Watching the reactions of Taizan 5 virgins to the Takopii anime has been pretty amusing, I have to say. You can’t really say “what a twist!” with him because there’s a twist every goddam page. But of course they don’t know that yet, haven’t been exhausted by the whole experience. There are very few mangaka about whom I’d say “they’re unique”, and Taizan being one of them is unequivocally a point in his favor in my view. That wouldn’t be enough of course – and by no means is uniqueness all that recommends him. He can be extremely effective at provoking strong emotions – in small doses. I’m here after all – and I wouldn’t be if I didn’t find the experience worth having.
The inevitable comparisons between Takopii no Genzai and Oyasumi Punpun are, again, something I totally get. But I see it this way – Punpun is a scalpel, and Takopii is a chainsaw stuck in the “on” position. I was actually quite relieved to see that (apparently) only the premiere ONA episode is going to be 37 minutes – this one was a TV-sized 22(ish) – because this series doesn’t need 10 TV eps worth of space. Not in terms of staying power, nor actual yardage – the manga is only 16 chapters. Even at this length no one in their right mind will be begging for more when it’s over.
Taizan is, at heart, a provocateur. And I think as much as anything this series is about what it makes the reader/viewer feel. Marina is a good example. Showing us her shitty home life is a highly provocative act, in my view. Do you feel sorry for her? Do you blame her parents for her behavior, on the grounds that she’s an innocent child? I don’t. I don’t give a fig about her mother being unhinged or her father a cheater. No human being – and guess what, children are human beings – would do the things Marina does unless they were evil at their core. Bullies choose to be bullies. Dog killers choose to be dog killers. Everything she does to Shizuka is calculated and pre-meditated. It’s not crimes of passion, it’s sociopathy.
And then there’s Takopii. Taizan keeps rubbing him in our faces incessantly, and he never lets up. No matter how badly things are effed up (sometimes by him) he just never gets it. And never shuts up. I think Taizan is genuinely trying to push the audience, get them to either hate Takopii or decide that he’s a noble innocent. Every time he pushes the reset button Marina outsmarts him, because he just doesn’t get it. That’s the series’ big joke for me – how heinous is it to unleash someone like Takopii on an alien planet when he’s dangerously incompetent about anything and everything related to the natives?
So yeah, the twist. This is the ultimate Taizan 5 provocation of the week – just what is one supposed to feel about this? I adore the whole thing, personally. No one cheered the little squid on harder than I did, except maybe Shizuka herself. Marina just kept digging the knife in deeper, doubling and tripling down on her depraved cruelty. Takopii did the world a favor – and I can say that because this situation is utterly ludicrous and bears no resemblance to reality. And the best part is Shizuka’s reaction, which again forces one to grapple with our instinctive reaction vs. our rational one. It’s not right, surely, that a little girl would stare down at a corpse and feel ecstatic glee. But we all understand her – you’re not fooling anybody if you say otherwise.
It’s interesting to me that normally I have no affection for fiction that’s provocative for the sake of being provocative, and yet I kind of get this series. I don’t know why that is, but I suspect Taizan’s complete abandon has something to do with it. He smacks you in the face with drama and perverseness non-stop, unrelentingly, gleefully. There’s no space to breathe and barely any to think. You just react, because that’s all he allows you to do. There’s an art to what he does, because no one else even tries to do it quite the same way. There’s no subtlety to it, no grace – but there is something sort of powerful in letting this sort of experience wash over you like a tsunami.
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