Aggretsuko, Life Scripts, and The Search for Meaning

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1

I’m pretty sure I screamed in delight when I opened Netflix to see Aggretsuko. For the uninitiated, this series features shorts about Retsuko – an adorable red panda with a calm, docile appearance that belies roiling rage begging to be released. Unlike the shorts, however, the Netflix series takes time to weave a cohesive narrative and delve a bit deeper into the motivations and struggles of our favorite red panda and her similarly adorable animal friends (including Fenneko, a fennec with a hilarious penchant for cyber-stalking, and Haida, a good-natured, if somewhat awkward spotted Hyena).

I watched the Aggretsuko shorts before it became a Netflix series when I was still in college, so this kind of reality was still a far-off mirage. Now that I’m in the same stage (and age) in life as Retsuko, the scenarios hit a little harder, and are a little less easy to chuckle at. Retsuko steels herself daily against the onslaught of struggles (unfortunately) typical of an average workplace – power harassment and sexism (courtesy of the porcine Boss Ton and his lackey/Professional BootLicker™ Komiya), drama and gossiping (courtesy of the brown-nosing deer, Tsunoda, and the garrulous, gossipy hippo, Kabae), and perhaps worst of all, Retsuko’s own helplessness and self-doubt.

Normally, Retsuko’s way of dealing with the mundane, soul-killing routine her life has become since joining the trade firm at 20 is to patronize a nearby karaoke establishment and scream out her emotions to death metal for catharsis. It’s only until her free-wheeling, peripatetic friend Pukko (a pink cat) makes an appearance and asks Retsuko if she’s actually happy despite her stable life that Retsuko begins to re-evaluate.

She then makes a series of well-intentioned, yet clumsy and misguided moves that thankfully land her in the hands of some kind older women who outrank her at the same company, Washimi (a prim, precise secretary bird) and Gori (an effusive, enthusiastic gorilla).

While Retsuko’s plight was relatable up to a point, sometimes I found her decisions to be beyond a little misguided, crossing over into just plain naive.

When she gets excited over the prospect of being able to leave her current job to work for Pukko’s business venture, she doesn’t think to ask Pukko detailed questions about the business. This backfires hard when she starts giving her supervisors sass at work (ALWAYS a bad idea. Also, searching for quitting-work stuff on the work server? Retsuko? More like Reckless-ko), leading to her demotion. But I guess that’s to be expected when you’ve lived your whole life more or less how you’re ’supposed’ to.

In modern society, the script we’re “meant” to follow usually looks a little something like: go to school, get a degree, find a spouse, raise kids, work for life, retire. Some people expect to follow this script, and there’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily, if that is what you want for your life. But there’s a difference between wanting something because you want it and wanting something because you’re “supposed” to want it.

The thing is, in my experience, if you run after something just to escape something else, eventually you’ll find yourself wanting to escape that, as well. Because you’re choosing out of desperation, not passion. And if you walk (or run) around the problem, you’ll find yourself right back at square one.

Retsuko decides at one point that she can always get married and escape the demands of work life and the responsibility of supporting herself. Thankfully, Washimi and Gori are quick to point out that she’d be trading one set of problems for another – the drudgery of grunt work for the drudgery of housework. (Always choose the option where you have the reins of your own finances.)

But the really big elephant in the room (no, not the company president Washimi works under) is the, uhm. Dysfunctional questionable way of dealing with her emotions – the whole death metal schtick that drew many viewers to Aggretsuko. Retsuko’s situation is a recipe for frustration, to be sure, though I wonder if she’d be screaming well into her 30s if not for the intervention of Gori and Washimi, and hell, even Pukko to some extent.

In the end, due in part to a whirlwind ‘romance’ she has mostly by herself with another red panda who works at the company, Retsuko becomes able to admit to herself when she wants something outside of the script laid before her. There’s signs of a possible connection between she and Haida, someone who’s shown he cares for her in his own fumbling, indirect way. Like their possible budding romance, navigating the waters of early 20s life is something I’ve found that’s best taken one day a time, being sure to move toward something desired instead of away from something undesirable.

Here’s hoping for a season 2!

Living Forward: How A Cartoon Horse Saved My Life

Written by Devonn Patterson

WARNING: Spoilers for Season 4 of BoJack Horseman below.

Anyone who knows me well knows how much I love animation. I’m definitely that friend that is more into cartoons than “real-life” movies, but I’m past the point where I feel bad about it. Animation, as Brad Bird once said on the commentary of his 2005 hit The Incredibles, is not a genre, but a medium. It has special meaning to me because it literally and figuratively gives color to my life; it’s a healing and invigorating force. Most of us know that animation is far from ‘kid’s stuff’ nowadays, especially with the advent of online original animated shows. One Netflix original has enthralled me for the last two years, and its protagonist is an anthropomorphic animated horse with depression.

BoJack Horseman from 04×06 lying in bed and thinking, “Piece of shit. Stupid piece of shit. You’re a real stupid piece of shit.”

(Image credit: horseman-bojack.tumblr.com)

BoJack Horseman has surprised a lot of people with its depth and storytelling, including myself. A friend once told me (before I goaded her into watching it) that she “thought it was like Family Guy but with a horse,” and nothing could be further from the truth (full shade to Family Guy). I began watching it with friends when I returned from studying abroad in 2015. Intrigued, I sought out the series to finish on my own. What began as an introduction to possibly one of the biggest animated jackasses I’d ever seen on screen eventually helped me further my own journey into self-improvement. At the time, there were only 2 seasons, and by the end, I was hooked and invested in each of the main characters.

A lot of viewers see themselves in BoJack, but I look at BoJack and I see someone I truly do not want to become in any way, shape, or form. This is not to say that I am free from self-loathing, destructive impulses, and the urge to isolate and push others away just like he does, but I have refused to let them to run my life. I think this is partially because I was lucky (?) enough to reach my low point in when I was 20 – I’m 24 now –  a relationship violently imploded, fully shifting me off center and into a chasm of despair. Feeling that I’d mostly hit rock bottom, I began to take an honest look at where I’d come from and how I – not anyone else – landed myself in that kind of situation; the choices and unspoken needs and hurts that drove me into the arms of someone with whom I wasn’t compatible.

I see many people in my past and present throughout BoJack Horseman. Take Princess Carolyn’s need for validation and desire to have a loving relationship conflicting with her devotion to her work and combine it with BoJack’s snarkiness, crippling emotional vulnerability, and tendency to lash out at others when hurt, and you have a simulacrum of my mother and father. And it’s because I saw my father in BoJack that I was even further motivated to not end up like him.

While I have my mother’s quiet mannerisms and conscientiousness, my passionate, emotionally intense temperament is more like my father’s. When we feel passionate about something, we won’t back down, which led to a lot of bumping heads. I stopped speaking to him completely in my late teens, something I didn’t realize was the first step on a long journey to healing from the emotional and religious abuse I endured at his hands. Free from his toxic influence, I was able to safely to step back and evaluate the relationship, and found him to be belligerent, childish, emotionally volatile and apt to lash out at others when hurt. I then had a startling realization; these were my worst traits in my teen years. This cost me a lot of relationships and earned me a lot of hurt, but at some point I realized that just because I was hurting didn’t give me the right to hurt others.

Or, as Todd tells BoJack plainly in Season 3, Episode 10, It’s You:

Todd from BoJack Horseman saying “You are all the things that are wrong with you.”

This, I believe, is where both BoJack fails, at least initially. As of the current season, he has learned that his actions have consequences and begun to internalize and implement the lessons that will prevent him from making more mistakes and finally allow him to heal.

Healing, to me, has to come to mean taking full responsibility for oneself. A lot of people stumble through life blaming everyone but themselves for their pain and their foibles, but all that does is rob one of a rich opportunity for self-discovery and developing personal power. That includes preventing your suffering from affecting others as much as possible, but more importantly, not turning the knife on oneself. In Season 1, Episode 5 (Live Fast, Diane Nyugen), Diane confesses to BoJack that she still wants validation from her toxic, emotionally abusive family, and asks if that’s “really stupid.” When BoJack says yes – definitely not the answer Diane was hoping for – and stresses the importance of moving on and “living forward,” Diane responds:

 

 

Diane Nyugen saying: “Yeah, but every time I come back here, they—“

BoJack interrupting, enjoining,: “So don’t come back here!”

 

In essence, BoJack urges Diane not to turn the knife on herself – to not do something that will just make her feel invalid and feel bad about herself. This scene has always stuck with me, but has greater meaning for me today. I watch this scene and remember that if my healing is to be complete, I need to do my best to not re-open my wounds again and again while they heal. I need to, in BoJack’s words, not “go back there.” And though sometimes we may need to retreat to our own figurative cabin in Michigan to start to figure out where to go from where we are, it is indeed important to “keep living forward.”

Todd Chavez telling Princess Carolyn: “The woods are dark and scary, but the only way out is through.”

(Image credit: horseman-bojack.tumblr.com)

Stolen Brilliance: Whitewashing and the White Mind as Perfection

Written by Devonn Patterson

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR BOTH “Get Out” and “Ghost in the Shell” BELOW.

Cultural appropriation is as old and American as colonization. Time and time again, white society finds a way to go beyond merely enjoying something to wanting to possess it. It happens with music, food, clothing, and other cultural practices from all around the globe. But for people of color, perhaps the most insulting appropriation is when it literally comes down to our bodies; that with which we physically navigate the world and makes us targets all the same.

This is neatly exemplified in the main conflict of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”

For those who haven’t seen the film, main character Chris, a photographer by trade, is captured by his white girlfriend Rose’s family and prepped for a surgery that will transfer the consciousness of an old, blind white man who covets his vision to his body. Right before the family turns on him, Rose’s father gives an ominous monologue about the nature of existence – conjuring images of fire, death, and rebirth with phrases like “Even the sun will die someday,” and “Gods trapped in cocoons.”

Rose’s father and mother, the main antagonists of the film.

Throughout the film, under the guise of ‘positive stereotyping,’ the black body is touted by the white people at the party as perfection, as superior, as the ideal – but only once it’s divorced from the black consciousness that inhabits it. In-universe, I wondered if that was how white people envisioned themselves. Gods trapped in cocoons of their white bodies, awaiting their transformation into beautiful black butterflies. And this is the truly ugly core of cultural appropriation – that art, culture, etc. needs to be under white control to reach its true potential.

This idea sat with me for a few weeks, and then Ghost in the Shell was released.

Motoko Kusanagi in the 1995 film.

Scarlett Johannson in the 2017 remake.

As an avid fan of Japanese culture and anime, I have to admit that this, much like the whitewashed reboot of Death Note, was a let down for several reasons. I decided I would not see the film, but I got curious once I heard it was falling so short of its monetary goal, and decided to read the synopsis. It’s your standard missing identity story; the recently cyberized “Major” is trying to find her original identity. Not only is this a highly individualized and Americanized take on G.I.T.S. (Jason Bourne Lite™, really), it also misses the point of the original entirely – to explore how much of one is still themselves in relation to technology – specifically,  the physical augmentations to the body. But what surprised me was that the film didn’t appear to go Full Monty on the whitewashing, choosing to keep some characters Japanese (Section 9 Chief Daisuke Aramaki is played by Beat Takeshi Kitano, who some may know from Battle Royale, and the antagonist of the movie keeps his original Japanese name – Hideo Kuze).

The most egregious part of it all, however, was the reveal that “Major” is actually Motoko Kusanagi – possessing the brain of a Japanese woman the whole time. Aside from the obvious waste of the time of splitting the Japanese context from the story, this is probably the most wasteful and insulting part of it all – rebuilding a Japanese character as a white woman. A form that is (falsely) touted above all as being the most beautiful and perfect. Surely there are Japanese women out there who have the same ‘sci-fi’ feel that ScarJo reportedly has, with the talent and the cultural background to fully bring the role to life? Admittedly, it’s hard for me to think of many outside of Rinko Kikuchi, and that is precisely the problem.

A comparison of Motoko and Rinko Kikuchi. Image credit: thatawkwardnerdytomboy.tumblr.com 

Why, again, must a story be so divorced from its cultural origins to be palatable to (white) America? A story needn’t be whitewashed or watered down in order for one to empathize with the characters. People of color have been empathizing with stories starring primarily white characters for a long time, after all. Some cultural differences may need to be explained or altered, yes, but the people do just fine to portray the story as is. Similarly, a body – of work or of a person – is not necessarily one’s to possess. Sometimes things are better left alone to shine with their natural, undiluted brilliance.