I’m a little late to the lovefest, but I really enjoy Arakawa Under the Bridge. It’s a great show, possibly my favorite this season, which is a first for Studio Shaft’s anime.

Above all, I’m amused by each character’s stubborn insanity.  When the zipper gets stuck on the kappa suit, no problem; just fix it up and go back to being a real live kappa.  Nino doesn’t know what the weather’s like on Venus, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s really a Venusian.  The people under the bridge believe in things that are clearly not true, and will persist regardless of the circumstances.  Even our main character and straight man Kou is pretty off his rocker.

The science-themed show Radiolab once covered the psychology behind lies.  The whole program is pretty good listening, but the last segment in particular described two interesting social experiments:  In the first, people were asked to respond to a series of embarrassing but hard-to-deny statements (like finding pleasure in their bowel movements, or having at least once entertained a rape fantasy), and then had those answers compared to their psychological profiles.  In the second, competitive swimmers were asked about their attitudes to winning or losing, and had their statements compared to their lap times.

The results are surprising.  The people who admitted enjoying unpleasantries tended to be more depressed than the people who lived in denial, and the fastest swimmers were the ones who made themselves believe that they could never possibly lose—the ones who lied to themselves, in other words.

(EDIT: I just listened to the radio show again after having written about it from memory, and the experiment was a little different from what I said– The swimmers were ALSO given the embarrassing questionnaire, and the ones who tended to deny these statements were the faster swimmers.  The self-deception about winning or losing was included but not a formal part of the experiment.  Sorry!  Moving along…)

I know that we in fandom are often fond of saying “kick reason to the curb and go beyond the impossible,” but is it true?  To be successful in life, do we really need to lie so hard that it becomes our personal reality?

I don’t think anyone can deny Ichinomiya Kou’s tangible successes:  He’s a Tokyo U student, well-off, fully prepared to step into a cushy CEO job.  But it’s all fueled by his obsession with self-sufficiency.  “I can’t owe anything to anyone.  Debt gives me asthma attacks.” It’s just as bad a whopper as not being able to walk outside of chalk lines, but because the products are money and prestige, he’s considered sane, even admirable.  In the underbridge community where none of that matters, the mask is pulled off, and the newly-christened “Recruit” is just as crazy as everybody else.

I think I must be one of three people who like the opening.

I sense an underlying warmth.  I want to see Recruit become a less neurotic person, and I’m looking forward to the other great lie of this show (“Nino-san is my lover [though we’ve never done anything, and actually Nino doesn’t even know what a date is]”) gradually becoming true.  But there’s some great, very sharp criticism of the society game going on here as well.  Carry a briefcase, or put on your star-shaped head; it’s pretty much the same.