This Week in Anime

Playing Chess With a Dog

Sylvia
Possibly! Maybe! I'd like to talk about it at any rate, Coop. Yes, this is another installment of "This Week in Highly Insular Social Media Phenomena," i.e., something I saw on Bluesky that isn't too big a deal but I think speaks to an interesting anxiety worthy of examination. Plus it gives me an excuse to talk about this adorable fish some more. Win-win!

So first a little context is in order. "Losing chess to a dog" is kind of self-explanatory as a metaphor—you should possess the capacity to know/do better, in other words. Yet if memory serves, I saw it spring up in the cultural vernacular around the time when you had all those breathless articles about the latest Marvel/Disney movie "breaking new ground" in the realm of queer representation, only for the film itself, when released, to have perfunctory representation at best. This happened several times, so it got to the point where, if you were taking this hype at face value, you were, in effect, part of this image. And not the dog part.

Precisely. And I think it's worth remembering that (again, if my memory is correct) this sentiment originally stemmed from the largest media conglomerate in the world being weenies about queerness (a problem, I'll note, that certainly hasn't gotten better in recent years). There's an argument to be made that every little bit of exposure helps, but I think that's a far cry from expecting Disney to "challenge" its broadest target audience in that way, let alone praising a faceless corporation preemptively for potentially doing so.

Fast-forward to the present, and now we have Goodbye, Lara, a modern iteration on The Little Mermaid that has already become a critical darling with a devoted audience, myself included. Moreover, it seems to have some pretty gay components. Some homosexual subtext. Some highly yuri overtones.

Or does it? Who's in control here? Us, or the dog?

What we do know for sure is that Goodbye, Lara is not interested in doing a straightforward adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's original fairy tale, and it is very interested in exploring and commenting on the nature of the "true love" Lara seeks. To expand on this week's episode as an example, Lara finds a couple so stereotypically storybook that their names literally contain "ouji" and "hime." Yet the episode pairs this with Lara's current obsession with corny romance films and the lack of a "happily ever after" between Himeka and her childhood friend. On one hand, you have the hyperreality of the movie industry, and on the other, you have the bittersweetness of an unrequited crush. Neither of those is "true love" in the real and romantic sense that Lara is searching for, yet Himeka's narrative stirs something in Lara all the same.

True! It's also interesting that Goodbye, Lara has already made some alterations to its origin. In The Little Mermaid, the prince ends up betrothed to somebody else due to a case of mistaken identity, after which the Mermaid casts herself into the sea rather than kill the prince and regain her mermaid nature. In this version, though, the prince holds the blade and cruelly rejects Lara after seeing her mermaid nature firsthand. If there is an argument to be made about the Lara & Mari endgame (and I believe there is), I think it lies in the inversions on this relationship. Mari meets Lara after she falls out of the sky, which is the reverse of how Lara met the prince. Mari sees Lara's mermaid form right away and does not reject her. And Mari ends up saving Lara from drowning, which is how Lara met her prince originally. Clearly these are intentional framings meant to be contrasted against the story we know and/or have already seen in the premiere.

That might be a (depressing) topic for another column...but let's bring it back to the chess dog issue. Goodbye, Lara is basically an original anime. We know its source, but we have no way of knowing where the story will go. We must, therefore, follow it in episodic chunks, one week at a time. This creates room for discussion and speculation. And thus, a mode of anxious speculation emerges: will the show be gay or not in the long run?

I saw this reach a kind of fever pitch after last week's episode had this very romantically charged interaction between Mari and Lara, complete with an over-the-top cinematic gushing of emotions (and possibly other things).

Somehow it always comes back to Gundam. But yes, those are two recent and apt examples. Speaking for myself, my estimation of Witch from Mercury rose thanks to the canonical wifery at the end, while I believe GQuuuuuuX dropped a few balls by pulling its focus away from Machu and Nyaan after the first several episodes. Granted, they are both flawed series with other positive and negative points, but I cannot pretend my thirst for yuri was not a factor in my appraisals.

My familiarity with that thirst also prompted me to join in on some of the dog-posting last week, albeit in my usual insufferable tongue-in-cheek fashion.

And in all fairness, I think most people doing this bit are also doing so with their tongues in their cheeks. It's not all that serious, and I'm not calling anybody out specifically. But when there are a lot of people making the same joke about the same thing, there's a nugget of genuine concern at the center of it. And the concern, potentially, is whether Goodbye, Lara will be a lesser show should it not follow through on consummating Lara and Mari's relationship.

I also think that a preemptively defensive attitude in response to the possibility of queerbaiting causes some people to forget how subtext (and in some cases, just plain text) works. I won't recapitulate all my arguments from our column on Sound! Euphonium a while back, but focusing only on whether a work meets some nebulous criteria of "queer enough" tends to produce myopic readings, in my experience.

Regardless of its endgame, Goodbye, Lara already has notable lesbian subtext that's integrated into its narrative and characters. Whether or not it becomes explicitly romantic, Lara and Mari already share a mutual love that's paramount to the series' core theme.

Additionally, I'd assuage some fears with the reminder that Goodbye, Lara's director, Takushi Koide, was a vital creative voice on Revue Starlight and its sequel film. While none of those Stage Girls smooch each other onscreen, that doesn't stop Revue Starlight The Movie from being one of the most powerfully sapphic works of art committed to film. There is no heterosexual explanation for a single second of its runtime. Like, we're not talking about Disney here. Fool me once and all that. This is a production from a studio and director who possess yuri bona fides. They know what they're doing. If they are a dog, they have an Elo above 2300.

I have very normal feelings about Teppu, I assure you. And while I will defend the merits of subtext to my dying day, we also need explicitly queer narratives, characters, and moments. From this season, for example, I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day is textbook yuri. And apparently Draw This, Then Die! just joined the girl smooch club too.

Of course! Goodbye, Lara is, in many ways, the latest inheritor of Utena's legacy by way of Ikuhara's influence. And that applies not only to its sapphic qualities and fairy tale commentary, but also to its striking and drop-dead gorgeous compositions with a flair for the surreal. And I guess that's what I fear if people put all their cards into whether or not Lara kisses Mari in the end. Goodbye, Lara has a smorgasbord of strong qualities that deserve praise and analysis. It's my favorite show of the summer so far. I already cannot wait for next Sunday's episode.

That's my secret. I am always talking about lesbians. And in that spirit, and to be clear: I do very much want to see these two idiots grow old together. Trust the process. Trust the pedigree. Trust the dog. Or don't! I think Goodbye, Lara will be an anime to remember either way.