You Are What You Eat, and the Menu is Evil – Earth Maiden Arjuna Spoiler Review

If you’ve been around the blog a little, you might have an inkling of how I feel about message fiction.

Now, I’m no enemy of messages in fiction. Some of the true all-time greats in anime, as well as genre fiction in general have had, if not a dedicated message they were trying to get out, at least a distinctly message-like slant to their existences. These are pieces that know the best way to convey the message is to let the fiction shine, delivering a compelling story with interesting characters colored by the lens through which the world is seen in order to communicate on a deep level. In some cases you might not even realize you’re looking at message fiction until you find yourself introspecting on the topics of what you just watched or read.

But then you get the other and all too common sort of message fiction, that sees the fiction as the vehicle for the message, that treats the viewing experience as a school lecture, and the author is the “teacher” attempting to hammer some lesson home to students because it will be on the final exam. These can come in many forms from the obnoxiously preachy to the hopelessly saccharine to the “scare ’em straight” comical absolutism of hellfire preachers and those annoying D.A.R.E. rallies that most Americans my age had to sit through.

I don’t hate message fiction absolutely. But I do hate when the message decides to stretch the fiction on the rack until its limbs look like something Junji Ito would have night terrors of, ties the writhing and tormented fiction into knots to hold millstones of judgmental morality in place, rides the fiction and its millstones down a hill of broken Aesop summations like some stone-wheeled go-kart, and cheers at its first place finish over a field of inanimate straw men while the tortured fiction unmercifully expires beneath the weight of the message’s arrogant grandstanding. When message fiction is bad, it’s pretty much the worst, and it doesn’t matter what the message actually is.

Earth Maiden Arjuna (sometimes simply called “Arjuna” in its western localization) is a little slice of environmentalist message fiction from 2001. If the name Arjuna sounds familiar, that might be because it comes from the Mahabharata, one of the greatest and most influential epics of world literature. In that work, Arjuna is a prince of the Pandavas and disciple of Krishna. He is a warrior of astounding skill (most often depicted with bow and arrow) and usually great virtue. I guess I’m left to wonder if any of that will bear out here. Arjuna is a show that was pretty well known and well-regarded when I was first really becoming aware of anime, but that unlike some of the standouts of that era has kind of fallen off the map. Should it be remembered at a level even fractionally approximating its mythical namesake, or does it deserve to be reduced, recycled, and pray-to-Haruhi not reused?

So, we start with an intro where main character Juna Ariyoshi explains that she died one summer day, resulting in a glimpse of the fate of Earth…

Oddly, we actually start a bit earlier, seeing her fail at archery, hang out with her annoying seemingly comic relief boyfriend Tokio, and then get dead in a motorcycle accident that seemed to happen due to a mystical something-or-other. We then see her (near) death experience where, pulled beyond the world and soaring into presumable oblivion, she’s contacted by a being known as Chris, who dubs her the Avatar of Time and says he can restore her life, if she will take up the burden of that title and fight the worm-like (or, really, Dhole-like) demons of calamity known as the Raaja, which will otherwise end all life on Earth. Little request there, really minor, just defeat planet-killing monstrosities of unknown number and scale and usher in a new age.

Naturally, Arjuna accepts for reasons of not wanting to die and leave her boyfriend and family behind, resulting in her waking up from seeming death completely fine and sprinting off to leave her boyfriend and family behind and catch helicopter where Chris (in the physical world a wheelchair-bound little boy) and his attendant explain that from now on she’ll be working with their organization, S.E.E.D.. He also gives her a mystic magatama that fuses with her forehead as they race off to a nuclear reactor that shortly comes under attack by a Raaja. Juna, at first, fails to power up, but pulling Tokio into the danger gets her to awaken as the Avatar and have an esoteric and really beautiful transformation scene into, I’m not gonna lie, a kind of dopey Captain Planet Magical Girl form.

It’s unique, and we do find out that normals can see neither her transformation nor the Raaja, meaning that even when she’s drawing her holy bow to hopefully strike down evil, we can be treated to normal Juna from some perspectives. In any case, she tries to fight and even manages to summon her giant planet defender, Ashura, which surprises her mentors. It’s far from sunshine and roses, though, as Juna is consumed by fear like a sane person, thinks that being told to fight and purge means fighting, and takes several slaps, talking to, and a second episode to really step up and defeat the worm and prevent this from being a prequel to Coppelion.

When she does, she comes to understand it, seeing the monster as an amalgamation of rage and pain created by the damage humans have done to the planet, in this case seemingly coming for the reactor due to being born from the dumping of nuclear waste (as well as more generic people bad planet dying imagery).

Juna’s qualified success leads Chris to declare she needs to go purify herself, so she’s immediately dropped off in the mountains to survive with nothing but the clothes on her back. Tokio rightly, if annoyingly, calls them out and gets pretty much told off by Chris’s attendant, sometimes relaying Chris’s words and sometimes adding her own. At least she’s less of a pain to him than she is to Juna, and he’s dropped off in the city, where he tries to figure out where they dumped Juna so he can go and find her.

For Juna, somewhere between the hunger, injuries, near-death experiences, and some mushrooms she blindly tries to stuff her face with, she has a very pretty-seeming spiritual experience that seems to please Chris and company, who are monitoring from their helicopter. It’s just in the nick of time too, as some trash dump in the forest seems to have attracted or spawned another Raaja to threaten Tokio, who had done a good little slice of detective work to get close to her.

Juna fights, Chris astral projects to not explain his objection to killing despite the whole deal of her role, the Raaja is defeated, and the couple plays us out with a melancholy little dialogue about the improper handling of toxic waste at the polluting dump.

Still lost, they end up finding their way to a crazy old man who gets super preachy about his natural farming, by which not doing anything to tend fields – no weeding, tilling, or anything of the sort – magically produces results. Juna also keeps going on her psychadelic little trips of absorbing the show’s philosophy. This time since we’ve done “Nuclear power is evil” and “Toxic dumping is evil”, we get “Farming is evil” with a nice big preachy speech at the end about how soil shouldn’t be tilled or fertilizer used. Compared to the last couple scenarios, the moralizing is much more direct and ham-fisted.

On returning to civilization (which seems to be starting to sour to Juna) the two meet up with their friend, Sayuri. The two fall sick, Tokio after eating city food and Juna when trying to help him, getting us a Fantastic Voyage plot where Juna fights microscopic Raaja inside their bodies. Which, since modern medicine is evil in this can only be cured via umbilical cord voodoo and bacteria magic. It’s a pretty weird sequence, but by this point I suppose I should be used to Arjuna being weird setups for heavy and misanthropic moralizing, with a slight trace of that all-important vague talk.

The next episode starts us off with the SEED authorities talking among themselves about how trade is evil as our topic for the day, which means you know that things aren’t going to go well with Juna meeting her estranged father when he talks about being in shipbuilding. She’s not really ready to forgive him anyway, and their interaction is mercifully very human and focused on the characters in question.

Shockingly, the Raaja of the episode is unrelated. I guess we have more things to learn are evil. What is it this time? Math. Or at least school. Juna has a magic autism overstimulation attack at the scritch-scritch of pencils taking notes as their boring teacher reads from a textbook, getting more of those creepy hallucinations of how bad Man is, this time focused on factory farming and Skinner boxes, only to notice that sensei is spewing Raaja from his mouth.

She fights a possessed school building to no avail, gets lectured again in broad and uncertain terms that you’re just supposed to be enlightened enough to get a conclusion from via Chris’s obnoxious astral projection, and then we… just sort of move on. You know, in the first couple episodes the Raaja were these giant calamity worms, that might have been invisible to normals but still very much existed in physical space and interacted with matter in a way consistent with physics, resulting in some real drama to, say, the showdown at the nuclear power plant. Here, an entire building dodges and weaves like Gumby and then appears to crash down on Juna, only none of it is real. Maybe she’s hallucinating, like she did when believing a pesticide spraying plane was a Raaja, but Chris goes ahead and does his impression of Navi (if all Navi could say is “Shame on you!”) so there’s presumably something going on.

I was prepared to take the microscopic gut Raaja, since while a different manifestation than the big ones they still seemed to exist in this world, but as of this one I think that as we add to the list of things that are evil at a rate of about a topic an episode, we can also add “consistency” to the list of things sacrificed on the altar of getting that message across.

Anyway, the possessed teacher turns out to be a run-down mouthpiece for the show when we meet him outside school, Juna hears him out, and we find out that math is good because it exists in nature while education is evil because it makes things easier for people.

I’ll be honest, I really don’t want to have to do highly detailed summaries of every lesson of the week, in part because I don’t want to make this about the message and in part because that’s just pointless micromanaging. By this point, we’ve seen the path that Earth Maiden Arjuna is treading, so in the interest of making this somewhat easier on both myself and you, the reader, I’m going to try to hurry along to somewhere there’s actual plot motion.

So, we get through the evils of words (in which Juna seems to start really understanding Chris, and rifts grow between her and Tokio in part thanks to Sayuri seeming like a romantic third wheel), a pretty strong episode that’s mostly about Juna dealing with her strained relationships (including Sayuri increasingly becoming a love triangle contender, even as she seems conflicted and Tokio oblivious to a fault), the evils of abortion (strangely with more work on Juna’s interpersonal relations and broken family as opposed to heavy moralizing, if with a bit much leaning on the magic primitivism), and the evils of genetic engineering (good in that they took a swing at Tokio’s broken family and did more work with his relationship with Juna, kind of weird in that they picked on efforts to clean up humanity’s messes). This actually brings us more or less to our endgame plot.

You see, in the chaos of the Raaja attack on the genetics lab where Tokio’s father worked, some of their transgenic petrochemical-eating bacteria got out and into the sewers rather than being locked down and frozen. Since these things are made by science they are, of course, evil, and begin to multiply, grow, and mutate out in the water over the course of the next episode. It’s basically the opening bit of Godzilla versus Hedorah (or Godzilla versus Destroyah for that matter), but purely anthropogenic in a much preachier production. And yes, I would much rather be watching either of those Godzilla movies right now, but I’d much rather be watching Tokyo Mew Mew right now so that’s not saying a lot.

While this is building, Juna is off in America for important Raaja-fighting work, which she told none of her friends, essentially just disappearing. She also hangs out with the angry lady from SEED so we can get a pointless bit about how said angry lady, who has never really rated in this show, is actually an XY female (it’s a thing), or in her words “actually male”, and blames evil medicine that was supposedly made from garbage for some reason for this bizarre state. I think the less I say about this the better. Meanwhile in Japan, Sayuri tries to put the moves on Tokio by bringing him to her place for a good ol’ family meal, Cindy is given a break from her attendant duties (not that she wants one), and that evil bacteria starts doing evil things, rampaging uncontrollably as Chris declares that “It’s begun.”

This brings us to the penultimate episode, ominously titled “The Death of a Nation”. In it, the bacteria (identified as having become Raaja) emerge and do evil things, as well as consuming everything made of petrochemicals, wiping out Japan’s infrastructure overnight while also doing things like causing Sayuri’s dad to burn to death in a sealed car, just for kicks apparently.

Not that this wouldn’t be a disaster, but it’s kind of funny when clothing and a metal watch are among items we see decompose. I get that synthetic fibers could count, but I have no idea why the watch melted, and at some point “petrochemicals” becomes “Hydrocarbons” and starts to include basically all life if we keep extending. I guess some of this, like the bodies of vehicles and obvious glass components, might be less petrochemical-eating and more just Raaja attacks. It’s all played surprisingly for pathos given that the show has basically been going on for ages about how just about everything being destroyed was evil and needed to go.

Buildings seems to stay standing, but everything else is not safe, either put in check by the bacteria or the fallout from everything else they’ve spilled. All except SEED’s base, which is protected by a magic forcefield. And where is Juna through this crisis? Unconscious in America from sheer psychic terror or something like that until about day eleven. Once she gets caught up she confronts SEED’s board room of shady suit folk, who are all set to cut Japan loose in order to save the rest of modern society. I guess they’re not all on the same preachy page. Juna gets mad and causes an incident, Chris astral projects just to call her awful, blame her for everything, and seemingly take the side of the suits, and Juna takes off for home anyway.

There, she fights a never-ending stream of Raaja until she runs into Chris, who gives her one last pretentious monologue, in the process revealing that he is the true Raaja, here to destroy humanity who are destroying themselves so really this is their fault or what have you. Juna manages to actually reject this, but gets a good reason to not just fill his ultimate monster form full of arrows since that would release world-destroying Raaja power from his body to wipe out all mankind and possibly all life on Earth.

Of course, he’s going to do that anyway with his ultimate monster form, but it’s important to find a solution that works.

Mission Control has a way, bottling up Chris and all the Raaja in Japan by messing with ley lines. But this would utterly disintegrate all matter in Japan on the subatomic level, so not ideal. Juna runs off, finding Tokio and Sayuri just after Tokio manages to use his basic five senses to find some berries in the forest to feed (and save) the dying Sayuri.

The realization that some humans are capable of learning how to survive in the wilderness galvanizes Juna to have an epiphany that there’s no difference between individuals or parts of the world (pretty much the only bit in this show that touches on philosophies native to India) and that because of that she’s as good as Chris and can deal with the Raaja by just sort of accepting it.

She goes ahead and does this, Chris… seems to maybe be healed since he can say Cindy’s name with his real voice rather than telepathy but also maybe be dead, Juna loses her voice, and it turns out that dead purified Japan-wrecking Raaja are edible so I guess that’s good news for the survivors as there was a lot of worm monster to go around.

And that is… hopefully what Juna Ariyoshi saw, higher than Brahma on morphine while doctors with actual medicine put her back together again from actual motorcycle accident injuries rather than “Magically dead but also not a scratch on her” ones. It’s the end of the show at any rate.

Let’s talk about the characters. I’ll start with the easy ones. Tokio is annoying because he’s meant to be annoying. He’s the representation of a normal member of modern society – aka, the audience – in a bit of environmental message fiction that goes pretty hard on primitivist sympathies. For a “this jerkface is you” character, he could be worse. After all, he at least tries to be a good and attentive boyfriend, listening to Juna even when he gets it 0% and can find some of what she has to bear annoying without knowledge. Sure, it still reflects kind of badly on him in a lot of scenes, but it’s at least human. I feel like the thing with Sayuri was in part to make him come off a bit worse, since while he might not have meant to two-time Juna there was certainly this wavering element. Then again, he’s sort of the vehicle for Juna’s ultimate epiphany, so maybe he wasn’t meant to be too bad.

Sayuri herself is a kind of interesting character, in that she’s mostly a good girl who even starts out trying to help mend rifts between Juna and Tokio, only to sort of turn when she sees how many there are and how deep they can be in the face of what she wants for herself. She’s not really depicted as evil, not for the most part, and that’s despite her archetype essentially being “treacherous friend”. But then, she’s also very tertiary, acting as essentially the least notable character I’ll call out.

If Tokio is annoying for all the reasons the show intends, Chris is annoying for all the reasons the show doesn’t intend. He is the smug spiritualist hippie who is depicted as all-knowing and always-right in his dogmatic moralizing, afforded by the author total moral superiority even when he’s throwing a teenage girl to the wolves and communicating badly only to pawn off failures to understand his heavy-handed declarations as the other party being insufficiently enlightened.

Juna… I actually like. I have my issues with this show; they are plentiful on just about every level, but to give credit where it’s due, she’s a good example of an archetype that’s hard to do well: The unknowing newbie being thrust into the role of the most special person of all. Sure, a lot of characters have that in their creative DNA, but usually the good ones are focused more on other things rather than just adapting to their circumstances, and will bleed away the “out of my element” traits rather quickly. The arc in Earth Maiden Arjuna, because it’s so determined to hammer lessons in, needs Juna to instead take the role of the character who is the outsider learner for a majority of the show’s running time. Of course, she starts to succumb to the cult that pushed her into a leonine arrangement, works to sever her from her friends and family at every turn, and berates her constantly for not having picked up their absolute ideological purity, but that’s part in parcel with her arc. Even as she gives into the “meant to be good but come off as overbearingly pompous” mentors of Chris and SEED, she does it through experiences, mushroom-spawned hallucinations or no, that feel like they would give her this religious-esque experience.

Strangely, I came around on Cindy Klein, Chris’s attendant with a crush. She’s deep in the magic side of this show and she can have a very abrasive manner, but she actually got a lot of scenes that were more about her personal experiences, inner world, and insight into what Juna might be going through as a person. In being less perfect than Chris, she’s worlds more personable, so that even when she’s going through traumas that are based around some extreme or even weird mystical stuff you can relate to her.

Now, in terms of the story and presentation… well, this show lost all my goodwill and then some in the first two thirds, but did kind of bring it back around with a strong ending. Basically everything that comes after the “Words are evil” episode (the episodes, for the most part, that I glossed over) is legitimately stronger and more human, actually developing characters and relating the issue of the week to what they’re going through with some technical and emotional nuance. Don’t get it twisted, the show lets the message trample the fiction with impunity for way too long and even after that break point remains as preachy as your average door-to-door religious zealot, even giving us the best summation of its take in a single screencap during this latter phase.

But if the entire show had been as solid as its ending arc, it could have been not just tolerable but actually kind of good. In a way, it reminds me of Revisions, a show that spent more than half it’s running time pushing me past my boiling point with one of the most obnoxious leads in anime only to do enough good material at the end that I was left hoping for a continuation even as I sent its grade to the dumpster.

And… that basically tells you what I’m going to have to do with Earth Maiden Arjuna. There are few shows that I’ve struggled so legitimately to get through. And you might say, “But it’s about a hard message, it’s not supposed to be light or enjoyable.” And sure. But as message fiction, it’s not just message. It has fiction and as I said at the start the fiction has to stand proud, including giving me a reason, whether compelling characters or interesting setups, to keep watching, especially if it’s also going to be unpleasant.

So for all that, here and now I’m going to offer Earth Maiden Arjuna a D. It may not seem like much, but that’s a whole letter grade higher than where it was angling at the halfway point so I think I’m being plenty generous. My recommendation? Skip it. Go read Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, it’s an absolute masterpiece. Or go watch Tokyo Mew Mew New, which was at least silly fun. Let Arjuna rest.

Post-Script: About the Message

I wanted to save this for after the main review for a reason. My thesis going in is that when message fiction is bad, it really doesn’t matter what the message is, whether you agree with it or not, and when it’s good it can be good despite the message being potentially… uncomfortable. Good writing or bad isn’t predicated on ideology; it’s possible to find compelling characters in support of political or philosophical stances you hate and even more likely to meet poor representations of ones you like. So, I wanted to tackle Earth Maiden Arjuna without resorting overmuch to critiquing the message rather than the fiction.

However, Haruhi as my witness, I am not letting this show get away without also taking on its message content as a post-script.

The reason for this is that Earth Maiden Arjuna appears, on the surface, to fall into a trap that a lot of… less than stellar Environmental message fiction falls into: Man is evil, everything not-Man is good, and Nature is a magical force that is not just morally but technically superior to artifice.

A lot of times, this is an artifact of attempting to dramatize a real issue with complicated layers of interest in a fantasy context. We know a lot of ecosphere damage results from technology, and having a tech faction versus a nature faction is a solid aesthetic, so it’s only natural to cast science and industry as the baddies, meaning that environmental messages have often gone hand in hand with reactionary ones that are likely sometimes unintended. It’s easy to make smoke-spewing factories look evil, and harder to balance that against clean energy and responsible utilization than against, simply “Trees good”.

We romanticize nature in media a lot, often forgetting that life for most organisms is a brutal struggle for survival. In trying to write so that the viewer wants to preserve nature, writers fall into the trap of setting humans apart from a harmonious cycle rather than acknowledging that just about every species on this planet (at least the animal species) will take over to the point of destroying itself if it gets the chance to transcend the arms race. You could make a case study of just about any invasive species, but the fate of the reindeer population introduced to St. Matthew Island is an especially pointed refutation of Agent Smith’s speech in The Matrix about how humans are uniquely awful and everything else “instinctively” finds balance.

The thing is, more than most of its competitors, I think Earth Maiden Arjuna really means its outright primitivist take. Where other media might not realize that its agrarian pastoral idyll would imply an overwhelmingly massive human die-back and subsequent drastic reduction of living standards and life expectancy in those who remain without the infrastructure that supports things like dietary diversity and modern medicine, I think Earth Maiden Arjuna knows that and is 100% on board with writing off the last two to three hundred years of human progress, and the greater portion of the planet’s human population along with it.

I won’t say that I’ve never seen a show quite this relentlessly negative about the human condition – I’ve seen Texhnolyze and Neon Genesis Evangelion to name just a couple, clear products of either massive depression or an overwhelmingly bleak outlook on the world – but it’s rare, and always a little disturbing when you realize you’re engaging with a a mind on the other end of the creative process that would see an apocalyptic scenario as an unabashedly good thing. I didn’t need to know what Ted Kaczynski’s favorite anime would be but now I’m stuck with an inkling that Earth Maiden Arjuna would at least be up there.

This gives Earth Maiden Arjuna… a certain creep factor you don’t see in its competitors. Eureka Seven had a lot to say about trying to live in harmony with a living world rather than seeking a destructive path, but wasn’t whispering “destroy all humans” under its breath. The manga version of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind projects a pretty bleak future for its humanity, but the final acts are made with the hope that there will be another way, rather than with that bleakness as a desirable end unto itself.

Because of this, as hard to watch as Earth Maiden Arjuna is just for its preachy and self-important aspects, there’s another layer here to be a turn-off, at least if you’re not of the same mind and do pick up on it, both things that I think will be pretty common with a lot of viewers.

Now, like a lot of things, this starts to level out later in the show. I was legitimately shocked that our SEED moralizers weren’t outright celebrating the shattering of the foundation of modern civilization, but I guess even this show couldn’t stay that totally twisted. I mean, it does kind of come back to that with the ending where the Raaja are a force of renewal so all’s going to be fine, but that’s kind of at the level where a lot of works that blend in supernatural elements with their environmentalist messages get, and would read as nothing more than trying to get a happy ending after so much bad had happened if not for the relentless misanthropy of the first half.

I’m not opposed to environmental messages. In fact, while media has had some trouble getting either laughable or just plain bizarre outings, if there’s a theme that’s begging to be worked with, saving the planet is kind of it. But Earth Maiden Arjuna mixes a poisoned outlook with childish misconceptions of both nature and human civilization, meaning it comes up at best deeply troubled.