Part Three: A Cultural Critique of the Madwoman Fantasy

V. A Cultural Critique of the Madwoman Fantasy

Visual analysis grounded in technologies for governing perception has reached a relatively negative conclusion about the madwoman in anime. Yet, as it delves into the media culture linking animation and audiences and the disciplinary operation of attention, visual analysis cannot fully account for the cultural logic concealed behind the madwoman—or, more precisely, the logic of consumers’ desires and fantasies. Moreover, its insistence on animation production’s control over character representation, and on failures of that control, confines the critical framework to pure differences internal to fictional images. The female figure’s radical force is then located in the completeness and univocity of her desire. Visual analysis also never adequately addresses the environmental factors established in advance for these characters. In view of this, the essay finally returns to its central psychoanalytic inquiry into animated fantasy, examining different madwoman fantasies to supplement its critique of visual culture and distinguish the characteristics of darkening and yandere.

1. The Madwoman’s “Fantasy”

Animation’s hyperfantasmatic character has already shown that, faced with animation’s absence of center, audiences actively construct fantasy to maintain the coherence of subjective experience. This challenges a model of cultural transmission built on a binary opposition between official producers and audiences. At the same time, the new mode of concentrated attention loses itself in the image’s scattered illusory elements, revealing the uncontrollability of the apparatus of desire. One fact merits reflection: animated characters are plainly nothing like human beings. The difference lies not only between the spectator’s flesh and the character’s ideal appearance, physique, and way of life, but still more in the seemingly incommensurable “dimensional barrier” between reality and fiction. Sexual desire for and attachment to animated characters constitute a distinctive symptom, also confronting the desiring subject with a peculiar possibility of being “pulled out of the story.” Most otaku do not desire “paper characters” exclusively. They still participate in, and are influenced by, the cultural heterosexual matrix, and do not entirely lose either their “interest” in human beings or the most basic ability to interact with them. Furthermore, even with VR technology and corresponding aids, otaku remain more or less aware of the difference between virtual worlds and bodily reality. The trauma of this split and its suturing deserve consideration. Two opposing processes accommodate those fantasy elements that “cannot stand the light.” One rigorously pursues a deeper, passionate fantasy, concentrating on virtual enjoyment to conceal the unsymbolizable fissure behind pleasure. The other uses fantasy to support the symbolic order, defining otaku hobbies and the animated characters they desire as “ordinary,” “normal,” part of what makes life good. Seemingly opposed, the two processes are not contradictory; together, they maintain consumer society’s hegemony. This is precisely the mutually reinforcing process Featherstone describes: the “aestheticization of everyday life” and the “incorporation of aesthetics into everyday life.”¹ Deepening everyday life into fantasy while making fantasy ordinary allows the subject to pursue consumerist cultural experience in reality without end.

Attachment to or anxiety about relatively extreme attributes such as darkening and yandere tests the suturing of these two paths. How can pathological personality or emotional attributes be made “everyday” and “aesthetic”? Cultural intermediaries have worked hard at this. There is no need to dwell on the “hyper-aestheticization” encouraged by animation’s layer aesthetics, or the precisely calibrated masochistic desire organized around male characters. In dōjin manga, the erotic artist Nagisa Ikura’s 12 Seiza Yandere-chan [Yandere Girls of the Twelve Zodiac Signs] classifies yandere traits by the twelve signs, matching them to each sign’s characteristics. Beautiful girls’ flat, flawless faces and bodies structured according to Cartesian aesthetics emphasize an erotic appeal to sensory experience. They conceal the yandere woman’s castrating capacity while retaining part of it as an obscene supplement. Similarly, the manga Onryō Okusama [The Vengeful Spirit Wife] preserves the visual impact of abject matter such as blood and hair, but confines the vengeful spirit to wifehood and dependence on the male protagonist, making every “fright” she causes part of ordinary married life. These treatments do not fully resolve—or merely conceal—the “pathological” and “resentful” dimensions of such attributes. They cannot satisfy everyone fixated on pathological characters. To enjoy the pleasures of these extreme figures without forfeiting respectability, consumers must immerse themselves still further in fantasy, negate the existing social symbolic order, and make exacting demands on society’s cultural tolerance. This disrupts the balance in which “fantasy” and “reality” construct one another. A further step would be possible if, rather than devoting themselves as sexual perverts to defending the legitimacy of pathological fantasy—perversion—they discovered inconsistencies among some of the fantasies supporting these attributes.

In Žižek’s terms, fantasy does not offer an entirely fictional, obscurantist space that drags the subject inside. Rather, it reveals that fantasy supports the consistency of reality. Immersive “cyberspace” can give concrete form to the inconsistent fantasies in the subject’s innermost depths.² Extending this line of thought, Tamaki Saitō’s psychoanalysis of the “beautiful fighting girl” may pursue further, through new media such as anime and manga, Žižek’s account of cinema as an ontology of incomplete reality. Saitō particularly emphasizes another side of the two-dimensional fighting girl’s hyperfantasmatic character. “Fighting” is not a decision explicable through the logic of reality, one that she must make to fulfill a vague wish. It determines her identity as a beautiful fighting girl, a symptom constituted by an impasse of enjoyment.³ This conclusion reveals that men’s desire for two-dimensional beautiful girls derives first from enjoyment stripped of gender, answering feminist accusations that all male otaku are fetishists. The “pathology” and “resentment” of anime’s madwomen similarly reproduce the hyperfantasmatic character of the medium. Does a pathological “symptom” possess a self-evident fantasmatic dimension—and the possibility of traversing it? If we accept moe attributes as a taxonomy better suited to Japanese animation, then we should observe that the symptoms embodied by yandere and darkened women differ when considered as ways of exposing the games of the viewing subject’s desire.

2. Yandere

The Kaede Fuyou incident in SHUFFLE! sparked widespread controversy over yandere women among consumers of ACG culture. By now they have become an unavoidable historical trend, cautiously watched and accepted. Although interpretations differ as to the attribute’s specific features and the behaviors it produces, “yandere” broadly denotes a pathological personality structure fixed in place over an individual’s development, which must also be understood within a romantic relationship.⁴ In other words, yandere is a sedimented experience of mental derangement or a persona. To manifest its affectionate side—the jiao in Chinese bingjiao, paired with bing, “pathological”—the yandere must engage in interactions bearing on sexual fantasy with a particular character, usually the one onto whom the audience is expected to project its identification. Generally, these two characteristics also reveal how the culture industry recuperates this attribute from within.

The typical yandere fantasy presents a paradoxical scene. In scenes of affectionate dependence, we see the yandere occupy a masochistic position and depend on a man. Yet it is precisely her unreserved affectionate dependence that becomes a sexual difference the man cannot face. Like the new femme fatale in Žižek’s psychoanalytic reading, the yandere displays fantasy through almost complete obedience to its rules, producing a remainder that cannot be symbolized. She defeats men within the rules of desire they have devised, overturning male fantasy. Here we see a Deleuzian masochistic subject, the force of desire escaping the rules of paternal law. The yandere attribute is a particular product rooted in the context of shōjo subculture. As the historical discussion emphasized, “dissonance in women’s bodies” estranges women from grand discourses and turns them toward embodied experience. They refuse to become a subject subjected to a discourse and instead merge with the object of desire that continually escapes control. The Araragi sisters’ declaration to Koyomi Araragi in Nisemonogatari seems to allude to this cultural background: they do not want to be allies (masters) of justice (the phallus), but justice (the phallus) itself. Small wonder Saitō distinguishes the power of Japanese fighting girls from that of America’s Wonder Woman.⁵ The latter corresponds to a product of masculine logic in Lacan’s formulas of sexuation: defeating men by possessing the phallus. The former corresponds to becoming a “true woman”—objet petit a—and contains the terrifying face of the Real.

Yet the illusion that the yandere is “subversive” arises precisely from a failure to notice the audience’s unconscious reworking of the remainder concealed behind fantasy’s direct display. Complete self-exposure and self-transparency can sometimes make the subject still more mysterious,⁶ endowing it with the possibility of being conquered conceptually. The feminine secret behind affectionate dependence both breaks through fantasy and sustains its replenishment, producing what Kant calls the illusion of the sublime. Woman thus remains the sublime object supporting fantasy. A further refinement occurs when the yandere woman displays a terrifying possessiveness toward the character with whom the audience identifies, forcing viewers to choose between masochism and withdrawal from identification. By pathologically exaggerating the femme fatale’s coldness and calculation, anime seems to provide a “true” cognitive map of this other. The “pathological” is precisely the incomprehensible feminine secret behind “affectionate dependence,” a visualization of the lack behind unreserved love for a man. This feeds back into the structural element—the moe attraction—that binds pathology and affection. The indirectly presented “pathology” becomes an explanation of the essence of “affectionate dependence,” not a traversal of the fantasy of the female body.

Here we again see a difference between the yandere and Žižek’s “new femme fatale.” The yandere seems to add an annotation to male fantasy on the basis of the new femme fatale: accepting her will lead to consequences as shattering as the madness displayed on screen. At the same time, as a fixed abnormal personality structure, the yandere is “the subject with a diabolical will who is perfectly aware of what she is doing”; “her gesture does not quite fit the description of a true ethical act.”⁷ She becomes caught in the inflated self-identification of the sexual pervert. Yet perhaps we must also recognize that, although yandere makes pathology explain affection and thus serves the overall construction of otaku moe attributes, the direct display of pathology still brings the horror of the drive-object—only for animation’s hyperfantasmatic character to diminish it. The crucial issue is how to prevent this display from becoming fantasy’s supplement to reality. Unlike the yandere attribute, which exists as a stable personality with conscious aims directed toward the opposite sex and ultimately becomes “everyday behavior,” darkening usually means a temporary loss of control and an intense dispersal of consciousness. It is not confined to heterosexual sadomasochistic relations but relates to a wider collapse of values and beliefs. It therefore looks somewhat different from yandere.

3. Darkening

The term heihua (“darkening”) first appeared in the Heaven’s Feel (HF) route of the famous visual novel Fate/stay night, describing the drastic change in Saber’s disposition after contamination by the Holy Grail’s mud. Later, it came to refer generally to a “good person” becoming mad and cruel after an intense psychic shock. It can also describe a story’s abrupt shift from healing to soul-crushing.⁸ Darkened women share certain similarities with women in the grip of yandere behavior. In their conduct, these madwomen all display an evil will without reserve, and all exhibit obvious signs of mental disturbance. But a psychosocial archaeology of the characters marked by these two attributes reveals equally obvious differences. Yandere, for instance, is a concept of duration: a personality long since internalized, operating throughout everyday life, manifesting a personality disorder that asserts an evil self through “transgression.” Darkening marks a point in time, a stress response to the trauma of the Real; the state after darkening is also temporary. Compared with the yandere’s excessive self-consciousness, intoxicated by evil, darkening is therefore more unstable and hysterical. The instant of darkening is the direct somatization of conflicts among the subject’s internal convictions. The anime Caligula stages this hysteria. Textually, the story’s progressive element lies not in the rebels against Mobius but in its creator, the virtual songstress μ. From her “father,” Ritsu Shikishima, μ has internalized the impossible command to “make everyone in the world happy.” When she sees everyone wanting to escape Mobius, her sudden eruption of power expresses not only anger at the rebels but an attack on the incomplete command itself. In short, the emergence of Mobius’s fierce rebels forces μ to confront an impasse: making people happy from the heart through external coercion is a paradox. In episode 6, encountering this split for the first time, μ has no choice but to repeat Antigone’s demand to the big Other. Her emotional loss of control is directed neither at those trying to escape Mobius nor at the Mobius establishment defending its order, but at this law of happiness itself.

Inevitably, however, darkening in its concrete presentation is always a fleeting fragment. We must therefore distinguish analytically between “darkening” and “the continuing pathological state after darkening.” Hysteria, or dispersed attention, cannot occupy a linear stretch of chronological time. Once the darkened character identifies with the dark side, the text turns, redrawing her as a villain. This involves more than the culture industry’s standardized demand that animation adjust its pacing to the aesthetic logic of mass-cultural commodities. It also involves the operation of a desiring-machine constructed visually within postmodern culture: repeated “hysterical” figures on screen grow tedious.

In commercial animation, therefore, the continuing state after darkening is no longer a technology of the self, detached from narrative and born of an artist’s obsession. It is a “contradiction” within the text awaiting resolution. This contradiction usually contains dualistic elements. When a character embodying goodness turns evil after a brutal shock, a pair of opposites within the character is often presupposed. In other words, darkening often indicates that the character retains a “white,” good side, merely repressed or temporarily displaced by darkness because of trauma. The HF route of Fate/stay night exemplifies this. Sakura’s darkening concentrates the eruption of her cruel experiences. Plainly, Dark Sakura is a removable stain, and the underlying cause is bound up with the essentially twisted Holy Grail. Here we see a contemporary enactment of early modern logic of governance. Psychic collapse is certainly not inexplicable mysticism, but anime is all too practiced at declaring it a pathology correctable through psychology, love, positive thinking, and warm everyday life. The HF route is nothing more than a boy’s Oedipal myth. In it, Shirou Emiya truly understands the paradox exposed by the dark nature of the Holy Grail—the phallus—that everyone rallies around. To save Fuyuki City, he must kill the “gate” of the Dark Grail. The choice made in the story tells us that he finally accepts his desire and rejects the belief he has held since childhood. In compensation for sacrificing his original wish—to become an ally of justice—Shirou receives the promise of obtaining the remainder split off from that wish, taking over the castrated phallus: becoming Sakura’s ally. As the Grail’s “gate,” is Sakura not a vivid embodiment of objet petit a, split off from the original ideal? Shirou does not dare face the darkened Sakura, insisting instead that he can bring the true Sakura back. Does this not express the Real of the loss of the original wish, figured by objet petit a, and the suturing of that trauma?

Here we see the dualistic logic enacted by the darkened state. Just as yandere displays the new femme fatale’s dark side to avoid questioning the enigma of woman, the darkened state tries to rationalize itself as a manifestation of that enigma by conceptually presupposing something “outside darkening.” After all, female desire and suffering have already been released and displayed through darkening; it is difficult to imagine what facet of desire could remain hidden. The text’s resolution of darkening is equally plain: either save the girl who has fallen into darkness or defeat the girl who has become a despairing villain. Sakura exemplifies the former; Sayaka Miki, the latter. The decisive difference between darkening and yandere appears when we take the female figure as the subject of analysis. Darkening means that she possesses the potential for an eruption beyond linear time that can distort everyday life. The instant of darkening brings intense dissatisfaction and exacting demands directed at the given discourse of the big Other. The yandere, by contrast, accepts this discourse and its commands, whether by identifying with them or by refusing identification.

Conclusion: Traversing the “Madwoman” Fantasy

The concept of the madwoman offers an interesting and powerful perspective on female figures. It also lets us reconsider problems concealed by feminist views that assimilate women to men: women can command power through writing as men do, yet remain unable to escape masculine discourse. Within Japan’s shōjo culture, however, tensions in the relationship between women’s bodies and the gaze make a close inquiry into the madwoman’s bodily image theoretically important. This essay has discussed bodily changes in anime’s staging of the madwoman, analyzing the prominent devices of eyes without highlights and frightening smiles in some detail while also indicating their limits. The critique of visual culture raises the problem of animation’s hyperfantasmatic character as a medium. In short, under cinematism, audiences repeatedly disperse the attention directed by predetermined shots and fill in fantasy. By contrast, animetism’s layer aesthetics and flat character design mobilize audiences’ attention to participate in the fantasy animation directly presents; the regulation of attention unfolds within a fantasy scene given in advance. An aesthetic filter also colors the display of the madwoman’s terrifying smile. It is precisely at this level that Žižek’s ontology of incomplete reality criticizes two approaches to fantasies of women.

First, we must not treat the hyperfantasmatic as the hopeless opposite of the “real,” falling into a Baudrillardian semiotic impasse. In this anxious line of thought, however a female animated figure expresses her unruly behavior and feelings, it is regarded as manipulation by a decentered male aesthetic order. This is no longer a unilateral patriarchal command imposed from a center, but merely the self-reproduction of signs of desire and the spread of power’s extremities. Criticism of the objectification of women thus not only has to confront its patriarchal enemy; it also faces dissolution within the postmodern context of otaku consumer culture. But if we consider fantasy as a mediator from another angle, hyperfantasmatic cyberspace—the two-dimensional world—betrays the consistency of the reality it supports. An ontology of incomplete reality holds that we will never see the day when reality’s symbolization is complete.⁹ The madwoman’s fantasy reveals precisely this. By exhausting the possibilities and nonactuality of fantasy, the hyperfantasy of distorted personalities loses the tension through which fantasy supports reality. Precisely because it infinitely expands and presents possibilities the subject has never anticipated, it “enables us to act out the fantasies that support us, down to the fundamental ‘sadistic’ fantasy that we can never subjectivize.”¹⁰¹¹ In this exhaustion we encounter the hard kernel of the fact that something “cannot be symbolized.”

Second, we cannot understand the hyperfantasmatic as an unqualified opportunity, imagining that immersion in a fantasy exceeding cinema’s is politically progressive. Saitō affirms both the phallic girl and the otaku captivated by her. For him, the most revolutionary otaku emerge among those who sexually desire extremely unreal two-dimensional girls. In finding ways to accommodate their erotic desire for beautiful girls, otaku are inspired to unprecedented creativity and devote themselves to fantasy’s autonomy. Yet precisely here, his ambivalence about otaku’s social position exposes his inability to handle the relationship between fantasy and reality.¹² Otaku who enjoy paper characters have not encountered some passion of deep fantasy. Instead, as he cautiously hopes, they have blended into ordinary life—a distinctive symptom of the later phase of Miyadai’s “age of the self,” beginning in 1996. Recourse to a pre-Oedipal “uncastrated imaginary” does not traverse fantasy. By abandoning real conditions deemed rigid and void, it instead produces a fantasy of traversing the fantasy.

We thus confront two sides of the madwoman’s presentation in anime. On one side, darkening and yandere, as standardized attributes, necessarily stylize appearances, down to specific behavioral prescriptions and affective forecasting. The femme fatale is ultimately a rehearsal of male desire for conquest. On the other, as we repeatedly enact fantasy, the fundamental “sadistic” fantasy that can never be subjectivized emerges. Drawing on Peter Høeg’s novel The Woman and the Ape, Žižek controversially explains this kernel. Both fantasies are written by male desire for conquest: for male protagonists, the ultimate fantasy is sex with a female cyborg whose attributes they have customized; for female protagonists, it is to obtain a powerful “male ape” who will love only them forever. Yet it is precisely the sexual relationship between these two fantasies—the female cyborg and the male ape—that we cannot imagine. This exposes the fissure in our fantasy: there is no sexual relation. We see something similar in Hanebado!. The lead heroine Ayano’s darkening is “feminine,” seeking recognition from the other and expressing intense attachment. But darkening inevitably takes the form of masculine sadistic acts, yielding, as a whole, the “Long Aotian power fantasy” of a transforming beautiful fighting girl.¹³ The second heroine, Nagisa, with her gender-neutral dress, is the character closest to a fantasy of masculinity: the sports fantasy. Hanebado!’s “breakdown” lies in the mismatched mating of the sports fantasy with the Long Aotian fantasy borne by Ayano, who demands the big Other’s desire. Just as viewers have identified with the sadistic dimension of the “Long Aotian spirit,” the repressed “sporting spirit” hidden behind the text suddenly switches from “bottom” to “top.” This display does not merely destroy the script’s logic; it tears apart the fundamental fantasy the audience has constructed. Unfortunately, the anime fails to bring the “sports fantasy” marked by Nagisa from the narrative margins to the center of the audience’s projected identification, on equal terms with the Long Aotian fantasy. Consequently, after the plot’s dark turn, viewers can protect themselves by withdrawing from the disintegrating power fantasy relatively unburdened.

Regrettably, reliance only on texts addressed to men, and attention only to the destabilization of male hegemony, leaves the position of the “female” spectator unexplored. It also overgeneralizes, even entirely cancels, gender differences in spectators’ fantasies. Constance Penley’s warning is useful here: focusing only on the resistance and limitations of mad female figures and turning to an “alternative theory of the feminine” like Kristeva’s merely essentializes the identification between socially gendered sexuality and the female body.¹⁴ We cannot help asking further: confronted with oppressive masculine discourse, might female subjects have other ways of participating in textual negotiation? How might the madwoman’s cultural effects differ across genders? In thinking through the hysteria of animated figures, what further openings might we discover for feminist critique?

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