I sort of dispute SDS’s claim that this anime is unique. I think the undercurrent that Jintai rides on is no rarer than the sort of jokes you find in Kometa’s manga adaptations or even in Welcome to the NHK. To wit, after 3 seasons of SZS and now with Joshiraku running along, Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita is not some sore thumb standing out in a sea of not-satires. One of my favorite anime adaptation of satire comes alive in season 2 of Seitokai no Ichizon, so this is not something that I would call a rare occurance, at any rate.

What makes Jintai unique, I think, has more to do with the straightforward western style of satire that you find in contemporary British literature. Dry wit, satire as fine as piano wires that cut just as deep; or something resembling the opposite spectrum, like a large aquatic animal. Or bread, in this case. But this made-in-Japan slash, I think, cuts so finely that so many probably don’t quite realize that they’ve been made fun of in the very show they enjoy to watch. To me, it’s very fun because the show portraits exactly what I am thinking of, which is a great testament of the way the story is adopted and written. I mean, it’s less ham-handed than me saying “hey guys, great minds think alike.”

But also along this line of thought, this is why I think there are people who watch Jintai for the fairies, just like there are people who watch Joshiraku for the cute girls. It captures well that spirit of decontexualized otaku thing that, indeed, leads to our decline. It is no surprise that bullying and how the protagonist and her cohort retreat to their own little project in which makes up a relatively mainstream response to the cruelty of human societies and ills that has plagued us since time immortal, even if it means resorting to becoming the queen of fairies.

Lastly, we do have to look at ourselves. Just how meta is it to enjoy escapism via media that is about escapism through critiques of escapist media using media? Can I say I enjoyed Jintai for Mai Nakahara’s resurgence? At first I thought the role was relatively straightforward and narrator-like. I did not expect the role of the protagonist to show enough of a range, from earnest deadpan, slightly vulnerable, to coyly manipulating and mildly annoyed. It’s safe to say this model seiyuu elevator school graduate passed with flying colors.

I looked around at the various reads on Jintai 3 [is animenano even picking up most of the blog posts with that tag?] a little and I think we can go the extra mile, do you agree? For starters, I’m going to take this as a proper satire. Furthermore I’m going to assume certain norms as the de-facto positive assumed by Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, or Humanity Has Declined.

For example, the ability to occasionally have meat to eat is generally a well-considered thing. It is in this context in which we consider the livelihood and living standards of our lovely UN mediator, the Main Character (MC). I guess here’s the third thing–I’m going to take the episodes not in an individually-wrapped vacuum, but all together. The fairies and their factory, their sentient chickens and mysterious industrial products, the village girls’ inability to slaughter these things.

Actually, it appears that while the country life MC lives in looks more like life in the 19th or early 20th century, the prevalence of electricity and other amenities such as books and steam automotive suggests not so much a perceived “tech level” but a thematic setting. Perhaps European-inspired? I can’t say too much, because it seems prudent to assume a certain level of malleability in the way Jintai includes popular cultural references using the setting. For example, I’m not sure how to explain that the livelihood of MC and her friends are under the charge of some regulatory agency (such as, no eating of mysterious canned goods), which is an artifact of the late 20th/early 21st century living for the most part. Or that there’s electricity available in the home.

Anyway. There is ultimately a pervasive feeling that I had about episode 3 that reminded me of the settings of fabulous British literary luminaries such as Bronte or Austen, the same stories in which made them a require read in American mandatory education. Naturally so, those influences continue their pull from beyond the respective authors’ graves, even in Japanese culture so many years later. Even in the development of the subculture of BL. I suppose even moe culture today can be traced to 19th century German lit? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Can we say the same about the smooth yet cunning satire in Jintai? That I think is up for debate. My personal opinion is that ultimately the subject matters in the first three episodes are not really painted in a positive manner. At all. I think it is fair to say there are some issues, and these issues can be multifaceted. Some of the different sides of the issues being explored by Jintai have been picked and absorbed in its probably-post-apocalyptic setting as a show of farce. Others are just made fun of. Some are once-overed as food for thought. Indeed, we cannot fly.

I think it is fair to extrapolate episode 3’s subject matter of BL and fujoshi mockery to include popular entertainment and fan-driven culture in general. I believe this is ultimately supported by Y’s primary mission, as I previously mentioned, that to archive the human history, technological advances and culture, is a job nobody really cares too much about in the end. That is the key concept in episode 3 which gets repeatedly reinforced by the little plot things. Such as how the UN doesn’t really care about what Y is doing; society doesn’t really care about Y’s comiket-reference; and Y doesn’t really care about Y’s assignment.

I think it’s fair to conclude, furthermore, that this attitude in which allows Y to do whatever she wanted, using technology and resources that might be better served in other efforts, is actually the key attitude being mocked by episode 3. It might be okay, at least based on one read, to have the girls all over the country to carry on in their own merry ways, turning and tossing in their sleepless nights, wondering about the plot of some romantic escapade in a yet-to-released volume of some manga. It might be okay for otaku culture to continue to exist. Episode 3 explicitly validates its cultural value and the mechanism cultural values propagate, after all. But how can anyone look at what Y was doing and think it is a good thing, without basically ignoring the entire setting to the show? Perhaps it is permissible, but is it beneficial?

In fact, I think this is one of the universally-taught, quality trait to satire. It again reminds me of Austen and her ilk. Perhaps Jintai is more like Swift? I guess it behooves me to stop here, lest I want to talk myself into a particular circle of hell reserved for that kind of people.

I have read more than one person’s reaction to Jintai 3 and complained about the lack of fairies. I think that’s pretty obvious why they’re not present–so far in 2 episodes, the fairies represents the institution in which our organizational/technological complex has become sufficiently…complicated to be understood by the public. The phenomenon of doujinshi publishing, however, is something easy to understand. If there had to be some fairies, it would be to explain to us how we got paper and electricity to furnish Y’s publishing operations in the first place. I don’t think we need any fairies to demonstrate the irony of Y’s actions, or to make a solid critique.

I thought episode 2 was tops in terms of actual humor, but episode 3 struck me as the one that is actually most interesting so far. The story begins with Y visiting our Main Character, explaining her assignment to create or continue to construct some kind of monument to bank the collective creation of human race in terms of history, culture and technology. The discussion quickly went to the direction of medium of storage, interesting enough. Why medium of storage? I don’t know, but if I were to guess it is to both lay the groundwork for what comes next, but also it is a very otaku-sai kind of thing to talk about.

The more important takeaway in that segment was how collectively it is de-prioritized over actually useful things and only idle workers (eg., Y) is sent to work on this project. In other words, it’s not something viewed as critical or important. To me that is already kind of ironic, if we were to assume fairies are sort of like symbolic human beings.

Y’s entire doujinshi movement thing is pretty cool in the sense that Main Character explained it to us as to how it is a way culture is created and propagated. There’s an angle you could take in there, in that scene; we can amuse ourselves in light of the nature of control and commercialism in popular media, and the real interests behind them, in parallel with what Y is going through. But that aside, we see the horde of rich girls that visits the village for their version of the Comic Market; the adults looked on with largely apathy, in which reflects society’s attitude to the same–as long as they don’t cause a problem and can sustain themselves. It’s just not really all that important. It’s is kind of amusing in that it is similarly making the same statement about the effort of collecting and archiving mankind’s cultural information. In other words, the job Y was assigned in the first place was equal or less important than her little sideshow. And nobody cares about either.

The thing that got me laughing was when the thicker, more comprehensive and competitive BL crap that gets published eventually caused a problem to the distribution network, and the couriers stopped distributing them as shipping these books were negatively impacting their ability to ship goods of greater importance such as food and basic supplies. Let’s put aside the innate joke about muscular men shipping BL anthologies for a second, and realize what it is actually saying. Given this was the only point of contention between “the real world” and the nonsense Y was doing, I thought it was worth a second of thought.

I’m just as weary of these otaku in-joke sort of thing as anyone else; for sure I consume as much as anyone else. Jintai’s treatment, though, does not beat around the bush in my opinion, and it hits the spot. I’m not sure if people sincerely enjoy waiting in line for 12 hours just to buy cartoon porn, or are they just people who’s never really been. I mean, I’ve never been and I don’t believe for a second Comiket does not have these fundamental problems that any organization and gathering of its kind would likely have at some point. In light of the troubles we encountered in the first two episodes, the fact that it’s making a joke about doujinshi is already kind of a question mark. The least it could do is to be honest about it.

Times like this I think about the funny media stories on big release dates about hit on productivity in the work force as people jet out of school and work to catch a blockbuster film or something. I guess that is just another way how humanity has declined.