Arjuna 8
Gee, Cindy, maybe people would understand you better if you weren't a colossal bitch? Just thinkin out loud here, but TRYING TO MURDER JUNA was probably not going to help her understand your thinkin'.
This episode also points out something that is enormously hypocritical of Juna's new world order: the sheer amount of food and drink she wastes. That cow died so you could live, Juna. You throwing away his sacrifice is more insulting than any process the meat was put through. Feel free to waste it, though. You're only deeply insulting the animal and the person offering it to you with this gesture.
Which is kinda the message of Arjuna, from what I gather. Mankind is unimportant, and human relationships are less important than being a stuck up ecosnob. Because that's the message being sent. Juna left home for DAYS without talking to her mom after giving her the scare of her life. Now she is imposing all manner of economic demands on her mother for things a single woman may not be able to provide to two teenagers. All of this without explanation. And now she's been forced, more or less, to dump Tokio (who is kinda a loser) because the environment demands it/she's realized that as long as she's with Tokio, Chris is going to continue to torment the fuck out of him.
I mean, the shit-eating old ephebophile on the mountain is clearly meant to reflect the shit-stained paradise this show endorses, right? And that guy lived alone with no friends or relatives at all. Probably because he was a massive creep and as abusive and vicious as all environmentally enlightened characters in this show tend to be. So it seems to me that the Mountain wants us to learn that to truly save the planet, we must be as removed from human relationships as possible. Or better yet, the Earth would be better off without humans at all.
Because The Mountain, the old man, and the writer are all, in fact, the Devil Gundam.
We transition from Juna wasting food to a lecture on starving children in Africa. This show was written by June Cleaver and she does not give a fuck if Pres. Eisenhower doesn't eat his meat, there are starving children in Africa and as a first world child you should eat less meat so it can rot away in a supermarket go to children in Africa! Sure that doesn't make sense but NEITHER DOES THIS SHOW.
Am I or am I not meant to eat my food? Maybe Juna's waste of Merikan burgers is heroic, since by eating less meat she can solve world hunger. But Merikan burgers are horrible and murderous, so that can't be right, can it? I don't know.
Lipstick as a metaphor for a penis ensues.
Juna has learned well from Chris the art of saying fuck all and then pouting when people don't understand you. Her sister asks what she wants, Juna says nothing. Tokio asks what she wants and she's all "don't you know who this is?" I suppose this is meant to tie into Chris's lecture on how words only separate people from their true feelings, rather than reveal them. Which, as someone who has been studying language a bit now, I feel confident in saying is bullshit. Not because people always mean what they say, but because language did not evolve as some bullshit method of keeping people from understanding us. I'm perfectly fine with the message that sometimes language does fail us and does prevent us from really expressing ourselves, but as with so many other parts of Arjuna, the message isn't what's wrong, its the delivery.
I'm of the understanding that in high-context, detail oriented cultures like historical Japan you don't say the point, you say things around it and lead someone to understand it themselves. That's part of being a high context culture and typical of high context business dealings. But what's wrong here is that, rather than guiding people to what they need to know, Chris and Juna are behaving like assholes and expecting
people to know. A good example of how to do all of this correctly is Jesus teaching parables. He didn't lay out the point of them to the crowd, they were supposed to get that themselves. Or, as a personal favorite, when Nathan chastises David for killing Uriah and sleeping with Bath-Sheba. He tells him that lengthy story, and David himself concludes that the person who did all of that was wrong, at which point Nathan points out that the story is about David himself. Chris is just "WHY KILL WHY KILL WORDS WORDS WORDS MERIKAN BURGER IS THE DEVIL." And Juna is just "MOPEY STARE". Neither of them give clues or take the time to guide the person they want to arrive at the conclusion themselves. They just expect that person to intuitively know. And I'm sorry, but unlike Chris and Cindy the rest of humanity isn't a bunch of serial mind-rapists. THEY'RE NOT ALL JEAN GREY AND CHARLES XAVIER AND CAN READ FUCKING MINDS. Without even so much as a clue, nobody is gonna know that you're sad you dumped your loser boyfriend to save him from being further tortured by the eco terrorists who are holding your very life hostage. It's just not going to happen.
Is Appare an actual brand? This is two episodes it is advertised in, now. I would love to believe this show bad-mouthed a product which sponsored it.
Honestly Tokio's hilariously poorly hidden nuclear stockpile of pornography annoys me much, much less than the fact that Juna is afraid of going to the ocean because it means she'll have to eat their food. GOOD GOD DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF GIRL? YOU CAN NEVER TRAVEL BECAUSE IT MEANS EATING FOOD FROM UNKNOWN SOURCES OH NO.
Like seriously, the writer doesn't just hate environmental threats, he hates human civilization, and all advancements we as a race have created since we first stopped being gatherers (he probably hates the idea of hunting, too.) We have gone, in less than ten episodes, from turning off the AC in the summer to stopping going anywhere because travel is BAD. This show is fucking obscene. It seriously borders on offensive to me as a human being. As in I honestly am tempted to believe some alien race made this entire anime as propaganda about how awful humanity is so that human teenagers would be demoralized by the time they steamrolled their invasion.
Arjuna is alien propaganda designed to spread the message of how shitty human civilization is, and that is not okay.
Bwahahaha, end of this episode is some serious do-ra-ma bullshit. I hope next episode ends with Sayuri force-feeding Juna a Merikan burger then ripping her gut out with a knife and carrying Tokio's severed head off on a Nice Boat.
I want every bad anime to end that way, really.