Hanasakeru Seishounen Episode 4

Hi guys, it’s Menma.  I’m trying to catch up on some stuff while I’m in Canada, having giggleparties every night where we watch Star Trek and Doctor Who and Supernatural and shout homoerotic innuendo and roll and scream and make dumb photoshops and laugh until our lungs collapse.  When I’m not working hard on that I also have some free time, so I’m gonna try to get up to date on Hanasakeru Seishounen, at least.  Let’s talk about episode 4, “The Sun That Dawns on the Long Night”!

FAMILY DRAMAAAA

So…this episode was totally. fucking. CRAZY.  I really didn’t think Eugene was going to have issues worthy of his massive eyeroll-inducing metric fuckton of emo, but I was so wrong.  Boy be messed UP!  Let’s talk summary: Kajika has followed Eugene to France, but Eugene doesn’t want her around on the anniversary of his mother’s death, mostly because he’s planning to kill himself out of guilt for destroying her life and driving her to suicide (of course he didn’t, but we’ll let him play his tiny violin anyway).  His mother, Christine, was crazy because the Vorkan family drove her family into bankruptcy and blackmailed her into marrying Eugene’s “dad” (Auguste, the older Vorkan brother), being artificially inseminated with the sperm of Alan, the younger (and prettier and smarter and better-liked) Vorkan brother (who was a crazy hedonist who got in a car crash and ended up braindead), and bearing a pretty, but terrifying, baby (that’s Eugene), so she killed herself.  Are you with me?  Good!  Eugene is, understandably, horrified by his fucked up family, and wants to die because it’s only fair that he go through what his poor mother did.  Kajika stops him, he lurves her, Eugene’s dad cries, Li Ren drops a cactus.  Happy end!  For me saying some ruder and somewhat more comprehensible things, read on.

So Kajika has arrived at the Vorkan mansion or whatever outside Paris.  Eugene wants her to gtfo, but Kajika, proving herself to be both more of a jerk and more aware of her feminine wiles than I gave her credit for, goes and cries to Eugene’s older brother, who – all too eager to suck up to the daughter of an important dude like Daddo Harry – has her set up in a room and invites her to dinner.  Kajika immediately notices a portrait of a scary and hot lady, who is apparently Eugene’s terrifying grandmother, who gave her fugly son Auguste a ridiculous inferiority complex.  Eugene and his brother expound on how their dad’s dedication to his work and family is his true beauty and etc. etc. and it is all dumb and unnecessary but I guess it shows us that Eugene isn’t totally shallow, or maybe that he just finds round old guys with beards irresistable.  Then, Eugene makes a really evil face for no discernable reason.

MUAHAHAHA???

Eugene goes to try and drive Kajika away yet again, but she’s having none of it and goes into another long thing about Gibori or Ghiboli or whatever the name of her home island is and their beliefs about souls and words and how she doesn’t lie because that makes demons come out of your butt or something and therefore she really really loves Eugene who is also Mustafa!  Look, we get it, you’d really like him to wear cat ears in bed.

Eugene is surprisingly touched by this speech and makes a sad face, presumably because he has his suicideduties to attend to and cannot open his heart to this purehearted and mentally unstable fourteen-year-old sex stalker.  He emoes a little about how her voice was the only thing to touch him in his vast, vast span of nineteen years (I love how that’s like forevar in anime terms, by the way.  In animeland, you’ve got it all figured out by fourteen, and by nineteen, you’re practically at the end of your life anyway, so why not off yourself in a weird incestuous gesture of love towards your dead crazy mom?), then asks her not to come to dinner.  Kajika is left alone to think, brilliantly, “Eugene is acting strange!”  Hurfle durf oh Kajika.

Butler Orbach, however, who has seen from the start that Kajika is a hugenormous Mary Sue and therefore can magically fix everyone else’s family problems, comes in to invite her and Toranosuke to take a brief tour through the Vorkan family’s disturbing, twisted history!  What better way to really get to understand the emotional unavailablity of your catboi fuckprey?  Come on Toranosuke, let’s go!

So Orbach explains, by showing Kajika a series of very creepy portraits, that Eugene’s mom killed herself by walking out of a third-story window the day before her twentieth birthday.  It all started with Eugene’s grandmother, who married into the Vorkans for politics or business or something and wasn’t very happy with being married to Fugly McFugmeister, and so took a disturbing degree of comfort in the prettiness of her younger son, Alan.  Alan grew up horrifically spoiled, of course, and since he was the younger son and couldn’t inherit the business, ran around being an asshole and a tool until he got into a car crash and turned into a vegetable.  Eugene, though, is even more beautiful than Alan, as Auguste says proudly and more than a little creepily.

Must we do this every day, father?

Meanwhile, at dinner, Eugene’s brothers get all matchmaker on him over Kajika.  Eugene – wearing black and purple with his hair slicked down on one side only and clearly far too fashionable for me to get – tells his brothers not to bother, because he’s going to be nineteen forever, just like his mom.  Then he knocks over a glass of wine, just in case the suicide subtext wasn’t obvious enough.  What a little bitch!  Then, as Kajika and Toranosuke listen with impressive subtlety from outside the door, Eugene drops a bomb on his poor uninvolved brothers, who really don’t deserve all this shit: his dad was actually Alan.  Zomg!!!

Here’s the deal.  After Alan was declared a vegetable and their mom flipped a shit about not being able to expect any pretty grandkids, Auguste came to the interesting conclusion that the way to take revenge on his jackass brother and mom was to HARVEST ALAN’S SPERM FROM HIS BRAINDEAD BODY, PUT IT INTO THE BODY OF PRETTY CHRISTINE-FROM-NEXT-DOOR WHO’S ACTUALLY ALSO A DISTANT RELATIVE, AND HAVE THE ULTIMATE BABY THAT WAY.  Uh, good work, guy!  That’ll show her!  What the fuck?

Christine was a delicate girl, only eighteen when she got a dead stranger’s baby stuck in her, and apparently hadn’t had much in the way of sex ed, because the experience of being forced into marriage and then a virgin pregnancy scared her off the deep end, and she killed herself not long after Eugene was born.  As a kid, Eugene found her diary, a terrified, near-incomprehensible account of how Auguste set his sights on her, drove her family into bankruptcy so she’d have to marry him, impregnated her with Alan’s sperm, and kept her locked up like an animal as he waited to reap his perfect Alanbebe.  And that is why Eugene is broken in the brain.  I actually am totally convinced that that is an experience that could result in Eugene’s unmeasurable levels of sadsack!

Feeling some actual sympathy here!

So….wow!  I honestly did not think this series could surprise me, but here I am, blown away by the sheer twistedness of this plot.  Well played, Hanasakeru Seishounen!  Also, apparently Christine’s pregnancy lasted ten months.  Anyone remember Hart’s Hope?  Anyhow, Eugene confronts his father for his fairly horrific crime(s),  and tells him that it’s his duty to kill Eugene – Eugene, whose existence was terror embodied for Christine – so that he will never have the twentieth birthday that his mother was denied.  Her screams, which he should never have been able to hear, won’t leave his head; he weeps as he hands his father a gun so that he, the abomination that never should have been, can be erased.  He begs Auguste to release him, and it’s really very sad and awful and I can’t say anything funny about it.  Auguste falls to the floor, crawls to Eugene; clinging to his son’s legs, he cries for his forgiveness, for Alan’s forgiveness, for Christine’s, who he really did sort of love.  Eugene dashes out of the room; Kajika takes the gun, and follows him.

Eugene, at that same third-floor window, sees himself in the glass – his young mother’s frightened, suffering shape.  Behind him, Kajika calls out his name, and shoots out the window, shattering the image.  She tells him that she’s killed the Eugene who always wanted to die, so now the Eugene that’s left can live.  And then she drops the gun like a fuckin’ pro!  Kajika really does have some unusual skills.  Did she learn that on her isolated Caribbean island, too?  Then she says, “Come, Mustafa!” and, shedding huge round shoujo tears, embraces the shellshocked Eugene, who finally hugs her back, and cries and cries.

Oh, man. She's finally worn him down.

And then they sleep together!  No no, it’s okay guys, it’s just in a normal, nonsexual, girl-and-her-giant-maneating-cat kind of way!  Kajika has decided that she loves Eugene, but it’s the kind of love she had for Mustafa, so she’s not going to make a decision about who to marry yet, but she is going to keep sleeping with Eugene.  TOTALLY NORMAL Anyway, in the morning, Eugene’s soul has evidently been healed by their night of intense cuddling, because he’s back to being obnoxious again, especially to Li Ren, who has come to collect Kajika (who gets a lecture on chastity from Toranosuke, lolz).  Oh yeah, and Auguste is eternally indebted to Supar Magical Kajika-sama, who has fixed everything and absolved him of his sins by breaking his windows and having some not!sexytime with his traumatized son.  There’s a dumb scene where she tells him how much Eugene loves-not-hates him, and he confesses that he really did love Christine and as soon as they got married he fell in love with her and forgot all about his fucked up revenge plan (conveniently, he forgot all about it only after he put his dead brother’s baby in her), but she was scared of him for some stupid womanly reason and he started to hate her as much as he hated his mother.  Y’know, with love.  Anyway, he cries and calls Kajika an angel of forgiveness (seriously), she smiles patronizingly like she does, and everything is good in the world.  Except for Li Ren, whose brain breaks when he finds out Kajika and Eugene slept together.

you let him put his WHAT in your WHERE

Next episode, we get to meet the brown dude who apparently is the center of the main story!  I guess I’m excited.  I’m actually kind of tired from having my mouth hang open for at least half of this episode.  See you next time :O

-Menma

5 Comments

• 

  By tekky99, August 13, 2009 @ 11:33 am

  haha, oh wow. Is the story supposed to be taken seriously? It’s more soapy than soap.

• 

  By menma, August 13, 2009 @ 11:57 am

  Yes, this story is srs bsns

• 

  By eNamorD, August 13, 2009 @ 12:06 pm

  L
  O
  L

• 

  By Patches, August 13, 2009 @ 12:16 pm

  AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Wow.

  Good to hear you again. You make me lulz.

• 

  By menma, August 13, 2009 @ 12:17 pm

  Yay hi Patches

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