Let’s start by getting one thing straight, Kill La Kill is a great anime, maybe even one of the best. It has a fantastic style, incredible animation, a bonkers plot, and a sense of humor that can knock even the most stone faced sad-sack into fits of hysterics. So know that this criticism comes not as a teardown or smug posturing, but from a sincere place of affection for a medium and show held in high regard: Kill La Kill is a very hypocritical show.
A brief primer for those who haven’t seen it: Kill La Kill is an anime about a teenaged girl named Ryuko Matoi. She attends an academy school run by the iron fist of Satsuki Kiryuin who may be behind the death of Ryuko’s father. In this world however, there are special clothes woven from “life fibers” that grant the wearer incredible abilities, and Kiryuin has a monopoly on them. Ryuoko is given an outfit by her father called a Kamui that is both sentient, and woven entirely from these life fibers. When she syncs up with it, she transforms Sailor Moon style into a much more powerful (and skimpier) version of the outfit, and must learn to master her new abilities in order to uncover the truth.
Readers may want to refrain from googling any of this at work, by the way, and that’s kind of the first major problem. The show is ridiculously sexualized. Ryuoko’s combat outfit is absolutely absurd, as is Kiryuin’s when she finally busts it out. At first, it seems as if the show plans to address this: Ryuko is visibly uncomfortable with how skimpy the design is, multiple characters make fun of her as an “exhibitionist,” which she vehemently denies, and early on a theme is established of not being ashamed of your body. Everything is in place for a the show to take this in an interesting direction, exploring the line between objectification and empowerment.
But then everything goes wrong. Despite the show’s constant lip service to ignoring the opinions of others and being comfortable in your skin, it consistently goes out of it’s way to put it’s main characters in explicitly objectified scenarios and remove their agency. Within the very first episodes Ryuko is sexually harassed multiple times, the camera explicitly focuses on her chest and underwear in fight scenes, and it is implied on multiple occasions that she is about to be sexually assaulted by characters we are then supposed to root for.
This is one of the more bizarre ways in which the show shoots itself in the foot. The very first time we meet the Mankanshoku family, who basically adopt Ryuko, it is when the patriarch of the house is caught leering over Ryuko while she is unconscious. Later three family members, one of which is a dog, spy on her in the shower, which becomes a recurring gag within the show. Not only are these scenes somewhat gross and unnecessary, they are completely out of character with how the family is portrayed throughout the rest of the show as caring for Ryuko as if she were their own daughter. In these moments they are not acting as their own characters with distinct motivations and personalities; they are acting explicitly against their own characterization in order to objectify Ryuko for the sake of the audience.
This isn’t to say humor based in sexualization can’t be funny. Satsuki Kiryuin is a great example. In a later episode, Satsuki, who often makes long, incredibly over the top speeches, goes on an long dramatic rant about how she will “bare her breasts for all the world to see” if it means it will make her more powerful. Moments like these are both hilarious and completely in-character, making them much more amusing than the peeping-Tom scenes with Ryuko.
Unfortunately not even Satsuki escapes the Catch-22. One of the worst moments in the show is an incestual bathing scene in which her mother “restores her energies” after a difficult fight in a way that strongly mimics giving her own daughter an orgasm. While Satsuki’s mother is admittedly a villain who leans into predatory behavior as part of her control over Satsuki, the scene is extremely gratuitous, provides no new information about their relationship, and is never remarked on again by any character. It serves no purpose other than sexualization, and is easily the nadir of the entire show.
The bottom line is this: objectification and empowerment are two different things, and you can’t get away with the former just because you paid lip service to the latter. Panty shots are not feminist, no matter how much the character says it doesn’t bother them. When a story removes agency from a character for the sake of “fan service,” it can no longer credibly argue a theme of sexual liberation.
Kill La Kill sits in the uncomfortable territory of being a show that I love, but cannot openly recommend without heavy caveats. Many people will not be able to get past the ways in which sexual assault and harassment are played for laughs, and who can blame them? It’s gross, unnecessary, and ultimately it undercuts so much of the fantastic work and writing that the series has to be proud of. For those who can stomach its worst moments, there’s an absolute gem waiting beneath the surface, and for those who can’t, I don’t blame you. All I can say is that I hope my next favorite anime comes with fewer caveats, and walks the line between agency and objectification a little more carefully.
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