[1] Jinrui wa suitai shimashita is an animated television adaption of the homonymous light novel series by Tanaka Romeo, published by Shogakukan between 2007 and 2016, with illustrations by Yamasaki Tōru and Tobe Sunaho. The anime series by studio AIC, consisting of 12 episodes aired from July 2, 2012 to September 17, 2012, directed by Kishi Seiji.

[2] Steven Jones, “Humanity Has Superflattened,” Tumblr, ＷＯＮ’Ｔ　ＦＯＲＧＥＴ　ＮＥＶＥＲ, February 2013, para. 2.

[3] Lukas Wilde, “Winter School: De/Recontextualizing Characters: Media Convergence and Pre-/Meta-Narrative Character Circulation,” Universität Tübingen, 2018, para. 7.

[4] Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 39–47.

[5] The Nendoroid series is a series of collectible palm-sized figures by the Japanese manufacturer Good Smile Company, featuring characters from various anime, films, and videogames with a chibi design. The American company Funko is known for their vinyl bobblehead figures of characters from pop culture.

[6] Azuma, Otaku, 39–47.

[7] Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts (Winchester, UK ; Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2016), 16.

[8] Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 55.

[9] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, New Ed edition (Harvard University Press, 2007), 91.

[10] Jones, “Humanity Has Superflattened,” para. 3.

[11] Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema, Documentary film (P Guide Ltd, 2006).

[12] Fiennes.

[13] Joshua Paul Dale, “The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,” in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 36.

[14] Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 17.

[15] Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): 816.

[16] Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge Cambridgeshire; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 34–41.

[17] Adam Roberts, “The Copernican Revolution,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould et al. (London ; New York: Routledge, 2009), 10.

[18] Paul A. Herbig and Pat Borstorff, “Japan′s Shinjinrui: The New Breed,” International Journal of Social Economics 22, no. 12 (December 1, 1995): 49.

[19] Uchigeba, combining the Japanese word uchi, meaning “home” or “inside,” and “gewalt,” the German word for “force” or “violence,” was the vicious, nationwide infighting among New Left sects during the 1970s which resulted thousands of injuries and many deaths. 

[20] Michiya Shimbori et al., “Japanese Student Activism in the 1970s,” Higher Education 9, no. 2 (March 1, 1980): 139.

[21] Shimbori et al., 140, 142.

[22] Herbig and Borstorff, “Japan′s Shinjinrui,” 49.

[23] William W. Kelly, “Finding a Place in Metropolitan Japan: Ideologies, Institutions, and Everyday Life,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 198.

[24] Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 11.

“Mankind’s sad end began a long time ago,” the Heroine explains, like one does to a group of children. “Very soon, we’ll be extinct.” Her tone is remorseless, matter of fact. Still, the fairies dote on the Heroine, telling her to “Hang in there!” “Don’t give up!” and “Let’s spend more time together!” Their concern for humans resembles the superficial pity of a child for an injured animal, before forgetting about it and moving on to the next play activity. In the anime series Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (Humanity Has Declined, AIC, 2012), or Jintai for short,[1] the fairies are a mysterious race of advanced “new humans” who will replace us after we are extinct. [Figure 1] Humanity’s extinction, however, is not framed as a global annihilation. Instead, in the Heroine’s words, it is retirement. A withdrawal, a decline; not trauma, but anticlimax. [Figure 2] The fairies coexist with humans peacefully but have no qualms about causing trouble for the sake of entertainment. They are hedonists who relentlessly seek out pleasure and amusement, feeding off candy and spontaneously multiplying when having fun. Although they are said to possess advanced technology, its exact nature remains vague throughout the series, and is mostly aligned with Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The fairies adhere enthusiastically to whatever they perceive as the new fad in town but seem to lack social filters. As a result, they often say horrible things light‑heartily, like hyping death by starvation as a new and exciting way to die, or quickly slipping into bouts of severe depression. [Figure 3] As one of the few people left capable of creating confectioneries, the Heroine is especially apt at communicating with the “new humans,” who naturally flock to her side, calling her Okashi-chan (“Ms. Sweets”). Because of this talent, the Heroine works as a representative of the United Nations Conciliation Committee, acting as a mediator between humans and fairies.

In terms of appearance, the fairies are tiny gnome-like creatures with pointy ears and caps. [Figure 4] Their expressions are permanently locked in a face-splitting “:D” grin, reminiscent of Murakami Takashi’s Superflat flowers.[2] [Figure 5] Like Murakami’s Superflat mascots—DOB, the flowers, Kaikai and Kiki—the fairies are quintessential kyara, embodying the merchandization of cuteness in “characters without stories,”[3] removed from a privileged relationship with traditional diegetic worlds.[4] Murakami brought the kyara into the field of contemporary art as a way of addressing the postmodern death of authorship, represented by corporate characters like Hello Kitty, Di Gi Charat, or Hatsune Miku. With their post-authorial design, the kyara allows for never-ending variations that provide a false sense of variety, enacting more or less straightforward, more or less complicated changes on a template that remains mostly unaltered and always recognizable. Fairies, too, differ among themselves only in ways akin to popular collectibles like Nendoroid or Funko Pop figures.[5] Different clothing colors and models, different hats, different hairstyles, and hair colors, hinting at the databasization of cuteness that Hiroki Azuma recognizes in the sampling of atomized components to create characters for the otaku’s consumption.[6] [Figure 6]

Jintai’s opening reinforces this impression of incomplete personhood—after all, the word “kyara” itself is but a cropped-out version of kyarakutā (“character”)—with its injection of J-pop and frantic choreographies, in which hundreds of fairies and sweets swarm across the screen. [Video 1] The Heroine and the fairies are almost too alive yet evade the phenomenological experience of “proper” living organisms. They dance like puppets or battery-powered toys. As Grafton Tanner writes, “There is a horror here in the proliferation and constantly reproducing throng of sentient objects. They are nonhuman, autonomous, unconscious, and eerily precise in their repetitions.”[7] At one point, three fairies hanging by nooses around the neck, like suicide victims, come “alive” with glee when the Heroine feeds them a piece of candy. Indeed, the fairies reflect the perceived endlessness, and deathlessness, of mechanically reproduced commodities, whose death drive manifests as an “indecent surplus of life.”[8]

The fairies are both “agitated things and deactivated persons,”[9] a stultified form of humanity in which individuals have lost their unique shapes and autonomy. Fairies all look the same, and their psychosocial processes resemble that of hive or mob mentality. “New humans” do not require facial expressions, a primary means of communicating emotions and social cues, other than a contrived, emoticon‑like “:D” smile that does not falter, even when they get depressed and suicidal. [Figure 7] Such immutability adds to the ventriloquist effect of their disembodied voices, for when they talk, the fairies’ mouths remain unmoving. In fact, their mouth is not much of a mouth at all. Not an opening, not a cavity, but a flat “D” shape drawn on their faces, lacking any biological or metabolic function. The fairies’ language bears the phaticness of small talk and soundbites, matching the pantomimic nature of their interactions with humans and other fairies. The fairies reduce interpersonal desires to superficial curiosity, dispensing with any kind of deep connection: even their reproduction becomes a “clean” asexual process of spontaneous generation. As mentioned by one commentator, “if we read the fairies as humanity’s successors, then perhaps the fairies are just superflattened humans.”[10] Indeed, the fact that the Heroine’s Grandfather refers to them as “a giant melting pot of culture and science” fits neatly into the theory of Superflat’s crumbling hierarchies and temporalities. Stuck in a continuous loop at the end of history, the fairies’ insistent pursue of play does not seem to carry the emancipatory quality of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic regime, but fashions a playground world where memory is short, and bonds are shallow. Where nothing lies ahead nor, for that matter, behind; just characters out of time, and a time out of joint.

The fairies inhabit the threshold of innocence and wickedness, childlikeness and chaos, and therefore represent not just flattened humanity, but the externalization of unrepressed human drives. In this sense, they become what Slavoj Žižek calls an “Id machine,” insofar as their presence allows for the magical realization of human discontentment, using Sigmund Freud’s words in his influential book Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). In The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema (2006), Žižek argues that Harpo Marx, the mute brother distinguished from Groucho and Chico by his use of visual (rather than verbal) comedy, is a typical personification of this trope. [Video 3, Figure 8] Harpo is “childishly innocent, just striving for pleasure, likes children, plays with children,” but he is also “possessed by some kind of primordial evil, aggressive all the time.”[11] Žižek’s claim that “this unique combination of utter corruption and innocence is what the Id is about,”[12] echoing the antagonistic qualities often attached to the aesthetics of cuteness in which care and play are laced with violence and aggression.[13] As pioneering scholars like Daniel Harris and Sianne Ngai compelling argue, the aesthetics of cuteness “coexists in a dynamic relation with the perverse.”[14] For Harris and Ngai, cuteness is infused with the violence enacted in every commodification process, for “in its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is as often intended to excite a consumer’s sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle.”[15] Too cute for comfort, the fairies give off an eerie aura of obscenity, one which we also find in the work of Superflat artists like Murakami, Mr., Aoshima Chiho, or Takano Aya.

While the fairies play a secondary role throughout most of Jintai, whose narrative focus is on human characters, the series’ ninth and tenth episodes—“The Fairy’s Survival Skills” (“Yōsei-san no, Hyrōryū Seikatsu”) and “The Fairies’ Earth” (“Yōsei-san-tachi no, Chikyū”)—are devoted to the Heroine and the fairies alone. These episodes engage with genre fiction in the form of utopian and dystopian speculation, weaving a counterfactual history of human civilizational evolution. They also muddle the dialectical opposition between humans and “new humans,” making it evident that the fairies are a puppet theater staging the farce of humanity. “The Fairy’s Survival Skills” is a concentrated history of human civilization. After an increase in the fairy population leads to bullying among “new humans,” the Heroine is tasked with accompanying a group of depressed fairies who seek asylum in a different country. However, in a Gulliveresque fashion, she ends up stranded with her tiny companions in an uninhabited island, isolated from the world, with no prospects of rescue. On the second day of being stranded, the fairies make an elegant piece of rococo period furniture, with tasteful simplifications to compensate for the lack of glass and other materials. “Although there is nothing innovative about design,” the Heroine says, “the mix of styles deserved praise!” (although she would have preferred they made a bed, the Heroine adds as an afterthought). The Heroine’s comments play on the postmodern zeitgeist of movements like Superflat, that question the notion of originality and authorship in art, reinforcing the fairies’ role as an embodiment of the “melting pot” metaphor. This occurrence foreshadows the ensuing parody of recycled imagery, historical references, and collapsed temporalities.

From that point on, in a very Superflatesque blend of Neolithic Revolution, seventeenth-century European aristocracy, and Industrial Revolution (not necessarily in that order), we are shown the rise and fall of the fairies’ civilization in little over a week. They start by dividing the island’s population into a privileged power elite (the Heroine) ruling over a subordinate rural populace (the fairies), thus giving birth to hierarchies, social classes and inequality, and division of labor. By engaging in agriculture, manufacture, trade, and research, the fairies extend their collective control over natural resources and establish the basis for massive population growth.[16] They devise the toilet, or, as the Heroine describes it, “a marvel of civilization that preserves human dignity.” But also, like the Swiftian inventors of Balnibarbi, they extract electricity from pineapples, tea grains, leaf coffee, and radish that produces sugar cubes. The fairies’ “techno-science” offers a glimpse into a Bizarro world where everything is the same, but insanely different. [Figure 9]

The Heroine exercises law and punishment, criminalizing narcotics and drug possession, and even sending a junkie fairy to jail. She also applies the principles of distribution of wealth by making and giving sweets to the fairies. Through genetic manipulation and intensive farming—the fairies invent a plant that can produce confectioneries—the island-nation reaches a golden age of material abundance, turning into a candy arcadia of endless, self-indulgent celebration. Out of boredom, the fairies go on a monument-building spree, stuffing the island with miniature park replicas of humankind’s monuments: Easter Island moai statues, the Great Wall of China, Egyptian pyramids, totem poles, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Arc de Triomphe, Stonehenge, among others. All packed together and “databased,” displaced from their original functions of storied cultural remembrance. [Figure 10] This surge of unrestrained construction leads to severe environmental and social issues. Soil and water pollution. Electricity rationing and food shortage. Unemployment and depression. Ultimately, the island collapses due to a rainstorm caused by the fairies’ collective gloom. The Heroine wakes up on the lake’s shore, surrounded by fairies who promptly ask her to rule them in a new nation. “Honestly,” the Heroine says, “this new humankind doesn’t learn from its mistakes.” Ironically, the Heroine herself is suspiciously like the fairies. When her Grandfather informs her that the island was the habitat of several rare species of spiders, which are now extinct, the Heroine quickly deflects away from the responsibility, blaming the fairies and hiding her involvement in the incident.

The unwillingness to be held accountable for one’s actions continues in “The Fairies’ Earth,” set during the Heroine’s first job as a mediator. This episode takes on the problems of individual identity and the res publica. When the Heroine comes across a small group of fairies and learns of the fairies’ lack of personal names, she decides to either give them names or allow them to choose their own. Names are, after all (according to our world’s United Nations), a child’s right from birth. The introduction of names is also a primary tool for telling individuals apart and identifying them for legal or administrative purposes. The Heroine thus appoints the fairies with names like Cap and Nakata. Two other fairies decide to name themselves Sir Christopher McFarlane and Fish-Paste. [Figure 11] Immediately, the Heroine’s action sets off a significant civilizational jump. Overnight, the fairies turn an uninhabited dump into a futuristic metropolis, complete with a public defense system—a super robot, about the Heroine’s height. The robot is a product of the fairies’ citizenship or, as they put it, “everyone’s devotion” to the community. [Figure 12] As the personal name fad catches up, the Heroine provides the city with a naming dictionary, so that fairies can name themselves freely. In turn, she inadvertently becomes a cultural icon, hailed as a god with a monumental stone statue carved to her likeness. [Figures 13 & 14] However, when she attempts to pass the title (and responsibilities) of god back to the fairies, panic spreads, and the whole population deserts the city, turning it back into a dump.

“The Fairy’s Survival Skills” and “The Fairies’ Earth” engage with the “more obviously political mode of speculative fiction, utopia,”[17] drawing on the emphasis on place that has shaped utopian literature from its beginnings. This “placeness” takes the form of, respectively, an island-nation (like Japan) and a metropolis (city-nation), two settings that allow for the exploration of communal power relationships. If “Survival Skills” deals with the politics of the social and economic development of civilization, “Earth” tackles with the issue of identity and citizenship, the relationship between person and state. In both, the fairies’ imitative nature and fear of responsibility are ultimately responsible for their communities’ demise. The fairies coerce the Heroine into assuming the positions, respectively, of monarch and god. As utopia turns into dystopia before her eyes, Jintai stresses that the fairies’ inability to maintain sustainable societies and infrastructures is a result of their pathological tendency for deresponsibilization.

Perhaps the fairies are a stand-in for Japan’s shinjinrui, the “new breed” or “new humans,” a moniker given to the Japanese generations from the 1970s and 1980s, who grew up “in an affluent, wealthy, powerful, influential, arrogant Japan,”[18] with no direct experience of postwar trauma. After the first wave of 1960s student activism gave way to uchigeba[19] and left-wing terrorism in the late 1970s,[20] there was a general retreat from activism. Students become increasingly apolitical, more conservative, and concerned with getting good grades to impress prospective employers in a recession­‑stricken job market.[21] In the Japanese media, they became known as the shirake sedai, a generation of apathetic youths with little interest in anything other than play and material comfort.[22] In turn, the 1980s shinjinrui were “feted and feared for their misplaced, though voracious, consumer appetites.”[23] Hello Kitty, released by Sanrio in 1975—who, like the fairies, has no real mouth for speaking or protesting—captures the zeitgeist of this reactionless “new breed” that spawned contemporary kawaii culture in the full force of its consumerist drives.

While the resonance with postmodern Japan is clear, the fairies’ situation rings a bell with the broader context of an Anthropocene malaise, particularly, as the issue of human accountability in the present ecological crisis becomes increasingly urgent. Jussi Parikka’s concept of Anthrobscene (Anthropocene + obscene) is a useful framework within which to understand Jintai’s critique of humanity’s planetary impacts. “Finally, one felt, a concept to describe the effects of the human species and its scientific-technological desires on the planet,” Parikka writes, regarding the Anthropocene. “And yet it is a concept that also marks the various variations of environmental and human life in corporate practices and technological culture that are ensuring that there won’t be much of humans in the future scene of life.” [23] (Parikka 2014, 11). In Jintai, fairies are the Id machines of hypercapitalism, and human culture and its discontents are represented in a constant state of flux. Their sometimes comic, sometimes terrifying remainders shape the fairies’ civilizations, rising from desert islands and dumpsters—those patches of Earth uninhabited by humans, either for their pristineness or their taintedness—only to collapse back into ruins and debris. Jintai uses fiction and metafiction to investigate the historical past and possible futures, mashed together to weave a satirical commentary on flawed individual and collective selves. This commentary is never entirely cautionary, but more ambiguous, absurd. The fairies are cute, filthy cute, embodying humanity’s obscenity. Our unrepressed desires, transmogrified from techno-scientific to magical, but retaining their complete disregard for the safety of fellow humans and nonhumans, like those poor island spiders, annihilated on a capricious whim.

At the beginning of “The Fairy’s Survival Skills,” we find the picture of the fairies’ social death drive. When the Heroine asks the depressed fairies, who have been bullied by their peers what they want to do in their new country, they perk up and answer with barely concealed delight: “Taxation! Oppression! Elimination! Persecution!” [Figure 15] The fairies appear to be oblivious to the contradictions of perpetuating the very system that terrorized them. They make the same mistakes relentlessly, again and again, without a shred of memory or regret. “I guess...,” “I wonder...,” “Who knows...” (saa…), they tell the Heroine throughout the episodes, whenever she attempts to pry more in-depth into the meaning or logic of their behavior. But whether the fairies work in mysterious ways, acting on the unregulated shifts of the human unconscious, or they are genuinely mindless and “flat,” is an unresolved matter in Jintai. In fact, although the fairies are mostly apolitical, such lapses into the ideologies of oppression are not uncommon. They parrot our group decision-making processes and political catchphrases (“You need leadership experience to get elected,” one fairy tells another, at some point) and mock the witch-hunts that often ensue (e.g., in a Red Scare allusion, one fairy accuses their interlocutor of being a candy communist). [Video 3] What such moments do tell us that the fluctuation between sovereignty and non-sovereignty, domination and subalternity, lies at the heart of the decline in a world whose “new humans” want to be led, rather than lead, but are virtually ungovernable. It is a catch-22, inevitably amounting to self-implosion.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Paradog & Red Toad Tumblr Post.

See in PORTFOLIO – Naturalis Historia.

REFERENCES in Fairies.

MILD SPOILERS

• Jinrui wa suita shimashita (anime)