Chatty AF 239: Sanda Retrospective (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

TONY: She reminds me so much of characters from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez.

CAITLIN: Yeah!

SYLVIA: [Laughs] Yes!

CAITLIN: I was never a Jhonen Vasquez kid, but I clocked that immediately when I watched this show.

SYLVIA: That is a very good comparison, yes.

TONY: Like, she’s not intended to be princely in the normal way that we see anime princely girl characters at all, right?

SYLVIA: No, she’s a little creature.

[Chuckles]

SYLVIA: Who I do love a lot. But yeah, I mean—

CAITLIN: A creatura!

[Introductory musical theme]

TONY: Hello! Welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. I’m Tony. I’m a contributing editor here at Anime Feminist, and you can find me on all social platforms @empty-visions. And with me, I have Caitlin and Sylvia! If you guys want to introduce yourselves…

CAITLIN: Hi, I’m Caitlin Moore. I am an editor at Anime Feminist. I am a reviewer at Anime News Network. I am a preschool teacher, which will become relevant to this conversation.

TONY: Very relevant, yes.

SYLVIA: And, hi, I am Sylvia. You may also know me from the Anime News Network. I write episode reviews and also contribute to the This Week in Anime column. And this is my first time on The Anime Feminist Podcast. So, nice to be with you all.

TONY: We’re very glad—

CAITLIN: Excited to have you.

TONY: We could not think of a better person to have on the cast to talk about this particular anime, because this week we are talking about the queer battle shounen, bizarro gonzo Paru Itagaki mess-terpiece, Sanda.

So, Caitlin, Sylvia, how did you guys first get introduced to Sanda? Do you have history with Paru Itagaki? Just give me your thoughts.

CAITLIN: I saw the first episode because I was doing the preview guide. Oh, wait, no, I didn’t do the preview guide for Sanda. But everyone was like, “You gotta give Sanda a try!” And I had watched, like, one season of Beastars. I knew Paru Itagaki did that. I know she’s the daughter of Itagaki, the creator of Baki. And I knew that she has an old man fetish. But, yeah, we ended up watching it week to week with my anime club, and it was a wild time!

SYLVIA: That, it certainly is. So, I also was introduced to Itagaki through Beastars, the anime specifically. I had heard how wild it was beforehand, but that still didn’t really prepare me for all the shenanigans Itagaki gets up to. And Sanda certainly lives up to that reputation. Other than that, I’ve also read her one-shot Drip Drip, about the girl who gets nosebleeds when she tries to be intimate with fellas. And that is also very Itagaki and interesting.

TONY: Yeah! Okay, I have a couple questions. First… I think one question… We’ve been saying that things are very Itagaki. What does it mean for something to be very Itagaki?

SYLVIA: I guess, for me, it’s… sexually charged…

TONY: Oh, yes. [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: … in a weird way. And I also just love how she draws bodies. Like, they’re these weird, lanky conglomerations of limbs and eyes—and fur, I guess, in Beastars. But, yeah, I really like her art style.

CAITLIN: Very expressive. Yeah. For me, sexually charged is definitely a part of it. And just kind of unexpected. You never really know what path she’s going to go down. Taking these big swings at commentary and gender and sometimes missing, sometimes hitting, but always going somewhere interesting. And also, old man fetish.

TONY: We love old men here. Bring us some old man yaoi anime, please and thank you! For me, I would say the fact that it’s sexually charged is important, because with me, with Beastars, I wanted to like it so bad, but I found that… it was just like… the sexuality was so hetero that I was just like, “Oh, I can’t with this.” But then, Sanda, all of the sexuality feels very queer, right? Like, Ono feels like— There’s obviously Ono and Fuyumura, who feel like just… I mean, they’re main characters and they’re the main romance plot of this batch of episodes. I guess Sanda has a romance plot going on, but I don’t really care as much about it. And then Santa in his transformed state looks… it feels like something out of a Tom of Finland illustration or, you know, uh…

SYLVIA: Yeah, a little bit.

TONY: Just very muscular, very kind of recognizable to me as being influenced in some ways by gay illustrations, though arguably also by battle shounen body types. I mean, it’s not that far removed from the sort of body types that you see in Dragon Ball Z, but with the kind of slight homoeroticism of those just dialed up to ten, right?

SYLVIA: Well, he’s very seldom fully clothed, which I think plays into that a lot.

TONY: Yes, in the fights with the old man teacher, not that there’s ever necessarily a sexual element, but I do enjoy both of those men when they are in the shot together, because, I don’t know, just kind of a stupid old man who comes around to being a decent person, that makes me happy. I like the old teacher character.

But yeah, did we want to talk about what we think Santa kind of represents? Because clearly he represents this kind of… there’s a very sexualized aspect to him, right? But obviously, he also has some symbolic elements, too, right?

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. I think it’s interesting that he can honestly mean a lot of different things, I think, based on the context and what this series is doing with him, not just overall but in the moment. Like, yes, he is someone who responds to children’s hopes and dreams in a time when their hopes and dreams mean nothing to society. He is also an adult that they can trust as children, who is not going to try to use them. And so, I think there’s a lot of different ways that we can look at Santa within the series.

SYLVIA: Yeah, definitely. To me, he’s this idealized image of an adult, but specifically a child’s idealized image of what an adult is or could be. So, also, that child perspective informs how he acts. Like, you know, he’s obviously doing everything for children, but he also can’t hurt children. Even when he has to, he has to do it in these weird, roundabout ways. So, yeah, he’s idealized but also limited.

CAITLIN: Yeah. I also think what’s really interesting is the way that he’s kind of conceptualized as he has to respond to children’s wishes. I don’t know about you; I wrote lots of wishes to Santa that were never answered. He still owes me that pony.

[Chuckling]

TONY: Well, I think that’s interesting. As a teacher, I think about this in terms of unconditional positive regard, right? Respecting a child’s feelings, even when those feelings are wildly, horrifically irrational [Chuckles], is part of being a teacher or educator or a caretaker, right? And you can set boundaries and say, “Hey, I can’t do that,” but at a certain level, you do have to meet a kid where they’re at, right? Obviously, in real life— I keep using the word “obviously.” I need to stop. Okay, but in real life, I would never give one of my students my finger that I’ve cut off. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: No. No. I definitely would not give the children I work with everything they ask for either. You have to be able to say no to a three-year-old.

TONY: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s interesting as an educator, just finding that balance. And I think part of what Sanda tries to do over the course of the series is… I think he is starting to find that balance between giving and respecting and meeting every child where they’re at and respecting the hopes and dreams of every child, and then also recognizing, “Okay, but these wouldn’t actually be good for this child,” and trying to understand them on a deeper level. I mean, if I remember right, a lot of what Sanda does for… what’s her name? What’s the name of the girl who’s kind of a psychopath?

SYLVIA: Namatame.

TONY: Yeah, a lot of what he does for Namatame, if I remember right, was helping her to kind of connect with her actual, deeper desires and what she actually, on a deeper level, wants, which is that connection to her mother, unspoiled by the really harmful fetishization of childhood and self-hatred that destroyed her relationship with her mother, right?

SYLVIA: Yeah, this is the stuff I really like from Itagaki, because she takes this to its extreme, where Santa has to fulfill a child’s wishes; this child’s wish is she wants to kill Santa.

[Chuckling]

SYLVIA: So, how does he square that circle? But the way he does it is, like you just said, he digs at what her real motivation is, and it’s the fact that she has this… her mother in her past that imprinted this damage and trauma onto her, and she’s expressing it in this way that’s destructive both to Santa and to her. And his way of resolving that is to dig into, yeah, the meat of the problem, not what her surface-level desires are.

TONY: Yeah, and it’s also particularly interesting to think about it in terms of the thing that her mother is cutting off is her hands, right?

SYLVIA: Yeah, I mean, it’s a very intimate image.

TONY: Yeah. It’s… it’s… I mean, one’s hand is both what one uses to do things. And also, I remember for a long time, I’ve always thought of the hands as a representation of all the things that we’ve been through, right? Often we talk about if you have soft hands, that means you haven’t worked a day in your life, right? [Chuckles] And there’s this sense of loving the kind of challenges that you’ve been through that are represented by having rough hands, that I’ve heard from many people. I don’t know if that’s as prevalent in Asian culture as it is in American literary culture, but there’s often this sense of wisdom that comes from all of [one’s] experiences that’s represented by all of the wrinkles, everything in one’s hands. And then to just devalue that and say that all of that wisdom, all of that knowledge, all of that understanding that comes from experience has to be cut off and destroyed… that it is the enemy, right?

SYLVIA: Yeah, and that also ties into the fact that… like, they specify the hands are the one part of the body that they can’t revitalize and make look young again. They’re the one part of Oshibu that is still old. So, it’s like this window into what the adults’ true selves are, and given everything we see in this series, yeah, of course they’d want to cut that off.

TONY: Cutting off one’s true self. Yeah, that’s quite a way of looking at it, right?

CAITLIN: I’d like to, just for a second, sorry, go back to talking about Santa and the symbology behind it. And I do think the series kind of got a little bit in the weeds with the whole Black Santa thing.

TONY: What is going on there? [Laughs] Is he like Krampus? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Is he Krampus?

CAITLIN: That’s what I was saying! That the series needed this symbology for a Santa that is going to deal with naughty children or whatever, children who are out of control and are making harmful wishes. And it’s like, y’all, there’s so much existing mythology in different cultures about Santa dealing with naughty children. Right? Like, you could have a Krampus. He could start throwing coal at them.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: He could call in the Yule Boys.

[Laughter]

TONY: [Gasps] Not the Yule Boys!

CAITLIN: The Yule Boys! Yeah!

TONY: [Laughs]

SYLVIA: That sounds terrifying.

TONY: That sounds hot.

CAITLIN: No, no! The Yule Boys are not at all.

[Laughter]

CAITLIN: I’ll pull up the list of the Yule Boys. I’ll read them at the end of the episode. They can be the stinger or something.

TONY: I want some Yule logs from the Yule Boys.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: But there’s all these ways that… Mythologically, there are ways of punishing naughty children because, you know, honestly, cultures for a long time had this cultural conception of good children, bad children, that we have largely left behind, but it is something that has existed. So what is going on with the Black Santa thing? It’s just… It felt very confusing and muddled.

TONY: I—

SYLVIA: Yeah, I mean, that’s…

TONY: Go ahead. [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: I mean, that’s Itagaki. You know. She’ll swing a lot and sometimes she’ll miss. Yeah, it feels like her trying to adhere to the structure of the battle shounen. Like, you know, Sanda needs to get some kind of power-up at this point in the story, and that’s the one she went with? I probably wouldn’t have done that, but, you know.

TONY: I mean, I don’t know if this actually relates to it that much. I was going to say this kind of American conception of Santa Claus… I think that was kind of represented by every time the soundtrack came in with “Joy to the World” but in a minor key.

SYLVIA: It’s so funny. I died every time. It’s so good! [Chuckles]

TONY: It’s so goofy! And they would just be… And I wonder how that reads to a Japanese audience.

Do they have the same kind of just oversaturation of that kind of Christmas Carol stuff when they’re growing up so that when they see it in this, they’re just like, “Oh, my God. Not that.” [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: Yeah, I don’t know. I definitely would be curious what the average Japanese viewer responds to as opposed to, you know, us.

CAITLIN: Yeah. As Americans, we have a lot more Santa mythology that we’re kinda working through and Sanda’s very much interpreting this other mythology through. It’s— Yeah, no, it’s interesting. Sorry, that didn’t come out as coherent as I was hoping.

TONY: Yeah, there’s a lot of playing fast and loose with Santa mythologies. I mean, Santa probably is not that ripped in any Western [obscured by crosstalk].

CAITLIN: Generally, no.

TONY: [Chuckles] But that’s okay because I don’t mind, because I am the exact fan being serviced, so it’s good. We’re all good.

So, I wanted to ask about… We touched on the fetishization of childhood, and we were kind of talking a little bit about that. I thought that you might have some feelings about the trauma-free curriculum idea, Caitlin…

[Laughter]

TONY: … because I have feelings about it! I’m also a teacher!

CAITLIN: Yes! Yes! I think we both have a lot of feelings about the trauma-free curriculum, because a trauma-free curriculum is one that fails… A trauma-free curriculum is a failure of a curriculum, because children are traumatized by existing in the world. The world is traumatic.

TONY: [crosstalk] Yes. Yes. Yes.

CAITLIN: And so, you have two choices. You can address that trauma and give children a space to work through it, a framework for how to think about it and how to respond to it. You can give them context for what’s going on in a way that is digestible and developmentally appropriate for whatever age you’re dealing with. Or you can ignore it and leave them lost and alone and trying to deal with this thing that they cannot deal with on their own.

And Sanda is very, very clearly aware of this, that a trauma-free curriculum does not exist, because even if you lock them away in an abandoned shopping mall—which is currently a plot in Abbott Elementary, by the way… [Chuckles]

TONY: [Quavers nervously] I thought Ava was just a mess, not a disaster like that. Oh, God!

CAITLIN: [Chuckles] But even if you have them in this big complex and you provide everything for them, you know, they were born into the world, they had parents who raised them, you know, they are being taught values that might or may not actually account for who they are existing as, right? Namatame… there’s no zero-trauma curriculum for her. Right?

SYLVIA: It’s all trauma.

CAITLIN: Yeah! It’s all trauma. And by locking her away in the classroom, saying, like, “Oh, well, you’re a child who has murdered an adult. Therefore, you are dangerous. But also, you’re a child in this society that’s obsessed with children as a resource, so we can’t do anything with you,” and it’s just piling trauma upon trauma upon trauma.

SYLVIA: Yeah, well, I mean, because they do that in real life, too. Like, the problem children get funneled off to their own classes and schools and what have you.

TONY: Or prison.

SYLVIA: Yeah. Or juvie, yeah. Like, we essentially abandon them.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm.

TONY: Yeah! No, it’s very interesting for me because this is something I’ve thought about, and I’m going to think about it from a little bit of a slightly different angle. I think that on one hand, yes, absolutely, problem children often get kind of shift off into more restrictive environments where they are offered worse educations or they’re— Subini Annamma, who’s one of my favorite theorists and somebody I consider an acquaintance, she wrote a book called Pedagogy of Pathologization, in which she talks about how disabled girls of color get hyper-labeled, hyper-surveilled, and then hyper-punished based upon the way that they act in the world, and then that sets them on the trajectory towards being put in prison. The thing that I think is really interesting about the trauma-free curriculum is also that the kind of policing that’s required to maintain the sense of it being trauma-free is in itself traumatizing. Right?

CAITLIN: Right.

TONY: And this is huge. I’ve experienced this a lot as an educator. So, I’m an ELA teacher, right? Like, I’m an English language arts teacher. And so, a lot of what I have to engage with… I often teach American literature. That’s what I’ve taught for basically my entire time as an ELA teacher, is American literature. And I’m often confronted with the conundrum of my bosses want me to teach the truth of American history, right, but not that much. You know? It’s like, teach about slavery, but never mention… you know, never use the word “sexual assault,” right? Avoid… There’s this extreme kind of policing of how you as an educator are allowed to talk about race, talk about violence, talk about all these different things. And the reality is that our students are going to be exposed to the existence in reality of violence, whether we teach about it or not. Right? Now, we can create a space in which we are extraordinarily careful and find ways to address them that allow students different modalities, different approaches. But the reality is that the policing of curriculum, the policing of the students and what they’re allowed to talk about in class, what they’re allowed to ask questions about, causes often as much trauma and leaves students as unprepared for the real world and what they’re going to then experience in the real world as preventing them from learning about it, right?

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. Yeah. Totally.

SYLVIA: [crosstalk] Yeah, definitely.

TONY: And by “policing,” I mean like when educators are disciplined for doing these things, right? Students notice. And that leaves them with their own sense of trauma, right?

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. There was a big incident at one of my old schools where… And it was just the beginning… Well, not beginning. You know what I mean. When the Palestinian genocide was really ramping up.

TONY: And this is a huge example of it. I’ve seen this happen so often. Continue, but I have my own stories about this, right?

CAITLIN: And one of the teachers made… didn’t even directly reference… didn’t say anything direct about it, but made a reference to, like, “Hey, you know, take care of yourselves and your families. Children in the world are being hurt and dying,” or something like that. I didn’t ever see the actual email. But one of the parents came storming into the school, started accusing everyone of anti-Semitism, pulled his kids out of the program, just from this vague reference that there is harm being done to children in the world.

And this used to be a school where you could have frank conversations about that stuff. You know, when there was a mass grave of indigenous children discovered in Canada, we had conversations about that with the preschool children…

TONY: Wow.

CAITLIN: … and a shoe drive, like a donation drive.

TONY: Wow.

CAITLIN: And that was— Honestly, that should have been one of the signs that it was time to get out of Dodge at that school, because things had changed and were too far gone. But, you know, how do you teach about trauma without intensifying the trauma, but also coming from the understanding that a lot of these children already have trauma?

TONY: Well, and also a large part of it is trauma comes from— The definition of trauma, like when you look at trauma— So, I’m actually really good friends with Alex Shevrin Venet, who wrote the literal book on trauma-informed teaching, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education. She’s like a buddy of mine. [Chuckles] And the way she defines and understands trauma is it is suffering that goes beyond the body’s capacity to… that overwhelm… excuse me… suffering that overwhelms the body’s capacity to cope, right?

CAITLIN: Mm-hm.

TONY: And so— That’s any kind of suffering, right? And that means that what we need to do to prevent trauma is to create spaces and opportunities for children to use healthy coping mechanisms, right?

CAITLIN: Mm-hm.

TONY: To create connections between each other so that they can lean on each other for support, spaces in which they can go when they need to have some time to do some self-care, teach them self-care techniques, give them space if they need to step out of the room and take a few deep breaths.

You know, I was teaching about slavery the other day, and students were… you know, sometimes students had to step out and just calm themselves. But they knew that they had my support and they had the support of trusted adults in the room to be able to care for themselves, right?

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. Yeah.

TONY: And that’s what they needed. And then we talked about it, and me and the student talked about it, and we figured out different ways that we could approach those conversations so that they could feel a sense of trust that it would be for a contained period. There would be a container on the conversation, right? Structure, predictability, and flexibility: those are the things that Alex Shevrin Venet says prevent trauma in the classroom, right? But it is not avoiding every single topic that has anything to do with violence, right, or has anything to do with, you know… Yeah, so, it’s just very interesting to me, this concept of the trauma pre-curriculum. I feel like we’re getting a little in the weeds with our own personal stories, you know…

CAITLIN: We are, yeah.

TONY: … and veering a little away from the show itself, so maybe we should refocus.

CAITLIN: Let’s move this back. But yeah, basically, the idea of a zero-trauma curriculum is… It abandons children. It abandons children who have experienced trauma. It abandons children who will experience trauma, because the world is traumatic, and honestly the world of Sanda doesn’t seem any less traumatic.

SYLVIA: No. I do just want to say that I love hearing the perspective of two educators who have hands-on experience with this kind of stuff. I’m not a teacher, so, yeah, that’s great.

TONY: I’m glad that our lived experience can be enlightening rather than solipsistic, as that is always the risk when you do lived experience–based stuff. So, I’m very glad about that.

I think to kinda get back into the show itself, do we want to talk about kind of the plastic sur… the person who created the trauma-free curriculum, that principal?

CAITLIN: I mean, we probably should discuss him a bit, because he is the series’s villain and he’s kind of the architect of their suffering.

TONY: Yeah. Sylvia, do you have any thoughts on him? Like, what’s your read on this guy? [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: I think Oshibu is a great character. Like, design-wise… Again, this is the stuff Itagaki does really well. Who would have thought of a 80-plus-year-old dude who gets so much plastic surgery he looks young, but then if he gets too upset you can see his scars pop up? A really creative design for a villain.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. What I really love— Sorry to interrupt, but I just had— The way he uses his cane to create an angry face…

SYLVIA: Yeah! [Laughs] Pull the eyebrows down, yeah.

CAITLIN: A couple weeks ago, I got high and watched All’s Fair, that new Ryan Murphy show. And let me tell you, Kim Kardashian does not have the ability to create facial expressions anymore.

TONY: Too much Botox! [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: He [Oshibu] has had so much plastic surgery that he just cannot move his face in a way that can make human expressions. But I just, like… Ah, I love that. That’s such a fun touch. Anyway, sorry, Sylvia. Continue.

SYLVIA: No, exactly. It’s a real thing taken to a logical absurdity. And he’s also great because he functions as a foil for Santa, because whereas Santa is this idealized image of an adult, a child’s idealized image, Oshibu is an adult’s idealized image of what youth is. Like, it’s perfect, it’s plastic, and it’s a lie.

TONY: And perpetually happy—or that’s the look he has on his face.

SYLVIA: Yeah, he’s got his face stretched back, so his eyes are constantly bugging out and… yeah.

CAITLIN: His rictus grin.

TONY: Yeah. There’s kind of this whole genre nowadays of plastic surgery horror or, like… We see it in The Substance, we see it in that new… speaking of Ryan Murphy shows, The Beauty or whatever. It is just very fascinating, because I find this genre of horror kind of queer-coded, as a… I don’t know, I’m a gay person, maybe gay man, gay nonbinary, I don’t know. But I’m often surrounded by men who are on steroids and have their face filled to hell and back with all sorts of chin fillers and having had microneedling done, and, you know, I’m considering getting microneedling myself. Uh… [Chuckles] And it is just this very direct mirror of, like, “Oh, yeah, we kinda got Peter Pan syndrome going on over here. Oh, no!”

SYLVIA: Yeah, I mean, I’ve always enjoyed body horror, and I do think it is a very queer-coded mode of communicating things. And, I mean, now that I’ve finally figured out that I’m trans, that kind of makes a lot of sense to me, too, because bodies are these weird sacks of meat that you can manipulate in ways you wouldn’t think would be possible until you try it, so it is definitely a very fascinating angle to Sanda, as well. Because, like—

TONY: [crosstalk] And I’ll say— Yeah, continue, sorry.

SYLVIA: No, I was just gonna say. Santa, too. Like, the Sanda–Santa transformation, that is also body horror.

TONY: Oh, my gosh, the sequence is where he’s going in between the different forms that he can take and it goes on for four minutes of just the most crazy transformation sequence sakuga, with just… That was so compelling. I really enjoyed that.

SYLVIA: Yeah, because when you get down to it, puberty is body horror. Your body is doing these things that you cannot control, and it makes you super emotional and look weird, and, yeah, it sucks.

CAITLIN: Yeah, no, I mean, even cisgender, going through puberty was such a uncomfortable, horrifying experience because it’s like, hey, I didn’t consent for my body to do this. I did not give consent for my boobs to grow. I did not give consent to bleed out of my genitals. This is not something that I desire. Stop. Stop it! Stop it. [Chuckles] Don’t do this.

TONY: Yeah. And, I mean, thinking about that, it’s even more astonishingly dysphoric of an experience if you’re trans, right, because you’re like…

CAITLIN: Yeah, yeah. No, I’m saying like even for me…

TONY: … not only is my body transforming; it’s also transforming in the opposite direction of how I want it to. Not me personally. I did not experience this. I sort of did? I didn’t? It’s weird. Anyways.

SYLVIA: Yeah, it’s not really something I was completely cognizant of at the time, but, yeah, looking in retrospect, that was definitely an aspect to it. And now, on the flip side, now that I’m going through puberty, too, it’s like, well, this is one I actually am opting in to do willingly. That’s a whole nother discussion, but it’s very interesting, I think.

TONY: Consensual puberty. [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: Yes, exactly.

TONY: Very different. Yeah, and I think that… Fuyumura’s kind of an interesting character in that regard because… What did you guys make of Fuyumura’s feelings about her body? Because she seems to have this really complicated relationship with her lankiness, her almost androgynous, prince-like, but also somewhat grotesque body, grotesque in the sense that she reminds me so much of characters from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez.

CAITLIN: Yeah!

SYLVIA: [Laughs] Yes!

CAITLIN: I was never a Jhonen Vasquez kid, but I clocked that immediately when I watched this show.

SYLVIA: That is a very good comparison, yes.

TONY: Like, she’s not intended to be princely in the normal way that we see anime princely girl characters at all, right?

SYLVIA: No, she’s a little creature.

[Chuckles]

SYLVIA: Who I do love a lot. But yeah, I mean—

CAITLIN: A creatura.

SYLVIA: It is all about that inherent awkwardness of being an adolescent, of not being a child, not being an adult, not quite being a boy or a girl. It’s this nebulous in-between state that… yeah, you can’t prepare yourself for that.

CAITLIN: Yeah, I… Personally, I read her as kind of intersex, which is purely my interpretation. There’s not really anything as far as I know in the canon to support that. But I think that the way the story talks about bodies and her body specifically is interesting. And I think it’s one of the spots where it gets a little muddled, because there’s the whole thing that’s like, well, the children at the school are supposed to be androgynous. They don’t sleep, so that they can delay puberty. The delaying sleep thing is also one of those things that’s super wild as an educator, because you know how much kids need sleep, how incredibly important it is. But, you know, and she is androgynous, but she’s standing there and looking in the mirror and being like, “I don’t have boobs!” And it’s like, well, does anyone have boobs at this school? So, it is a little muddled there. And Ono is having all this dysphoria because her body developed all of a sudden. So, yeah. No, I think the show is a bit confused there. I think it’s one of the spots where Itagaki got kinda lost in the weeds.

TONY: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that that arrested development thing in general… I think it has so many different symbolic or even… meanings that are just very potent that get kind of muddled with all the different layers of symbolism and possibilities for symbolism. I find Sanda to be doing kind of a similar thing in terms of the way it approaches symbolism to something like Yurikuma Arashi, which has just got these very… it’s swinging for the fences, doing very blatant symbolism. The symbols are quite amorphous in meaning in that they mean one thing one scene and they mean something else another scene, and those meanings sometimes contradict each other. [Chuckles] And, like—

CAITLIN: I do think a lot about the otter in Sarazanmai just singing, “I am an abstract concept.”

[Chuckling]

TONY: Honestly goated. And I think that the arrested development thing is interesting on a number of levels because it’s got a metaphor for a metaphor for a metaphor, right? It’s like, you can’t dream, so it’s a metaphor for not being able to dream anymore because adults have taken away any hope for a better future or the possibility to imagine a better future, because the best time of your life is when you have no agency. But then, also dreams themselves are a metaphor, right, for having a better future, for one’s connection to one’s subconscious and the deeper, truer parts of oneself, that one is scared of confronting, right? And almost needing to be protected from those, which we then see with Ono, who, like, the minute she dreams, she has to confront, like, “Oh, wait. Oh, fuck. I’m a lesbian! Fuck!“ You know?

[Laughter]

TONY: So, it’s just like… there’s so many different layers of how it operates symbolically, and the ending makes it messy. But, yeah, I don’t know, [Chuckles] what are your thoughts, Sylvia? Seems like you might have some thoughts. [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: Well, I tend to appreciate messiness when a story is swinging for the fences like this, because, I mean, you’re right: if you follow through certain metaphors and symbols, you can’t really carry them all the way home, but at the same time, it’s that unique amalgam of different images and readings and perspectives and interpretations that… when you get down to the fundamentals of it, that’s what makes art interesting, is you’re telling a story about something that’s also about something else that can also be about something else, you know, ad infinitum. With Sanda specifically, yeah, definitely a hell of a lot going on there in terms of adolescence, queerness… I mean, you know, you have this lesbian love story between Ono and Fuyumura, but we don’t really see it gestate at all. The story begins with Fuyumura looking for Ono because she’s disappeared. That’s the inciting incident of the story. And then when they do finally reunite, it’s awkward and weird and they don’t really know how to talk to each other anymore because one of them has grown up, one of them is not allowed to, and that causes pain and confusion and all sorts of good stuff like that.

TONY: Yeah, I mean, there is this sense that before and after puberty there is this disconnect that it’s hard to reach across with them.

SYLVIA: Well, I also think about looking at this through the perspective of what we’re seeing in the real world, which is where queerness in children is being heavily policed and essentially you have governments attempting to erase it entirely, framing any child who identifies as trans or gay or lesbian or what have you like “Oh, they must be groomed. We have to…” I mean, that’s kind of like the quote-unquote trauma-free curriculum, is these children aren’t autonomous human beings; they’re property that we have to control and measure and keep under our watch at all times, because that’s what we want to do, because we’re the adults in the room and you don’t get a say about anything.

CAITLIN: Right. And that does bring things back to one of the things I wanted to say, which is, puberty is uncontrollable. It is unpredictable. Child development from the very start happens at its own rate, right? But puberty especially is when it starts being like, someone’s growing boobs, someone’s crying, someone’s got boners 24/7 and someone’s testicles haven’t dropped yet. And it’s this very uncomfortable liminal stage where someone’s body might be adult but they’re still emotionally a child, or emotionally they’re a child sometimes and other times they need to be treated like something closer to an adult. You know, puberty is this moment that’s very difficult to control, and, Sylvia, as you were saying, this is all about control. So, if you control puberty, you eliminate that liminal stage. You have a lot more control over the children.

SYLVIA: Yeah, because ultimately the impetus for this is that the population is declining, so they want to make sure these kids grow up quote-unquote “healthy,” i.e., they marry each other and make lots of other babies that can go into the system and keep the wheels of the nation going. And so, any child who would not fit into that mold, i.e., you know, a lesbian like Ono, she has no place there. As soon as she hits puberty, she is no longer of any use to anybody anywhere in the world of Sanda.

CAITLIN: It might be— Mm, I think it might be time to talk about… to get into it.

TONY: Yeah, we should. Yeah, it’s time.

CAITLIN: It’s time.

TONY: [dull] It’s time to talk about the ending.

[Chuckling]

TONY: So, if you’ve gotten this far in the frickin’ podcast and you still haven’t watched the end of the show, we highly suggest that you watch it and then come back because we are going to spoil the hell out of it.

CAITLIN: Yeah. It’s time. It’s time for that conversation. So, this is— I have some very controversial opinions about this. [Chuckles]

TONY: I’m ready for them. I have absolutely no idea what Sylvia thinks, so I’m very excited to get to learn Sylvia’s take on this. And then I’ll save my opinions for last because I’m not… ah, my opinions are complicated. So, go ahead. What’s your hot take, Caitlin?

CAITLIN: Okay. I believe… that narratively Ono had to die. So, Sanda is a story where the characters exist to fulfill a narrative purpose. And they may be well-written and we may love them like our own children. But ultimately, they are there to express symbolic and thematic concepts. Ono… The concept that Ono was expressing, the abandonment that happens when a child does something out of their control, the abandonment that happens when a child appears to be an adult, the abandonment that happens when a child is queer and is not able to fulfill their accepted purpose, is deadly. It is deadly in the story and it is deadly in real life. And so, if we are going to have the conversation about those topics, we need to unflinchingly, unflinchingly look at the consequences of it. I think that Ono being queer is important to it. There are some people who believe that Ono died so that Fuyumura can get with Sanda. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.

TONY: Oh, absolutely not. No. No, no, no.

CAITLIN: No. I think that that’s a big misread of the series. If you’re someone who reads it that way, sorry! But yeah, no, I think just within the structure of the story, Ono was marked for death

SYLVIA: Yeah, I do pretty much agree with that. I think it also fits thematically where the story had been and was going to be at that point. I mean, I do understand the frustration with this. I mean, you have the quote-unquote “Bury Your Gays,” where if you look at the history of queer fiction, that is a thing that pops up a lot, that I think especially in older lesbian literature they weren’t allowed to have happy endings. So, one way you could mark the progression of queer narratives is that there’s an allowance for happy endings now, which is good. Thumbs up. I’m all about that. But I do think there should also be the full breadth of the human experience, which is not all sunshine and roses. And I guess it’s also a little more difficult for me to be too upset about what Sanda does here when last year we got a lot of really good and interesting queer anime that kind of runs the gamut of cute fluff like There’s No Freaking Way I’m Gonna Be Your Lover! Unless… or whatever it’s called.

CAITLIN: Unless…

TONY: YuriMuri. There’s way too many acronyms. I just can’t with all the freaking acronyms. Anyway, sorry.

SYLVIA: Lot of words. But yeah, I mean, you’ve got that. You’ve got The Summer Hikaru Died, which is doing queer horror exquisitely. You’ve got This Monster Wants to Eat Me, which really surprised me with how interesting it became in the end. So, when I look at Sanda, I’m like, this obviously isn’t a queer-focused narrative. Queerness is an important part of it and it’s something that it seems genuinely interested in, for all the reasons we’ve discussed prior to this, but I was not shocked when Ono died in the end—and not just because it had been spoiled for me, because everyone talked about it as soon as the episode aired. But yeah.

CAITLIN: I also… I fully agree that the fact that we have a lot of queer narratives now that end happily means that there’s room now to kind of explore the darker, more troubling side of how society reacts to queerness.

SYLVIA: And again, I think it especially feels, for lack of a better word, correct to tell a story like this now, when there has been so much prejudice and persecution against queer children in particular, for all the reasons I previously mentioned. I mean, this is a kind of devastating thing to think about, when you think about all these children who are not allowed to be who they are and have to conform or die, essentially.

TONY: Yeah, I mean, to me it’s complicated because I think it’s—

SYLVIA: It is very complicated. [Chuckles]

TONY: [crosstalk] It is. I personally don’t think it’s— I agree with you guys that given the surfeit of really good queer anime that have come out recently, I’m not particularly inclined to view this necessarily from a representation angle in terms of, like, we just need more gays to increase the quantity, right? For me, the reason that I find it a little bit frustrating is that honestly Ono was the thing I was enjoying the most about the series. And—

SYLVIA: That’s definitely fair. Yeah. I also very much enjoyed her.

TONY: And I was loving watching her begin to explore her sexuality. Like, the dream sequence… I think watching the dream sequence was probably the highlight of the entire series for me. I love—

CAITLIN: My jaw dropped when Ono did that.

SYLVIA: I was not expecting to see fingering in the anime about Santa Claus.

[Laughter]

SYLVIA: So, thank you, Paru Itagaki. Love you!

TONY: [crosstalk] Like fully on-screen graphic fingering! [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: That shit kicks ass.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Yeah, like no question what’s going on there!

TONY: Right. And so, it was frustrating to me to lose out on the part of the series that I was kind of most enjoying, and I’m feeling a little bit like, well, now that she’s gone, do I feel that much more motivation to continue watching the show? I love Fuyumura, but I don’t feel as much investment in the other characters as I did in Ono. I found her intensely, intensely relatable. And I know that’s just my personal feelings more than it is a critical evaluation. Just I thought she was really well-written and interesting and had a deep interiority, and I was interested to see how her and Fuyumura might try to resolve their thing. And it almost feels like a cop-out to have the show end with an “I love you” but that she can’t hear so we can’t know how that would have played out. I kind of would have wanted to know that.

Additionally, to me, the death of Ono of growing pains undermined some of the series’s other themes. Like, if a lot of the series is about how growing up is not something to fear, you can grow up, you shouldn’t be afraid of dreaming, you know, dreams should be valued and loved and cared for, right? But it seems like it almost reinforces the idea potentially that— Well, first of all, I’m not sure if it necessarily reinforces the idea that dreaming is something necessarily for these children to fear. I mean, I think you’ve made arguments, Caitlin, that it’s partially because there is simply no medical infrastructure to support somebody who’s going through this because they don’t give a shit; she can just die and nobody cares, because she’s been abandoned by the systems.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

TONY: Yeah, I don’t know. You can speak to that, but I do have a bit of a retort once you’ve said so. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: She’s growing up in a way that is out of their control. And I don’t know what the plan in universe is for all of those kids the first time they go to sleep and they wake up with completely different bodies, how that is handled in universe. I don’t know if Itagaki knows at this point. But presumably there is some kind of cover, something to handle that. And I have been thinking about your statement about how you disagree with the ending because it shows growing up as something to fear since the first time you said it when the episode came out. But you can finish what you’re saying, and then maybe we can talk about that.

TONY: Yeah, well, I mean, I think the thing is that even if it’s ultimately society’s abandonment of adolescents that’s to fear, right, it does narratively… again, there’s things that I was kind of excited for the series to explore. Like, what would happen if our protagonists did the ultimate rebellion and decided to sleep? [Chuckles] You know? And I’m not telling Paru Itagaki what she should have done, right? That’s very silly, right? And that’s part of why I’m a little bit like, I don’t know if I should really be making this critique, because I’m basically asking the series to be something other than it is, which feels unfair. But at the same time, it’s a little bit like, okay that was a very clear narrative possibility. It’s surprising that they never just thought of, like, yeah, why don’t we just sleep and… Or, why isn’t that a potentiality? And it seems almost a little bit like foreclosing that for whatever reason, and I don’t want to ascribe a reason that is out of line, right, but foreclosing on that possibility that the characters actually end up going through puberty and embracing adulthood, to an extent. So, to me, I just am… I’m a little bit like, okay, well, I guess we’ll see where Paru Itagaki takes us, but I’m just a little frustrated. [Chuckles].

CAITLIN: Yeah. Yeah.

SYLVIA: I think that is very fair.

CAITLIN: I think it is fair that there was something that you were looking forward to the show exploring from your own perspective and that pathway is closed off. I’ve experienced that all the time.

SYLVIA: Yeah, I mean, would I rather Itagaki have explored Fuyumura and Ono more as opposed to, like, the weird black Sanda stuff? Yeah, I think that might have been a more interesting use of the story’s time. But, you know, them’s the breaks.

CAITLIN: I mean, yeah, she’s a… you know, if you are going to love mess, you have to accept that sometimes it’s going to be a different mess than the one you were hoping to dig up.

TONY: And that’s the thing. Like, what you said earlier really speaks to me, which is that the benefit, the thing that makes Paru Itagaki so wonderful, is that you never know what she’s gonna do! Right? And so, whatever I’m thinking would be like the cool rebellion that the characters could have done or the direction that this series could take after this, she’s gonna do something completely different. And, you know, maybe it’ll be amazing and interesting and fascinating. But whatever it is, I will never see it coming. [Chuckles] You know? That makes the whole “Why didn’t she do this thing that I was really enjoying a lot?” feel a little silly when it’s just like, well, that’s part of what we love about her work, is that you can’t predict it and she’s not going to do necessarily what you want. She’s not going to service you as a fan except for, you know, giving you lots of… The one thing that you can predict is we will see more of Santa shirtless. That’s the one thing you can predict.

CAITLIN: Paru Itagaki makes fanservice for Paru Itagaki, and she does not care what you like. And I respect that so much.

TONY: Thankfully, my taste aligns with hers, so we are okay.

CAITLIN: [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: She is all about burly old dudes and furries, and God bless her.

CAITLIN: God bless her.

TONY: Furry muscular old dudes. Do we want to talk about what we’re hoping for? I feel like this kind of brings us to what we’re hoping for for season 2. I don’t know. I kind of want it to continue to be completely off the wall. I feel like it’s wrapped up so many of its plot threads that it can only get more insane from here, so I’m excited to see what insanity lies ahead. But what do you guys think?

CAITLIN: I want Fuyumura and Santa to kiss!

TONY: What!

CAITLIN: [through laughter] No!

SYLVIA: [Laughs]

CAITLIN: [through laughter] No!

SYLVIA: How dare you.

TONY: Caitlin cancelled.

[Laughter]

CAITLIN: No, I am… you know, with Sanda, I’m just kinda like, “Okay, my body is ready. My brain is ready. Do with me what you will, Paru Itagaki.”

SYLVIA: Yeah, I co-sign that statement. I do like the narrative thread we kind of leave off on, which is where Sanda comforts Fuyumura by being like Sanda instead of Santa, being a fellow kid who knows what she’s going through to the extent that he can, and I guess to the extent that any of them can escape this, it’s going to be through that kind of solidarity. I mean, I would love if future Fuyumura content explores her identity and possible queerness more. Again, I don’t know how the show would do it now that Ono is deceased, but I mean if there is a way to do it, I would love to see it.

TONY: Yeah, I mean, I would love to see that. I want the series to get more queer. I feel like— Something tells me that… Is his name Amada? Amane? No, no, no, hold on. Give me…

CAITLIN: Yeah, I think it’s Amane.

TONY: He hasn’t gotten a huge amount of development so far.

SYLVIA: Amaya?

CAITLIN: Amaya!

TONY: Amaya, yes.

CAITLIN: Amaya.

TONY: I want to see Amaya get some development and I want him to be gay. Please make him gay. He feels like a gay boy to me.

CAITLIN: [Chuckles] He’s such a bro! I love him.

TONY: You think he’s a bro? [Gasps]

CAITLIN: I mean, you know, in the colloquial sense.

SYLVIA: Yeah, I actually— I would like that a lot, to kind of serve as a couplet with what the show did with Fuyumura and Ono. Like, if it also explores Amaya being a gay boy who doesn’t really know what’s going on, could be definitely an avenue through which to do interesting things.

TONY: Yeah, well, I mean he has not expressed any interest in girls so far, so I’m not sure what that means. I want to see more fanservice of their teacher because I think he’s hot. That is what I want.

CAITLIN: Yeah, I feel like we’ve really only scratched the surface of talking about the relationships between adults and children that Sanda is really going into, but we are running out of time.

SYLVIA: True, yeah.

CAITLIN: There’s so much to talk about with this show.

SYLVIA: There’s a lot.

CAITLIN: It’s crazy how dense it is.

TONY: A lot. Yeah. [Chuckles] And you know, I’m glad that Paru Itagaki has given me something that I can sink my teeth into and scratches my particular itches.

SYLVIA: Yeah, it is for sure a very chewy story to digest. Lots to work through.

TONY: I’m sure that we will reconvene as best as we can, if you’d be open to it, Sylvia, when season 2 comes out. [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: Yeah. Well, whenever.

TONY: Wonderful. So, any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

SYLVIA: I guess I’ll just reiterate that I would like to thank you both very much for inviting me to participate in this very mature conversation about a very dignified anime series.

TONY: “Dignified” is one word for it. [Chuckles]

SYLVIA: Yeah, I hope we get to do this again in the future.

CAITLIN: We would be happy to have you back any time.

TONY: Yes, very much agreed with Caitlin there. Alright, yeah! And with that, this has been Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. If you like what you heard, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It helps other people to find us. And, yeah, if you really like what you heard, you can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/animefeminist. And it helps us to make all of the amazing anime journalism that we do and pay our contributors well. We will likely be having a fundraiser drive pretty soon, so watch out for that. If you subscribe to our Patreon, you also get access to our patron-only Discord! It’s a very fun place. It is how I got involved in the Anime Feminist community in many ways, after having pitched a couple articles. And it is, yeah, just a fun place. And you also get access to some bonus episodes, which we will be recording soon. I just gotta get on that. So, with that, thank you for listening. See you all later.