X

Why is it that so many years later this movie still bugs me?

"X" is a long-running manga series that was adapted into an absolutely terrible movie back all the way in 1996.  However since back in 1996 nobody on my continent cared about anime except for three dudes on the Internet, it took four years before the movie made it to America.  And it even got a limited release in the US back in 2000.  It wasn't until... 2005, I thiink, that I ever actually caught this movie on Starz.  Anyway, "X" is a massively complex story with around six hundred million named important characters all fighting an epic battle of Good vs. Evil that will decide the fate of the universe.  Being huge and complex, adaptating this story into a ninety-seven film is quite frankly impossible.  So as you'd expect, the movie is really confusing if you watch it knowing nothing about the "X" saga (which I didn't and still largely don't) because there are tons of named characters and a lot of really complicated rules you have to learn while trying to meet and care about characters.  Actually the movie is a mess, and the English dub doesn't make anything better - its the second worst dub I've ever heard in my life*.  I wouldn't recommend it on any level.

So that's exactly the thing that lead me to write this post.  I've seen dozens of shitty anime movies.  As matter of fact, I have plenty of fingers to list all the good anime films I've seen - all but two of them were made by Miyazakis.  But while I've complete forgotten mindless crap like "Eureka 7: The Movie", for some reason "X" is the movie that keeps me up at night.  There are even really good movie that I saw in 2005 that I've forgotten largely, like "Good Night and Good Luck".  What is with this stupid little movie?

(Note the following summary was only put together after honestly extensive research on this subject, and with a second viewing of the movie.  It wasn't any more enjoyable to watch, but it did kinda make more sense, maybe.)  On the surface at least "X" has all the ingredients of a classical Greek tragedy.  In modern day Tokyo - or at least what was modern-day Tokyo when this series began back in the early 90s - a war is raging for the fate of the universe.  One side fights for the Earth, the other fights for the humans in what is an overly literal metaphor for environmental issues.  The hero, Kamui, is the chosen one, and whichever side he fights for will be sure to win (I think).  He doesn't really care about the war, all he wants to do is protect is love interest, Kotari, and his best friend, Fuma.  Fuma and Kotari also happen to be siblings.  However, Kamui's position is an impossible one:  no matter which side he picks, Fuma is fated to stand against him on the other side and Kotori is straight-up doomed.

This would all be well and good and tragic, but the way the series deals with fate is downright bizarre.  In the movie, Kamui goes with the humans thinking that Kotori and Fuma are human, so he should protect them.  Then, for no reason that is ever adaquately explained, Fuma flips his fucking shit.  He goes completely insane, out of nowhere.  Yeah, the movie is pretty rushed, so you don't get to know any of these characters, but in no way is Fuma ever shown to have much of a violent or even an angry side.  One scene he's an innocent bystander in the war, next moment he's decided that he's Kamui too(?) and is out to murder Kotori... which he does.  At no point do Fuma and Kotori even have a sibling argument.  She has a sword in her womb (there's a lot of weird stuff here like that) and Fuma wants the sword, so he kills her.  All of a sudden this guy, who was portrayed more or less as completely normal, is out to murder his sister, kill his best freind, and destroy the world.  Does this guy have a "Good/Evil" switch on his back?  Then for the rest of the movie Fuma is just wrecking every single person he sees.  In the last act, he gets tired of the other villains and murders the rest of them for no reason at all.

I mean, at no point do you really get to meet the guy, he has only about two scenes before he inexplicably turns evil, but it is massively sudden.  Its like there was a character named Fuma, and then next scene there's a new character named Fuma who has been transported from a parallel universe or something.  This is this movie's biggest failure.  Forgot the bad voice acting or the numerous extra plotlines that go nowhere or even the cast members who are introduced just to die, this right here is why "X" fails as a story.

Let me explain.  Tragedy is nothing new to literature, it goes all the way back to the Greeks at least and almost certainly further back than that.  Characters have started out good, and in attempting to save their loved ones or their nation or something precious to them, have turned evil, this isn't new.  This is one of those classic stories that people can hear a million times in a million different forms and still enjoy.  But the main difference here in "X" is that the character of Fuma isn't developing in any way, he's being replaced.  Fuma 1, for all intents and purposes is dead, Fuma 2 is some psychopath** who takes his place.

Imagine if in the story of Oedipus, that instead of Oedipus being caught by an incredible string of tragic ironies that inadvertently force him to marry his mother and murder his father, that the original guy simply disappeared.  There was a character named Oedipus who didn't want to commit incest and patricide, but he goes away half-way through the story in order for Fate to complete its sick design.  So instead of a Oedipus who doesn't want to murder his marry his mother, we have a lunatic who jumps right at the opportunity to murder his father and then steal his father's wife.  Does that story even begin to make any sense?  I know this is the Internet and all, so all things are go, but can you honestly say you at all sympathize with a character who for no reason in particular wants Daddy dead so he can sleep with Mommy?  (For the purposes of both the ancient Greek Tragedy and this hypothetical story, we have to assume that Oedipus grew up in a relatively normal household and would find these ideas reprehensible.)  If Sophocles had written the latter story, I don't think we'd be reading it in High School English class, would we?

This is all being written from the perspective of a person who absolutely hates mind control plotlines as well.  The general trope is "good person turns evil thanks to the magic of the big bad, so the good person is entirely blameless for their actions".  I find this to just be lazy characterization.  In the real world people do all kinds of awful things for all kinds of reasons, the writer can't find one of those things to use?  Instead we have a literal Wizard Doing It?  Come on!  When you write a character, they can be good, bad, or a mixture of the two, but you can't have a character being good while performing evil acts without a proper explanation.  Fuma's sudden shift to mass-murder is not explained in any way, not even mind control.  He's just evil now - accept it like that.

So this is where I was with this story, and I didn't quite like it.  My next step was to research it the best I could.  Well, I did discover something of an explanation behind Fuma's bizarre and ridiculous actions, and it doesn't really make me any happier.  The creators of this manga are a bunch of women who call themselves CLAMP.  Being Jaapanese females, they love watching homosexuals together, especially if those homosexuals are extremely pretty.  For those who ponder why women would like watching two men together, let me refer to the classic formula:  1+1=2.  Anyway, in this subgenre known as "yaoi", for whatever reason there's a recurring trope of one guy raping the other, I'm not exactly qualified to explain that one, nor do I want to investigate that issue at all.  So anyway, since these women love having a "dangerous molesting semi-evil molesting guy" going with a "resisting guy who will eventually submit out of love" they made Fuma into a serial killer who can spend the entire manga attacking Kamui and fondling his privates.  How nice.  And the more dangerous and crazy, the sexier this dynamic is, I guess.

Unfortuantly that still doesn't explain anything.  Nothing I've read ever even attempts to give any explanation to why Fuma goes Horror Movie Slasher on us, its almost as if the writers of these summaries haven't given the issue any thought or just don't care.  If anybody reading this can give me any kind of satisfaction on this issue, feel free.  I simply want to know why.  Since I live in the real world, I actually have a sister, and I don't think that even if my best friend is actually the Chosen One, I'll suddenly murder her for no reason.  That's what makes this story so disturbing to me:  this implication that if Fate or the Contrivances of the Plot demand, you can become a completely different person and murder your loved ones without a care in the world.

"X" isn't just a bad story, its a horrible story.  And I'll stick with this interpretation until somebody can show me why any of this makes any sense.

I hope that a future manga named "Y" can be better.

ツ

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* The worst dub I ever heard in my life was for "Shadow Skill".  That anime had voice actors so incredibly bad that I am quite certain that the actor for the main character couldn't even speak English fluently.  Later when I spotted the show again I checked it out again and found that the entire voice cast had been canned, rightfully so.  "Shadow Skill" sucked either way, however, don't waste your time with it.  "X"'s voice acting is really bad, and recorded horribly.  I think the recording might have been done in a New York subway station at rush hour.  Even if you can make-out what the characters are saying, good luck making sense of any of it.  And yes, the acting is so wooden you could build a log cabin out of it.

** I think the original comics attempted to show Fuma as being a bit more than a wandering ax murderer, but the movie never attempts to show him as anything more complicated than just that.  You could give this guy a Hockey Mask and a machete and call him "the Jason Voorhees who talks".  I have let to find much evidence that Fuma is really motivated by anything at all really, which is another reason why this story is so terrible.