that said, an honest lecher can still appear threatening, or at least unsettling. Kazurou Inoue’s Ai Kora stands out to me in that its protagonist seems almost dangerous compared to other harem leads; his active devotion to his assortment of fetishes renders certain of his acts of perversion somewhat more deliberate than what I’m used to from characters afflicted with sheer bad luck. Love Hina’s Keitaro Urashima collects photo booth pictures; Hachibe Maeda collects covert photos of his housemates. Both characters are pitiable, in a way, and both manage to be funny, but I have some difficulty relating to and laughing about a character whose ultimate intentions worry me. Hachibe is mostly harmless, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that the manga’s outcome won’t include some success of his that I don’t especially approve of, that he’ll definitely change into someone I can legitimately like.

There’s an obvious and easy way to remove that concern altogether: give us a protagonist who is not yet old enough to really worry about sexual attraction, at least in the same way a young adult would — and, as an added bonus, have the cast disarm him of sexuality every so often.

“You’re just a kid,” the cast of Negima! reminds Negi, and in doing so reminds itself of Negi, to some degree. Sexually and socially, he isn’t really a “threat,” and while the latter may change during the course of 260 chapters (as of now), the former really doesn’t; he remains his usual innocent self even when shape-shifting into the middle of puberty. As an extreme point of comparison, we have Evangeline MacDowell, who knows how to play up her sexuality as typically befits her fictional race; the libido spectrum of class 2-A/3-A more or less stretches from her to Negi, with everyone else falling somewhere between.

It follows that Negi’s acts of molestation can’t really be anything other than accidental; none of his motives suggest malicious intent. When he does show interest in girls — say, by noting that Nodoka is “very cute” in his class roster — it’s hard to interpret such actions as anything but innocent. In fact, Negi’s a victim as often as he’s a perpetrator — as often, if not more often. But we don’t really worry about him, thanks to a variant of the present rule: molestation serves humor when the (male) victim is too young to appreciate it.

This caveat spills over into rule 3 — really, all these rules are connected in some way — because I have yet to see an example of a rather young girl molested in the name of humor by an older assailant (excepting Kanamemo, maybe). Now, it’s not unreasonable that Negi might suffer some lasting trauma due to his…unique relationships with older girls, but the manga doesn’t push that. Just as he’s harmless to them, they’re harmless to him.

Unless you count suffocation/drowning, I guess.

But they have good intentions, or at least not bad intentions. As far as I can tell, this mostly serves to compound the victim’s status as ironic, or at least emasculate (as per rule 3; more on that in a moment). As far as his students are concerned, Negi is so innocent (biologically, even) that things like this couldn’t possibly bring about an indecent thought on his part. I just wonder what it’ll do to his conception of women in ten or so years.

It’s worth noting (albeit obvious) that this rule doesn’t really hold up with characters of very similar age, even if they’re all fairly young. We might say that, given two young characters of similar age, refer to rule 1, which is what most matters of humorous molestation hinge upon anyway.

3. Molestation often serves humor when the victim is male.

There seem to be few situations in the anime and manga I’m familiar with in which molestation of male victims is dealt with in a serious (that is, non-comedic) way. And when it is, the act is often ambiguous; it may be negative or it may not — in some cases, it may be molestation or it may not — depending on how we choose to read it. The most ambiguous example I can think of hails from the Welcome to the N.H.K. novel; Satou, our troubled protagonist, says of his high school crush (minor spoilers):

A few days before graduation, she even let me do her once.

It moved me deeply to think that the payoff for having kept on her good side over two whole years was that one single act. It was randomly exciting, yet it was also sad. In the end, I was able to do it just that once.

I felt like I should have done it a few more times. But then, I also felt that it might have been better for me not to have done it even that one time. I wondered which would have been right.⁴

Satou tells her later that “The fact that the one time we did it, we parted soon afterward…that was rather hard on me.” And, given the condition of said drug-addled hikkikomori at age 22, that may be a bit of an understatement. But the crush wasn’t especially right in the head, either, and we never learn the specifics of her advances. Maybe she pressured him; maybe he pressured her. Was it molestation of a sort? An act without much thought behind it? A genuine gesture of affection? Should we think of it (as I tend to) as simply a thing that happened, more passive than active (insofar as she “let him” do it)? It’s nothing if not ambiguous. See also FLCL, if you haven’t; I won’t even begin to spoil that one.

More commonly, though, harassment of men is played for laughs, even when intentional.

As the young man in question is, yet again, everyone’s favorite punching bag Keitaro Urashima, this particular scene also demonstrates that rule 3 is especially true of harem protagonists. And that makes a good deal of sense, given their previously-established ironic status. These incidents (like the one above) often take the form of a woman manipulating the easily-manipulated protagonist through sex appeal. It’s perhaps a bit difficult to say whether a male character’s susceptibility to these tactics demonstrates his healthy manhood or proves that he isn’t such a strong contender in the sexual arena — both could be true, and so I’m inclined to think that both probably are true, but in any case the latter is yet another diminishing force acting upon the character in question. It doesn’t help Keitaro’s case that he’s paralleled by Seta, who attracts half the regular female cast without really realizing it.

Lurking beneath this rule is, quite likely, the unfortunate fact that sex crime against men isn’t nearly as widely publicized or recognized for what it is as that against women. Consider the possible implications of molestation used to render a male character ironic; there’s a sense that a victimized man is somehow less of a man, or simply somehow lesser, for having been preyed upon and having been unable to do anything about it. Of course, haremettes generally don’t bear harem protagonists any genuine ill will, and whether these situations could or should be called molestation can be debatable, but the implications may be worth considering at least cursorily.

4. Molestation often serves humor when everyone involved is female.

Most shows that take homosexual relationships seriously are exempt from this rule. But, really, there aren’t too many of those. And, interestingly, the show from which I’m pulling my example does take at least one homosexual relationship relatively seriously.

Under rule 1, it’s accidental. Under rule 2, the impact on all involved is deliberately minimized. Rule 3 situations are at least marginally ambiguous, and they do serve the cause of irony. What’s your excuse, Kanamemo?

Not that I’m trying to single this rule out (well, maybe I am); I just think it works better when one or more other rules are in effect as well. And I’m not trying to fault anime as a medium here, as there are shows in which same-sex molestation is treated as a serious thing. It’s just that, in some cases, everyone involved being a girl seems to be the only justification I can find for these kinds of situations being employed for humor.

In Kanamemo’s case, this probably serves to make the molester ironic; in a way, it’s opposite rule 3. But, here, creators tread an uncomfortable line. Kanamemo’s execution just didn’t really work for me.

5. Rape is never funny.

I hope this one is self-explanatory.

I’ve never seen outright rape played for laughs in anime and manga — which is good, as I doubt I could stomach it. It is in reality too dire a thing, and I don’t know how a creator might render it sufficiently far from our experience to make it a laughing matter. The threat of SURPRISE BUTTSECKS and such might be a kind of exception to this; again, I don’t think there are a whole hell of a lot of franchises that take homosexuality too seriously, which is by no means a trait unique to anime and manga. But, generally, nothing ever comes of such threats.

I’ve tried to maintain a balanced perspective, neither discounting the seriousness of sexual assault nor making something out of nothing, but that’s hard to do when opinions on this sort of thing vary so widely, so I apologize if I’ve offended you somehow; it wasn’t intentional. You may notice, also, that I didn’t really deal with the issue of fanservice here, but I have a good excuse: that sort of thing is the topic of my next “What the hell is art?” post. Which I will finish. Eventually.

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Endnotes

¹“Comedy is…a representation of people who are rather inferior — not, however, with respect to every [kind of] vice, but the laughable is [only] a part of what is ugly.” (Aristotle. “Poetics.” Trans. Richard Janko. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 94.)

²I know, I know. I’m considering changing the Northrop Frye tag to Fryesturbation. In case you really need it again, here’s the SRS BSNS citation: Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

³“For the laughable is a sort of error and ugliness that is not painful and destructive, just as, evidently, a laughable mask is something ugly and distorted without pain.” (Aristotle. “Poetics.” Trans. Richard Janko. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 94.)

⁴Takimoto, Tatsuhiko. Welcome to the N.H.K. Trans. Lindsey Akashi. Los Angeles: Tokyopop, 2007: 105.

Tags: ai kora, comedy, harem, irony, kanamemo, love hina, mahou sensei negima!, northrop frye, welcome to the nhk

Thus spake Pontifus on Monday, 10 August 2009 at 6:55 pm, and Anime, Art and Culture, Literature, Manga expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.