Spotlight #4: Twelve Kingdoms

English Title: Twelve Kingdoms
Japanese Title: Juuni Kokuki
Author: Fuyumi Ono
English Publisher: Tokyopop
Anime Makers / Distributors: Studio Pierrot via Media Blasters
Manga?: No.
Novels?: Yes.
Anime?: Yes.

Twelve Kingdoms is my favorite anime. Some pieces of fiction hit you in exactly the right way at exactly the right time, and this can make you feel close to them, a bit in the same way that you can feel close to a person and a bit in the same way that you can feel close to an idea. Greer Irene Gilman's beautifully dense, painstakingly ornate novel Moonwise hit me in the right way at the right time. So did the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And so did Twelve Kingdoms.

The first time I watched Twelve Kingdoms, it was not my favorite year. Stuff went down, I cried a lot, and I wanted out. Not a permanent out, but just a chance to sit back, relax and breathe for awhile.

I read a lot of fiction and watched a lot of anime that year. Of all the new anime titles that I "discovered" during this period, Twelve Kingdoms is by far my favorite. This review will be focused primarily on the Twelve Kingdoms anime and not on the books upon which the anime is based. (So far, only three of the seven novels have been published in English.)

"Normal high school student" Nakajima Youko is attending her normal high school while some long-haired blond guy called Keiki pledges loyalty to her, gives her a sword, and goes on to be entirely unforthcoming about why Youko and her classmates are being attacked by a bunch of demons from another world. Keiki then spirits Youko (and her two "friends") away to said other world, where Youko obviously has an important destiny awaiting her.

Sounds pretty predictable so far, right?

However, just about as soon as they get to the other world, Keiki is put out of commission, and the three "normal high school" kids are left to fend for themselves in an impoverished kingdom where foreigners are despised and where, for some reason, only Youko can speak the language.

What really makes Twelve Kingdoms is its character development. When we first meet Youko, she is a rather unremarkable complete pushover of a reluctant fantasy heroine. By the end of her development arc, she is competent, confident and mature. (I feel like Twelve Kingdoms is the anime that women should give to their younger female relatives.) However, this is nothing like a smooth transition, and in the intervening time, Youko makes a lot of mistakes and actually gets to learn from them. But the lessons she learns are not the lessons that anime heroes and heroines tend to get in any genre. (How to "train" for the next battle, how to be nice, how to expose yourself to ridiculous and unnecessary risk (which leads to success for boys and failure for girls, more often than not), how to let yourself get walked on, etc. Youko started out the series getting walked on, remember? Happily, this means her big life lesson is about something else.) At the heart of the first arc, Youko learns that the world can be very harsh; even more importantly, and with much greater difficulty, she learns how to maintain her own human decency in a harsh world.

Youko is my favorite anime character. Also, she looks great in drag.

Youko, though central to the anime, is not always the central character. There are arcs toward the middle and end of the series in which she barely appears. Nonetheless, all of the major characters go throgh developmental arcs, and their development is always based on learning, about themselves and about their wolrd(s).

Twelve Kingdoms fits pretty solidly in the category of "femdom anime" as I define it. Keiki is an important enough male character in the show to vie for the position of "male lead." (Another possible contender is Rakushun, the mouse Hanjyuu (half-animal) who befriends Youko.) And (you can see this coming miles away in the show so it hardly counts as spoiler here, but SPOILER ALERT anyway) since Youko is eventually an Empress, the only male characters in the Twelve Kingdoms who could have official authority over her would be the world's actual gods. So, Twelve Kingdoms is femdom anime. What is even more exciting, however, is that it's also feminist anime. Hallelujah.

A short note on the first three novels: They're good. They're solid YA/children's lit fare, with a focus on strong young characters. In all three books, children from our world find their place in the world of the Twelve Kingdoms, where they learn about honor, courage and personal responsibility. Youko is the hero of the first book (and apparently shows up later in the fourth and sixth, which I await eagerly). The young male leads of the second and third books both discover that they are kirin, noble unicorn-beasts with the duty of choosing and serving the rulers of their respective kingdoms.