The Subtle Villainy of Takeo Kumagami

Episode 26, I’m Takeo Kumagami, of Patlabor is by far my favorite episode so far, trumping even episode 19, Shadow in the Geo-Front.  While episode 26 is definitely lacking visually in the first half, with rather shaky lines and frequently off-model and inconsistent characters, this episode and the one prior brings so much to our attention.  The character growth and progression of everyone that would easily go unnoticed thanks to the extremely small increments they occur in being an example.  K-ON progresses and develops the characters in a similar way, very slow, small and naturally to the point that it’s nearly unnoticeable until it’s pointed out.  This is something I would love to talk about, however, this time I’m going to examine another part of the episode that perfectly illustrates how to write a great villain and make us hate him/her with only the most subtle and non-extreme ways imaginable.  Takeo Kumagami is by no means an evil character, but she is the target of our ire for majority of the episode by doing what amounts to little more than scolding a puppy.  To understand how excellently executed this is, we need to first understand the circumstances of her arrival and the relationship of whom she’s replacing with Noa Izumi.

Kanuka Clancy is a brilliant character who acts as the antithesis to the only other woman in Division 2, Noa Izumi.  Where Kanuka is cold, calculated and efficient, Noa is emotional, impulsive and eccentric.  Kanuka went through academics to hone her skills and become an officer and brilliant pilot, Noa held her nose to the grind-stone and worked job after job until she could afford the police academy and is a naturally talented pilot.  These two embody one of my favorite themes, training vs. talent and is one of the reasons I love mecha since it’s practically guaranteed to come up at least once.  This relationship between the two leads to a healthy rivalry, each pushing the other to be better versions of themselves.  We see this pay off in episode 26 when Asuma is showing Noa’s performance compared to Ohta’s; Noa has become the more efficient of the two forwards.  This lack of efficiency was the main cause of Noa losing to Kanuka early in the series.  Outside of her rivalry with Noa, Kanuka’s an exceptionally deep character, shown as someone who truly loves her grandmother, someone that has strong convictions and, despite being the most level-headed of the bunch, someone that can panic, make bad calls, and succumb to terror.  She is a strong, competent and relatable character who leaves a massive vacuum in the show upon leaving.

Already at Takeo’s arrival, we’re in doubt.  We just lost who could very easily be justified as someone’s favorite character.  Who can fill the shoes Kanuka left?  No one, that’s who.  Fortunately for Takeo, she brought her own pair.

Just a flick of the wrist

We expect a similar relationship between her and Noa as there was between Kanuka and Noa, however this is not the case.  Where the relationship between Noa and Kanuka was an antithetical one that lead to rivalry, Takeo is framed as simply being a better Noa with only one major difference, which I’ll get to in a moment.  Takeo immediately proves her superiority to Noa as a policewoman by being a fast learner, great at programming, in top physical shape and being a comparable labor pilot to Noa after only two days of training.  But that’s only the professional side, she’s also a master of the more feminine aspects:  She’s gorgeous, charismatic and a great cook.  For the first time we see Noa compare herself to who, in our mind, is her rival and she feels inferior and defeated.  The light cast from Takeo serves to highlight what Noa really is, a slow, labor crazed tomboy.  This is not to say any of those things are bad, where we are weak in some areas, we are strong in others.  Noa is by no means a weak character, but in this moment for the first time, we don’t see her take this inner comparison as a challenge.  Instead she takes it as a sound defeat.  This culminates in the key difference between the two of them:  Ambition.

In the locker room, Noa innocently asks Takeo why she chose Division 2 if she could have gone anywhere.  To which Takeo gives Noa a hard look and explains that she wants experience, she wants to be the best and she won’t get that anywhere else.  This is what really sets these two apart because Noa had plateaued in her ambitions.  Her entire goal was to pilot an Ingram and being forced to realize that she could be better, to have higher ambitions, destroyed her.  She doesn’t take that as a challenge, she only quietly looks down and away.  At this moment, by merely saying something that has extreme merit only more bluntly than necessary, Takeo holds all our hate.  How dare she say something so hurtful to this poor, sweet, innocent Noa?  What did Noa ever do to deserve this treatment?  She’s happy piloting her Ingram and that’s enough for her, so it should be enough for you.  A simple act, but one that carries so much weight that we can’t help but feel emotional over.

This brings me back to the point I was making in my previous blog about the nuance in children’s shows versus the lack there of in adult’s shows.  There is absolutely no need to go to an extreme such as rape or murder to make us dislike a character or establish them as a “villain.”  As I mentioned earlier on, Takeo is not evil, the problems are mostly resolved by the end of this episode and she’s accepted into the group.  That does not change the fact that for half the episode, I was seething because of the inferiority she unintentionally and then intentionally made Noa cope with.  I didn’t even need any character to tell me to not like her.  The closest to that was Asuma being a through line for the audience as we follow his suspicions of her being too good to be true before accepting Takeo for what she is and informing Noa that she needs to watch herself.  Asuma’s rightful and justified skepticism is the closest the episode gets to overtly and explicitly telling us anything.

A rare Mai smile

Since a villain is just a hero viewed through a different context, the same principles of nuance and subtlety are true of heroes.  We do not need a grandiose reason to like, respect and relate to our heroes.  The simple gesture of Ohta saluting Kanuka on the escalator to her plane, or giving Shinshi a hardboiled egg are small, simple gestures that endear Ohta towards us and shows just how much he’s come from being a bigheaded, trigger-happy asshole.  Tiny actions things build over time like in K-ON, simply changing one of the lines of a song to “little angel girl” is enough to make anyone cry like a child.  That principle is literally what Nichijou is built upon, small, subtle changes that compound and gain more and more significance.  This is why so many simple things at the end of the show are so significant, like Mai exchanging shark drawings with Hakase or Mio deciding she wants to be a mangaka.  This principle is held so well that several of the one-off skits like Helvetica Standard, Word Play, and Love Like are more significant and with more well-rounded stories and characters than majority of seasonal anime and are usually in less than a minute.  This is not exclusive to Nichijou, however, considering that there are hundreds of short films that capture the same effect and more than plenty anime that do the same in their first episodes:  FLCL, Land of the Lustrous, Made in Abyss, Princess Principal or Cowboy Bebop to name a few.  We don’t need twenty episodes to understand the significance of the small actions each character takes.

Buy building and plotting a story around smaller actions the creators give us more fully realized characters, worlds and overall stories.  Small ripples can carry the force of a tsunami when applied correctly.  The shows I listed as doing this well don’t include these same ripples because they are great, rather they are great because they include the ripples.  It is not an easy way to write, it is not an easy way to direct, but it is an easy way to create a worthwhile experience worthy of being praised.

Thanks for reading, friends.  I actually have the next blog mostly written already on the topic of defining art and the point of this blog.  I had a lot of fun writing it, but it was at around 2 am so it'll be a lot more fun editing it, I'm sure.