Selfish vs. selfless brotherly love in Ikuhara (Chikai in the shadow of Kanba, Shouma and Enta)

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I’m talking about brothers specifically because there are, honestly, very few sisters taking this role. Lulu is an icon for us all, but hers is a story of the rejection of love, not the personal malfunctioning because of it.

At any rate, the canon of Kunihiko Ikuhara’s original works starts out with a dive into adolescent sexuality which yeah has a pretty greek tragedy take on fraternal relationships. We’re introduced to three significant pairs of brothers and sisters, and all of them have explicit erotic components to them. Miki’s dream girl must take the place of his estranged sister, whose sexual escapades are attempt at making him jealous becaues she wants him to kiss her. Nanami wants to have the place of her brother’s girlfriend although she doesn’t actually want to be be his girlfriend, though he still tries to play her like he does all other girls. Anthy and Akio, well. There are no adults around, and family love is a complicated place at best in Revolutionary Girl Utena.

I’m not going to detail the clusterfuck that is the Takakura love triangle here, though it bears notice that they’re still far more functional than… well, Masako, pretty much, though I’m sure there’s a lot to be done in comparing them to Ringo as well.

The lesson to take away from this is probably that children need parents around. Kazuki’s misguided attempts at giving Haruka the love that Haruka wants but which Kazuki believes he’s not worthy of giving him is, uh, creative, but it’s fixed. Maybe because Haruka, unlike Toi, Himari and Shouma, doesn’t depend on Kazuki for survival, Kazuki has the luxury of keeping his distance - and when he’s gotten over himself, of bridging the ditch he dug between them, to use the show’s own visual metaphor.

But observe the ones who are not so lucky.

Here’s the older brother turning to crime to save his family. And of course, you can’t really compare them at all. Kanba ends up a single-minded extremist, gone so far off the deep end that he can’t or won’t acknowledge that Himari would never want him to kill others for her sake. Chikai merely involves himself in the yakuza to gain the means of preserving the family’s way of life, and never tries to leave again.

Here’s the older brother rejecting his siblings so that they won’t have to carry the blame for his sins. And of course, you can’t really compare them at all. Real though Shouma’s guilt-by-association might be to both the society around him and to him himself, the story makes it very clear that children do not carry the sins of the fathers. But Chikai is the sinner, and it’s never entirely clear if his distance from Toi is for Toi’s sake, or his own.

Penguindrum runs into its final arc on this clear division between Kanba and Shouma. They both love Himari, and they go at it from opposite extremes. Kanba has given so much of himself to save her that he finally condemns himself, takes up their parents’ legacy and abandons all hope that he could ever be a part of society as he becomes a terrorist in exchange for a cure for her illness. Shouma belives he carries the blame for Himari’s “curse”, and breaks up their family in the belief that he doesn’t deserve that happiness and that Himari is a victim that he pulled into the sludge that is the Takakura family.

There is the fact at play that Kanba is acting against Himari’s wishes, and is either too far gone to realise that he’s acting against her wishes, or darker yet: Is aware that he’s acting against her wishes, but carries on because he’s too selfish to let her go. Contrast Shouma, who punishes himself by rejecting the love offered him by Himari and Ringo both. Love is what drives them both, and that’s off course what makes Chikai so unlovable next to them.

Because whatever Chikai is doing, he’s long since stopped doing it for his family. He knows that whatever Toi’s best interest is, it’s not to follow him like he’s currently doing. Like Kanba, Chikai has abandoned all personal morals, but unlike Kanba, he didn’t do it for love. Toi might’ve been the only comparatively pure thing left in Chikai’s life, but he’s still willing to leave Toi behind to an unknown fate if it’ll save his own ass.

Of course it’s no coincidence that Chikai spent his last day alive hanging out with Enta; by the end of the night, they’ve both taken a bullet. Chikai dies. Enta is dying. But Chikai died pointing his gun at his brother’s head; Enta took a bullet for someone he loved. And I swear to god I’m giving up on humankind if I have to witness someone who previously has gone on about how Enta is a “toxic stalker” now mourn Chikai because he got a devastating death scene. Enta was helping Chikai because he was Toi’s brother well before Chikai mentioned he’d skip town and take Toi with him. Chikai repaid him by throwing him at a sword.

There’s more to point at here. Where Chikai is a shit older brother, Enta goes out of his way to become a surragote brother to Haruka in Kazuki’s place. Unless I’m forgetting something crucial from the earlier episodes, it’s never suggested that he had any ulterior motives in doing so. In this episode, Haruka brings that up with Kazuki: That his and Enta’s wishes for Kazuki were the same. (here’s where I’m not going into the regular Ikuhara incest shenanigans that this might imply) If anything made me doubt that Enta/Kazuki was endgame, it’s actually how tightly Enta is connected with Kazuki’s brother, to the point where they’ve got something like shared custody for him.

No, Chikai wasn’t 100% horrible, but his redeemable qualities more or less starts and ends Toi being the only person that mattered to him. But as was clear from this episode, no-one much mattered to Chikai at all, any longer. Love is the redeeming factor when we forgive Kanba and Reo and Anthy and Ginko their bullshit. Chikai doesn’t clear that bar.