Aspiring to be someone who can get people off.
In real-life relationships, exes often seem to be a sensitive subject. Most people I know take the subject in their stride, but plenty are touchy about it. Quite a few who say, “I don’t really mind,” still mind a little deep down—or even a great deal.
Perhaps it is precisely because the subject is so sensitive in our emotional lives that exes remain an evergreen theme in the arts. Many people may have complicated feelings about discussing the exes in their own lives, yet thoroughly enjoy stories about exes in works of art. Sometimes the ex is a “scumbag” who makes the current partner’s devotion stand out; sometimes the ex is someone to get back together with; and sometimes the point is simply how much it ties your stomach in knots to choose between an ex you’re still tangled up with and a current lover with whom sparks fly.
Two games released this September feature stories about exes. One is Marvel’s Spider-Man, currently winning acclaim (Editor: ?) and selling well, with everyone’s beloved Spidey and his recent ex-girlfriend, Mary Jane. The other is Torna—The Golden Country, the standalone story for last year’s Xenoblade Chronicles 2, with your waifu Mythra and her ex—her former Driver, that is—the great hero Addam. Compared with the storms of stomach-knotting drama in works like A Town Where You Live, neither of these stories really counts as its game’s main storyline, and both unfold in a fairly steady, untroubled fashion. Peter Parker and Mary Jane’s breakups and reunions are as commonplace as anything in a prime-time soap. Only when you finish Torna—The Golden Country do you discover that the script has forcibly singled out Rex as the chosen one who will save Mythra. Addam already has a wife; even Jin, the standalone story’s male lead, believes that Mythra’s bond lies “not here, but in the future.”
But that is how settled things look in retrospect. At least in Chinese online communities, these stories about exes—or “exes”—were hardly greeted with calm from the outset.
When Mary Jane began lending her support to Iron Man’s Stark Industries in the comics, online controversy over her character was not hard to find. And before the official release of Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s standalone story, Torna—The Golden Country, platforms like Tieba were awash with cries of “Stop it, please.jpg.” As Mythra says in this standalone story, a Blade and Driver are “one in mind and body.” Consider the romantic feelings that develop between Rex and both Mythra and Pyra in the main game. Add to that the fact that her former Driver Addam is so much better-looking than Rex, that five-heads-tall fishing brat, and you can hardly help worrying about just what the relationship between Addam and Mythra might be.
Whether in games or in real life, when people have feelings for someone—or once did—talk of “exes” always brings up a complicated mix of emotions. Still, perhaps Marvel’s Spider-Man and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 do not quite belong in the same comparison. The former’s main audience inhabits a mainstream, adult context, where people tend to take exes in their stride; the latter probably has a substantial proportion of otaku among its audience, and otaku tend to be sensitive to the possibilities lurking beneath the word “ex.” Long before Chinese netizens began cursing Yutaka Yamamoto’s ancestors, Japanese otaku had already erupted over Nagi, the heroine of the Kannagi anime he directed. An even more famous, older story goes back to elf’s celebrated Kakyūsei 2 (Underclassmen 2). Its heroine, Tamaki Saimon, not only had an ex-boyfriend but, after getting together with the hero, admitted that she had already slept with her ex. Although the hero, Rōma Oriya, could accept all this, the otaku losers who had bought the game for its “pure love” label went ballistic. For a while, people were snapping their discs left and right. But in all fairness, in a mainstream context, neither “having had a boyfriend” nor “having slept with that boyfriend” conflicts with “pure love.” You can have a past and still find true love. Who can claim to be spotless? Those otaku losers, though, often hold “pure love” to higher (fantasy) standards.
This is also reflected in the “no-dating” rules adopted by many Japanese-style idol groups since the turn of the century. Whenever news breaks that a member of an idol group is in love—or has merely had an ex—extreme reactions tend to follow among idol otaku: snapping discs, self-harm, even sending threatening letters. Some claim that they are outraged simply because they have been deceived as consumers. Ordinarily, though, we do not seem to use self-harm to express our anger at commercial deception. Perhaps idol otaku are always living in a fantasy: if an idol isn’t dating anyone and has no ex, then the idol is actually dating them. Perhaps they even imagine that idols are born as teenage angels, without the tiniest scrap of a past (nor, naturally, should they have one).
Of course, if real people can never satisfy the otaku’s obsession with purity, then anime with light yuri elements seems to be heaven for some of them. After all, in the minds of these otaku losers, cute, yuri-tinged shows should have no male lead—no males at all, in fact. Cocoa Hoto’s older brother in Is the Order a Rabbit?, for example, is a character who shouldn’t even exist in the backstory. For some of these touchy losers, perhaps this is a compromise born of realizing that they “can’t really enter the 2D world”: that way, there can never be an opposite-sex ex or current partner. But yuri is good—who doesn’t like two pretty young girls cuddling up for you to watch.jpg.
These stories, however, often have another side. If “pure love” brings to mind a serene marble statue of Apollo in an ancient Greek temple, then “NTR” (“寝取る,” Ne To Ru)1 suggests rites of revelry in worship of Dionysus. And if we avoid understanding NTR too narrowly, everything that comes with the word “ex” is practically the most faithful servant of the great god NTR. This simple, utterly ordinary subject can so often produce two-way NTR. Take Rex and Addam in Xenoblade Chronicles 2: if Addam and Mythra had also developed feelings for each other five hundred years earlier, who, exactly, would be NTR’ing whom? If we go by who came first (“But I was first!”), Rex would be NTR’ing Addam. Yet the very word “ex” gives the player a viewpoint looking back into the past. From the standpoint of the character the player identifies with, it would instead be Addam NTR’ing Rex.
For NTR to be possible, nothing need actually have happened; an instinctive tightening of the heart, even for an instant, is enough. That is why we can speak of a kind of two-way NTR where exes are concerned. Even with 8102 nearly over,2 these lines from Lao Lang’s 1994 song “You, My Deskmate” still tug at the heartstrings: “Who married you, so sentimental? / Who read your diary? / Who pinned up your long hair? / Who made your wedding dress?” I wonder whether someone might write another song from the perspective of the husband who married this deskmate—call it “You, Back Then”: “Who saw you in your younger days? / Who once took you by the hand? / Who once lent you half an eraser? / Who watched you leave when you graduated?” “Your” deskmate and “your” husband are both searching not so much for traces of you, past and present, as for the shadow beside you—who saw you then / who sees you now; who saw you then, so sentimental / who sees you now, gentle and strong. This kind of NTR may seem far removed from what otaku originally meant by the term. It is utterly commonplace, but there is still plenty of beauty in that haze of remembering and looking ahead.
Much of the NTR in popular culture, though, is not so delicately beautiful. The stories in “Love Like the Tide” and “Going Too Far,” songs from roughly the same era by the Prince of Love Songs, Jeff Chang, seem much more charged. Whether it is “I don’t want other men to see how alluring you are” or “I went too far in giving you freedom,” the lyrics almost spell out “a lover cheating” and “having sex with a third party.” Stories created by the older generation also often contain NTR plots that audiences of their day loved to talk about, such as the famous episode involving Xiaolongnü and Yin Zhiping in Jin Yong’s The Return of the Condor Heroes. Then there is A Curtain of Dreams, adapted from Qiong Yao’s novel, with a story that goes: “Ziling likes Chulian; Chulian first likes Lüping; Yunfan likes Ziling; then Chulian likes Ziling too; later Ziling falls for Yunfan.” Besides all these frequent changes of heart, the story features a pivotal car crash, a fabulously wealthy eligible bachelor in Provence, France, and Lüping—the first yandere I had ever encountered in my life. Even more famous is the story in The Bund. According to my father, after the episode in which Feng Chengcheng agreed to marry Ding Li aired, “some people at the factory didn’t even turn up for work the next day.”
Miku is number one under heaven! (Teacher is heaven?)3
Our parents’ generation may have bottled up so much anguish over the romantic entanglements of Yiping, Shuhuan, Ruping, and Dufei that they practically suffered internal injuries. Today’s otaku are not to be outdone. The aesthetic pleasure of NTR—tragic pleasure?—often lies in this collective revelry of shipping wars. As the anime adaptation of We Never Learn draws closer, anime, manga, and gaming forums are full of people yelling “Teacher is heaven!” and “Miku is number one under heaven!” Under the banner of “The Quintessential Quintuplets Never Learn” (?), it looks like a fierce shipping war. But from the perspective of those backing the character who loses out—through their empathy with the character they support—it is a brutal NTR scene unfolding before their eyes. A more obvious example is the hugely controversial DARLING in the FRANXX (DitF). After our chubby pal Futoshi swaps mechs and piloting partners with Mitsuru in episode five, the crowd who feel for him (and the twisted freaks) cry their eyes out. An even more remarkable example is ALDNOAH.ZERO (A/Z). After that all-too-true-to-life ending, both Team Slaine and Team Inaho experienced this NTR feeling. For a while, Slaine × Inaho shippers were out in force.
More carefully crafted NTR works, such as Biniku no Kaori (Scent of Seductive Flesh), devote finer attention to the characters’ backgrounds, the reasons for the NTR, and the principal characters’ inner lives. Taken as a whole, these works often tell a moving story. They may involve the hero’s regret and self-reproach, or even pleasure tinged with guilt; they may involve the heroine’s quiet endurance, inner conflict, and fall, as well as the schemes and cunning concealed within love and desire. Carefully crafted NTR works always seek to make us feel as though we were going through it ourselves, to experience the inner pendulum moving from resistance and conflict to submission and enjoyment. First comes being caught in a predicament with no freedom to act; then comes the conflict between moral impulse and bodily and mental strain; finally, the pleasure of abandoning every rule. Not every good NTR work has to depict the whole journey from one end to the other. Stories about holding the line even amid indulgence have their own particular appeal. Broadly speaking, though, the aesthetic pleasure these works offer lies in the tension between the two poles of the pendulum’s swing.
To come back to the point, it is worth stressing that NTR cannot be summed up by some depraved stock plot with a “blond interloper.” In a sense, if society’s binding rules go so far as to require celibacy—as they do for monks and nuns in some faiths—then even two people in a pure-love relationship would be NTR’ing the deity. If monks and nuns are required to devote themselves wholly and completely to God, there is no room left for love between mortals. Such a pure-love romance also produces tension between body and spirit, between loyalty and betrayal, or between love and desire on the one hand and faith on the other.
Editor’s Note
To me, what this article calls NTR looks more like Dionysian revelry breaking through the restraints that law places on emotional relationships. For instance, in ancient times, the law permitted and even encouraged a man to have one wife and several concubines. By the laws and customs of the time, the wives and concubines—unjustly placed in an oppressed position—could not be said to have been NTR’d. So those of you who clicked expecting R18 content will probably be disappointed (laughs). Also, the account given here has no necessary connection with the editor’s or author’s value judgments about social realities.