type_wild | So "Banana Fish" is finished and I have thoughts about it (Reply)

(partially reworked from tumblr)

I paid too little attention to the second half of Banana Fish to write a useful review of it. I was supposed to re-watch it over Christmas with my sister, who hadn't kept up, but then it turned out that she'd caught up anyway. So here's your quality gauge: I won't be watching this anime again unless someone pays me for it.

The thing is, had Banana Fish not been what it is, I’d have dropped it five episodes in. But Banana Fish is noteworthy just for being what it is: namely an adaptation of a shoujo classic that’s usually sorted into the BL fold somehow, following shortly after a previous anime by the same studio that was also about a pair of dudes who had the kind of relationship the female audience eats up and regurgitates on pixiv.

In short: It's a mediocre action-drama gangster anime which is mainly interesting becaues a lot of people are swearing up and down that the main guys are a couple, even if it never happens on screen. It's not awful. It's not great. My enjoyment ended pretty quickly after my favourite character was killed, and that, I think, says everything that needs to be saying about the writing of both characters and plot.

Well, that and the fact that I was watching Sailor Moon on my work commute over the same time period as I finally made the effort of catching up with the last three months of Banana Fish. And Sailor Moon was three times more fun.

Spoilers below.

Banana Fish was promising, early on. I liked the first half of it, but it had a recurring problem that never was solved, and when my enjoyment of the series took a nosedive in the second half, that problem became all the more urgent. And it never went away. I like Eiji, as the kind of person he’s depicted as. But as a character, he is given a role in the story that is jarringly awkward. My following of the story got thrown off by the screaming dissonance whenever he was around, and particularly after he insisted on being included in the violence. And when I'm not getting Eiji, then I'm not feeling the Ash-Eiji relationship, and when I'm not feeling the Ash-Eiji relationship, then there's preciously little to be enjoyed here.

There were other problems, of course. The plot got repetitive (someone is kidnapped, quick, let’s get the gang together and arrange a raid on this bizarrely ill-guarded mansion/mental institution/museum of natural history). The introduction of a new character five episodes before the end to overtake Dino as the final villain did not do this story any favours. I’ve come to understand that the last half covered a lot more pages than the first one did, which might explain why some characters come across as so... tokenishly dramatic. Yut Lung, Blanca and Sing are the main ones. Most criminal of all, the titular banana fish ended up as little more than a macguffin explaining why people is kidnapping Ash and/or Eiji all the time. I’m pretty sure this happens beceause Yut Lung gets more plot space on Dino’s expense, but it seriously distorts the narrative focus. No, you idiots, the problem isn’t that Ash is kidnapped. The problem is that the military and parts of the political establishment currently in office is seriously developing a drug that can deprive people of free will.

Finally: I’m really, really not a person who judges quality based on woke points, but I am a person who thinks it’s relevant to discuss how fiction depicts social issues. There are things to be said about both women and black people in this story, but there is a singular, jarring point that needs to be made, at least when they went and changed the setting from 1985 to 2018.

At least when it there are professional reviewers talking about Eiji as Ash’s “boyfriend”.

The final half of the final episode had a lot of narration on Ash and Eiji’s behalf, discussing their relationship and their not being together, and they both use the word “friends”. Yes, Virginia, that was all that the intense bonding and romantic allusions amounted to. Were they in love with each other? Possibly. Who knows. Quasi-romantic teasing between guys is common enough in newer shoujo titles becaues they know their audience; without the context of this being a (regretfully faithful) adaptation of an eighties work, Ash and Eiji's emotional moments would've been even less convincing. Whatever their inexplicably weird relationship was, it was never like that in-story. They might or might not have fallen in love with each other, but they were never a couple.

But while Ash and Eiji were forever left in a limbo of “maybe, depending on how badly you want for it to be true”, this was a story that openly acknowledged that gay men exist. Two men are explicitly stated to be gay. They’re both child rapists. Another one is only shown to be sleeping with men. He’s a child rapist, too! Add to that how Ash is raped twice and almost raped once by men whose orientation is never stated in addition to him getting to a fourth one by showing up as a prostitute, how Yut Lung is suggested to have been molested by one of his brothers and pretty much given as a sex slave to Dino. There is either some uncomfortable gendering going on here (Yut-Lung looks like a girl, Ash is so beautiful that even straight men get it up for him), or a really toxic depiction of gay men. I’m pretty sure what is happening is the former (see: that prequel revealing that Ash as a young teen was raped by both male and female tutors), but when Ash and Eiji are ~tomodachi~, the moral we’re left with is the latter.

Since Banana Fish has been canonised into the list of liek omg totally natural representation and not nastybad fap material for icky straight women, I really hope people are talking about this.