Breaking preconceptions – Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai (in English)
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Every type of anime has it’s predominant tropes, and this is true for harem series as well. Watch one, you’ve seen the jist: multiple ladies fawning over that one guy who has a special something, a little sparkle of magic about him that makes the world revolve a bit more around him than anyone else. Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai embraces the tropes of its forebears and gives them some airing and, perhaps, a slightly unwelcome jostling. We’ll let Katsuragi Keima walk us through a wonderworld of dissected harem tropes and find out what is The World That God Only Knows.
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Breaking preconceptions – Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai (in English)
- 1. Kami Nomi zo Shiru SekaiBreaking Preconceptions #KamiNomi @Isperia_ isperia@desucon.fi
- 3. This presentation... • Will be in English • Is based mostly around the anime, not the manga • Might get a bit image heavy • ...aaand some of the images and text might get a bit raunchy
- 7. There will be some (hopefully slight) spoilers! You have been warned.
- 8. What are you in for?
- 9. Every type of anime has it’s predominant tropes, and this is true for harem series as well. Watch one, you’ve seen the jist: multiple ladies fawning over that one guy who has a special something, a little sparkle of magic about him that makes the world revolve a bit more around him than anyone else. Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai embraces the tropes of its forebears and gives them some airing and, perhaps, a slightly unwelcome jostling. We’ll let Katsuragi Keima walk us through a wonderworld of dissected harem tropes and find out what is The World That God Only Knows.
- 10. What makes harem animes tick?
- 58. The girls
- 83. On with the ladies!
- 93. You are now entering spoiler territory!
- 109. Galges tropes
- 113. To wrap things up...
- 114. Thank you for listening and participating! The cat will now take your questions.
Notas do Editor
- Hello, name, handles, hashtag. Feel free to ask questions at any time, if I don't notice you immediately just jump up and give a holler – I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes.
- This presentation will be in english, but I'm a native finnish speaker. If you want to ask something but don't want to do it in english, ask it in finnish! I'll try to keep my answers in english in case there are people who don't understand finnish so well.
- All of the subs seen here are from the translator group Chihiro. My japanese is not that up to par, but as far as I can tell they're pretty close to home. I appologize for any trope- or stereotype (I use these two in tandem here, by the way) related comments I'll be giving today – as what I'm talking about is based on them, I figured the presentation might as well base some on them too. I'd lose a bit in the translation otherwise.
- But luckily for you...
- The anime and manga go pretty much hand in hand from screen to screen.
- I went for the anime mostly because I like the art style more – it feels a lot more finished visually – and the seiyuus are pretty good. And little Keima knows best. My knowledge of KamiNomi also began with the anime, not the manga.
- I'm trying to unveil the meta-ness of The World God Only Knows – KamiNomi for short, so I'll try to have a two-pronged approach to this. 1. What is KamiNomi's approach to metaness and the harem and galges genre? 2. What are the tropes in said genre? If they are what makes KamiNomi funny, why? Another thing is that my ingress for the presentation is a bit wrong, as it read as follows:
- I rewatched the first two seasons of KamiNomi for this presentation, as well as finishing the third as it aired while I mulled over this. Then I rewatched the whole thing just to be sure, and noticed I had been sort of wrong about the premiss I was working on. KamiNomi isn't just meta – it's also meta meta. It looks at itself and laughs while laughing at the rest of the genre as well, and that means my ingress isn't wholly thruthful. I will try to delve it to the fullest during this presentation, but I apologize in advance if some of the questions left by the ingress won't be answered.
- To break down a meta anime, we need to first look at what it is meta about. So what is a stereotypical harem anime?
- From Navel: Shuffle! - not quite as raunchy as an anime, a lot more so as a game...
- Key: Kanon – the sort of start of modern harem culture, beginning in 1999 with a non-erotic reprint later
- From Key, Clannad First a game, then visual novel,then a manga, then an anime, it's made quite the rounds.
- And To Heart, which was good enough to even get a sequel, aptly named To Heart 2. There are some combining features in all of these shows, but the biggest one is that they're based on games.
- Literally, pretty girl games. These are sold for a young adult male audience, and the original games are usually rather more explicit than their anime counterparts, where things stay sweeter, are aimed at a younger audience and it's more baww and not the other thing. But what do these things eat, what is there to poke fun at?
- The Protagonist Bland everyguy with not too much any personality traits barring the tragic past that makes for good game events. Someone anyone can relate to.
- Stupid side character – helps and hinders and provides comic relief. Sort of a catch-all idiot. Mostly known, inside the genre, as a partner character – someone who should theoretically help you. Of course the tropes have come a ways, as a certain someone can attest.
- Keima-kun has some pretty steep ideas about how to make his genre better, as we'll get across this lecture. But back to the tropes!
- A cute animal for the bawwws. No real purpose.
- And of course the girls. Girls, girls, girls, girls, girls. There's one who's shy, one who's energetic, one who's kind of tsundere or yandere, one who's a bit clumsy but kindhearted, one who's really forward... The tropes aren't just here, they're everywhere. Anime, manga and galges all rotate on archetypes, and that's where we get to the beef of this presentation.
- This isn't the first presentation on KamiNomi - ”Kaada kaunottaria kuin Keima Katsuragi”, Desucon 2013, Maik & Zoro. Where Maik and Zoro focused more on how Keima got his girls, I'll be focusing a bit more on the why's. Keima-kun is a bit more of a case example to the boys anyway.
- The World God Only Knows – Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai or KamiNomi for short, is what might be called ”the” harem anime. Normal harem animes are made from the galges template – same characters, same-ish plot, maybe a pick of one story arcs... Whereas KamiNomi is about the guy who plays these games. It's not giving the basic consumer a template that is approachable, it's giving the consumer themselves.
- Katsuragi Keima -san, the protagonist. The Capturing God. Actually, even Keima's name is a pun – Keima is not a usual Japanese name. It could theoreticallybe a nickname, except that Keima pronounces it with a half-hard K – a mix between Keima and Geima, using it even for a few half-hearted puns like ”Geima Love!”
- The name puns are usually a lot more hidden, but he does do the ”geima-keima” pun a few times. It does have a lot more overture most of the time, this is from the last episode. I would've capped video, but I had some technical difficulties with frying pieces of computers so that was left undone. However, Keima's not your everyday galges protagonist. I couldn't talk it better, so let's hear it from the man himself.
- This little clip actually flags some Keima tropes – he has the good old assburger glass shove move that is actually one of his main visual tropes. He's otherwise a rather hikigomori kind of guy as well, lapsing into neckbeardish rants about everything related to his interests.
- Next up is Elsie, or full name Elucia de Lute Ima. Elsie is a demon from New Hell, assigned, to be Keima's buddy or partner (see the pun?) for capturing lost souls. Now, why was Keima chosen? Well because he's the capturing god of course, and he can capture any girl alive!
- Capturing basically works as follows: there are loose souls, evil souls that have escaped from hell, that worm their ways into the emptiness of a girl's heart. That hole needs to be filled with love, and then the soul can be captured.
- There's a couple of jists to it, though: there are quite a few of them, for one. And what if you don't capture them?
- … is that the rather spiffing ring around his neck blows up and decapitates him. It's a rather effective way to ensure co-operation, no?
- It goes both ways, though. If he fails, Elsie dies too, and the same to the other direction. They're bound, and so the buddy character arc is completed. With the force of a thousand suns.
- Keima and Elsie have a bit of a strenuous relationship at first, though, because Elsie is, well, Elsie, and she ends up living at Keima's, because...
- Because her modus operandi is a bit scary.
- Next up, Haqua du Lot Herminium, another demon from Hell. Haqua begins as a more of a side character, although the further into the series we go the more important she becomes. Haqua is Elsie's counterpart – Elsie is the stupid, energetic bumbler that gets things right halfway by mistake, whereas Haqua is the more thoughtful, skillful model student who doesn't really cut it in the real world.
- Haqua is actually introduced as a sort of capture target – a name Keima uses for the girls in the series – because of her school problems...
- ...although she's helped in the end by Elsie, not Keima and captures the loose soul herself.
- And it all wraps up into a rather well-rounded ending. Here we have Keima as his ”usual self” with a girl, spot the signs of a reclusive nerd. This whole capture points out an interesting thing about Keima:
- Actually Keima is a specifically unheroic hero – he dodges danger when he can and cares more for his games than the real world, just like he says.
- ...but he does have his redeeming qualities, downplayed or brought up as necessity dictates. As the girls keep on noticing he's calm, goal-driven and excessively intelligent and analytical. This works a lot better for him than you might think.
- He's also very trustworthy, in his own way. Keima is a bit bipolar on this, though, as there are practically three sides to his coin. Mode 1 you saw up there: basic Keima, not that good with people or girls – his classmates call him otamega – a combination of otaku and mekaneko.
- The basic Keima plays games and goes to school, and is a bit of a recluse. ”Otamega”, the sideline gamer. He has an up-end though, which brings us to 2: Gamer Keima.
- The gamer Keima doesn't care about the real world, he lives for his dating sims. He is the original capturing god, and he's kind of always been like this.
- And I do mean always.
- And he is truly passionate about games. Games are his life. One of the biggest running gags in the series is actually the Gamer Keima – it plots out filler episodes and makes for most of the fun overture jokes:
- But the third mode is the second mashed into the first: it's what summer's Kaada Kaunottaria was all about – it's the capturing god Keima, the player (yes, it's another word pun). Keima is an anti-social gamer, an archetypical sleek otaku/hikigomori. But when forced, he becomes the character of his games – the sleek ladies man, but with a sort of petulant twist. And that gets us to:
- Mode 3: Capturing God mode. This is Keima when he's hitting on girls, and this is what the This Keima is a player that plays girls like musical instruments or, you can probably guess it, games. And the meta of games and players is not something that KamiNomi is going to miss out on.
- Keima's reference frame is games. When he talks about captures – he's not wooing or hitting on girls, by the way, they're always captures – he talks in game terms. He even changes as a character when needed: his demeanor and even his pronouns change with the girl: boku no's become watashi was.
- And when I say his ref frame is games, I do mean it. This is another big thing for the series. It references all the girls and situations ”like games”.
- This is one of the deeper meta aspects of the series, while it's been shrugged off everywhere I've found mentions on it as the most obtuse one. I heavily disagree (and have to note, here, that I've found very little talk about how KamiNomi is meta – usually everyone just nods it off as ”yea, galges meta” and moves on).
- In my opinion (and this part is underlined, I'm basing this on what I know, not what the series might have meant to do), every time KamiNomi throws a game meta joke it's doing a sort of double entendre. Firstly, it's showing off that it's a meta series, and thus throwing fun around at it's genre and tropes. At the same time it get's to show off meta knowledge and intertextuality in gaming and anime in general, it can poke fun at other areas of games, anime and manga as well – and it can do it into almost any direction, because the main character is a nerd and could know that stuff.
- It likes to toss it's knowledge of history and intertextuality openly – and at the same time do it behind the scenes. Outres like this one are not exactly abundant but not remiss either – this one is referring Ouran High School Host Club, by the way – but the more subtle nods are harder to find.
- But even possibly more importantly, it gives the series an opportunity for introspection and some self search. Keima is the most critical consumer possible and the series plays on that out constantly.
- Here is where the meta aspect really shows off. Kami Nomi refuses to be a simple game of circus – it's not simply the clowns declaring ”Here we are again!”, it's the ringleader and the dancing bears sitting down to ponder why the clowns do it in the back. While the series slips on this a bit (the hows and whys of which I'll get to in more detail a bit later), it is what watches the watchmen.
- The most important thing in the series, of course, is the capture of loose souls. This happens, as said, by filling the target's heart's emptiness – basically making them fall in love.
- When that happens, the soul pops out of the host and ends up in a size-shifting bottle that the demons have around. The way to get the souls out? Why the ever-sweet prudishly japanese last nail on the coffin of love:
- The kiss. The ever-pure, eternal symbol of love, the kiss. This is one of the biggest meta-runs of the series: where normal games would either end, or end with a significant change in the system, KamiNomi pulls the breaks.
- The capture targets lose their memory with the loose soul, with only Keima remembering the capture – this gives KamiNomi the biggest metatool in it's toolbox, when the girl is captured she's put into supporting cast and Keima moves on.
- But, what would a galges meta be without the beef? What really brings out the genre meta in KamiNomi are the girls, so let's have a look. All of the girls are tropes and even tropes of tropes. In capturing order:
- Takahara Ayumi, the energetic, flustery sports girl.
- Aoyama Mio, rich, aloof, apart, short girl. It's perhaps at this point worth noticing that Keima flags the girls according to their tropes. He lists the tropes and plays the capture accordingly, with even trope proclamations such as:
- ”Aloof characters armor themselves to protect their pureness.” The proclamations are again one of the meta overtures, with this sort of special ”signed by Keima” clip and all.
- Like this one. Keima has a clear dictation between real and game girls. Game girls are pure and true, whereas real girls are pestering, bothersome and in the way. But back to the matter at hand.
- Nagakawa Kanon, idol girl. Funnily, she's also a spin on the shy girl archetype – the series likes to do some extra polarisation where it can as well. Her name is probably a pun on the series Kanon, in which snow is ever-present as snow is a big thematic on Kanon's capture as well. Keeping promises is also important to her story arc, which might also support the hypothesis.
- Shiyomia Shiori, bookish library girl. She actually has a lot of dedication put to her, being the intelligent, ”real” shy archetype at the same time – the true bookish girl with an inner voice and all. This is another archetype the game likes to poke fun at.
- ”If you listen carefully, you can hear a bookish girls inner voice.” Again, one of Keima's proclamations (not every girl gets one, but almost half of them do) telling us important parts about how galges tend to work. On a side note, none of the proclamations Keima gives are spot on. He's always close, but never quite on the mark. The proclamations being a clear poke at the industry Keima, the heart and soul of it's consumer being wrong, might be another.
- This is again another one of the ways that KamiNomi does it's ”commentary”. Keima meets an archetype and gives off a nosing of something related. In this case Keima goes on to proclaim that if Shiori isn't the perfect example of a librarian character, he won't even bother. You can guess what she turns out to be.
- Keima of course eventually realizes that the bookish girl's thoughts can't be heard in the real world, but manages to ”hear” them anyway and ends up forcing Shiori to swap her inner and outer monologues.
- Shiori is, in the first season of the anime, the last capture, and ends up honing a lot of the finer points of what KamiNomi is doing. Shiori is the first of the girls that really hammers in that Keima warps reality – around Keima things turn a bit more game-like, simply by him being him. This is one of the curious aspects of the series, as it's never explained. It simply works so that Keima, in Capturing God mode, seems to warp reality. Most probably this is so the series is more interesting to follow, but worthy of note nontheless. But onwards we stride!
- Season 2!
- Kasuga Kusunoki, the martial artist ”hard” girl and the cute girl at the same time. Kusunogi is the most meta double character, with her inner self split in two to the hard, unyielding martial artist and another part inhabited by the loose soul that likes cute and girly things. Some fun is had at the bipolarity, but Kusunogi is more of a funny side character than anything else, and unfortunately, slips by without much comment.
- Capture nr. 6, Kosaka Chihiro, the ”normal” girl. Chihiro is Keima's class mate, and ends up being one of the most important captures in the series – she is the first thing that jolts Keima into the real world, forcing him to see it as different from the game. (Note the keep clam at the backround.)
- As Keima says, Chihiro is a real person instead of a trope – and the hardest and easiest capture Keima ever faces. Later on Chihiro starts a band and becomes operative in breaking down some of the ”meta” of KamiNomi. But there are still captures to be seen.
- Next up, Nagase Jun. Teacher trainee, who wraps up anime season 3. Yep, she's a grown-up woman, and Keima's 17. No, it doesn't matter. Yep, the trope is played to the absolute maximum. In the end, Keima doesn't really make her fall in love, but rather helps her over her troubles – KamiNomi is trying to be family friendly, after all.
- Keima plays this one like a pro, though. Again, life shifts closer to game, and Keima suddenly starts helping his homeroom teacher to garner info on Jun, and it works.
- This is also one of the times and characters that pokes fun at fanservice – another thing KamiNomi likes to go meta about. KamiNomi is rather family friendly almost all the time, exept for, among other things, Nikaido-sensei, who's practically the closest the series gets to constant fan service, which is interesting itself from a series poking fun at the most singularly explicit genre in the business. KamiNomi is very self-aware of it's meta, but it shows especially with fan service. As usual, this is done mostly through Keima (and it's very specifically non-explicit at all times).
- The thing that KamiNomi has a fixation on is baths. A lot of the scenes that could happen anywhere seem to happen in the bathroom because hey, why not? The series remembers to poke fun at it later every time, but it is a bit odd. This is one of the things that I never wrapped my head around – KamiNomi likes bathroom scenes, but unlike most of the rest of things that glare out, they don't seem to be there to poke fun at anything, but at the same time the series is really self-concious about them – focusing attention on the bathroom scenes when unnecessary.
- I mean goes to lengths about the baths.
- … But Keima does end up in some pretty interesting situations in the bath.
- And it turns out he's pretty unfazeable. In this scene, he's actually called up ahead that he's coming – it makes no sense that Chihiro is in the bath, which the series actually goes to lengths to explain. But then again...
- It's always also possible Keima is a rapist. (I'm telling you, these things happen curiously often) There's some more fan service, but it's again closer to KamiNomi's usual self-attesting approach. Now that we're in the neighborhood, though:
- Befory you draw any conclusions, she's passed out from the heat. And before you draw any more conclusions from that, it's because she was under Keima's blankets. KamiNomi is really explicit about when it's doing fan service :D
- I've digressed from the girls again, though, so back to the matter at hand. Next up the anime does a time skip on captures, moving on a bigger plotline. That doesn't mean you don't get to hear the tropes, though, because I read up on the manga.
- This is a sort of a score card that opens the third season, but anyone who's been keeping count will notice I'm only up to seven. Keima rolls through the rest pretty swiftly.
- And here are the most important characteristic traits of five of them: younger underclassman, a ghost (again, not a true capture), a ramen cook, a shogi player and an older woman.
- Top right: Ikami Minoma (C9) Underclassman, young and sweet and all those beans Bottom left: Hinaga Rieko (C11) the ghost – made to accept her loneliness Bottom right: Uemoto Sumire (C12) the ramen chef – energetic and loves to eat, in a very galges way – if anyone's played Kanon, she resembles speficically the game versions Top left: Haibara Nanaka (C13) shogi player – honest, persistent and proud, the driven girl archetype Middle: Kasuga Hinoki (C15) older sister of Kusunogi, a loud and ”western” character – also an older and fanservice-y character, just check the looks there. We have 2 other captures missing as well, which are
- Kujyo Tsukio, (C8), a pure astrologist girl that loves beautiful things, such as dolls. She's archetypical ”pure” character, a sort of a prude archetype, which made her capture a bit of a hassle – she shows no interest in flawed things, focusing on the doll and the sky instead. She actually turns into a doll because of the loose soul and is turned back at capture by Keima.
- Goido Yui (C14) is a rich, shy girl that loves music and gets bodyswapped with Keima, ending up capturing him instead and turning into a tomboy in the process. Yui has the time of her life in Keima's body and almost doesn't capture him/herself due to enjoying being a boy, which ends up with him becoming a boy. The plotline of course pokes fun at gender unfamiliarity and all that, but doesn't really get anywhere with it. Again, a relatively uneventful capture.
- There's one girl that get's her own arc without capture – Ayukawa Tenri. She's a childhood friend of Keimas, and introduces us into the third season's story arc. She is clearly in love with Keima, which is also something kind of new. As an archetype she is the shy childhood friend character.
- Childhood friendship is, again another trope that KamiNomi really shoves into the viewers face.
- Keima actually ends up talking about marriage a bit – he believes in bringing game logic into the real world on a full one on one basis – if it worked for him in games, it must work in real life, and therefore if something's not gameworthy, Keima ignores it when possible. Chihiro is the only exeption to this rule that I've encountered thus far, making Keima bent a bit from the rather obtuse and unchanging character archetype he is.
- I'll avoid the biggest plot twists, but I have to give out some info.
- KamiNomi is split into story arcs that create a continuity but are rather apart from each other for the start of the series, until the Goddesses Arc. This is an arc that mixes things up quite a bit, dropping off all new captures. Instead, we end up with a situation where Tenri and 5 of the old captures host goddesses inside them that need to be awakened to escape disaster. This is where the meta part of KamiNomi gets interesting. Unlike before, I'm not sure how aware this is – KamiNomi, in the goddesses arc turns into some sort of a mix of a Shonen Jump cover and the most classic harem tropes.
- Of course, Keima takes all this rather cool. But he's not immune to the changes in the series, as the goddesses also change the girls's personalities somewhat.
- Suddenly, there's a need to gather all 6 goddesses, and a week to do it. Diana and
- Apollo, the one's inside Tenri and Kanon are already known, and Keima weeds down the remaining four to five girls.
- … and sets out to play it like a slap bass.
- And the girls don't take it as well as one might think.
- Actually, they don't take well to it at all.
- Especially the goddesses dislike Keima, when outed – everyone wants him for their own host. See a pattern here, maybe familiar from a show type you've seen? This is where it gets odd. I'm not sure how self-aware a choice this is. KamiNomi has always thus far been very consistent about making sure that it shows that it's aware of the tropes its using. Suddenly it speedbuilds a harem and shows no interest in it happening. It actually slips into super classic harem territory, with Keima trying to maintain relations with everyone and everyone wanting Keima for themselves while at the same time Keima is playing his game, because he has to.
- The series is very self-aware of the part that Keima is playing the game but shows no awareness to the fact that it's becoming what it parodizes. It even ends with one extra outsider in the bunch, apart from one of the five courtees that isn't a goddess host.
- But seeing as to how badly he was doing with the ladies, Keima turns out to be quite the harem anime protagonist: suddenly everyone wants a piece.
- Even the goddesses are falling for Keima.
- And then there's this.
- All of a sudden, Keima's character makes no sense. He's still the same Keima per se, as such, but suddenly he's also the main character of a harem anime. And he's also acting the part. I haven't read beyond where season 3 ended, but I suppose it is possible that this is a character development arc for Keima. Either or, KamiNomi is becoming what it was supposed to be a parody of.
- So what are the galges tropes that we end up going home with? Not as many as you'd think.
- KamiNomi loves to do it's galges fun poking openly – Keima actually ponders what games should have in them and ends up with this. This following is from an episode where Keima is asked what kind of game he'd like, where we end up with a sort of Keima-induced fever dream where he rolls through what there should be.
- Funpoking is done both generally and specifically. KamiNomi doesn't point names, but it gets pretty close to all but.
- KamiNomi is a meta series about bishjoujo games. It's also a meta series about harem anime, and it rather feels like a meta anime about itself. It's not really one or the other, and it manages to be a fun series on top of it. The World God Only Knows remains a bit of a mystery, as it should. It is an ongoing series, after all. It might find it hard to find breathing room in the future, though, in it's meta box.