This is mine

I looked around a bunch and used some online stuff like saucenao and trace and my lead is the end of nekoshiro (2nd series episode 5) but i cant find it.

I think it might be a later arc, seeing as she's, you know, happy in this photo.

Any ideas?

by me!

Specifically, 18:15-29:00. Especially, "I'm not in love with Hanekawa... I'm sure. Let's keep it that way. That's the happiest way to end this."

To be honest, I used to think Araragi was a coward for this choice. And the whole screaming uncontrollably when he went to her house and realized she didn't have a room thing. But rewatching the episode, I suppose his suicidal tendencies compounded with someone with baggage like hers, and she would just end up alone without a family anyways because he would die, so it's fine he pulled away for his own sake. And him choosing to not be with her was a sign of his own growth since Kizu's story, him cultivating his newfound his will to live with the character of Shinobu. I'm still a bit fuzzy on this interpretation, so I would welcome other perspectives. Of course, my heart hurts for Hanekawa, but Araragi isn't exactly a treasure either way, so.

Just finished Koyomimonogatari, if that matters.

She looks a lot alike, from Okusama wa Shougakusei by the creator of Eiken

Hello everyone. I finished the series recently and have been thinking about this for a while, so I decided to share some thoughts publicly. (There'll be spoilers for everything up to Zoku Owarimonogatari I think, so just be aware.)

Hanekawa: "I don't know everything, I just know what I know."
Gaen: "There is nothing I don't know. I know everything."
Ougi: "I don't know anything. You're the one who knows."

What strikes me about these often-repeated phrases is their resemblance to the theory of the Four Discourses propounded by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan was a devoted follower of Freud, and his attempts to "purify" psychoanalysis and formalise it drew reactions ranging from an embrace in the fields of literary and film theory to accusations of complete incomprehensibility. Whether he was a genius or a charlatan, I think it's fruitful to note that he had a wide-ranging influence; he even took in Jean-Paul Sartre as a patient for hallucinations of lobsters following him around after a bad mescaline trip, and it's not unlikely that he was at least an indirect influence on Nisio Isin. (Check out this sick-ass illustration of Lacan by Hirohiko Araki for the cover of a book explaining his ideas!)

Before I get into this, let me try to explain some background knowledge. For Lacan, every person is a "split subject": we're caught between the "cleanliness" of conscious speech and the dark, murky, contradictory "language" of the unconscious. Our conscious experience is not direct contact with reality, but one filtered through the lens of our psychic structure. We desire things, but when we get what we desire, we're unsatisfied; this means that our desire isn't for any particular thing, but for a sort of "hole" in our experience that we're forever trying to fill. Lacan calls this hole the objet petit a, the object cause of desire. In order to deal with the fact that we can never fill this hole, we have psychic structures that are anchored with master signifiers; that is, concepts, ideas, and thoughts that provide us with a feeling of definiteness in the face of an indeterminate and confusing world. For instance, "God" for a Christian, or "nirvana" for a Buddhist, or "government" for a politician, or "the unconscious" for a psychoanalyst. A master signifier is simply the idea of something that defines who you are and what the world is and what relationship you're supposed to have to the Other. Lacan draws a distinction between the other (with a small o) and the Other (big O), where the little other is the model in our head of whomever we're talking to or thinking about, and the big Other is our model of other people and the world in general. We don't communicate directly to another person when we speak; we talk to the version of them that exists in our heads, and when we listen to another person, we harmonise them with that little model.

The Four Discourses themselves are essentially the structures that Lacan believes are available to us in communication. For him, there's four positions in any communication: the agent (who or what is speaking), the Other (who or what is being spoken to), the product (what the discourse is creating), and the "truth" (what is trying to be expressed). The split subject, the master signifier, "knowledge", and the objet petit a rotate through each of these positions in a fixed order, for reasons that are frankly somewhat inscrutable to me but which may just be trying to keep the list of discourses to a small and tidy number lol. The Four Discourses are the Discourse of the Master, the Discourse of the University, the Discourse of the Analyst, and the Discourse of the Hysteric; I'll be explaining them as we go along.

With that out of the way, firstly, Hanekawa's phrase corresponds to the Discourse of the Hysteric. This doesn't mean something inherently pathological; for Lacan, this is the mode of the majority of ordinary speech. It's defined by the question, "Who am I for the Other?" When Hanekawa says this phrase, she always says it to Araragi specifically. For her, Araragi is her primary anchor point, he's the one who provided an escape from her trauma and loneliness. So at first, her usage of the phrase is a sort of challenge: implicit in there is a demand, "Tell me something I don't know. Tell me who I am for you." But there's also an implicit defiance. The "truth" of the Discourse of the Hysteric is always the objet petit a, the desire that can never be satisfied. So when he does tell her, directly or indirectly, what she is for him—a love interest, a friend, an oddity—it doesn't satisfy her. Her arc in Nekomonogatari White is her "traversing the fantasy": not giving up on her desire of "finding something she doesn't know", but accepting that no single person or system can tell her who she is for her. She still poses the question to Araragi, but it is now a form of play for her. Araragi is no longer her master signifier; he's no longer the Other for her, just an other.

Gaen's phrase corresponds to the Discourse of the University: she is speaking as the representative of knowledge, of expertise, and this knowledge confers authority. She addresses the objet petit a itself; she views it as a problem to be dealt with in service of her master signifier of metaphysical balance. And what she is attempting to produce is an orderly world where people and oddities know their places. This causes some problems, of course. Lacan uses the concept of the Discourse of the University to critique modern institutions, specifically how they position themselves as neutral while still relying on unspoken master signifiers to define what their actual goals are, in the process trying to "smooth over" vital conflicts by reducing them to problems to be solved mechanically. Many of Gaen's more antagonistic moments can be seen as springing from this principle: she manipulates Araragi all throughout Second Season and sabotages his efforts to save everyone because she sees the troubles caused by oddities as administrative problems to be solved rather than as personal conflicts that have to be worked through. But it's also precisely this attitude that allows her to act to constrain Yozuru when she goes "too far", and to ultimately adjust to Araragi's solutions even when he defies her plans to implement them—whether Ougi is killed or simply pacified by Araragi's acceptance, for instance, the end result is that Ougi is no longer a threat and Araragi has passed her test.

Speaking of Ougi, their own phrase corresponds to the Discourse of the Analyst, but with a bit of a strange twist. The analyst is supposed to position themself as the objet petit a itself, frustrating the analysand's attempts to demand a meaning be imposed for them, and letting the analysand's own desires manifest so that they can gain a new understanding of themself. Ougi certainly confronts Araragi with his own desires, but they do so aggressively and with a lot of their own talking. There's an element of perversion there, where Ougi's entire purpose is to stage Araragi's desire on his behalf, not necessarily to get Araragi to come to terms with his desire (which is a proper analyst's goal for the analysand), but to get him to face them in some way regardless. What I find really beautiful though is how Araragi's final confrontation with Ougi enables both of them to traverse their fantasies: Ougi, by remaining in the position of the objet to the end, forces Araragi to question his own fixation on martyrdom and self-destruction and take responsibility for his own life, and Araragi, by explaining that his act of saving them was an extension of his desire to save himself, makes them come to the realisation that they do have desires for life of their own that they can no longer disavow.

You might notice that I've only covered three of the Four Discourses here; the Discourse of the Master, in which someone speaks as the master signifier imposing meaning on the Other while repressing the truth of their own "splitness", doesn't really correspond to any character's catchphrase. Lacan himself thought that the Discourse of the Master, the "because I said so" of kings and lords, was becoming "outmoded", replaced by the Discourse of the University, the "because I know better than you" of bureaucrats and managers. But this doesn't mean it doesn't show up in Monogatari. It shows up frequently in conflict with the other discourses—the vampires asserting their power as just a fact of the world, natural and unquestionable. But the most striking example is really Nadeko, once she becomes a snake god. She defines her newfound power as unassailable and absolute, surpassing any weaknesses she may have had before. Her will is inevitable; she may make allowances for the mortals she is now antagonising, but she ultimately decides who lives or dies. But, of course, Kaiki confronts her with her own repressed desires, and this leads to the collapse of her power and her acknowledgement of vulnerability, which causes her to return to the Discourse of the Hysteric and begin trying to figure out what she actually desires.

This is really not very comprehensive; there's a lot of stuff in Monogatari that fits curiously closely to a Lacanian analysis. Still, this is probably the most obvious example, and I hope it's interesting (and comprehensible haha) for everyone reading this.

👀

https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/129113098

I’m currently trying to get better at drawing, so I decided to try drawing some of my favorite girls from the series in my style

x: chocoloIita