Kill la Kill: Monsters and tradition in their ways of life

Abstract

Anime is an artistic-communicational language produced primarily by and for Japan, and can serve as "an open window into Japanese identity, a glimpse –not necessarily into reality– but into the aspirations, dreams, nightmares, fantasies and fetishes of a culture" (Frederik Schodt).

After World War II, with the U.S. occupation of Japan and the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a literary tendency is gestated on this traumatic scenario that relates adult failure, the destruction of the world and the survival of a group of young people impregnated with imported ideals linked to freedom and democracy, in a context in which tradition failed but did not disappear.

Kill la Kill is an animated production that can be labeled in this trend: it introduces an extraterrestrial creature called Life Fiber, which has contributed to the development of humanity and now threatens to destroy it; a group of young people must fight it from different ideological fronts, except that the invader will also be an ally.

This paper will analyze the thematic relations that occur in the encounter between humans and 'life fibers', starting from epistemological coordinates coming from posthumanist and transhumanist philosophy (Monica Cragnolini, Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben) and the representations constructed from the category of 'monster' (Julia Kristeva, Robin Wood, Jefrey Cohen), that plurisignificant figure related to 'the other', characterized as different and that must be annihilated or assimilated. Who is the monster and in what way should it be confronted?