preliminary materials for the theory of an onee-san ~ 奥さまは魔法少女

“When the Young-Girl has exhausted all artifice, there is one final artifice left for her: the renunciation of artifice. But this last one really is the final one.”

“それが魔女っ娘ミラクるん♪”

What happens when you have everything you need? Well, of course, you require the expungement of excess energy. Death, destruction, shit, cum, and cute anime girls. Modern society (in the first world) more or less gives us all that is required for subsistence, until we are left with organizing the pieces privy to us. Capitalism brings us many fun toys to play with, and things need to move forward, to keep accelerating; that goes for our little hobbies as well. But even in pre-feudal societies (capitalism is just a vulgar mutation of feudalism), we have always needed a societal orgasm. A festival for the end, productive and anti-productive in a paradoxical sense.

As we speed ahead, this cosmic desire chases our shadows. Cars are an explicit example: the locomotive designers create new body styles according to the taste of their consumer base, engines are optimized and made increasingly fuel efficient, and of course the internal cabin is treated like a luxury resort, with fancy cupholders and LCD screens to distract us till we die, which is also the point. The libidinal economy cloaks the death drive, the vehicle for high speed must also condition its full throttle impact. This mess of desire and production color all facets of subjectivity to include progress and love. This is a process terrifying from the human perspective, it almost seems as if an alien parasite inseminates this vulgar positive feedback loop.

We speed on, love on, and crash. We can almost convince ourselves that the speed in which we gallop on is for the sake of prosperity, or whatever the tech bros consider a design flaw. The machine’s pressure gradient drives us until we meet the ends of our means, and the only possibility is a new model of extravagance. Which then leads to culture, as it is largely a reflection of the immediate world, even when they are not properly scrutinized or written on a blank sheet, it remains that we will come to see its effects as the future permits.

the dearest person i’ve ever met

Everlasting Particle CORE @ Harmony Art Gallery, Shanghai

Perhaps the most apt place to look would be within the flicker of the screen, in the two-folded blush of a cute anime girl. Anime, namely anime girls, are best understood as the falsified ideal born through the gaze, but there’s a sort of power implicit within such a fiction. Anime girls aren’t constrained by biology or even morality. They are something of a schizophrenic chimera, where one character doesn’t merely signify itself nor the franchise she resides in, but as a collection of micro-narratives or petit fetishes. The anime girl is an assembly of aggregate affective mutations which emerges from mankind’s relentless pursuit of excess in which Otaku unconsciously curate a database of moeficated traits, which are thereby engineered for maximum masturbatory efficiency. Kemonomimi, world-destroying goddesses, child prodigies, war-traumatized schoolgirls, and eldritch beings conform to the shape of a Young-Girl. That list grows endlessly, analyzing everything within the 387.44 miles of printed circuitry. The economy of schizophrenic fantasies is a runaway arms race of attraction, where the diminishing returns are no longer factored.

There is a form of inverted power within the sublimated ideal of the feminine body. With what that is produced by a capitalist society, following its lust for domination and the upholding of pre-modern mythologies, it is also particular in how new forms of agency can arrive within its cute doctrine. Alas, one must not forget the otaku’s dream[1] is one typically coinciding with the ideals of the standard sexual disposition: The DNA of the cat-girls and angels, of silver-haired exchange students and mecha-piloting war orphans, occurs from the cute little idée fixe that, what if—what if the girl in my formative years was, in fact, an alien princess from a far away galaxy? But why stop there? What if she were blind? Couldn’t walk? Had lost half of her brain functions? What if her skin bruised at the faintest touch, if she achieved her frailty through the oblique of bandage wraps?

To quote Karl Andersson’s troublesome qualitative essay, I am not alone — we are alone. [3]

The ontology of the feminine body is the site of our limit-explorations, the structure upon which we chart our patriarchal desires[2]. A double acting character, a mirror hall of method and madness. Carnal sweetness caramelized by every subject who has dared to wish upon a star. The moe point, that exquisite punctum of affect is the conjoining of the refusal to relinquish, to simply keep moving in search of a becoming of the perfect extreme, the whore, the mother, the daughter, the wife.[4] The fetishes become grotesquely refined, and you wouldn’t be alone in recognizing this as a site of male empowerment by cute suicide.

Anecdotally, it seems that we are simply speeding into a cute oblivion, maybe a sexy one too. I’ve written about this from the perspective of the otaku’s romance in the context of the one-shot romcom, but it remains that the past moe points are still functional, much like the neo-feudal society capitalist economies seem to reinstate. That original sin buffering each new seasonal waifu like DNA, proliferating into more and more consumer-first character traits. Even then, it seems that this acceleration is halted, or at least put into question when a contemporary visual novel keeps its osananajimi. Why choose the plain girl?

Saekano answered this long before it was asked. Tomoya, the main character of the series, brings together a collection of talented artists in the attempt to create his kamige. Through his self-involvement in moe environments, he accesses the affective database and is presented with the central node of quality: the heroine. A curious question should be raised, what is the perfect heroine of a story? One might point to characters with a traumatic past, invoking a pitiful adorability like the inverted appeal of the Evangelion characters. Or maybe it’s a gross mass of hundreds of traits, aiming to appeal to absolutely anything or anyone. Rather, his answer is closer to what I have expected: the unremarkable girl who becomes the locus of spectacle.

Megumi is normal and conversations with her unfold rationally; she doesn’t even like Tomoya’s at the start, as any sensible person would find him rude. She is neither too tall, nor too short. Her skin is smooth, but only to a reasonable degree. Her body conforms to expectation: curving where it should curve, flattening where it should flatten. Megumi is cute, and Megumi does not dream. 

Tomoya reveals that within the cast of archetypal heroines, the plain girl is the spectacle’s most potent form. She is special precisely in her capacity to change, to become, her potentiality operating at the zero degree. Even the normal is illustrious. The “plain girl” is the apex of contemporary anime femininity: the primal template, the ur-form from which all proliferations multiply. She is the infinite rationality of market logic sublimated into godhood, the highest articulation of commodity mysticism, the fairy-tale impossibility that femininity must forever uphold. The database of the young-girl, after all, is coded on iterability. What do you do with the plain girl? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy.

Any of the impossibly-kawaii girls, no matter how grandiose their spectacle, are structured by this same mechanism. They exist in a degree of rotation, pivot points in the machinery of mass desire, the [bombshells] and [girlbosses], [girlfailures] and [girlanythings]. The structure refuses a singular characteristic that gives way to subjectivity. Their capacity to be molded into the object of eros and consumption is because they must be attainable, imminent or not. Either way, the girls will be waiting warmly.

Sometimes, days like this happen, right?

To continue traversing the landscape of the media apparatus, watch with patient indifference as the speed rail carves through nations with a simple logic of pure speed.

Consider the careerist environment, the vast terrain in which one can either starve to death amidst rising prices of food and a shitty job, or live lavishly and rip apart the crystaline gleam encasing a Touhou Project stuffed doll. Even survival isn't enough, and we know this well. What remains in the subjective life cannot return to some pre-capitalist form, but instead it is sublimated into productivity. The Sisyphean condition is unchanged, that boulder still needs pushing, but we have plenty of distractions on the way. That path is laced with abscesses of anti-wrinkling agents and increasingly obscure fragrances. You may do as your like, the system has already made that choice, the ticket prize is just a call away, a shimmering exchange as the rock toils afar.

A specter looms over the world, the specter of capitalism. It reaches beyond the material, into the subliminal, the symbolic, the unconscious, and consumes it all like a ravenous beast. Each impulse, each stray desire is extracted into value form. It metabolizes the absurd and the mundane alike, from the most grotesque vanities to simplest of quotidian gestures. I argue for it's ambivalence, but the images remain stark reminders of this omnipresent, absolute system of control that pervades us and tinges all forms of governance and education, structuring our reality while insisting on its invisibility.

The final magic trick (yes, the final one) is transmutation of the commodity into another—something else, something so utterly worthless that even the highest promoters of fashion would hesitate before consenting—product. Trinkets, make-up, expensive dinners, are all wrapped in the same aesthetic of packaging. This includes you, if that needed to be clear. The Young-Boy, (surely, an ungendered concept[5]) eyes stargazed by the CGI spectacle, recognizes that the body itself is a site of dominance and accumulation. He strives to become the figure of libidinal excess, imaginary phallus as real, The Man Who Has Everything, now unshackled from the embarrassing act of being broke with a small dick.

The Young-Girl, in contrast, will aspire toward the Bombshell, the empowered entrepreneur of her own desirability, one hand in the economy, the other gripping the keys to sex, sovereignty, and mass desire itself, until her surplus value is abstracted and her use as a body-battery has depleted, insisting that the cycle continues, insisting that her potential is to be submissive, a sadomasochistic relationship where even the role of being dominated has an impossible exchange between the S&M. Because you don’t want what you want, you want what I want you to want. The Young-Girl desires the Young-Girl. The Young-Girl is the Young-Girl’s ideal.

i love the cyberworld

Kanome Reina never gives herself; she only gives what she has, which is to say the array of qualities that THEY loan her. This is also why it is not possible to love Kanome Reina, but only to consume her. [6]

Home & Away in capitalist society, autoconsumers are born as perfect escalating models of production and citizenship. The reason for, and the way hyperreal fixations on acontextual moe points come into being. This is a love like no other. You existed for this love, and this love is autism for two.

Personal subjectivities, sullied by the nature of our current age are, in of themselves, their own marketing strategies. A place where even active rebellion is absolutely adorable. All that is cool melts into something unserious. The question of lack, of desire, of want and absence is erased entirely when subjectivity is flattened, folded, and made to fit in the glovebox of a drop-top car.

The way we engage with the franchised fictional world mirrors how we, as consumers, are understood. Take, for instance, the curation of profiles in online spaces. You kneel before this invisible other, crafting something that represents the “true” expression of your ideals, your desires, your needs. But in the end, the space you carve out for yourself is nothing more than a string of text, better suited for the purchasing of a horse, somehow more entwined with corporate bureaucracy than anything a LinkedIn web developer could concoct.

And before you realize it, you begin to curate your beginnings with metadata and your ends with copyright. The anime girl profile picture is more real than any IRL identity you hold to yourself.

The protocols in excess’ festivities aim for the jugular. Glistening with the plastic of artificiality, a process both euphoric and self-nullifying. (because how else would it work?)

You're in pink, and I'm in blue.

CRYSTAL CLEAR Anmi

Now, let's cut bullshit. This text you see here is a strange hodgepodge of Tiqqun, some Azuma, a sprinkle of Bataille, and maybe a bit of that Freudomarxism that was popular in France. Well, I suppose it isn't that strange in a general sense, but this essay is inspired by a brilliantly superior writer (who I look up to immensely in almost every regard) But I think that before I return to theatrics, it's worth going over the polemic nature of the text this is roughly larking off of.

Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl renders visible an invisible war. One hopelessly obsessed with the kinds of things your next door neighbor might find tantalizing. The Young-Girl is a critique, albeit one that reads like if the Frankfurt school absolutely hated women and found no power in anything but a rejection of the spectacle. It is more or less about how closely the work of consumer products have shaped subjectivity, up until the protocols that gave rise to these festivities are self-regulated.

The application of this text is useful here because of the sort of self-consuming nature of the otaku, as well as the framework of how these cute characters proliferate and what that might entail/reveal within the system that allows these art forms to persist. The issue with the text is of it's polemic tone, it reads like an evil autopsy that almost revels in the ability of cultural systems to homogenize and entirely rid the possibility of agency away from it's subjects. What can happen from this register of philosophy (or if that word is too icky, theory) is a perverse love for this genre of destruction and oppression. I personally tarry with this destructive inclination myself. The rest of my commentary will be footnoted, carry on.

“That’s a scary idea. I think I get it.”
—A woman in the middle of purchasing new Jordans for her infant child. (2025)

The New Flesh is soft, pink, and delicate. You don’t even need to think about it, she’s already thought about it for you. The Young-Girl isn’t some abstract idea you can point at like a clinical diagnosis of an affliction you couldn’t possibly have. No, don't be silly, she’s a mask you can't take off.

There was only ever one possible answer, it’s always been the easiest choice. Unfurrow your brow now, dear friend.

Agnes Bell.
The eternal maiden.
The Young-Girl, all grown up now.

I know that we were made to break.
So what? I don't mind.

y43xs @ Twitter

Perched on a grassy hill, we overlooked the fields, the trees, rolling farmland and the town caught in the amber light of a setting sun. It's glow melted the ice that had settled deep within its streets. I thought this place was rather gauche, reminiscent of a time I thought I’d moved away from, something I assumed you would have moved on from years ago. This town never changed, it didn’t move. It only converted children into adults and adults into older adults.

You… they, we—we have all indulged in this unchanging dream for long enough. And yet, despite it all, I suppose I’m still on your side.

“I love this town. I hope you will like it too. Actually, I’m sure you will.”

You said it with such certainty. I shouldn’t have expected otherwise. You made a promise, didn’t you? To be the guardian of this land, Agnes Bell.

But things won’t always stay the same, things have to change. The roles you play — the Wife, the Housekeeper, the Magical Girl — are not static identities. Cute people (such as yourself) will always keep becoming because nobody remains who they think they were. No amount of control and power can withstand the tingling sensation under your skin, the potential you hold. Especially because—

Ureshiko Asaba, you are a fictional character who stars in a J.C. Staff production from Jul 4, 2005 to Sep 26, 2005, directed and created by Hiroshi Nishikiori often attributed to Azumanga Daioh and the anime adaptation of the index novels. You are an assemblage of adorable signs, a compilation of affective symbols engineered to produce moe, the star in a scripted event made to be consumed. Your problems, as real as they are, are not a simple occurrence of fact, but crafted intentionally to subvert the viewers in what a Mahou Shoujo series can narrate.

Agnes Bell and Ureshiko Asaba are not separate people. They are two frames of the same body, each trapped in their own cyclical dilemmas, each bound to a role within the spectacle.

As Agnes Bell, the Last Maiden, you are the sovereign of a pocket world, a single dimension, a world where magical power is absolute. The ruler dictates what the land may be the next iteration. It is a metaphor for governance, parenthood, and hegemony. Your duty is to uphold, to preserve, to keep the dream intact. A role that mirrors parenthood, shaping without force or cruelty, to not let bad habits to take root. Yet even as you preserve the dream, you are denied even your physiological needs. A touch. Because your role as the Magical Girl demands chastity. Your iterability is based on the exchange rate of your innocence. No Kiss.

As Ureshiko Asaba, the Plain Girl, you continue to produce labor for the Innhouse alongside your grandmother. You clean, you cook, you maintain the order within the house. You spend your time with your close friends, sometimes bickering over the eventual collapse of your own system, the conversations tinged with melancholy, an awareness that even now, as the normal woman, you are bound to your role within the spectacle. Your relationships are strained. You listlessly dream into the void, trying to retain what was left, retaining the formats that defined you.

What is there to do when your entire existence is grounded in artifice?
Even every crisis is preordained, when your anxiety is scripted, when all despair is manufactured only to be resolved within the same conditions that necessitated it? When there is nothing left to you but the “mundane life continues, and everyone is happy” mantra, that narrative prosthetic designed to weave the raw nerves of the culture industry into your very own nervous system?

I suppose one answer would be the one already chosen by you, Miss.

Your successor, or rather, the creeping of new technologies is rendered passive to the land. By your design, of course.[7] Sayaka-chan is defanged, her want for rupture and equinox transmuted into a mandate for stability. A world of different magical aesthetics, the Plain Girl to The Magical Girl Who Became Plain, reduced to the most fundamental directive, to keep this world the same.

The truth is, there isn’t a clean break from the system.
And really, why should there be?
The choice you made is the same one chosen by every other Onee-san enshrined in television memory.[8]
Crushed by the role, saved by the very same.
The promise of happiness is right there, and you’ve earned it.

Instead of expending energy disquieted by nuclear values, I should congratulate you.

Anything less than following the script would be suicide, your character arc would be axed. There wouldn't be a place for you in the first place. This isn’t the time for questioning, not the time to attempt crafting something beyond the faith carved into your body, this is the time to commit to yourself knowingly. To understand why things are the way they are and to submit in spite. Because there's far more power in being a magical girl, isn't there? But there's also much to be found in the one who had already thoroughly mingled with the system. There is agency in surrender, breakthroughs must occur from within the channels prescribed.

A whisper of love tinges the ears still listening. The Last Maiden bows for the audience before walking off stage, leaving room for the next actress to make her entrance; and their dreams their dreams.

BGM: DENONBU – Ultrarhythm

Footnotes:

[1]: To reiterate, an otaku in much of the writing on this website isn't as much as a demographic of consumers. This text reads out like a universal claim about the (likely male) desires that give shape to the collective management of kawaii aesthetics. Of course, the otaku has a plethora of queer theory about some of their less socially apt traits (along with, things like Babiniku), but I think we must also recognize the side of anime we don't really want to bring up. That is, the speeding of fetishes, even if innocent by consumer or producer, aren't exactly on the side of progress.

[2]: These are constructed necessarily by chance by a vast array of cultural rituals. None of it is natural, and are subject to change.

[3]: This is a reference to Karl Andersson's strange paper. More about it here, but it's worth recognizing it as in part serious academic work, as well as in part strange sexual gratification.

[4]: If I may explain: the term “DaughterMommyWife” is used to describe characters that embody the synthesis mentioned earlier. It is most commonly observed within imageboard culture and Lolicon scenes online. For example, characters such as Momoka Sakurai, Kokkoro, and other youthful figures with caregiver-like qualities serve as representative examples.

[5]: Tiqqun’s work often veers into a visibly reductive depiction of femininity. Ironically, they describe it as something ungendered when in reality much of the text is “ungendered” in so far that certain ruminations can be applied to anyone other than the Young-Girl.

[6]: Kanome Reina is… pretty. Kind of sexy, even. This happens for two reasons. Reina is a character within a galge where she is meant to be an affectionate and adorable girl you’d want to spend time with. She's a perfected algorithm of desire. Second, Reina is a model. A high schooler, childish and sweet, embodying the ideal citizen in a world where the only values are delight and compliance.

[7]: It’s not her choice to make, ultimately.

[8]: Understanding the animated character of the Onee-san plays on femininity in so far that it acknowledges the roles in which a woman of presumptive power must play.

Database:

Bataille, Georges, and Robert Hurley. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Zone Books, 1991.
Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
TIQQUN. Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by MIT Press, 2012.
Leftwich, Patrick. “Knightess of Faith to Inhuman Love.” ŠUM, www.sum.si/journal-articles/knightess-of-faith-to-inhuman-love-a-symposium-of-magical-girls. Accessed 13 Mar. 2025.
Kraus, Chris. I Love Dick. Semiotext(e), 2006.
Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo. Directed by Hiroshi Nishikiori, J.C.Staff, 2005.
Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend. Directed by Kanta Kamei, A-1 Pictures, 2015.