Patreon Letter: 26th October 2019 (Patreon)

Content Warning: explicit discussion of sexual assault and an attempted rape scene.

Spoiler Warning: Royal Space Force: The Wigns of Honnêamise 

Hey, folks!

Jackson here with the Patreon Letter. Em took a doctor approved week off, it's been a real couple of weeks for them, so thank you for being understanding. I, however, am just late. It's been a busy week. Sometimes that's just how it is on this bitch of an earth.

Anyway recently I watched the movie Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, which I talked about a little on GGP, and I wanted to dive into my feelings a little more explicitly here on the letter, because I love so much about the movie that it really is a shame about that one scene. Both in terms of how it collapses the movie, and also how it so widely dominates discussion of the movie that all the writing about it is either, at any given moment, talking about The Scene or dancing around The Scene, this piece included. Putting a scene in which the protagonist attempts to violently rape the love interest in your otherwise suitable for kids movie will do that. 

I will get into that at the end of the piece but I want to talk first about the elements of the movie I really liked, and I want to talk about them without going "BUT!" at the end of every sentence. So hopefully by mentinoning it here at the start it won't be hanging over our heads and I can talk positively about the film for a while with the knowledge it will all come crashing down at the end. Because without that scene, Royal Space Force would be incredible. 

It's a film about an alternate reality, slightly steampunk world, focusing on man named Shiro who always wanted to join the Navy and fly planes, but ends up in something called the Space Force. The Space Force is a small branch of his Kingdom's military which, like the Navy deploys in the sea and air, deploys into space. Theoretically. They haven't been there yet, and it becomes clear that the Space Force is the an experimental branch, launching Rockets that mostly explode and kill their pilots, which exists because it is the pet project of a General close to the Royal Family, but with nothing but failure to show for all the money he's taken for the project, the Space Force's days are numbered. Unless with this final rocket, they can make it to Space.

What follows is a slow mediation on what it is like to be trapped inside a fundementally evil society, to look back at the horrors of human history and consider what that means on the edge of a seemingly wondrous breakthrough for a new age, yet knowing in your heart that the same structures will repeat, the same violence will continue, and the new age is a lie that we tell ourselves; but it's also a prayer that maybe this time things will be different. Shiro ends the movie as the first man in space, clasping his hands together and making that very prayer, away from the warring planet below and amongst the calming stillness of the stars.

The prayer is literal - it's the final monologue of the movie - but the lie comes how he gets to space in the first place. Shiro becomes a minor celebrity, the representation of the military might of Honnêamise, proud member of the Space Force being sent on the very first warship to the stars. The warship is a single capsule for one person, with no guns. Yet as the project progresses he witnesses Riquinni, the girl he volunteered to impress, standing powerlessly outside her own house, bulldozed by the power company. He walks past the homeless to his prestigious photo op. The Space Force seems like ten guys in a field at the start, and the core group is, but through the funding for this mission there are eventually hundreds if not thousands of engineers sacrificing months of their lives to bring this achievement to reality.  And so Shiro cannot shake the obvious question from his mind: how can this be such an important symbolic victory for humankind when people are starving in the street?

The answer, of course, lies in imperial warmongering and internal politicking. The movie doesn't posit "going to space" and "feeding the homeless" as a binary moral choice because that would be ludicrous, instead it presents a world where resources are dictated by the needs of the state. The Kingdom funded the Space Force with hopes of military domination, and bereft of results its decommission is conducted in the same practical manner. The launch site of this presumably useless rocket is moved to right next to the border of the rival hegemon, The Republic, who they hope will commence an incursion into their territory to steal the rocket, giving them an actual justification for an inevitable war. Either they get a rocket, a war, or the justification to stop funding the Space Force, the Kingdom wins regardlesss.

And with all characters basically aware of this being the situation, where the movie shines is in the way that the movies political world relates to the deep seated malaise in the characters. Shiro - until The Scene - is a legitimately fantastic protagonist, drifting between listlessness, selfishness and empathy in ways that felt very poignant and real. We are all of us living in Hell World. What does it mean to self-actualise and take control of your life when this is the world that we're living in? At its best, Royal Space Force is the Gundam UC 0 story we've been asking for, with a precise focus on the interiority of its characters and what it's like to be a person in the world depicted, rather than the differeing arguments for what the future should be when the war is over (the war is never over).

Which brings us nicely and unfortunately to The Scene, and the relationship between Shiro and Riquinni. Shiro meets her handing out religious flyers in town, and is the only person who responds and goes to her house to talk about it. He does not actually care about her religion, but seeing the strength she gets from it, is inspired to risk near certain death and volunteer to be the spacecraft pilot. Their relationship is dysfunctional (they don't actually have much in common) but not without empathy and connection. He rushes to her aid in the middle of a training session, and this is when he arrives to see her house destroyed, but stays to help her pick up the pieces.

A core source of tension between them is that Shiro wants their relationship to be physical, and Riquinni is simply too religious to ever consider sex. He asks, she plays it off as a joke, he jokes back but his jokes are barbed, suggesting this religion has left her repressed and unable to have any fun. The movie gets the totality of what it has to say about gender and violence much stronger in this more subtle moments than the supposed catharsis of the actual attempted rape scene. Here Shrio's entitlement comes through, along with the dance of politeness that Riquinni is forced to perform to ensure this man who she genuinely does care about, will stop questioning her on this very simple issue of her body and her consent. It paints a strong portrait of the way the loneliness of this world has created these deep desires for real connection within both its protagonist, while highlighting the ease of access that men have to a legacy of violence at any time, that they can leverage against women they see as a means to to fill their emptiness.

Even this scene is fraught, but I think it's pointing towards something honest and isn't gratuitous, and is open to generous readings. This is completely undermined later in the movie where we reach the scene that dominates Royal Space Force's repuation. Riquinni comes home from the rain and dries out her socks, revealing briefly to Shiro that they are stuffed with money - a sign that she has been making ends meet with sex work. Shrio is bitter all night, refusing to speak, turning his back during dinner. Later, he sees her changing behind a screen and gets up from his bed, walks towards the screen with grim intent, throws it back and forces her to the ground. He catches her eyes for a moment during the struggle, and hesitates, giving her the chance to knock him out with a blunt instrument. The next morning, she attempts to act like nothing has happened while he continually apologises to her, and only relents to apologise herself and beg his forgiveness for knocking him out. She runs off, leaving him alone and confused, and this is their last interaction in the film. In the next scene, Shiro is preoccupied while out in town with his best friend, and wonders if he's the villain in his own life story. A republic assassin attacks at this moment, and he runs away for a chase sequence, before eventually finding the inner strength to fight for his own life, and, we infer, to be a better person. One who doesn't attempt to rape anyone.

It's legitimately disgusting. It feels very in line with Gainax's later work in End of Evangelion, wherein sexual assualt and rape are presented as evil, disgusting things: we are not meant to sympathise with Shiro in this moment. Yet in both movies complicates that, first on a surface level with the gratuitous indulgence of the scene, and second by gesturing at deeply problematic "truths" about the symbiotic nature of abuse (the director has said that Riquinni's refusal to blame Shiro shows her 'strength,' so y'know, that sucks). And then, unique to this movie, there is the element where it is presented as a direct response to Shiro discovering the truth of her sex work, that this pure religious girl that he has invested in is A Lie. And not only that, but she's fucking other men, for money but not him!! This fact is presented in many articles as a defence of the scene, even though it very clearly makes it just so much worse. Here's a quote from a blog I found searching for reactions after the movie: 

"During  the attack he pauses. As he lies on top of her he suddenly realises  what he is doing and stops himself. This moment acts as a symbol as well  as a literal event. Lhadatt’s realisation is not just the realisation that he is capable of raping a woman, but that he is part of the military driven society which has forced her into prostitution."

This paragraph jumped out to me because it is, almost word for word, exactly what I said about the earlier scene with Shiro's verbal sparring as he tries to convince her to throw off her entire sense of religious identity because he is sad and horny. These themes, and especially the sense of Shiro's complicity within the history and structures of gendered violence come through so much stronger in those more quiet scenes, because it is the smallness of those actions that give them their power. When he speaks, he speaks with the weight of those structures, but when he acts, he holds her down by his own force. It is no longer about societal relations, it is an individual man committing a horrifically evil act. And the movie continues, expecting you to still sympathise with and root for him as the movie continues, and frames the next action scene as somewhat of a redemptive rebirth.

I want to say for any defenders at this point that I do understand what the film is trying to do with this scene, especially as it is a movie about how violent and cruel history has been, how close it is to us, and how far away the future is. It is trying to inject nuance and realism by presenting us this cruelty and violence in our relatable main character. But it cannot shake the fact that it is written by men, for men, using Riquinni as a prob to moralise about why the sexual violence of men is bad but only because it's a bad thing for men to do. Her interiority is given no consideration and she falls out of the movie. Plus it is utilising a woman's history as a sex worker as if that makes assault against her more of a morally grey area. Much too think about and all that. It fucking sucks, it breaks the movie, I was legitimately furious.

Anyway. This was a long one. I loved so much of it, that it only made the fact that it fell down into some extremely regressive bullshit all the more frustrating. I'll be back soon with another letter - hopefully about a much lighter topic - but this was the length of three regular letters so you know, I feel okay about the delay in this case. 

See you soon!

-Jackson