What The Monogatari Series Talks About

What the Monogatari Series Talks About

Imagine that you just made a couple new friends, who are more or less familiar with a couple of the biggest and most impressive anime you ever watched. You're interested in talking about your favorites and hearing their opinions on certain characters or arcs, maybe even directors and storyboarders, especially since they seem to have a couple interesting things to say. When the opportunity arises, you bring up the Monogatari Series, counting on a long and deep conversation about it. It's been a while since you last watched it, and at that point in time you were a completely different person, still lacking in experience and literacy. You feel somewhat confident about your takes, or at least too excited to doubt yourself, so you expect to be at least at the same level as they are, if not even higher. When your new pals start talking, however, you realize that some of their thoughts and observations are completely outside of your entire impression of the show. Even the approach is noticeably different, with several seemingly self-evident interpretations of theirs stirring up a whole lot of questions inside your mind. What do you do, when that happens ?

There are things you forgot, sure, but the level of insight and creativity in their interpretation appears to be outright incomparable to “yeah, it's fun and weird” that you remember thinking back then. Even if you tried your best, there's only so much you can recall when you clearly haven't been paying attention to much besides the literal events happening on the screen and some basic themes. Not knowing what to think or say, you decide to just focus on maintaining the flow, following up whenever and however you can. On the inside, however, you feel like there's a whole lot to process, including the previously unnoticed mountain of details and implications. Slightly confused, but happy to revisit the series once more, setting off to explore it using everything you've learned and gained since you watched it for the first time. As you start thinking about all sorts of signs, references, metaphors and so on, the first major question arises. This is the point of the following analysis, the matter of what the franchise even is.

On the surface, everything is already made clear in the show itself. There's a protagonist, a high school boy named Araragi Koyomi, and his adolescence is the premise of the story. There are various smaller tales, self-contained to a bigger or lesser degree, but even those tangentially related to him still maintain some kind of a connection. Each entry contains some series of events, typically serving both as an actual event, and an allegory for the audience to maybe decode. Every time it either introduces new things, or contextualizes something that came before it, usually leaving something for the audience to chew on. There's even a whole mystery building up in the background, and once everything is set up, a problem arises, situation escalates, and eventually reaches a semi-stable state when Koyomi “becomes an adult” by fighting for himself for the first time in his life.

Almost everything revolves around some supernatural occurrence, usually involving strange monsters called “Aberrations” or “Oddities”. Sometimes a sudden time-slip episode happens, leading to no change in the status quo at all (until some consequences are retroactively inserted during the Shinobu Mail arc), other times a teenage girl becomes a dangerous snake god. Regardless of what's happening, there's always a human being involved, while philosophical and political views get presented or hinted at during various conversations leading up to the resolution of whatever personal issue caused all the trouble. Koyomi usually gets involved immediately, before even finding out what is going on or how to deal with it, and then gets some kind of help. Following some explanation, some action is taken, the entity leaves or disappears, while the afflicted eventually resolves whatever attracted the monster in the first place – typically some time later, except for Hitagi.

Taking all of this together, what seems to be “the gist of it” is a character driven series of supernatural incidents more or less directly related to the protagonist, with some kind of a mystery gluing everything together. There are weird moments and quite unusual direction, but unless you're already familiar with certain concepts, it's easy to get the impression that this is just personal growth and drama happening as a result or in response to some Oddities getting involved with humans. And yet, watching or reading serious essays about the show seems to suggest that there has to be more to it than just whatever jumps by itself into the eyes of the beholder. Details can be picked up, interpreted and connected, while supposed facts within the universe have deliberately hidden assumptions and implications, all of which can be organized into a statement about the human condition and society at large.

But if this is the case, then what does it mean for the series, what is it even on a fundamental level, and how much more is there to be found? And if there really is that much more to uncover, can the experience change that much for the better from all of this deliberation? Personally, I believe that you can always get more out of any entertainment, if you put some effort into analyzing it and reflecting on what you just saw or read. Not all fun is right on the surface, so spending a bit of time digging through the layers beneath can make you appreciate and enjoy the work far more than you'd think. Showing what exactly this means, when it comes to the Monogatari Series, will require some buildup. Before we get into the meat of it, I need to ensure that we're all on the same page with regards to the subject, scope and key conceptual tools, so that you can understand what I'm doing here.

What is this an analysis of ?

Since we're dealing with an adaptation of a still unfinished series of light novels, the first thing to clarify is what I consider to be relevant to this text. Both the anime and the official English translation go up to Zoku Owarimonogatari, while a whole lot more is introduced in the books of the Off and Monster Seasons. So far, there's no end in sight (especially with the recently announced Ikusamonogatari, possibly implying a whole new season of light novels), making any attempt at writing about the source material as a whole impossible from the start. What's more, reading in Japanese isn't really common, or even an option for most people likely to stumble upon this article, so there's little sense in including material I myself am not even remotely familiar with.

Explaining the details of what happened is, in this case, far less important than what is going on on a more fundamental level, so I'm not going to delve into any plot details not relevant to the argument. This, of course, doesn't mean that I won't be taking apart anything, quite the opposite. Certain scenes can, after all, still serve as examples or case studies. The thing here is that the series of events in itself serves a secondary role to the dynamics at play, if you can even draw a clean line between what actually happened and what was made up or distorted by the narrator. The core of the show can only be uncovered by analyzing the underlying mechanics themselves, which are already present in the anime version. Regardless of any differences, some of which can be pretty big as far as certain arcs and their atmospheres are concerned, the original work is not crucial to this analysis.

Taking into account how much more vague and permissive of differing interpretation the adaptation is, and the fact that more people watched the series than read, this text will work the best based solely on how things are presented in the anime. This is partially because I'd have to delay this a lot just to read the whole thing, but also in response to the effort put by the staff into allowing the audience members to come to their own conclusions. There might be moments that are explicitly one way or another in the source material, but as long as the anime is not saying outright what we're supposed to see, there's nothing wrong in picking whatever makes sense. This might make some elements of the puzzle wrong in the context of the novels, but the purpose of this essay is to aid in engaging with Shaft's adaptation, and the author worked closely with the studio anyway, so it shouldn't have any major negative impact.

Lastly, we need to talk about the authorial voice, especially with regards to how it relates to the themes and ideas that can be extrapolated from the text. All works, whether intended to talk about certain issues or not, are influenced by the views of the author. What's more, certain beliefs and principles are baked into the world, characters and story, even when not intended to be taken seriously. This goes for Nisio Isin as well, especially given how certain positions are stated explicitly by those that hold them. It can be really hard to uncover the message, especially when dealing with a more indirect method of presenting it, but in this case the intended reading is irrelevant to what I'm trying to achieve. To put it another way, everything I say in this analysis is how I understand the Monogatari Series, rather than what Nisio thinks about it. This is, therefore, not an explanation of the author's politics, but rather my own proposition on how the anime can be understood better.

A Critic's Toolbox

Like with any other form of communication, stories utilize some kind of medium, each with its own set of symbols to play around with. They can have some specific rules, but most of them tend to assume certain things to be true for the sake of conveying an idea of what's happening. Even when motivated by the need to thematically tie everything together, like by inserting spiral staircases everywhere, the portrayal of events is still assumed to be at most quirky in its method, rather than deceptive. Plenty of works just happen to be organized this way, more out of habit than on purpose, and that wouldn't really be an issue if there was a broad awareness of the fact that it doesn't have to be this way. Despite how often people just take everything at face value, there's a lot more going on behind them, especially if you're willing to bend or break the rules and assumptions that govern the art. So no matter how often the third-person narrator may be omniscient, that doesn't mean you can't write an ignorant one if you know how. And while it might be typical to assume that anything presented as a fact or law has to be true, you can always find a way to suggest that something is wrong.

All of this is much easier to pull off with a first person narrator, who by taking part in the story is bound to have biases and gaps in knowledge or even personal reasons for manipulating the narrative. The degree to which this might be the case depends on a lot of factors, but what is important to keep in mind here is that the very format of a tale, visual or otherwise, has an irreversible impact on how events can be told.

While emphasized in pretty much every way possible, the storyness of the Monogatari franchise is far from being just a natural result of the way things are. Although not immediately obvious, the intentionality of it becomes readily apparent once you set your sights on it. Besides all the times the characters say the word “story” as if they were referring to some mysterious entity or force, it can also be seen in the direction itself. Multiple moments indicate moving from one chapter to another, lines of text from the novel appear on a regular basis, while many events seem exaggerated or surreal. There are even multiple cases of the narrator openly admitting to telling a story, as opposed to simply recalling a memory or two.

What stands out to me the most here, is that the essential elements of fiction are deliberately and consistently brought up by the cast in every entry of the franchise, utilized in both subtle and explicit ways as means of enabling a deeper analysis of the show. Whether it's Kaiki's open warning that he will lie, or Koyomi's reflections on the impact specific events would have, these moments establish a sort of distance between the narrator and their own self as a character within the story. That the audience is not engaging with a historical source, but rather a more intentionally and unintentionally constructed retelling, based on some memories and experiences, is therefore one of the core assumptions of the show.

The implication here is not just that the true version is different from the one presented to the audience, but also that not all arcs are about an actual series of events in the first place, but rather philosophical and political explorations of certain topics. Sometimes, everything is just a thought spiral told in the form of a self-contained episode, like Kabukimonogatari's supposed time-traveling shenanigans – even with the attachment of Shinobu Mail's odd explanation of how the First broke out of the cycle of not-death and not-rebirth. In other cases, like in the anime adaptation of Otorimonogatari, crucial elements are distorted or otherwise questionable, leaving only the fact that something happened intact and a whole lot of implications coming from the fact that and how it did. Regardless of what is true, there remains something to be taken from every arc, even if on the surface it's just an opportunity to explore the characters more without the consequences that would have to come with real choices being made. And even when assuming that something did happen mostly as told, there is always space for seeing some details of it as constituting some kind of an allegory, or even just a medium through which something more substantial is being said.

This is most often the case with Oddities, like the immortal Phoenix that we first came to know as Koyomi's youngest little sister. She's unaware of her origin, or the fact that things like wounds or scars don't seem to stay on her body the way they should. In fact, no one notices anything, except for the so-called Specialist that decided to target her. When you pay close attention, however, the exact circumstances of Tsukihi's birth begin to appear more like something to trigger Kagenui with, so that her reasoning can be likened to the arguments Terfs make to justify their transphobia. In fact, the whole arc fits this interpretation a bit too well to just be a complete coincidence, especially considering that this wouldn't be the first for Nisio. All the talk about fakes and reals might seem like some disconnected from reality pseudointellectual drivel, but it can also be easily seen as a summary of an actual discourse. What's really interesting is that the relevant terms appear to have been swapped out with ones that fit the main theme of Nisemonogatari, and the same thing can be said about any other concept within the show too. When applying a correction for that, big brother's attempt to verify how he feels about Tsukihi turns out to primarily function as a rejection of the view that the genitals one is born with determine gender, despite years of developing as a person.

Of course, this is by no means that all Oddities in the show are nothing more than metaphors for not being “normal”, even though they do very much work that way. While you could argue that some characters are just easier to tell as supernatural, rather than actually being that way, that doesn't imply that the mysterious entities can't simultaneously just be what they are. In fact, it appears to be part of the main point of the Monogatari Series. Some entries in the franchise can be exceedingly difficult to reinterpret as having no real supernatural forces or characters in it, and the series doesn't really make it necessary to remodel every arc so that it can work within an entirely non-magical framework.

Considering how flawed the narrators are, it's not that hard to see how their narrating selves are doing far more than just coloring and distorting some facts about the outside world. Because they're not only talking about specific occurrences in their world, also saying a lot about themselves and everything that is internal to them (sometimes quite inadvertently), they naturally end up creating a whole character of themselves on top of the “setting” of the reality they're trying to comprehend. That is to say, the person telling the story is, by including themselves in it, distinct and separate from the self they created for that story, just like they are separate from any other character in their narration. This is partially coming from the fact that they are retroactively creating a series of events based on their inaccurate to some extent memories, but also can be said to result from the social and material environment they have to function within. Like the social animals we all are, they have to move within society's structure, and thus are affected by the commonly accepted notion of what is, how it is, and what you do with it. This constant creation of the separate self, by virtue of how it plays into human behavior and the actions we take towards the other and the spaces we live in, seems to be the main driving force behind the existence of the supernatural.

The reason why is mainly because the human mind has an incredible, reality-bending and creating power within the universe of the Monogatari Series. There are, of course, limits to it, one of them being society and its dominant view of the world. But even with outside conditions in mind, it nonetheless is a unique narrator of the world. Even though there doesn't seem to be a single preferred, or universal, point of reference capable of modifying it and putting it together into a coherent whole, there still seems to be a way of constructing a coherent understanding of all the messy and complicated experiences and their possible origins. The effects of this can vary from purely internal, to visible changes in one's biology, but they are quite significant enough to be noticeable by outside observers. Most notably, however, the same can be said about the way the collective consciousness works as well. As the most powerful, it often ends up overwriting or otherwise denying the perspectives of individuals, and even has the ability to reconsider erasing the unwanted beings if you know how to present them as not invalid.

You could say here, that this makes the world a character in and of itself, and considering how it's constantly “corrected” by the shared understanding of it in people's brains, it certainly seems to be the case. Since it's just as much an object of narration as everything else, it's inevitable that it is twisted and separated from the raw reality that people experienced, itself quite fluid and relative. As a result of countless thought processes of the individuals and their seniors (most often parents, teachers, priests and occasionally classmates), it doesn't come from a single place, so it has no way of being a united and consistent grand narrative on everything. Due to society existing and regulating how everything is organized, the differences usually amount to slight variations of the same basic premise, typically coming from individual opinions on minor issues. There doesn't seem to be any awareness of being inside a consciously designed and arranged setting, even among those aware and frequently mentioning the story, which is another crucial part of the message.

Because we still need to conceptualize things, before we can act in response to them or communicate with others, some amount of ideas and thought patterns is absolutely crucial and inevitable. Part of that understanding is shared and even expected, but there still remains a wealth of personal interpretations of the previously agreed upon paradigms. This means that although there is a material origin of this whole mess, there's also a whole set of meanings and value judgments attached to everything people encounter. This has a transformative character on the world, which implies that part of the experience is purely conceptual, like seeing a bird and thinking “oh it's a crow”.

Since the human mind has actual power in the Monogatari Series, this effectively implies the existence of a whole new dimension overlaid on top of the purely physical universe. Certain entities or forces are only really a factor to those that either stand outside the common understanding of what is normal, or are in some way involved with the Oddities. What's more, internal circumstances can also lead to distortions and confusion, like the 404 classroom supposedly appearing out of nowhere on the wrong floor, only to disappear after Koyomi solves the riddle, as if the whole thing happened more in his head rather than a physical space.

While all of this is happening, various characters keep mentioning “the story” as if it existed just as much as everything else. Some of them in the context of the supernatural being defined by it, others instead focus on the roles different people have in it, like Tadatsuru in his final speech about how he doesn't want to be a pawn anymore. This particular way of talking about it seems to imply that there is more to point out than just the fact that narration is a thing with meaningful consequences. In fact, rather than an object or a process, it would be better to try seeing it as yet another character in the Monogatari Series, just like the world it interacts with and costantly rebuilds in its image, a true capital s Story. Considering the allegorical nature of some arcs, with multiple viewpoints presented and then either accepted or rejected by different members of the cast, it's actually quite important for any attempt at crafting a fundamental theory on the franchise.

Understanding the nature of what it is and how it affects other people is crucial, especially since it seems to have power over those that live within its boundaries. The difference between the kind of influence it has over human beings and Oddities, both being separate roles with expected behaviors and properties, is of particular importance here. Ever since Bakemonogatari came out, there's been a sense of being stuck in a play, forced to act according to some sort of a script. The things you could do or see, the problems you might encounter, all of that is defined by your involvement in the Story, often leading to judgements and punishment depending on how well the role was played. Most importantly, there's a certain dynamic in it between those that live out the role of a human, and those that do not have such ability. Imposed on the entire cast, it forces the characters to “live like who they are” according to their assigned key traits, erasing those that “pretend to be someone they're not”. As a result, this creates a conflict between people and “monsters” right at the core of the anime's overarching plot. It's this part of the series, in particular the two seemingly opposing sides, that will serve as the first key element of this analysis.

The Normals and Everyone Else

Stuck in the same world as the supernatural, “normal people” are all of those that fulfill a certain set of commonly accepted expectations of what human beings are and how they live. These are, on one hand, a part of a certain theatrical role within the Story, but also something akin to an unspoken law imposed on the universe, a sort of requirement for being allowed to remain human. It involves having certain character traits that can be seen as compatible with the notion of “how things are”, as opposed to what is perceived, and thus narrated into being “strange”. Since the Oddities originate from being talked about by the normals, this means that they only really exist within a much smaller story, revolving specifically around them. This results in them being invisible, pretty much non-existent, to everyone that hasn't become a part of some kind of rumor about them.

At the same time, the everyday Joes and Jills are, in a sense, just as much part of the premise, a fictional setting acting as a bridge between every possible thing that one could observe and the experience of living in that mess of a real world. Said to occupy the “front stage” of reality, they never really purely interact with anything as it exists, at least not independently of the greater narrative on how things are. That's not really to say, that everything around them is entirely subjective, but rather that there is a certain degree of influence the Story has on the material, which means the intelligent beings within it are affected by and react to a seemingly homogeneous mixture of what would still be there without the Story, and the parts that are modified by or created in it. Just like the human narrators create a tale different from what a perfect observer would have witnessed, both the front and the back are distinct from their source.

If that is the case, then is it even possible to exist in pure reality, or are our characters stuck navigating a brain-made conceptualisation of it? Assuming nothing can exist without some kind of observation, the answer is pretty clear. The environment in which the teens grew up is always bound to be seen and thus made real by becoming the object of said observation, whether it's the universe itself doing it or an animal. And just like the material world observes itself to be a certain way from a certain point, so does the mind perceive all its experiences as distinct and meaningful existence. The difference here is that for people, there is a difference between the outside, including all entities and forces within it, and the inside. Unlike the Universe, for which there is no separation between the subject and the environment, a person has their own mental world. A mix of ideas informed by experience, family and society at large.

All of these have influence on both the normals and the Oddities, pressuring them into interpreting or at least acting as if reality had to be one particular way, and by that measure changing both the observed and the observers themselves so that they fit in the commonly accepted perspective. The dominant group, to which most of the characters in the series belong, is entering a whole world of rules and concepts all centered around organizing life in society – itself a whole new world separate from the physical one it acts on. They are human, because, as Ononoki put it, they “live like a human”. They see things and attach already existing labels to them, they react according to instructions passed down to them by their superiors and eventually find a place for themselves in this huge mass of expectations, institutions, viewpoints and the material world, all mutually influencing each other to a surprising degree.

As our adolescents navigate this structure, in an attempt to figure out a way to function within it, some conflicts occasionally arise between them and the world, other people or the supernatural. If you organize reality into one abstraction, certain ways of being will have to be left out for this singularity of a collective consciousness to retain its strictly defined shape, just like a single rigorous mathematical framework is always imperfect no matter how hard you try to make it internally consistent and perfectly determined. Regardless of whether someone sticks out like “the ghost of a ghost” or not, it simply isn't always possible to act according to a limited set of universal rules. Depending on how far away one might be from the ideal “everyday person” or “normal life”, the consequences range from something along the lines of “just like us, but slightly off in certain places” to outright denial of the right to existence in the world. All of that on the grounds of the rest having already accepted the one Story, never really told about other possibilities existing and being just as real and valid.

The teenages in the series might walk on a wider path than that of their parents or grandparents, but it is still the only one they know of. Following the same sequence of socially and politically scripted events, they become used to acting as if there was only one truth and one way, leading them to going through the exact same life as everyone else. This means that simply functioning in society inevitably results in reinforcing the narrative they received from their parents and teachers. Those that either are or pass as normal are in a sense trapped, no matter how much wiggle room they might have before reaching the designated monster territory. So while it might be possible for them to retain some quirks as long as society knows about them and sees them as an acceptable variant of the common standard, even then their status as real depends on their ability to put the theoretical understanding of the world into practice.

At the same time, external behaviors are distinct from the internal state and self-experience , which in some cases means brushing up against the premise of the Story. Growing up in a seemingly singular world, the teens are stuck between having to live in the agreed upon outside and the distinct, often rule-breaking subjective worlds of their private and inner lives. Even when encountering outright holes in the collectively agreed upon narrative, they often still struggle with understanding the notion of an alternative, so foreign in the dominant tale of life as a simple list of boxes to check. The main cast did have some contact with the abnormal though, simply because there was something off about their own circumstances, so it's not like they don't have the ability to notice that things can indeed be different. However, recognising that fact takes a lot, even when confronted with entities that are not supposed to exist in any physical sense whatsoever.

As they continue getting involved with the Oddities, the adolescents find themselves stumbling upon things that do not fit anywhere in their conceptual maps of the reality that surrounds them. Of course, not everyone can become aware of what is going on between the lines of the narrative, the presence of which they can't even notice. The minority that does stick out enough to be affected, in a certain sense destined to experience and realize the oppressive character of the Structure, suddenly finds itself in a hidden yet crucial part of society – what one could call the margin that defines the page. At the other side of it are strange monsters, only spoken of in legends. They appear to be out of this world, and yet, since it is the only world people know of, they have to be explained for there is only one Story into which they can be integrated. All of this in compliance with the logic and dogma that made their existence nonsensical in the first place.

Since there is no alternative in sight, and some answers are always preferred to none at all, the response of the dominant point of view emerges from the rumors and conversations about the odd situations some people end up in. The exact way of justifying the fact of experiencing something outside of common sense reality can vary between different groups and individuals. Denial, whether coming from the place of reason or not, is generally the easiest and most effective strategy, but simply insisting that nothing happened isn't really enough in certain cases. Coming up with an explanation, on the other hand, allows for much more freedom in how the discrepancy is handled. One way or another, without the concept of an alternative, the normals are forced to work every sign of “the way things are” not being the only possible option out there into the Story about all of the aforementioned things. Thus, in an attempt to keep telling itself through the countless human minds, the Story creates the concept of the supernatural, all in order to protect the perceived correctness of its structure. By doing so, a new category with its own rules is created, so that the categorized can be isolated and controlled from a distance.

Pushed farther and farther away into the almost inaccessible back stage, the freshly incorporated mistakes discover themselves to be defined completely against their will, forced to live like the monsters the Story thinks they are. For some, this might mean doing something helpful to humanity, but it can often involve hurting them. If that wasn't enough, opposing the role results in being erased by the Darkness, so there is not a lot the Oddities can do about their situation. As things stand in the Monogatari Series, they can only either fulfill the expectations regardless of what that entails, or try not to get involved with people. This isn't really always possible though, since simply trying to play the role of an everyday person (or any other minor variation of a “human being”) will inevitably lead some quirky individuals to developing all sorts of negative thoughts and feelings in response to that. The encounters are, given that the normals are defined as being mostly just stuck with small issues here and there, inevitable as a simple result of problems still happening despite the fact they're not supposed to exist in a Story built around the premise that the perceived structure is correct.

All the harm done by the status quo is relegated to the Oddities in order to justify it away as something that magically came from the outside. The things that would have happened anyway, even if the supernatural never existed, still explainable as a simple bug in the code even without the concept, are now made to further reinforce the notion that bad events simply come as a result of things not working as intended. This is even more obvious considering that the Specialists are mostly just a bunch of adults trying to find a way to let the parties involved go on with their lives, to simply continue as if nothing meaningful or indicative of a broad underlying issue has ever happened. So the problems get defined away just like the Oddities that are made to cause them, isolated from the structure that birthed them. This conveniently absolves the sociopolitical and economic environment, and also all people that are complacent in it or ignorant about it, from all responsibility towards those that were harmed by it in one way or another.

Although not guaranteed forever, the continuous existence of the Story can still be secured for the foreseeable future by all intelligent beings in it, whether they function on the margins or right at the center of it. This is all, of course, at the cost of everyone affected, even the most privileged that are basically free from the most extreme negative effects. You can say therefore, that everyone is technically on the same side, since all will benefit in some way from taking down the oppressive narratives and the status quo they were made to justify. While it is certainly true, at the same time the normals are still invested in the social arrangement that hurts them, rewarded for reproducing everything as it was shown and told to them. Despite there being a constant, universal problem in need of a solution, the vast majority of people still lack any knowledge or intent to change anything, and they don't even have an immediate need to act in the first place – they are functional after all. The exact nature of what is going on and why, in the context of the core issues baked into the world they found themselves in, can be therefore interpreted as one of the most fundamental elements of the Monogatari Series as a whole.

The Pursuit of Correctness

Assuming that the Story is really some kind of entity or a force in the world, one that our characters are stuck with having to interact with, the question of what it is and how it works cannot be easily ignored. Especially given how it seems to have an enormous power to shape reality itself, to such a degree that the smaller personal narratives create their own setting separate from what other people might observe. The differences vary between large and small, but regardless of what a hypothetical perfect observer would say, it's clear that at least there are certain events that happened in one way or another. Some of them might only exist in one person's perspective, while others are deeply exaggerated or twisted around some base idea of what is going on. Most of them, however, still follow the same fundamental logic that constitutes the shared understanding.

Since there seems to be a relatively large number of viewpoints compatible with the setting of the Story – as in, all of them map onto the things that are allowed to happen within it – it follows that some amount of wiggle room is afforded to the individuals. This conveniently creates an illusion of diversity, while simultaneously keeping everyone on the same ideological page when it comes to the things that define the dominant narrative. This arrangement isn't perfect, however, since there always are things that fall outside of the carefully crafted rules. Given how the existence of different positions on certain questions illuminates the fact that there are different ways of thinking out there, there are events that can undermine or otherwise expose elements of the Story's setting as immoral or enforced on the material reality. And because you can shift from one perspective to another without sacrificing the fundamentals, it only makes sense that arriving at a much more substantially different conclusion is also within the reach of intelligent beings.

Although new ideas can be created, given some kind of real life input and the right mental machinery to process it with, they all have to come from somewhere. The starting point of such an exercise involves gathering already existing ideas, since without them there would be nothing to work on or with, and the end point involves trying to incorporate it into the broad societal views that you're trying to modify. It has to make sense to the normals, while not disturbing their ability to comfortably function too much, so any attempt to revise or expand the grand narrative about reality would have to retain the majority of elements that it was made from. Of course, having a subjective idea, even as a group within society, is not the same as literally everyone else sharing the same base assumption on “how things are”. So if you can't facilitate a change in the collective consciousness, all such exercises will only amount to a curiosity at most.

Any attempt to communicate what happened, who or what a certain entity is, and what all of that means moving forward, can therefore only be successful, if it employs a part of the mental world the rest is stuck with having to live in. Because of this, whatever the mind of a character in the franchise comes up with, cannot be too far from a surface level change, or else it would break the rules of the Story they function in and accept as real. Any addition or modification can only be allowed to exist in a way that doesn't disturb the Structure, for as long as it retains its power.

This creates issues when encountering things or people outside of the canonical reading of reality, that don't really have any good enough ideas to be conceptualized with. One such example would be Black Hanekawa, an entity that seems to be a “modified Meddlesome Cat” or, in Tsubasa's own words “her sister” that presumably got absorbed into her brain. Cases like that are still manageable though, since the reinterpretation of the offending existence is still an acceptable permutation of the already established traits, so it's allowed to exist and given a place in the narrative. Things don't always work smoothly, however, because not all ways of putting the mental blocks together are friendly towards certain hidden assumptions about how everything supposedly works. In those cases, the poor being is interpreted as unacceptable or false, a mistake to be “corrected” by the Darkness or a specialist capable of coming up with a more peaceful way of dealing with it quickly enough.

One good example of that would be Hachikuji Mayoi's arc, which starts with a ghost of a little girl that unwillingly makes people lost as a result of dying while she was lost on her way home. The first arc ends with her finally reaching the physical location where her mum once lived and supposedly disappearing, only to then reappear again in an attempt to be with Koyomi. The whole journey is a really good example of what is going on between material reality and the Story that narrates the character of the world, especially the resolution. As the introduction to Darkness, it shows exactly how the whole “natural order of things” is clearly enforced by some power, and thus is evidently malleable under natural circumstances. And the really interesting parts are quite important, especially since it's not the only instance of living being getting erased by “non-existence”.

Starting with her first appearance, while she was still just a Lost Snail, we can see that she could function forever for as long as she continued to perform her role, or at least not contradict it with her behavior. Naturally, this existence wasn't particularly fulfilling, so upon getting a chance, she tried to close her chapter in the Story by moving on, only to realize that she can't, because she now has a personal reason to stay anyway. Reportedly no longer a Lost Snail, Hachikuji kept interacting with Koyomi, and sometimes also Tsubasa, but not really anyone else besides other Oddities. She appeared to be in the physical world, and lived as if she really did just happen to change in a way that allowed her to remain, while still being recognised and treated by the Story as the same Oddity that we saw in Bakemonogatari.

After spending some quality time helping the protagonist out (and performing strange, fetishistic greeting rituals with him), it became clear that she's acting in defiance of her role, as well as the “proper” ending of that first arc, which seems to make her a liar in the eyes of the Story. In response to that, the Darkness began to chase after Mayoi to erase her, since her way of being doesn't exist in the canon of the narrated world. Since hiding forever wasn't an option, a Specialist was needed to resolve the issue. However, after a short explanation of what the Darkness even is, it became apparent that there is no way to fight back, implying that the only option is to move on just like stories about ghosts are expected to. And so, in order to prevent erasure from reality itself, the girl chose to finally move on to the afterlife. She did eventually end up coming back from Hell as a result of Koyomi's virtuous kidnapping, and even turned into a deity, but that's only because someone had to fill the position of God in the local shrine.

What strikes me here in particular is how she was deemed a liar, especially in the context of the forgery being supposedly done to deceive our protagonist into thinking that he's interacting with none other than Mayoi, as if it wasn't evidently true. According to Gaen, Mayoi is lying about being in the material world, when she should be in the afterlife after finally reaching her home at the end of Mayoi Lost. Now, she does have a reason for doing so, and yet her choice is not treated as a valid option here, but rather a violation of the rules surrounding ghosts. Regardless of the fact that she clearly formed a connection with Koyomi, and thus is no longer just a lost child unable to go home, she is still treated like one and punished for not acting like a ghost “should”. What's more, she also still has the obligation to make people lost, making her a double liar since she also “pretends” not to be a Lost Snail.

Of course, what really makes it a problem, is the fact that the Story defines itself as correct, and thus can only see her choice as a fabrication of something that it considers to be outside of the way things are. That it did happen, without even hurting anyone in any way, is of no concern to this entity. Since there supposedly is a natural order of things, containing a true, proper series of events quite different from the one told from Koyomi's own memories, it only follows that nothing actually happened. She did, after all, lie about being in the material world, according to the Story at least. At the same time, there clearly was something materially going on, that led to Mayoi interacting with others and clearly affecting them, so there is a context in which she still was real the whole time. This, as it turns out, is where the whole argument against her breaks down.

What seems to be implied here, is that by not moving on Hachikuji kept being in a place she, according to the underlying logic of the Story, actually wasn't in. Her presence then, consisting of not only accounts of other characters but also of significant influence she had on them, was therefore a lie that she made, just by existing despite not existing. To say it another way, she performed an action that was deemed an attempt to fabricate her own existence among the living, despite said existence being an obvious prerequisite to being able to carry out the aforementioned action. An internal discrepancy arised as a result, prompting the Darkness to “correct” it.

The two different “crimes” that Hachikuji committed, that of lying about existing and that of defying the nature of her existence, are quite similar to what Ougi was targeted for, in a way that highlights the key similarities and differences between them. The first one that comes to my mind is of course the origin, since one of them used to be alive before becoming an Oddity as a result of dying in a traffic accident, while the other seems to have emerged and split off from Koyomi due to intense feelings of guilt and a conviction of needing a punishment, leading to a whole series of attempts to right the perceived wrongs.

Together with the fact that Ougi actually lied about being Meme's niece, what comes out is a lack of a material basis for their existence, as someone who's supposed to have their own body by being related to another human being, coupled with what the Story sees as a violation on the Darkness's monopoly on judgment. While “doing what the Darkness does” is quite possibly the biggest part of the whole conflict, it can't be overstated here how much their true origin messes with the fundamental notions on how the narrated world works. In particular, the way the canonical explanation doesn't make much sense under scrutiny might be a nod towards something much more difficult and unusual, too far outside the boundaries of the Story and its setting to be explainable within its framework.

Considering Hachikuji's life formed in the standard way, only to then be followed with a bizarre posthumous existence, the fact that she still had a way out seems to indicate that being born “normally” is what gave her enough similarity to typical human beings to facilitate her eventual ascension into godhood. There was, in other words, some kind of permitted existence that could be used to fill in the position of a deity because of how compatible it happened to be with the snake. In comparison, Ougi didn't have any way to present themselves that could be accepted by the world, until Meme acknowledged them as his niece. This makes the spook a curious case of an allegedly non-existent person, who's real identity as a not existing person, as well as the actions they took to correct things in situations where the Darkness didn't act, made the fake impostor a threat, once again highlighting the internal contradictions within the Story. This is indicative of some of the unspoken assumptions about reality, that are not only part of how the narrated world is fundamentally organized, but also fundamentally in conflict with regards to how the material reality from which everything else emerges actually functions.

The detail in question here is that usually processes that happen in clumps of matter are treated as always real, unless it's that of consciousness – in which case the contents have to be “observed” by the third party, before being given an accuracy score based on subjective opinion. So something inorganic like a stone is just a stone, because it would still be there the way it is even if nobody perceived it. A human brain, on the other hand, has lots of activity in it without a clear one-to-one correspondence with observable phenomena of other matter outside of the region that produced the mental state in question. It can alter the experience of the outside, but also imply something not readily observable like a problem with someone's attitude, or a certain character of someone's internal world, completely impossible to be accessed and perceived by others. All the other body parts though, like genitalia or skin, have clear qualities that everyone can see, which makes it easy to attach concepts to them even when they don't make sense, just because the object that it's attached to is undeniably real.

In a standard society, where one dominant group spreads its thinking everywhere, anything outside of already accepted explanations for those invisible parts of someone as a person are subject to judgements about their veracity and normalness. If you look the same as all the other people that do the normal things, not being exactly them can be seen as a lie just because of the way some part of you contradicts their “observations”. This is especially true for the processes that form the mind and all of its contents, all because there is nothing external that can work as an undeniable proof of your entire personhood, while everything about your physical form can be used to insist that you have to secretly be the same like all the other people that have the same human parts.

The struggle here comes from the fact that your nature has to be accepted for what it is. It doesn't, however, reveal itself in the same way that any mindless object does, which makes it vulnerable to being categorized as entirely external to the physical reality it comes from, exposing everything it does to denial and invalidation due to the perceived lack of material “proof”. Or, to put it in other words, there already is a concept attached to every physical part of you, so to assert otherwise would be to “lie” about the “facts”.

The problem here is, that all of those things are still happening, including all the experiences and thoughts. There is a process of consciousness going on in that brain, and it exists just like the concept it is confused with exists in the collective consciousness as well. When something unusual happens, the explanation involves taking all the material parts of it, with all the ideas about them conflated with the raw arrangement of matter, and then rearranging it so that the attachments make as much sense together as they can. When the thing in question is the existence of two people in the same body, one of whom fools the other into thinking they're actually standing over there, the mess that comes a a result of trying to bend the concept of one person per body so that it can appear to explain the actual state of things is just as ridiculous as Hachikuji's “lie”.

For Ougi, this means being an “Oddity” that was born from Koyomi in an attempt to right his wrongs, while also being interchangeable with him, due to his physical body being seen by the Story as “proof” that there is only one person there. The other one, therefore, has to be the same one, standing in a different place, while having a different personality and doing things other than the ones that the “original” is doing, all contradicting his definition within the Story's setting. The drive to right all wrongs, explicitly criticized by Koyomi as something distinct from doing the right thing, makes them a threat to Darkness, distinct from the non-threatening version of “the same person”. One of them is therefore subject to punishment by being “exposed” as Koyomi, while the one that exposed them is not. All of this as a result of Ougi's nature being misinterpreted as a naughty part of our protagonist, that can somehow be treated as a separate person while being denied that personhood due to it being deemed “wrong” by the Darkness.

You could say here that something in the brain is causing two distinct thought patterns to coexist, bundled with their own memories, wants, needs and actions, which is exactly what makes each of them a distinct person. If you knew everything about brains, you could even point out the exact physical process that led to a separate person coexisting in the same blob of gray matter. What's more, there is no way the same person could exist in two places at the same time, especially given that the other “version” has all the traits that the “original” doesn't and couldn't possibly have – manipulativeness and gender being two most obvious ones in this case.

If some defining elements of Ougi can't have possibly come from someone incapable of doing or feeling such things, then plurality is the only explanation of how they actually came to be. This is where the crux of the matter is, however, simply because the concept of multiple beings existing in the same organic cable mash doesn't have a place in the world narrated by the Story, which is where the confusing and nonsensical interpretation of Ougi being Koyomi, but only Koyomi getting to be real comes from. The issue of acting like the justice of the world, despite not being supposed to exist or assume a role reserved to the supernatural police force imposed on the otherwise much richer and more open world, is yet another proof of their personhood. Our protagonist, to make it very clear, wasn't targeted after “exposing the true identity of Ougi”, despite it supposedly being Koyomi himself.

What is readily apparent here, is that the Darkness, as well as the Story it serves, is the real source of this mess, just by virtue of what its actions implicitly confirm to be true. Theoretically, we're supposed to believe that there is this equal sign between the two people at the center of the entire arc, but the treatment they receive is very much not the same. The “part” explanation seems to imply that something about Koyomi split off and acted separately from him, but that would imply that he's simultaneously not capable of understanding what is going on around him, while also having the intelligence and character necessary to manipulate people with ease.

It's not controversial to say that the original would never act towards Nadeko like we saw Ougi do, and yet the impostor was somehow perfectly capable of the exact kind of drastic measures Koyomi would never resort to. All of this, despite being supposedly made entirely out of Koyomi, and by that measure judged as invalid unlike the person from which they split off. In the first place, the act of splitting off is, for the Story, not indicative of being their own person, but perfectly enough to be treated as one when it's time to clean up the inconsistencies. And the way the situation was resolved in the end is just as good of a proof that someone was there, given that Meme was referring to Ougi specifically when asking Koyomi what he's doing to his niece.

The fact that the trick worked, despite changing nothing at all about Ougi, is really important here, as it underlines that something was there all along that Meme specifically could point towards, attaching to that part, absent in Koyomi, the concept of Ougi actually being related to their uncle. This act of reinterpretation was enough for the Darkness to disappear, just because the new definition was consistent with how the world is characterized in the series. This allowed the arc to end in the only other way it could, leaving everything that actually happened completely untouched, but still affecting how everything worked moving forward. The same could be said about the resolution to Hachikuji's arc, but the stability that was achieved here didn't come with any change to how the word is defined in the Story, which means that something similar is bound to happen in the future

We can see here a narrative that continuously attempts to establish itself as the sole existence, the only way things can and should be, trying to bend or remove things that cannot be assimilated into it. As the dominant way of thinking, devoid of any notion of an alternative, it keeps recreating itself in the minds of the next generation of people, even going as far as to alter the physical side of reality. Without a way out of it, any concept of change or multiplicity, it can only force everyone to play along. From humans that might become Oddities if they stray too far away from their role, to Oddities threatened with outright erasure, everyone is forced to act within its framework, lacking any other.

Seemingly more powerful than any dictator, the Story doesn't actually have the power to maintain itself forever though. From the existence of the supernatural, it can be derived that the everyday reality is not all there is to the world. And the fact that some people have stories to tell about past interactions with entities that got erased, often including personal involvement in each other's issues and significant growth as a person, proves that they did exist after all, even if outside of what the Story defined as the real world. The characters, whether they ended up being consumed by the Darkness or not, still made history that can never be undone, and thus always reinforces their reality, regardless of whether it is acknowledged or not.

It seems then, that something is wrong or missing in the idea of the natural order of things, and that the raw source of all experience is far richer than what is possible in the mental construction of it that most people are stuck with. What is particularly interesting here, is the way a specific definition of reality is violently enforced, but never retroactively. The plot of each arc is made to follow the instructions closely, save for some moments of clever use of rules, but it doesn't rewrite what happened, and it seems like it's not even possible to do so. This implies that the world would be a much better and more abundant place, if it wasn't for the Darkness and the Story that employs it. This is where the seriously left-wing tint starts to reveal itself, as the similarities between the Monogatari Series and our own situation become more apparent. Accordingly, the franchise can be said to be built around dealing with the fallacies of normativity in a society that only knows of a single “way things are”.

The conflict that arises between the dominant view and the personal experience of the world, inevitable due to the way the shared understanding excludes many ways of being or seeing others, has a major presence in the Monogatari Series. Not only does it bind the various arcs together, while also laying the foundation to the entirety of the Final Season, but also constitutes a key problem within the franchise. The issue has major consequences to everyone as long as it remains unsolved, and since the Oddities are bound to keep forming, simply trying to prevent or manage them is only stalling for time. In the first place, they have their own valid interests, and the whole issue seems to originate from how humans think, which means that any attempt to come up with a solution can only succeed if a sufficient understanding of how the Story works and spreads itself becomes common knowledge. To put it another way, the key to understanding the issue here is in the process of socialization.

Learning the Story

When Koyomi found out about his vampirism getting closer to the point of no return, due to his frequent use of vampiric powers, what also became clear is that the only way to remain human is to refrain from what the Story considers acting like a vampire. No matter the situation, he must “live like a human” in order to remain one, and no amount of performing the human way of living after getting redefined as a vampire can bring him back. Now, he did get “murdered” and then “brought back to life from Hell”, allowing for the balance to be reset, but it's still the case that frequent use of his powers can only end in vampirification. To put it simply, the nature of who he is – according to the Story of course – is determined by how his actions fit into the definitions of certain entities that are considered real. At the same time, not doing what is expected is simultaneously treated as going against the inherent, immutable nature of the world and yourself, the very essence of reality itself. In other words, you live like a human being because you are one, but also you must live like one because you're a human being.

Depending on the context then, things either just are, or you're doing them wrong. Everything is already fixed in place, but also it has to be kept in place just because it's not. A human being is simultaneously a very specific and immutable type of existence, and a set of rules that have to be followed under the threat of turning into a monster. There is only one way things are, and also a whole set of alternatives that have to be kept in check or lest they threaten the only option. While impossible things never happen, they somehow have to be erased, because they do, despite the fact that they don't. The status quo is a particular arrangement between the material and the ideal, that has to be protected by force if necessary, even though it actually just spontaneously happens to be the way it is. And so on and so forth, contradictory implications keep arising in the Story, forcing it to manipulate its way forward, creating more nonsense in the process. And no matter how the next chapter is achieved, the premise gives birth to problems that necessitate change, stripping the narrative of its ability to attain it.

Since all of it has its origin in the collective consciousness of society, just like the rumors that conquer the minds of people that live in the unnamed suburb of the series' main location, this means that the self-reproducing oppression is happening through the medium of countless human brains and the multitude of thoughts they have – including those that are actually theirs, as opposed to the ones that were put there by their seniors. What's more, there doesn't seem to be any organized attempt to explicitly dictate every little thing to children, so while institutions like the family, the school or the state play a major role here, the core tenets of the Story cannot be simply transferred to the next generation in a literal way. This is because a lot of them are assumed to be the case, implied in the sense of having to be true if what was actually stated is to be true. Most characters in the show never really state the paradigms outright, often despite acting either in accordance with them or opposition, but the Story itself still moves in accordance with them anyway. The kids might not conceptualize the fact that they're performing a specific role, but they still have an intuitive understanding of how to navigate their way through life, so there is an intuitive understanding of how they're supposed to act, putting the ideology in practice despite not actually trying to.

If this is the case, then the way this flawed shared understanding forms has to be more subtle than just plain old indoctrination. It has to, on one hand, happen in between the lines, so that it can remain unnoticed, even as implications of seemingly innocent words keep piling up on one another and forming a somewhat coherent framework for further observation and interaction with reality. On another hand, the material world needs to serve as both the source of the views, and the means of confirmation, so that every idea is reflected in how things actually come together, by force if necessary. Lastly, there has to be a way of responding to every strange occurrence within the Story, so that it can be either contained or expelled before it does any lasting damage to “the only thing there is”. Everything needs to remain sufficiently restrictive towards the minds that constitute the structure, while also leaving them with some acceptable way of functioning in it.

Given that human beings are defined by how they live, and thus forced to realize that idea in action, we can say that there's an element of teaching a performance of normality. Just like how it happens with children in religious families, the practice always happens first, so that it can become an obvious part of everyday life. Then, as a certain surface-level meaning is attached to it, usually when met with opposition, the whole idea eventually takes root – including any unspoken or necessarily true parts of it. Since everyone also does it, and not doing it is either not possible or results in punishment, a whole canon of beliefs forms out of that strange monopoly. As people continue practicing it, the norm becomes their second nature, and by that measure turns invisible. Once that happens, any attempt to argue otherwise is futile, because there simply is no place for any competing idea, especially since every second of functioning in the constructed reality only serves to make it feel more and more like it has always been that way. Most importantly, however, it also prevents the need for critical reflection on it, and thus any revolutionary reconstruction of it, from becoming too apparent to the dominant group by measure of their ability to function in it without breaking down too often.

The sheer amount of power the mind holds, especially when the thought is shared between millions of others, seems to be enough to keep altering the external world to the internalized structure's image. In spite of that, events conflicting with that description keep happening, prompting their swift removal. Even as they get basically spirited away, the fact that they happened clearly implies that they could, and the existence of the so-called back stage, and the Darkness that rules over it, only serves to confirm that. After all, if there really was a natural order of things, there would be no need for a secret force that erases the outliers. For the people that do most of the narrating, this means there's always a contradiction hidden in the Story that, due to the supernatural being indispensable for its maintenance, keeps getting repeated to the listeners. As a result of that, every new generation of speakers has tales to tell that contain things contrary to the hidden core of the narrative, meaning that the seeds of change are irreversibly built into it. This makes it fundamentally unable to go on unchallenged forever, despite the fact that the revolution can still be contained and delayed just by the virtue of the Story still being the only one in humanity's consciousness.

Of course, something needs to take the place of the old ideology, because in the end there has to be some kind of shared understanding between people, or at least a way of conveying your own experience without it being constantly questioned. Since the problem arises out of a lack of flexibility, as well as the Story having a monopoly on meaning, any kind of solution would have to allow multiple completely different frameworks to coexist at the same time, much like the personal narratives already do. For the Darkness problem to be resolved, a certain degree of plurality of thought, experience and existence is needed. Since the Oddities are almost exclusively talked about, thus making them unable to define themselves, this also implies finding a way to give them a voice, so that they can choose who they want to be just like human beings already (kind of) get to. And lastly, there has to be awareness of the sheer multitude of possibilities, and therefore also a common ability to reshape the world consciously. Initially, this might involve some specific social institution or mechanism designed for that purpose.

All of this, in a world ruled by narratives, can only be achieved with the involvement of new stories, ones that consciously paint a different picture as a refutation of the old order, but also a proposition of a new one. Since that would require a knowledgeable and skilled teller, someone like Sengoku Nadeko seems the most likely to manage such a task, seeing as she already happens to have the right skills. Before any movement can form, however, people need to become aware of what they're in and why it's not the good place they used to think it is, which is a whole new problem entirely.

Breaking Out

To reiterate what I just said in the previous section, before any change can happen on a societal level, some critical mass of people that are aware of the problem has to be achieved first. This is where personal circumstances start to matter a lot, although the importance of outside conditions cannot be understated. Still, the process of recognising the issue has to happen on an individual basis, whether it's something big like racism, or more contained to your own life, like being in an abusive family. Shining some spotlight on your own pain is, although absolutely necessary, only the first step of a much longer and more difficult process. Just untangling yourself from the thought-terminating notion of the thing in question being “normal”, and thus totally okay and even obligatory by default, is already a huge feat. The conclusion after that initial realization, however, is where the path forward splits. Acknowledging the existence of harm, after all, doesn't have to come with any drive towards change. In fact, it's the very concept of alternatives existing that proves to be the most elusive for so many, to such a degree that only direct contact with it can break through the apparent inevitability of evil. A good example of that is, as far as the Monogatari Series is concerned, the character arc of Hanekawa Tsubasa.

Before she first became involved with Koyomi, Tsubasa was just a seemingly perfect class president that lived in a house with neither her original parents nor her own room. She played her role perfectly, whether in school or not, always making sure to repress any particularities of hers that might cause a negative reaction. Having a keen eye to other people's internal states, or the situation around her in general, certainly helped a lot in figuring out how to avoid being hated. At the same time, despite seemingly being aware of her own imperfections, she lacked the ability to recognise or accept any feelings of her own, except those towards Koyomi – which she still kept to herself all the way until Neko White.

In the context of the abuse she had to deal with, you can say that Tsubasa's way of functioning is a result of having to protect herself against her new parents, with the same attitude stretching to other people through the sheer amount of overcorrection involved. Seeing as she acts more or less the same even without them being present, like in a much less restrictive Hitagi's place, we can say pretty confidently that it's probably the only way she knows of. Though she is technically aware of how some people season food so to speak, or even grow to hate each other, wiping herself clean of any potentially non-neutral characteristics seems to be the only option, regardless of what the far away others do.

This constant act of playing the role of an inoffensive girl, almost as if to present herself as a clump of appropriate behavior, has its negative consequences for Tsubasa and those around her. To begin with, maintaining this sort of outward appearance is bound to generate a whole lot of stress, while also making it impossible to fully escape her mind. This is shown to result in the displacement of that negativity, and then further relegation of its relief to an Oddity called Black Hanekawa. Since there's so much of it to work through, the cat has to be quite violent in order to effectively get rid of it. What's more, the fact that the issue at the center of this can't be addressed by venting, outsourced or otherwise, serves to ensure the next wave of attacks whenever Tsubasa becomes overwhelmed again. Having no knowledge of a solution, nor the power to address her situation, this leaves her with no choice but to simply continue avoiding further confrontation or any behavior that might cause other people to dislike her, generating more stress as a result.

Of course, all sorts of stressful events, big or small, inevitably happen from time to time, so the role is clearly too heavy of a burden even without additional issues. This is especially the case in an environment that seems to be hostile towards any mistakes or flaws. The sheer amount of effort necessary to maintain the perfect student council president or good stepdaughter personas is already too much for someone that has difficulty processing and working through emotions, even more so when there seems to be no safe place to do so. What's more, simply throwing the emotion away doesn't constitute the kind of purification that Tsubasa appears to have been aiming for in that period, but a complete reversal of her usual attitude also wasn't an option for her. Since daughters are supposed to obediently love their parents (and the same can be said about good friends too), as well as to ensure no negative emotions arise in them or their “caretakers” or loved ones, a strange obligation to suppress the “bad emotions” forms in response to those expectations and preconceived notions.

Her involvement in the lives of Koyomi and Hitagi, and thus all the feelings that arose from that, only made it more painful to have to do something about them, both the positive and the “bad” negative ones. As a person that spent so much of her life “protecting the rules” just because she couldn't develop her own sense of morality, polyamory was never on the table despite being arguably the best way out, assuming things would've worked well between the three. Simply realizing her feelings and attraction towards Hitagi, as obvious as the shower scene or the infamously omitted line from the light novel might make them, was already a serious exercise in getting out of the heteronormative shell that she was stuck in simply by virtue of playing the role of a perfectly inoffensive proper high school girl. Even if she did get out on time, pursuing one over the other could only result in hurting her loved one, since the pair would have to break up for Tsubasa to enter the only kind of romantic relationship she knows is considered normal. Giving up is, on another hand, difficult and time consuming, especially when the people that broke your heart are your closest friends, but also can be delayed indefinitely, in hopes that the feelings will peacefully go away after graduation.

Not disturbing your loved ones' happiness (on top of everything else that was also a factor here) is, especially in the context of a monogamous society, a good recipe for a whole lot of those supposedly immoral negative emotions, far more difficult to deal with than stress. As one would expect, given what happened in Tsubasa Family and Tsubasa Cat, a new Oddity was born from the pile of anger and envy, a massive Tiger called Kako or “Past”. Targeting places she considered home, or at least important, the first one to get burned down is her own family home, followed by the abandoned school Hitagi found her sleeping in. Since at any point the next place she slept in could be attacked, in particular both Hitagi and Koyomi's place, a confrontation with the Tiger was necessary to prevent more harm. This, however, required understanding where it came from and why, which is where she needed help the most considering how much she struggles with self-awareness.

Since it partially came from unrequited love, recognising the problem and coming to terms with it had to be, at least in part, facilitated by one of her crushes. Koyomi was neither available nor capable of noticing what was actually going on, so the only other option was to talk things out while roommating with Hitagi. Of course, our cat girl couldn't possibly initiate anything, so a helpful dose of questions and invitations was just the right thing she needed. The food preferences conversation is particularly interesting in the way it brings out Tsubasa's tendency to refrain from doing things that can be judged or personally disliked by others, making it easy to point out to her and then follow up with a serious talk. There also are multiple attempts to turn her on, and possibly even initiate a sexual act, which lead to a very important realization of her own queerness. On one hand it makes her aware of already not being neutral as a person, but it also makes the love triangle even more painfully indicative of the way societal rules made the whole situation way worse.

The arson attacks that Kako started committing, as the expelled envy and anger that Tsubasa felt towards others, threatened not only her but also her love interests and friends, including her next shelter – the house of the Araragi family. This is where yet another helpful stay and a bundle of conversations happened, including one with Koyomi's mother. What might've been brewing inside her for a while, was directly stated to her in that short moment, ensuring her that there is another life possible. Seeing a relatively healthy family after that first eye-opening stay with Hitagi only made it more apparent, but it's also where she made her decision to accept the emotions she previously treated as something she shouldn't have, which turned out to be a crucial part of the resolution. Now, she did get technically saved, despite getting Black Hanekawa to fight against the Tiger, but that's not really the point here. What is important, however, is the fact that the necessary realization and the change that followed it could only happen after a self-made fire hazard cracked Tsubasa's head open for just long enough for new thoughts to arise.

In the context of what she absorbed growing up in her family and society at large, the act of accepting herself as who she is, regardless of how that might affect other people's views on her, marks an important transition in her life. All the way up to that point, she was constantly focused on following the rules and expectations, trying her best to melt and disappear into them so that nobody has a reason to hate her. In order to function in a wide variety of institutions and contexts, some amount of self-repression was necessary in order to fulfill all the tasks and showcase every single attitude and emotion out of sheer sense of duty – even in cases where not following this moral duty was the expected reaction, like that one time when Tsubasa was hit by her foster father.

Doing all those things was bound to be taxing to her, but it also conflicted heavily with who she actually was, paradoxically preventing her from getting anywhere near the self-realization that the commonly accepted life instructions were assumed to lead towards. What's more, checking boxes like that doesn't leave much room for personal development, which is a serious problem when you're at that period of life when growing up is supposed to happen. In order to fully function as an adult, she'd have to deal with things on her own, regardless of any prescriptions she might've been given by her parents or teachers, which requires becoming distinct enough from others to be able to interact with society as her own self. The decision to absorb all the rejected elements, symbolically marking her uniqueness by the transformation of her hair into black and white stripes, is by that measure a critical departure from childhood. The role she played as a kid, with all its positives and negatives, ended right there.

Looking back at the whole arc, especially in comparison to how other characters dealt with related issues, reveals a lot of things about not only Tsubasa's evolution as a character, but also the way a real type of person she represents here acts in normative society. The most obvious one is that she kept trying to be someone she wasn't, simply because those were the rules. The act of, to borrow the original Japanese phrasing, “protecting the rules” was exactly what kept hurting her to a genuinely dangerous degree, causing a major emergency that could only be solved by accepting her real self. And it was all a result of doing the only thing she knew, following that fateful moment in life when parents didn't tell her about the possibility of being wrong about things or other valid options existing. A combination of performance and ideology lead to her internalizing everything, making it near impossible for her to recognise and express a more personally satisfying way of being just because it didn't fit the “proper” one. And she couldn't truly mature until she interrogated all of that almost at gunpoint.

This is, perhaps, what sets her apart from someone much more conscious and accepting of herself as Suruga, especially when it comes to queerness. One reason why the gap is so big boils down to Tsubasa's tendency to be unaware of her own internal state, to a comparably bad degree as Koyomi's blindness to things happening around him. You can see how it makes her confuse both the outside and herself into thinking she's the same proper citizen as everyone, even though there are plenty of moments that prove otherwise. Understandably so, considering that she's been playing the good girl role for such a long time, that it became outright automatic for her. Not even seeing other people act wildly out of the box could stop her mind in its tracks, until a mixture of intense feelings and a major supernatural threat to others finally crowbarred the way out open.

On one hand, she seemed aware of being flawed, as shown by her saying in Kizumonogatari that she's not as good of a person as Koyomi thinks. And yet, it's almost like the concept of stopping for a while to think about doing something about it simply didn't exist for her, seeing as her life was dominated by simply continuing to put up the facade no matter what. This is also very visible in the difficulty she had recognising her own queerness, unable to notice that the way she described Hitagi in the first episode of Bakemonogatari is far from what a straight person would typically say, and how they would look like when doing so.

And yet, despite her best attempts at self-repression, she couldn't help being different from that ideal person, and to a much more significant degree than most people are. She spent almost the entirety of her childhood acting like she doesn't have anything that out there about her, but the very fact that she met and became so entangled with an Oddity proves that not to be the case. The same can be said about her ability to see and understand what is going on with other people, paired with a complete lack of self-awareness. Something was always standing out, even when unnoticed, like her sexuality was due to bi erasure. And those parts of her, just as important as the “normal” bits, were obviously never put there by anyone or explained to her, forcing her to realize everything on her own. But as long as she could function in the expected way, there was nothing significant enough in her life to break through the conditioning, which is why her life had to break down first before she could recognise the issue. And the reason all of this happened in the first place can be said to be the true form of what is going on at the heart of the Monogatari Series.

The Problem at the Core

As the countless words in this analysis have already made clear, normative society has an issue, and that issue is that it is normative. Expressed in the language of the universe in question, there is a certain set of things you have to do depending on what kind of entity you're written as by the Story. If you're the human on top, prancing around on the so-called “front stage”, you can just do whatever you absorbed from your environment and you'll be fine most of the time. Your existence is safe and observable by anyone capable of observation, making it undeniable for as long as you keep standing in your assigned position. You even have some minor wiggle room, everywhere except the fundamentals of the definition of course, which allows you just enough of a choice to feel like everything is perfectly okay. This doesn't change the fact that some repression and control is still happening, but in a way that allows you to have a decently livable time on earth. As much as “living like a human” might be complicated for the “strange ones”, the only thing you really have to do is to become complicit in the Story, to absorb it and pass on to the next generation. It is, after all, one of “the things that humans do”, most often referred to as “parenting” or “teaching”.

Learn to navigate this system of conditions and social rituals, you slowly internalize it to an outright terrifying degree. The question of organizing your life and the pursuit of happiness eventually comes up, but the countless institutions you go through make it easy to follow the intended path, at least in comparison to crafting your own made. However, a problem comes up in the critical period of adolescence. Who you are as a person, besides the memories that only you have and what little acceptable variation exists in the social reality you're in, is a matter of how you differ, including all the stuff outside of the accepted range.You are, in a sense, because you separate yourself out from the “outside”. This includes the society that surrounds you, trying to shape you into an image of itself exactly because of the fact that you're distinct from it. And it's unavoidable, just like the crucial moments in Tsubasa or Koyomi's character arcs were, since the ability to live like an adult develops over the course of that process of individualisation. You still have to exist within a specific set of fixed, enforced rules, which means that the way things are organized comes in conflict with some of your needs and wants.

If you're lucky, what you can get is good enough or even almost the same as what you truly need, but things aren't always that convenient. Especially given that the common perspective on things always comes with distorted or hidden elements, making it hard to figure out what to do. The thought patterns you memorized might, for example, allow you to interpret the feelings towards this boy as love, but only have the notion of friendship for how you feel about his girlfriend. The path you're given may be good for the type of person you play, but there is no other role to choose from except for a slight variation on that one archetype. And while you're expected to grow up, and thus fully separate out from society, you're also supposed to become the next version of the adult that raised you, even though you can't just be someone you're not simply because a senior wants you to.

When the degree of abnormality extends the tiny degree of freedom afforded for those on top of the hierarchy, you end up being categorized as “strange” or even “not human”. What lies outside the box you're supposed to pick and choose from, has to be expelled or invalidated somehow, so that the box can remain the only set of elements that are acceptable to build from. The more of yourself you find to be in conflict with “how you do things”, the harsher the treatment has to be, unless you find a way to excuse yourself using a creative combination of elements from the aforementioned box. This is why Suruga is just a human “pervert”, with only a monkey's arm as the source of the wildest parts, but Ougi has to be “exposed” as the “monster” they are. Lesbianism isn't much, since you just swap who you're attracted to, and being bipolar can already look like a case of demon possession to some people, so it fits her condition very well.

But while disturbances can be twisted into a more unusual, but conditionally acceptable variant of the proper person, conflicting ways of being do not have that leeway. So when a ghost is supposed to move on, not doing so is treated as invalid, which prompts the Darkness to target the poor snail girl. Choosing to perform the intended ending ultimately saves her, validating the view that ghosts move on the second their problem is solved. The concept of being mentally born from Koyomi is even further outside the norm, which is why the only way to save them was for Meme to accept Ougi as his niece, despite that still not being the case. One way or another, the offending trait has to be removed, with or without the offender.

Whatever your role is, and how it fits into the Story, there is a canonical mode of existence, from which every other is derived as anything from an addition to an outright violation of that canon. This way of life is celebrated and maintained as the most, or even only, secure option. The reason why is that the world is arranged and organized around certain social and economic institutions, all in order to facilitate that exact model life, even when it doesn't lead to the individual's happiness. The ideology that justifies the order and teaches people how to live in it has to exclude all the ways of being that come into conflict with the intended “way things are”, regardless of whether they're harmful or not. And as this Story roots itself in the minds of people, the characters they play as end up shaping their own actions and ideas, becoming the internalized image of the normative oppressor.

Despite the sheer number of obedient followers of the general life instructions, problems still arise. The sheer wealth of experience and existence is far beyond what any set of rules could ever account for, but as long as people keep pathologizing and undermining them, there will always be violence and coercion underneath the seemingly peaceful surface society. It's what ultimately makes it unstable, since resistance always happens in response to oppression, but the problem can't be fixed by expanding the wiggle room a bit more. Allowing for some more choice within the boundaries of the same role doesn't change the flawed mechanics of normative society or the material conditions that gave rise to the economic system on top of which everything else is built.

It follows, therefore, that normativity has to be abolished, that it cannot be our way of living, raising children or setting boundaries. It is flawed, in ways that only create more suffering than what it is supposed to prevent, assuming it even is trying to. And it's harmful to everyone, even the people on top of the hierarchy. The many tales of the Monogatari cast prove, by all the details of how their very real stories went, that there must be no way of life celebrated above others, no concept that would segregate everything from marriage to having mental breakdowns into hierarchical categories, no institutions or laws that pressure everyone into a single form. The very concept of “canon”, as it pertains to different ways of being, all the messaging and categorizing that constitutes it, every part of the machine that organizes social life in this very specific way, all of that has to burn. The Story at the center of this, like any other thing that began, eventually loses whatever positive purpose it had. And it is the end to that story that not only we all, but it itself needs the most.

Stories About the Story

What initially started as a collection of shorts about some supernatural encounters involving a guy and some girls, turned itself over time into a wide variety of arcs and events that all center around the franchise's allegory of normativity – the titular story. While the first season is told entirely from the perspective of Araragi Koyomi, the later installments include other narrators as well, allowing it to touch upon topics that Koyomi wouldn't be able to give justice to or talk about at all. The views presented on certain issues can vary quite a lot, but they all come from the interaction between the Story and its characters, including the world itself. This entity that appears to be some kind of a force of nature reveals itself, through the countless smaller substories, to act like an abusive ruler of the narrated reality. It's an omnipresent ruleset, but the only reason why it manages to maintain its dominance is because of its own supernatural police force, literally cutting out everything that doesn't fit in with the specific notion of how things are. This is the real main topic of the series, the source of all problems and struggles inside of it.

Some of its logic may be self-evident, given that it makes itself out as the mythical common sense, but under the surface a whole new set of hidden laws regulate and police every single one of its elements. It spreads itself everywhere, controlling whatever outcomes it can through various actors, constantly reproducing the appearance of a natural order of things. At the same time, by having to do so, it cements the falsehood of the form it presents. It removes unwanted contents through the Darkness, yet it cannot erase them from the memories of the witnesses, nor change the fact that they were there before they got spirited away. The tale of the disappeared always gets passed on to someone, leaving countless signs of something being wrong in the minds of the audience members. And seemingly small details, like the fact that there are beings older than the Oddities, prove that it is not eternal, that it will eventually meet its end.

This grand narrative about reality and life as a whole is deeply intertwined with and even outright fused into the personal stories of the cast. Paradoxically, it makes it less visible, especially since it provides a whole collection of justifications for when something strange or unwanted happens. It's part of the reason why the narrators don't talk about or at least show some awareness of the underlying issues, despite clearly struggling with them on a regular basis. This is because the time all those people spent living in society, without having to deal with extreme situations on a daily basis, left an impression on their understanding of the world and themselves, while also making it feel like there's no need to stop and think when everything is supposedly working well. This arranged reality is full of bigger and smaller divergences from how it is supposed to be though, which leads to a situation, where the entirety of human experience becomes impossible to map onto the specific set of concepts provided by the Story.

As a result, those that cannot build a working definition of themselves out of the pieces they were given end up being treated as wrong or even non-existent. Even when there already is a concept that accurately describes who you are, it often doesn't come with any major variations or customisation, like the way vampires are always made to turn the people whose blood they drink into their own kind. The consequences of forcing the “monsters” into acting like how they're viewed by the humans have to constantly be managed by so-called “specialists”, so that the whole system can function without breaking down or ruining the delicate balance between the normal people and everyone else. But while early installments might make it seem like it's possible to just keep going like that forever, Koyomi's vampirism is one way in which the series points out that it's not.

What is, perhaps, the most striking here, is how the fact that everything is happening within a story is repeatedly pointed out throughout the anime, as if to encourage people to try to dig a little deeper than normal. The events themselves can already be very similar to what some have experienced, but the sheer severity of normative oppression, together with the role it plays in the franchise as the source of all problems and one of its major connecting threads, tells a whole new story about the society we live in. It might be difficult for the broad audience to fill in the holes with what they never experienced, but the anime still believes in your ability to extrapolate from what is already there. The combination of style and ingenuity involved in making this massive thing happen, in my opinion, is why it deserves to be called a masterpiece, despite all of its shortcomings. And even if it never gets anything close to another anime, or an official English translation of the novels past Zoku Owarimonogatari, it will forever remain impactful to me and many others like the queer wonder that it undeniably is.