Tv review: Inside Mari

[haitangkitty]

I watched Inside Mari the tv adaptation because it has the Chaser Game W actress Yurika Nakamura . I've read the manga few years ago and really liked it. The tv adaptation didn't quite capture the weirdness and angst that is in Shuzo Oshimi's manga but I still liked the series.

It's a psychological work with supernatural and lgbt themes - but in a subtle and complex way.

It mainly deals with identity. Two people - a popular high school girl and a NEET man get their identities tangled up. But it's not a typical bodyswapping story. The high school girl - Mari also has an outsider best friend who is important in the story. These three people connect with each other in the story in an interesting way. It deals with how to live one's life and become yourself, how to find connection with others and yourself. What is real identity - who are you - is the main question. The protagonist(s) find themselves in a situations where everything is foreign in their lives and they don't recognize themselves. The body-soul connection is broken.

Other theme that many have analyzed is gender. Many people (online) view this story as a trans allegory. Since the girl gets the soul of the man but the man doesn't, it has been analyzed as a story about trans womanhood. What I also considered as a perspective is a Jungian analysis with feminine and masculine parts of each of us - anima and animus.

I watched this youtube analysis called The Incel to Trans Pipeline and Inside Mari, which talks about the work from the perspective of this online phenomenon called "transmaxxing". It's an incel phenomenon and I was first hesitant to approach this work I liked from this perspective but then again I'm interested in other people's interpretations. The video analysis is actually not so much an intepretation but more so uses the work as a example for the video essayist own reflection of her trans identity.

The video essay made me also consider what I personally related to in this work in context of my queer identity. I've also have struggled with my gender and sexual attraction but then came to realize it wasn't a trans experience but an experience of being trapped in society's role as a woman. I feel like Inside Mari can capture the horrors of gender that are relatable to both cis and trans people. Mari represents the perfect idea of girlhood but it's not something that is an essential experience for all women - even Mari isn't what people think she is and she is trapped inside her identity as well.

Lately I've been getting into jpop and specifically AKB48 and it has been a very comforting world for me. It's this idealized version of girlhood  that is both a performance but also a real experience is also very much at the heart of the idol industry. Most of the fans are men which I struggled with because lot of them sexualize their oshis and they used to make bikini mv's and photshoots (even of the underage members) and that's an issue i've had with it but luckily it isn't really part of AKB48 anymore. It's what Inside Mari also touches upon: sexual shame and being a woman but looking at yourself from the lense of a man. Our desires and experiences are not like in a fantasy but it's comforting to be in the "pure" girlhood fantasy world. In real life teenage years at least for me were really chaotic, sexually confusing, and full of self-hatred - which is also what Inside Mari touches upon - the ideal girlhood does not exist except in the eyes of the alienated man who finds comfort in it. But it is a comforting fantasy - beauty, friendship, freedom, joy, and fun.