Kobeni is Not Your Waifu | Chainsaw Man

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fandoms and somewhat equally so non-fans of specific characters love the process of distilling a character down into memeable traits until those memes become what the character is known for and memes are made from those memes by people uninvolved with the original material which spreads the meme version of the image farther than the original if it catches on the meme of a meme because its own cultural Beast having completely metastasized into something barely representing anything to do with the original character at all normally this happens after a show or anime is popular and the dissonance is mainly felt by people months or years down the line who are completely unaware of the cultural significance and get into the material with some of those meme expectations only to find a dissonance in the Gap and possibly a confusion from it like this quote from a Fujimoto article where he confirms makima owned a this was perpetuated as a fun fact repeatedly but it's totally made up it's just a joke that somebody put together Fujimoto never said this the original image was just a meme made by someone to look like it was from a quoted article and that was perpetuated as a joke because of makima being seen as a Dom type character the thing is though people thought it was real and it fueled the community into spiraling further in that direction despite the fact that makima herself is cold and sexless throughout the story only using her features as a means to control people to her other ends you also see this nearly every time a shipping Community grabs momentum people invested in certain types of ships here one is Canon and check out the original material by enjoying the fan material first and are then sometimes shocked at the very little engagement between the characters or maybe even disappointed and such chainsaw man is different though instead of a lot of separate smaller groups or individuals trickling in over time to discover the flanderization and meet mild confusion the flanderization is already happen before the anime even came out with people excitedly sharing fan art and memes and dances and individual edited panels fueling a certain idea only for the tidal wave of interested new people to the series to be swept up in the community experience and then experience the character for the first time [Music] people didn't react well post after post of Chainsaw man anime onlys with thousands of likes swept Twitter decrying kobeni for being annoying and useless and you know what I I can sympathize I thought kobini was cute but I didn't like her character immediately the fact that she in my eyes would so quickly betray a member of her own team was what I didn't like and to be fair most of what people love kobeni 4 hasn't been adapted yet and a lot of it probably won't be in the first season what I really want to talk about today though is this mimification the sexual bimboification of kobeni is a really weird case specifically because of who her character is a girl forced to give up on her Dreams by a controlling abusive family who value her like chattel making it hard to truly ever escape them they offered her to either risk her life devil hunting or get into selling herself to make the family's wants be met her life her body herself a commodity gripped in the hand hands of this family but she also genuinely cares about her siblings she wants her siblings to get out to escape this toxic environment and so even though she feels stuck in the situation she's been forced into she works so maybe some of her siblings have the chance to escape like her little brother going to college despite being stripped of her agency wanted to keep at least something private to maintain some level of dignity and had the strength of resolve where she would rather die than sell herself to another person now let me just say I think anyone has the right to sell their own body it's extremely hard and respectable work it can be dangerous and I respect basically all the workers of the type and you know what if you enjoy what you do that's an awesome thing too regardless of what you're doing people should know that I'm not condemning that in any way and neither is the story or Fujimoto or this character of kobeni but in context of understanding kobene as her own person and her own perspective it's maybe the last thing that she hasn't had taken from her it's that final bit of privacy of agency the final thing that she gets to have a say in and she says no it shows a strength of resolve that even when pushed to her very end she maintains the value of her right to life and dignity and to remain with that respect even if it's under a crushingly powerless small box of a life any choice she gets to keep living she's going to take any freedom of choice she gets any way out she's committed I feel like considering this in her action to immediately turn on dingy is a lot more dramatic in retrospect she lives a life of constant suffering kill or be killed she didn't go through all that suffering just a die in the mouth of a horrific monster so her resolve is very clear and it's not just for her survival but for the survival of her siblings to get out of that toxic situation and let's be honest this is a really unique resolve for an anime character in The broader landscape and especially for a Shonen series now it's no secret that anime fans are horny and will sexualize anything that breathes and a lot of things that don't but it's also interesting to mention that kobani despite being a consistently major character in chainsaw man and Chainsaw man being super rock and roll in terms of its Aesthetics is never sexualized she's never seen in a state of undress she's never nude she's never made an innuendo or a crude joke of she never so much as kisses anyone really she's always wearing fitted but still loose menswear and also is not a particularly curvy or sexualized character in terms of her body she's as unsexual as she can be which sort of shows fujimoto's respect for presenting her to the reader as she wants to be presented to the characters in the story a lot of stories will present sexuality against the will of the character as narratively a bad thing but then dress it up as something alluring and enticing for the viewer think any of David Cage's games like heavy rain for some obvious examples or think of any Shonen when a female character gets groped without her consent or Comfort it's played as a joke or worst played as serious in the story but is somehow still framed as tantalizing for the viewer there's a cognitive dissonance but not with kobeni both in The Narrative of the story and in The Meta textural sense of how she's presented to a reader Fujimoto keeps kobending as who she is someone who doesn't want to sell her sex appeal to anyone to the point where she would stake her life on it this metanarrative and narrative cohesion is also consistent with the other female characters power thinks human sexuality is dumb drive and doesn't care about social conventions so she has presented suggestively in casual ways that sort of portray her own misunderstanding and lack of care makima's sees sensuality as a way to make her do what she wants while asserting control and is only seen sexually in that context via her own actions himino does it for personal reasons for push and pull like a deal and Reza uses it as a distraction and a manipulation it's a surprisingly mature and respectful way of treating these characters within the story but I think kobeni is the most interesting due to the lack of focus on her sensuality in any clear ogling way at all all the other female characters in chainsaw man interact with their perceived sexuality in active ways that reflect their characterization and for kobeni it's never on the table for her so it's never on the table for the story either her most identifying moments are action oriented and character important vague spoilers here I really don't think it'll ruin anything but she saves Genji's life in one Arc and in a later one she gives him the talk that he needs to give him the strength to confront the biggest threat in the manga she's super fundamental to major major aspects of the overall story she's unbelievably instrumental despite her goofy despair-ridden comical character flaws she's a complex character who despite her anxiety and crippling weakness always does what needs to be done and never forgets why she does it never lets herself become a tool in someone else's story and always takes any ounce of dignity that she's given despite still being a total mess and often being put in humiliating and death encroaching situations it's a mix of humanity and principle the famous dancing moment that is metastasized into two iterations of a meme at this point was something she was forced to do against her will so she wouldn't be brutally murdered she's crying because her life is at risk and she feels humiliated that panel became a understandably funny out-of-context meme and then that got edited into other memes then the dance got taken to Tick-Tock into a kobeni focus dance and now that got taken to this cat ear dance meme which in its final iteration no longer involves kobene at all anymore the song is unrelated the dance is different the cat ears have nothing to do with it and kobini isn't even in most iterations of the meme the meme metastasized so far past the original thing that not a single trait of the original is present in its most recent iterations so it makes sense why people would be confused as who kobene is seeing her debut as this slobbering mess her devil being a secret got turned into the toppy devil meme which I can only imagine is due to the amount of sweat and nervousness she's always displaying when she shows up but once again it ignores everything about her character to a level of parody where the character being memed or cosplayed is only an aesthetic it's almost as if two separate kobeni characters exist one in the mind of the fandom and one in the mind of the story that being said the memes are mostly funny I'm not sitting here saying oh why are the memes not accurate but more so just interested in how a meme can metastasize so far away from its original concept where it no longer even resembles anything it originally could be described as I mean let's face it when people see cute anime girl they just sort of jump on the train and hey she's cute and she's not real do whatever you want with the character design it's a banger character design no one is wrong for Mr presenting her in this way it's the norm for anime characters to be put through the ringer like this but in context of kobeni there's some extreme dissonance between a character literally willing to die before letting themselves be sexualized and a community so willing to sexualize her that nothing of her original character is carried over into her broader fandom appearances other than tihi she's so nervous if you are an anime only annoyed at kobeni please stick it out she gets her times to shine as the show will go on and anyone angry that she's not actually the toppy nervous ooh girl sorry kobeni is not your waifu but she is mine thanks so much for watching and I hope this gave anime onlys or people interested in fan flanderization something interesting to think about if anyone looks like kobeni please DM me on Twitter and keep all fan art coming too because it's still funny out of context once again this video is about the dissonance between the character of kobeni and the many levels of flanderization kobene has gone through in fan communities that will make her not even resemble the original character the nature of that process if you want more videos like this subscribe and comment and if you want to talk about this more in depth come see me on Twitch I stream almost every single day at 3 PM's CST thanks to Daniel frausing my name is Klein burrito Ronan zioma Benny Icarus young Suk Chong Dex and all my other patrons on screen now chainsaw man is very good and I'll see you soon foreign
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Channel: Hiding in Public
Views: 469,075
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: chainsaw man, chainsaw man anime, chainsaw man manga, Kobeni, kobeni higashiyama, CSM, csm kobeni, kobeni meme, kobeni dance, kobeni analysis, csm anime, csm manga, kobeni waifu, kobeni best girl
Id: yqNAhMl0df8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)
Published: Sat Dec 03 2022
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