Stars Intertwined: The Demystification of Sex and The Mystification of Love

*Spoilers Warning

(please don't take this review seriously, it is merely a spiritual continuation of craptacular)

Kuttsukiboshi, a two-part ova with its first entry released in 2010, shocked millions of Yuri fans across the globe due to its incest-ntr ending, and was forever banned from entering the Yuri canon. However, I propose in this review that the amount of sex/moral deviation in the ova is not simply for superficial shock value, but it does have something interesting or perhaps profound to say about sex and love. I will demonstrate in this review that this borderline hentai of an anime is talking about the secularization of sex and the holiness of pure love, hence recalling the title, the demystification of sex and the mystification of love.

The Process
The most important evidence in support of my argument is the fact that the two different types of sex demonstrated in this show are unproductive. The first one which is the Yuri one, the one we all love, is homosexual love; the second kind of sex is unproductive because it is incestual, and that the Aaya’s brother has terminal illness which led to his ultimate demise, which is evident in episode 2. What we’re beginning to witness here is that the act of sex has lost all of its ties and implications with social responsibility, but simply serves for the act itself. Thus, a process of secularization and demystifying, a drifting away from the orthodoxia.

Eros and Thanatos
Before analyzing the kind of love between the Yuri couple, we must face the unwanted truth of incestuous sex, the sex between Aaya and his brother, which is revealed by the end of part one. Aaya’s brother, I propose, exerts, if not personifies, the fusion of the Freudian idea of the Eros and the Thanatos, which, transcribed in Layman’s terms, is the sex (life) drive and the death drive. His drive for sex (although he always admired his sister’s beauty) was realized once he acknowledged his imminent death, as evident in the opening of episode 2, which becomes more and more desperate as the days go by. An aesthetic parallel I would like to draw is Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, in which the main character with a Gustav von Mahler’s face named Aschenbach became infatuated with a polish boy, Tadzio, the apollonian figure representing the eros, and this infatuation becomes entangled with a sense of decay and impending death, causing Aschenbach's pursuit of beauty and passion becoming increasingly desperate and destructive, which, as you might’ve guessed from the novella’s title, resulted in death. The relationship of Aaya and his brother in Kuttsukiboshi, although the cause and effect are reversed, can be seen as a Platonic admiration’s catabasis into the destructive Dionysian. Lastly, I would like to highlight, this sexual relationship is ultimately destructive because there is no love present, but only sympathy and possessiveness.

Beyond 'Planet-Orbiting Love'
Now let us get to the fun part: lesbian sex. The title of the show, Kuttsukiboshi, reminded me of a term called “planet-orbiting love” which is from D.H. Lawrence’s modernist masterpiece Women in Love. In the novel, Birkin envisions love as a central force or principle akin to a gravitational pull, around which individuals orbit. The metaphor suggests that people are drawn toward love, much like celestial bodies are drawn toward a planet by its gravitational force. The idea also implies a sense of distance and separation, as each person is an independent orbiting entity. It is a form of platonic love infused with a type of DaVinci-ism distaste for sex. However, the title of the show implies that these planets are not in orbit, but already smashed into each other, which is due to the intense gravitational pull of sex. Similarly in Women in Love, we will see Birkin giving up on this idea of a ‘pure love’ without physical intimacy. This can be explained by the unmisinterpreted definition of Platonic love: “Plato in Phaedrus argued: sensual beauty is the manifestation of archetypal, eternal form; thus, to succumb to sensual beauty, to fall in love, is to gain provisional entrance into the realm of disembodied form. Plato says that the soul ‘grows wings’ and makes a first step toward its own dissolution into pure form--hence its ability to communicate in this state of loving self-abandonment with the eternal archetypes.” And indeed, this love grew wings with sensual beauty, as we see the main characters literally fly to a transcendental realm, the platonic realm, if you will, marked by pureness and infinity. (Transcendence has already been echoed throughout the show, i.e. superpowers, memory infusion, and most importantly, I would like to point out, is the odd reference to ‘forgetting to lock the door with the key’, which is Kiiko’s final line before they reached the platonic realm. Keys has always been a hint to unlocking an otherworldly existence in the western literary canon, such as the poetries of Vladimir Nabokov in his last novel written in Russian, Dar)

In conclusion, the show was great, I liked it.