Nisemonogatari Episode 5 – Incest is Best

Good God, this show is slow as shit.  After five episodes there is still barley any plot and Karen’s illness still hasn’t been cured, though the next episode should fix that.  But of course then Araragi will have it, and it’ll take three episodes for him to get rid of it, so that doesn’t help anything too much.

Fortunately, the show finally tells what happened when Kaiki cursed Karen, or at least Araragi’s version of what happened to her.  After Karen tells Kaiki, a grown adult male, that she, a middle school girl, is going to beat him up so bad that he’ll stop selling curses and the cures to them, he gives a long winded talk about what his motives are.  His desire, simply enough, is money (or so he claims).  And, yeah, that makes sense; middle school kids aren’t exactly the hardest market to cater to.  Think about what happened with Sengoku; she was cursed by some girl because she rejected some boy that the other girl liked  As stupid a reason as that is, that definitely sounds like some typical school melodrama, and something that a bitchy girl would do if she had the opportunity to.  So as long as there are stupid, jealous, and assholish kids around, the Kaiki will have a market for his rather pricey curses.  After Kaiki gives Karen his advice about the world and money, he curses her for being such an idiot and thinking she could have actually done something to him and leaves.

And that’s about all of the plot that’s in this episode.  Hanekawa and Araragi talk for a while as they walk home, but don’t really say anything too important.  She does make another allusion to Kizumonogatari but nothing like the big-ass spoiler that Shinobu dropped in the previous episode.  I really that for the sake of the people who haven’t read it, the show doesn’t talk too much about Kizumonogatari, but at the same time, you’re technically supposed to know what happened back then at this point in the series, so it’s possible that some parts of this series will talk about it.  They also talk for a moment about Oshino, and Araragi says that he thinks Oshino will be back to help them with Karen’s problem.  So, maybe Osino is going to come back at some point in the series, if the show is going to talk about a character that has supposedly left so blatantly.

The rest of the episode focuses on what should be a very awkward situation.  Now, maybe the Japanese are even more sexual than I thought, but I have a sister who’s two years younger than me, and I would break my own arm with a sledge hammer before I would do anything like that with her, not to mention that she would probably do the same  to me if I even asked her to.  Perhaps Araragi’s relationship with his sisters is just that good,  but I thinks it’s more than likely just fanservice.  Of course, he’s just trying to be a good brother and help his sick sister, but I don’t really think that Shaft was about to pass up on a chance to have him do this.  But not only does this scene contain Araragi stripping his sister and wiping her down with rags, it gets even more awkward.  After Karen tells Araragi that she doesn’t want to get him sick, he gets the idea to ask Shinobu is there’s a way to transfer her illness to him, similar to what he attempted to do with the snakes that were constricting Sengoku.  This being an anime, the obvious answer would be “sex”, but since they can’t show that on TV, the next best answer would be to make out.  And yes, that’s the answer.  Apparently if Araragi kisses Karen, then the illness will be transferred to him; I guess Shaft wanted to apologize to their fans for having to censor Shinobu, and they decided that wincest was the next best thing.  Sorry, but my sister would just have to deal with it if that happened to her.

I’m not entirely sure how well Karen is going to receive that request next episode, but I’d imagine about half the episode is going to be spent convincing her to allow him to do it.  Or he could just go for it and the first three seconds of the show and Karen could beat the shit out of him after, but either way, I can’t picture her accepting it too well.  Also, how does that really solve the problem?  Araragi will still have it, so he still has to find a way to get rid of it, or maybe he just assumes that his vampiric body will resist the poison.  But if Shinobu said that the fire wreathe bee is a low level monster, then it should be fairly easy to deal with, so Araragi wanting to take the illness onto himself can have only two reasons.  One: he’s so nice of a person that he’d kiss his sister to help her, or two: fanservice.  I think the real reason is probably equally split among those two.

Really, I can’t see where this show is going.  I mean, Kaiki’s kind of an asshole, but he doesn’t really seem bad enough to be a very menacing villain.  He wants to make money and has found a simple and effective way to make it, after all, if you’re good at something never do it for free.  Hopefully he’s given more depth as the series goes on and isn’t just portrayed as some douchebag who wants a bunch of money.