Introduction
As viewers, we inevitably go through a process like this: a film or show ends; on a sudden impulse we replay the video, start typing, and try to say something about a popular work, whether it is an ACG work, a film, or a more traditional novel. But once the general introduction is over and we begin analyzing the plot, a difficult question appears: how can we offer a convincing and logically consistent explanation of each character’s personality and function? Characters are the soul of a work and to a great extent shape its overall direction. Without a deeper reading of them, we cannot fill in the many gaps that may exist in a story, and the force of our interpretation ultimately suffers.
Different critics emphasize different things when analyzing characters in ACG works. One common approach at present is to dig deeply into a character’s personal life history, trying to find clues in that character’s lived experience. Another approaches characters from narrative-functional analysis, asking what function a given character performs within a particular story structure. The former expresses empathy, trying to endow the character with personal charm while the critic intermittently mixes in transferential imaginings of their own. The latter tries to understand the character as a device for the author’s (or market’s) narrative intentions, separating the character from abstract humanity and assigning them an objectified, generalized database identity. Yet when we compare which method is better or worse, three important points are easy to overlook. First, no matter what, a work is created by an author, and the fact that a character is an imagined Other does not change. A character’s growth concerns growth in real human beings; the two are not completely severed. Second, works are themselves heterogeneous, which poses a challenge to anyone using a single rigid method of character analysis. Third, there is one mode of a character’s existence that closely connects characters to one another within the story and characters to viewers outside it. It brings us into a virtual situation while supplying the character with a rich supporting background. That mode of existence is the subject of this essay: relationship.
To define relationship, we need to distinguish it from personal history and structure. Analysis by personal history naturally mentions events and the intricate relationships among characters within them, but it takes a single character’s growth as its point of departure—a historical way of grasping the character. In writing, it often proceeds chronologically, with one subheading for each character. A relational perspective instead proposes folding historical time into space: suspending diachrony and treating relations as given geographical positions, so as to excavate what Simmel calls “social synthesis.” This can keep the perspective from being limited to records of individual experience—for example, using the roles people play in a romantic relationship to supplement separate accounts of each person’s experience. At the same time, the “social synthesis” in an ACG work is not merely a structural product of the culture industry or cold, unfeeling analytic material. It contains rich emotion and a self-consistent logic of its own. If we cannot understand the human element in a relationship, we cannot grasp the side of a character that feels real to us, or what effect the story has on us.
Relational analysis tries to remedy the empiricist shortcomings of personal character histories and the functionalist arrogance of database analysis. It connects situations in ACG works with situations in real life and offers a new way to analyze fictional characters. The two installments of this essay will discuss, respectively, “relations among characters within a work” and “relations between a work and its audience.”
I. Toward Relations Among Characters—Triads and Their Variations
If relational analysis is based on the way ACG works “sublimatively map” real life, then formal analysis of real life can be creatively appropriated for analyzing relationships among characters in works. Simmel’s formal sociology offers a vivid and interesting line of thought. He tries to abstract the purest social forms from concrete social life, distinguishing them both from the analysis of individual action advocated by nominalists and from the macroscopic functional analysis advocated by realists—to express society as a kind of mathematical geometry.
Within this framework, Simmel keenly identifies the most basic unit of social analysis: the triad. A triad can be understood as the starting point of all society. The individual is the starting point of philosophies of the subject and concerns the inward exploration of the self, but it cannot handle the erosion of subjectivity produced by social coexistence. A dyad does involve intersubjective interaction, yet because each side has only the other, it acquires privacy and particularity and lacks elements that can be generalized to social reality; it is a romantic illusion. With the introduction of a third party, a triad qualitatively changes the privacy of the dyad. Each person must now be responsible to two others at once and must take sharply different actions in order to preserve the group’s delicate balance. Family relations work this way: excessive intimacy between a child and either parent puts the affective compact between the parents to the test. Appropriate distance and indifference—substituting desire (lack) for satisfaction—therefore powerfully support the stability of the triad, and this lack constitutes a basic property of social form. In that sense, the triad can also be seen as the endpoint of social analysis: every complex form of social interaction evolves from triadic relations. Simmel accordingly offers a taxonomy of third parties: the mediator, the arbitrator, the beneficiary, and the divider-and-conqueror. In discussing triads in ACG works, I will not continue using this taxonomy. I will instead try to establish a new paradigm for three-person relations in fiction.
(1) The Love-Triangle Model—A Special Form of the Triad
Love triangles in ACG works, especially school romances, are a perennial topic among viewers, but analyzing triads differs across works aimed at different gendered target audiences. In male-oriented heterosexual works, the story often revolves around the affective bonds between one male protagonist and two female leads. (Why not a male protagonist competing for a woman with another male protagonist? Because when that happens in a male-oriented work, viewers are more likely to call it NTR. This has something to do with gender culture.) On the one hand, these bonds place the viewer in a voyeuristic position, using embodied imagination to substitute for the male protagonist and obtain enjoyment while investing transference in the objects of desire. Factional wars then erupt. On the other hand, the same bonds obstruct emotional progress between the characters, keeping the plot suspended in negation until the story approaches its ending. Only when the climax re-embeds a symbolic marker—an object or event connected to the past—does the protagonist finally make a choice. The love triangle is therefore the most special kind of triad. Its ending usually rewrites the relational form of “three people” into a triangle of “two people – society (the world),” and the plot generally ends there, leaving behind an empty signifier: “the princess and the prince lived happily ever after.”
Here I want to discuss a love-triangle routine that some authors know extremely well. Love triangles in certain male-oriented works have an interesting feature. Male protagonists vary in personality, but more or less often carry a perverse structure (and quite often depression as well). This appears in the fact that they almost never lightly abandon either object, whether they take the posture of a passive avoider or that of an active nice guy. The former corresponds to a Hachiman Hikigaya–style melancholic temperament: pretending that “youth” is already dead, maintaining harmony in the environment by relinquishing subjective power and desire through self-castration, while also blocking the narcissistic fantasy and prolonging the period of transference onto Dango or Yukino. The latter corresponds to Haruki Kitahara’s sanguine temperament: offering undifferentiated care to his objects and, through what looks like active initiative, immersing himself in enjoyment of the relationship. For example, after the school festival, Setsuna’s sudden confession becomes a traumatic kernel. Haruki’s nascent feelings for Touma are thrown into disorder, and the player can directly feel the character oscillating again and again within this complicated psychological state.
Compared with the male protagonist, the characterization of the two crucial female characters is more intriguing. In male-oriented works, female characters are often depicted as objects of desire. Setting aside database analysis of moe elements, if we look only at relational form, the two female characters are often positioned respectively at a near distance from the male protagonist and a far distance from him, producing a staggered sense of psychological distance. This unevenness in distance gives readers a novel experience. For the moment, I will call the heroine at close range the “girl-next-door type,” and the heroine at a distance the “mysterious type.” The girl-next-door type has personality traits that make one naturally want to approach and protect her; structurally, she is linked to the ordinary here and now and generally does not transgress everyday life. The mysterious type, by contrast, produces aesthetic sublimity through distance, often surrounded by an aura of cold pride or composure. Her elusiveness produces a lack in desire, and she carries the potential to bring danger into the story. The lifestyles and background relations of girl-next-door and mysterious characters necessarily differ substantially, adding instability to the love triangle.
This taxonomy has long been familiar in real-world culture. Plenty of greasy straight men make comments about actresses in precisely these terms. When they see someone pure-looking, petite, and charming, they call her the girl next door and say she would make a suitable wife. By contrast, a talented, sexy, mysterious actress is regarded as the ideal mistress. Fan Wei’s TV drama The Happy Life of the Boss portrays both types: Mei Hao, who becomes a foot-massage worker after upheaval in her family, is the girl-next-door type, while the career woman Xin Wen is the mysterious type. The “boss,” played by Fan Wei, even solemnly “objectifies” the two women orbiting him, calling Mei Hao “the shoe that fits better”—an implication of male domination and compromise after entering marriage. In youth school dramas, of course, this male chauvinism is restrained by the fantasy of “pure love.” The male protagonist, the childhood friend, and the school beauty commonly form the most typical triangle. And almost without exception, once the relation is established in a boy meets girl form, the childhood friend becomes the sacrifice in the game.
For the girl-next-door type, the key is that in psychological distance she stands closer to the male protagonist, and as a “phenomenon” he has grown accustomed to, she may be overlooked in the process of his intentionality. Her personality is not necessarily gentle and may even include non-everyday attributes (denpa, near-emotionless). But within a larger social group she occupies a marginal or gazed-at position, and this indirect arrangement emphasizes the special relation between her and the male protagonist. At the same time, her family’s material circumstances are often similar or comparable to his. She may have family members who depend on one another for survival, or a complete family with an attentive mother and humorous father, enjoying ordinary love within those relations. All of this gives her a sense of closeness and similarity to the male protagonist. In My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, for example, Yui Yuigahama plays this kind of role. Although she is cheerful, helpful, and popular with boys, she still occupies a relatively marginal position within Yumiko Miura’s group and finds it exhausting to read the aura of interpersonal relations. Her family is a warm and harmonious nuclear family. In true tears, Noe—the “chicken girl”—is likewise marginalized because of her denpa qualities; she is also very close to her brother and receives his care. The same applies to Mu Xin in Gaokao.Love.100Days. These family backgrounds and positions within a larger background lay down a mark of “ordinariness” for the character.
By contrast, the mysterious type stands at a relatively greater psychological distance from the male protagonist. As a kind of “art object” that startles him, she takes up the position of the object under the gaze of desire and thus often becomes his “sublime.” Mysterious-type characters often have exceptional talent or excellent grades. Their temperament is coldly proud or composed, and they acquire another kind of marginal position within a larger social group—the inaccessibility that comes from excellence. Just as importantly, their families are often well off, yet they bear unexpected family pressures. They may have a severe Big Other, a mother or father, leaving them locked in a long, cold contest with family members; or the family may be broken, forcing them too early to assume responsibility for themselves and for caring for others. It is easy to see how such a family background leaves a psychic opening specifically for this goddess-type character and creates a possibility for intervention by the male protagonist. This account corresponds to Yukino Yukinoshita in My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, Hiromi Yuasa in true tears, and Luo Xiaohan in Gaokao.Love.100Days.
Female-oriented love triangles—one woman and two men—depart to some extent from this male-centered relational model. The heroine is not required to accept the castration expected by author and audience, and her personality can therefore be more varied. She may choose to disguise herself as an object of male desire and become a girl-next-door or mysterious woman, as Hagu does in Honey and Clover; or she may take men as objects of desire and construct several male types, herself occupying the contradictory position of independent spectator and embodied participant. The former is more common in male-oriented works written by some female authors. The latter is now more widespread and to some extent reflects women’s independent consciousness and women’s aesthetics. Such heroines often have sly little thoughts and genuine personality flaws. Their attitude is by no means simply gentle, yet they usually do not become some eye-catching spectacle. Still, it cannot be denied that the heroine-centered “big female lead” pattern in most female-oriented works reproduces real heterosexual relationships and displays passive expectation in romance. The protagonist tends to rush about, clumsy in love, and precisely through that awkwardness attracts the attention of her objects of desire.
If a love triangle occurs, male protagonists can likewise be divided according to the “near” or “far” sense of distance. The close-range man may also be called a “boy-next-door type.” Unlike the “girl next door” in male-oriented works, however, the boy next door in female-oriented works is often active and positive in personality: rather noisy, flippant toward others, and perfectly at ease in everyday interactions with the heroine. In fact, though, during those interactions he is only following the game rules of ordinary language while burying his desire for the heroine deep inside, revealing it obliquely to the reader. What moves us about this type is that the jokes are only a disguise for pain. By comparison, the “mysterious boy” is even more perfect than the “mysterious girl” described above. Some mysterious men have no major traumatic event at all; they are mysterious simply for mystery’s sake. He may be a literary youth, a teacher, a rational geek, or a domineering CEO: commanding in his field of expertise without losing elegance. Compared with the boy next door’s occasional moments of weakness, the mysterious man is exceptionally capable and more aggressive, yet at crucial moments he is oddly sexually indifferent. In Daytime Shooting Star, Suzume’s desk neighbor Daiki and the object of her first love play these two roles respectively. Likewise, in Short Cake Cake, Riku looks flippant but is actually single-minded in love, a thoroughly loyal dog; the literary young man Chiaki’s elegant bearing likewise gives him mystery early in the work. Regrettably, the emotional change by which the heroine Ten Serizawa goes from clever and wary at the beginning to falling completely into love is faintly unsettling, especially once she decides to dress herself up properly and become a girlfriend worthy of Riku.
From this analysis, it is not difficult to see that love-triangle relations in heterosexual works are both anchored by the central protagonist, male or female, and restrained through that center. Romantic relations under the influence of private-property culture are exclusive. The relation between the two heroines (or male leads) who are the central protagonist’s objects of desire carries a latent risk of rupture because both love the same person. Yet jealousy is prohibited by the presence of the central protagonist or by preexisting social ties. When I want to tear my rival apart, I must constantly consider “what the person I love will think of me tearing my rival apart,” or fall into anxiety over whether to overturn a “former friendship” I have personally lived through. Whatever the outcome of a showdown, it produces a “dissolution of the relation.” The losing heroine returns to the position of that “Other” outside the intimate relation of two. To delay this traumatic event as long as possible, the subject chooses to maintain with the other subject—who is likewise an object of the central protagonist’s desire—a delicate relation of compensation and satisfaction (disguise), trying to dignify it in the name of “preserving a beautiful relationship.” Concretely, one protagonist may remain for a long time in a psychological game with the other rival: letting go, hatred, reconciliation, gratitude, and other complex affects pile up together. At times the subject violates their own desire and exits in order to preserve the protagonist’s happiness, thinking “as long as they are happy” (a condition very likely to trigger a depressive-perverse turn); at other times, they experience their own uniqueness through the beloved’s kindness toward them. Most viewers who insert themselves into the position of the central protagonist fail to notice that this situation also lays groundwork for same-sex erotic desire between the two same-gender characters. In fact, the most shocking part of a love-triangle relation would not be the central protagonist establishing a stable romance with one of the objects of desire, but the central protagonist exiting and thereby enabling a homosexual relation between the two objects of desire.
As stated at the beginning of this section, the main contradiction in a love-triangle work lies in the dynamic bargaining process of the triangle, and that relation dissolves at the end of the work. The protagonist ultimately moves toward reality and accepts their genuine feelings. One of the objects of desire must leave and return to the “Other” among the mass of ordinary people. The triangle thus returns to a state of separation between the “world of two” and the “real world.” For another set of works, however, this relational state is only where the story begins.
(2) The “Journey Under the Midnight Sun” (Fugitive-Lovers) Model—The General Form of the Triad
A more general relational form now enters the analysis. Once two people establish an intimate relation through relatively rapid plot development, they have to deal with the imbalance between their bond and cruel reality. For both partners, the crucial question becomes how to live with society. This condition is closer to the original problem: a triad is not a relation among three concrete persons, but a relation among three positional forms. What stands in those positions is not the biological individual, but a symbol concerning the human.
Some works have only two core protagonists, bound by an extraordinary intimacy, such as lovers or sworn companions. The third party in the story is not a particular intervening person but politics, society, atmosphere, the whole world, the Ninety-Nine Organization (get out!). The third party tests the intimate pair and drives the plot forward. Stories with this relational model can relatively easily produce emotionally devastating developments, but they also allow the protagonists‘ charisma to appear in full. The protagonists are often not “everyday people” (an everyday person is someone common in real life, distinctive in speech and behavior but not extraordinary). Some degree of psychological distortion, an unusual, perhaps repressive or broken family relation, and a horrifying experience such as kidnapping or murder are all important attributes of these characters. Labels such as “fugitive-lovers type” or “Romeo-and-Juliet type” are more general, but here I prefer to call this relation the “Byakuyakō model,” after Journey Under the Midnight Sun. On the one hand, most people know the work, and the three Chinese characters of its title concisely evoke the character relations in the story. On the other, Ryoji’s meticulousness and Yukiho’s cruelty have left a deep impression on many readers; stories of this type push the contradiction in the “two people – society” relation to an extreme. They also wrap a core of individual heroism in a tragic shell, offering substitute satisfaction for banal everyday life and producing a novel experience. Cruel fugitive-lovers narratives are typified by works such as Journey Under the Midnight Sun and Kurai Heya (The Dark Room).
As for why these works move us, Baudelaire long ago noticed the sublime aesthetic significance retained by marginal social groups. On the one hand, they preserve an aristocratic temperament and an expectation of political aesthetics—a purely formal search for redemption and revolt. On the other, they have already become the sort of group excluded by society: utterly vulgar, even intolerable to social custom. Under these conditions exclusion becomes abjection, the remainder of negative elements that belongs to society yet is absolutely unacceptable to it. The madman boards the Ship of Fools, the criminal is sentenced to imprisonment, the “subject” becomes Other, and the legal person becomes homo sacer. The historical negative significance borne by marginal groups then becomes a fact worth anticipating.
Of course, there is no denying that when this meaning is placed on the big screen or written into popular fiction, the element of resistance is finally sutured into fantasy. What I want to reveal here, however, is that the relational form of these figures remains preserved in such works. Just as Baudelaire sympathetically depicted the lives of marginal groups, I want to explain how interactions between partners in the Byakuyakō model move the audience under the Big Other’s threats and inducements. In an age shrouded by narratives of everyday life, commodity relations among signs have replaced the symbolic and affective exchange that once took place between people. Even the communicative meaning of exchanging glances has undergone a historical failure with the rise of long-distance communication technology. “Sharing hardship together” has become quite a luxury. Yet the old heroic spirit still retains aesthetic meaning in people’s minds—a shock that transgresses everyday life. Once a story displays this element of marginal resistance, the protagonists‘ intimate relation becomes an object of admiration. Their personalities and backgrounds are so unusual, and the suffering imposed on them by the third party is so heavy compared with what ordinary people bear, that we must believe this is true love. Whether or not it is a kitsch fantasy, it is enough to show how readers and viewers fall in love with fictional characters.
Within ACG, the Byakuyakō model differs in “degree” between school dramas and harder-edged abuse or suspense dramas, but its essence is the same. The “adolescent syndrome” faced by the former and the “murder/kidnapping case” of the latter are simply two sides of the same third party. Indeed, many Japanese scripts do not even draw a firm line between school drama and suspense drama (Lying Boy and Broken Girl, CARNIVAL). Likewise, in neither genre does the Byakuyakō model involve an excessively complex background of symbolic order. Works that explicitly depict a struggle between the couple and politics are in fact very rare. More often this triangular relation is realized through school bullying, kidnapping and crime, or grand but empty organizations of a sekai-kei sort. Perhaps it is precisely because of this lack of political imagination that Japanese scripts focused on complex humanity or obsessive psychology can become so gripping.
At the same time, we find that under this model, whether the story is an emotionally brutal abuse plot or a serious drama exploring the meaning of existence, the relation between the two people is often confined to a narrow time and space: a rooftop, warehouse, or enclosed basement; a private secret known by you and me but by no one else under heaven. Family relations are already among the most explicit symbolic orders such stories will mention. This implies a motive to resist social analysis: the work seems able to portray its two attractive protagonists solemnly only by making the third party nebulous. The question therefore inevitably arises: how can the appeal of the Byakuyakō model compensate for the lack of political imagination? An answer is difficult. We can at least detect the phenomenon in the cracks some writers expose when depicting the third party. Strictly speaking, Romeo Tanaka’s scripts possess a kind of sociological tension. When we are immersed in the savage fantasy of “chūnibyō kids falling in love,” AURA: Koga Maryuin’s Last War and Yume Miru Kusuri: A Drug That Makes You Dream come as a blow to the head. Romeo’s works about school bullying and chūnibyō certainly do not handle the broader problem of symbolic order. But by introducing a mediating agent—a concrete bully—they bring the contradictions of social relations in as well, producing a kind of discordance. The Byakuyakō model in AURA is based on resonance through a shared chūnibyō taste, yet it is inserted into the fact that Ichirō Satō was previously bullied and mocked for his chūnibyō behavior, while the heroine Ryōko Satō is in fact currently being bullied. This is plainly a violent collision between symbolic order and the narcissistic fantasy of chūnibyō. The conflict is reconciled in the rooftop field as well, in a highly romanticized form, but the result is that Ryōko hopes to “be an ordinary girl.” The audience is left in an insecure atmosphere. The chūnibyō idea was supposed to be “perfect”: its perfection lies in encompassing every element of good and evil while excluding only reality—the Real. Romeo puts the reality of social relations openly on display, which is hardly a strategy one would commend to a “light-novel author.” The work neither maintains its “Byakuyakō” relation directly at the social-order level of school violence, as A Silent Voice does, nor keeps the relation within the fantasy of romance, as Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions! does. The triad viewers and readers see arises neither from realistic conflict among characters nor from a romantic conflict among boyfriends and girlfriends, but from the conflict between reality and imagination. For a chūnibyō fantasy, it is too serious; for a work of social criticism, too extravagant. Looking closely at Romeo’s other works, this tension appears to some degree again and again (even when trying earnestly to portray the wilderness of the industry, incongruous “moe” elements remain mixed in). Why the Byakuyakō model tries to detach itself from the causes of triadic relations through disregard and attenuation will require further thought and investigation.
**Personally, what I would rather see is a “Byakuyakō” that breaks through the fantasy of pure love. This is also a key criterion by which I distinguish whether a yuri work is truly hardcore. Unfortunately, I rarely see it in the well-known works around us... 。
Conclusion
In sum, this essay has tried to excavate a basic analytic paradigm linking character relations in ACG with social relations. It differs both from examining personal life histories and from examining story structure, focusing instead on the basic forms of relations among characters. In the second part of the discussion, I borrowed Simmel’s concept of the triad and discussed two relatively typical triangular relations in ACG: the love-triangle model and the Byakuyakō model. The love-triangle model is in fact a special form of the triad, because one relational subject must exit at the end of the story, transforming the original love-triangle field into a relational field of “two people – society.” When that field serves as a new story’s presupposed relation, it forms what I have called the Byakuyakō model. The Byakuyakō model reflects a characteristic of Japanese writing: political mediation is removed or weakened so that a “triad” appears to be a “dyad.” The causes of this textual characteristic await analysis from other dimensions.
In discussing relations within the work here, I have already mentioned the connection between the work and the audience outside it. In the next installment, I will focus on this “work – audience” question.
