Tsukimonogatari

This review contains spoilers.

The first series of the third season: Tsukimonogatari. It’s nothing groundbreaking for Monogatari but a good series in it own right. The series tells a great story and developed Araragi’s story in a clever way.

This section of the timeline, between the end of Second Season and Hanamonogatari, is shaping up to be very interesting, as we see come to see what should ultimately be the final part of Araragi’s growth into maturity.

Tsukimonogatari, then, takes place a month before Araragi’s (and company) graduation and explores themes about the blurring of what it is to be human and apparition as Araragi deals with the consequences of his actions during the period when Nadeko was a god.

The series starts, as the all the shorter series seem to do, with a prologue. In this case, it talks about Yotsugi and we are introduced to this core theme: what is it to be human and what is it to be apparition.

Yotsugi is the apparition that appears as a human but is not. Yotsugi looks like a human, made from a corpse and the apparition of a doll, but is not human. This is constantly reminded to us in the peculiar was she talks, quite like a doll with a voice box in it. And it is her very act that means she is not human. As Shinobu highlights, learning the language allows you to communicate but it doesn’t make you the given nationality.

Yotisugi, here, become the point of comparison for Araragi, who has constantly flirted the line between human and apparition. This comparison of Araragi and Yotsugi is not a new one, in fact it was a brought up in the Shinobu Time arc of Second Season.

Araragi is both alike and different to Yotsugi. We learn that his use of vampirism over the previous six months to visit Nadeko has pushed his soul towards being a vampire. He is a transitionary state, not wholly human, but not wholly vampire. Rather than not being a human and having to act as one, Araragi is a risk of losing his humanity.

In this sense, the two are on the same path just at different places. Yotsugi, the corpse that was turned into a doll was transformed from (dead) human to an apparition. And Araragi is on this same route, on the transition from human to apparition.

Yotsugi has already crossed this line and does not want the same fate for Araragi. She cannot become a human for she is a monster, which she dramatically demonstrates by killing Tadatsuru. For Araragi, so much of his quest in not wanting to be a vampire and preventing Shinobu from becoming one again is precisely to prevent people from being killed.

And this very act of killing Tadatsuru punctuates why Araragi cannot rely on his vampirism anymore. Becoming a vampire not just a literal loss of humanity, figurative too. Becoming a vampire requires one to kill, and this is the loss of humanity that Yotsugi demonstrates for Araragi. He cannot become a vampire or else he will becoming like her: a monster who kills.

While I enjoyed this series more than I expected I would after I finished the first episode, I don’t think this series was an amazing Monogatari series. It did what it needed to do, and then it did some other not very interesting stuff. The animation, as always, looked very good, but at times it bordered on being a distraction rather than an amplifier for the dialogue. I think this was particularly the case in episode three, when Shinobu and Yotsugi are snowball fighting while Araragi and Yozuru are talking.

Along with this, this series is notably egregious with the ecchi bullshit. This series has a run time of 100 minutes, and ten of those minutes are a bath scene with Araragi’s younger sister.

I’m going to be honest, this shit is the main reason I don’t recommend Monogatari to people. The dialogue of the first episode could have been done in any other way, but no, there had to be the incestuous and paedophilic crap that drags this series down.

In some series I am willing to look past it, but this made up such a large portion of this very short series that it must be commented on. I don’t care for the totally ridiculous shots of Hanekawa or Senjougahara, but they’re forgivable. But this shit with the really young characters is just awful.

I am not usually a fan of stories about the literal loss of humanity, but Tsukimonogatari worked very cleverly to integrate this story with a figurative loss of humanity. This has been something that Monogatari has always be great at, and it’s a big part of why the overarching story works so well.

The story was also complimented by some great ground work for the season ahead. We are introduced to some important plot developments, namely about a mastermind who was behind Tadatsuru being called into town and something to do with Ougi Oshino.

Tsukimonogatari was a great story, but not an incredible series. In the end, though, it still had my interest thoroughly piqued.