In Praise Of: Kill La Kill

 

To explain why Kill La Kill was such a pleasant surprise to me requires a little back story. There were two anime series I seemed to hear everyone talking about; Sword Art Online (from now on abbreviated as SAO) and Kill La Kill. SAO was appealing, it had a solid concept and I thought the buzz surrounding it would be a positive sign. I went in with moderate, but somewhat restrained expectations. It started with a few decent references to game culture and an obvious disconnect with the psyche of a player from the mindset one would employ in a real life scenario and I thought it would carry on like that. Unfortunately it devolved further and further into a mess of poorly constructed reasons for fan service. I stopped watching after the end of the second arc and didn't like more than a third of the episodes in the end, which I thought was a massive shame given the potential they had going for them from the beginning. The two words I would describe SAO with is squandered potential.

Sorry SAO fans, it's not my thing.

And then I watched Kill La Kill (which was of course the other series people were talking about), now with low expectations; after all, I'm not a fan of fan-service, not massively into anime in general and wasn't sold on a show in which the main two characters (kind of, Mako and Satsuki are of equal importance really) are a school girl and her skimpy outfit.

So I have an issue with fan service. Aaaand I like Kill La Kill? Alright, let me explain. Kill La Kill takes just about everything I don't like about anime in general, exaggerates it, flips it on its head and then exaggerates it some more. But of course I've got to talk about the fan service first. There is a lot of it. A LOT.

Roughly the first three or so episodes felt a touch out of balance and the excessive fan service initially felt a little on the nose and I was worried it would get worse (much like SAO did). And it did. But something changed, all of a sudden the fan service was infused with a great sense of humour; the discussions between Senketsu and Ryuko were fantastic (as was the dialogue in general) and the raw visual style of the show started to sink its hooks into me. The biggest change in my perception of the fan service was ultimately that the framing wasn't dis-empowering for the subject of the fan service in question; indeed it was actually empowering.

Although the transformation sequence is a touch too much in my eyes, especially so given how often it plays.

Rather than perpetuating a trope I seem to see a lot in anime; that of weak female characters that only serve to fill a harem for the male lead who is invariably a psychopath to boot (looking at you SAO) Kill La Kill went out of its way to flip the convention of fan service on its head; making it equal opportunity by mid way through the series; having its purpose as to accentuate humour (rather than exclusively keep a male audience interested as it often seems to be the case) to the point that I felt the same way about the male nudity as I did the female nudity. That is to say it wasn't linked even a bit to sexual attraction as I initially had assumed was the only purpose of such excessive nudity. (At least that was my reaction, the internet at large seems to disagree with me on that front).

And the characters. So damn good. Too often there is the hero, the villain and everyone else. While the hero and villain get fleshed out characters, back stories and appearances, everyone else tends to look or act pretty much the same way. This is certainly not true of Kill La Kill. Ryuko quickly establishes herself as someone who doesn't take anything from anybody, has no respect and more importantly no fear for the oppression that presides over the entirety of Honno city at the hands of Honnoji accademy. Mako subsequently also establishes herself as almost the complete opposite of Ryuko and strikes a friendship with her based on something other than merely similarities. Homeroom teachers have alter egos with glowing purple nipples, a guy with a Mohawk has an ingrained hatred of clothes and minor characters all have their own appearances and character traits.

The music, character design, backgrounds and fight choreography all take in a variety of of styles and forms yet feel cohesive as a whole and elements are repeated to form a language entirely its own when it comes to a pursuit of comedy (see the Mako scenes). Above all else it oozes style, from the colour palettes of different characters (see Satsuki's white, blue and gold next to Ryuko's black, red and navy blue clothing) to the wonderfully over the top backgrounds, chunky fonts that take up nearly the whole screen in a violent red and Ryuko herself (Mako too) who so wonderfully subvert and defy the standard roles women (within the context of fictional narratives) are usually expected or desired to play. It's so crammed full of jokes, fights, dialogue and characters without a single moment of filler (bar one brilliant joke that mocks the notion of catch up episodes in roughly a minute) that I legitimately felt spoiled watching it.

In closing I'd like to acknowledge one thing that is a bit of an issue with the series, and those are the scenes between Satsuki and her mother which go much too far in my eyes, as do the transformation sequences, these, in my eyes at least, are the only moments where they seem to focus purely on fan-service to the detriment of the story. But that's the show's only flaw, and when the series as a whole is packed with so much humour, style and character what a small flaw it seems.

Kill La Kill, I salute you, may we see your like again.

Edit: If you've come this far you might be interested in another piece of writing I did on Kill La Kill, it's currently my featured article. I also made a video on the same topic from that blog post, it's embedded below. Cheers - Tim.