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Murder Princess, one of the mid thousands anime produced out of the anime studio formerly known as Bee Train found its way to my eyes though a cleverly placed plug in the back of a favorite Broccoli Books manga. Its formula could mostly be summed up as an edgy then, blood splatter, chest piercing, slice & dice seinen yuri. And so appears deceptively common until it lays claim to a unique element in the way it deploys its rendition of the Freaky Friday gimmick as the princess falls off a cliff with a bounty hunter.
A little backstory for that is probably forthcoming. Princess Alita is next in line for the throne plus some complications. When a coup is initiated to overthrow her kingdom. With her father injured and dying she is sent through the never would have guessed it hidden passage in the throne room to make her escape. Following her egress through the forest surrounding the castle she runs headlong into bounty hunter Faris and they take the dive.
On the way down they are engulfed in light, marking an exchange of bodies. Thereby producing conditions in which the princess’s wish that her kingdom be saved can be fulfilled. With the given promise of Alita’s life “her everything” in exchange for saving the land from the coup, Faris (now possessing the princess), her skeletal and Frankenstein’s Monster-esque compatriots descend upon the capitol. The newly embodied Princess defeats the rebel’s dolls fueled by lost technology* ,Teoria, from when humanity had fused science and art, controlled spaces and time and throws the usurper from her throne. Their victory being followed by the unfortunate meeting with what in Alita’s absence has become of royal advisor Jodo’s granddaughter. She who had taken place as Alita’s imposter is now a corpse to be wailed over. & Altia (now Faris) assumes her identity, serving as the princess’s closest servant* for the rest of the OVA.
Of interest here, beyond the body switching gimmick, or more specifically, within it; is the nature of the obscured romance between Alita (Faris) and Mirano (Alita). Their relation, never stated or acted on explicitly, becomes more than evident throughout the run of the series. These circumstances, a literal exchange of selves, set the stage and tone for their relationship and in many ways the experience of love itself.
A frightful meeting leads through the height of a fall to the awakening of their new state. Faris first, distraught, is quickly recognised by her associates. Alita, not quite Mirano, remains unconscious when the forest monster who consumed her escort party arrives in pursuant on elimination of the tresspasses the remaining member. (Alita) newly embodied Faris engages it, and with a little coaxing is able to get the just-entering-consciousness inhabitant of her previous vessel to toss her her guardless Katana with which she swiftly slays it. An awakened into battle former princess describes the experience “its like I'm watching myself fighting inside a dream. At the time I thought …. I was fighting with such deep intense emotion.”
The subsequent events begin in the Cyndia Area 672, the 4th month of Jade. A dating made relevant in establishing a setting of medieval fantasy aesthetic. One which is, perhaps, surprisingly adept at displaying this subject, love. Being enchanted by a peculiar untimeliness associated with the transitions of the period from which it draws, a period of a very particular loss, and so poised for its re-birth. The death of dominance by the irrational, artistic, aesthetic mode of cultural development, the death of the mythic sensibility and its subsequent subsumption by the technologic, the scientific. The moment when the theo is forever separated from the logical. & so it is that fantasy tales most often harken back to this last time when the attitudes being summoned forth were predominantly culturally believable. & it is for this reason that in his essay “the Sorcerer's Apprentice” Bataille laments the loss of this sense, ushering forth love as the only place it has been able to remain alive in current times.
“The meaning of love is determined in legends that illustrate the destiny of lovers in everyone's mind.”⁰
Bataille says of love, what for him makes its experience spectacular, is that it inspires, it possesses, in a way that demands it be made real with a resounding force which is hardly ignorable. This is its connection with the mythic, that it is something that has a pull towards its emergence. It is something not yet real that drives its creation; Legends of love that exist in illustration of its depth, its highs and lows. The invigoration of experience that brings one to live as flame, to move completely unreservedly in a way that does not, that is in all possibility actively against, the assurance of more or better tomorrows. Acting and being that daftly escapes the rational. Emotional excesses which demand to be lived even if only self allowedly on the sly. Feeling and meaning so palpable it could not occur to seek anything beyond its self evidence, these fruits so worthy of pursuit. Movement which creates a new world, its own, outside the concerns of those commonly considered to be real, even if it only exists between its participants.
Though in the beginning the beloved appears on the horizon engulfed in a dream, the world thus created is no less real than the hollower which has lost its place. New worlds can only be created by multiple people, and only those so maddened by isolation cannot dissuade themselves from trying alone. This new world is gifted description by Firestone: the enrichment of the self through the gain of a new window on the world. The height of selfishness in process, a demand to absorb another being in their entirety, to enter into an unreserved exchange of selves. & like Bataille she finds love to be a force which throws itself against reality, its rationalized requirements and economic considerations. “... women cant afford the luxury of spontaneous love.”¹ Denied the chance at this powerful will to be at the hands of a debilitating idolization in an ever evolving hold over from the Chivalrous, she hands to art the task of imagining a new forms and shapes of love that would do away with the constraints which cause its pursuit so often to be disillusioning. It is art, she says, that makes what we call humanity a creature of time, able to imagine what is not, and thus change reality. Here Bataille draws a distinction between Art and Myth, one which hinges on art placed in the restraints of the memetic. Meant to be a reflection or a recreation of what is, it can never change anything. Myth, however, is driven, driving, and demands action be taken on its part; & only those surrounding love, the emotional tales embodying it, survive today with the same force and heat that so much once had. To breathe truth anew into legends where they begin to flounder, truths appropriate for the times we occupy.
“The exaltation of women and love, which is today the basis of our moral wealth, does not only originate from the legends of Chivalry but from women’s role in magic.”²
The seduction of Witches, largely the seduction of Evil, is what ties them to love so readily in outminds; its ability to possess and become the pivotal concern around which actions are taken. A concern with the capacity to eclipse essentially any other. Historically, it can be unsurprising then, that the submergence of the sense of which this remains the only hold over, its subsumption by the scientific in the rising of the renessancian reasoned rationalist, is paired with an equally violent action against the social embodiment of that which was displaced; that is, its co-occurrence with the witch trials."For one warlock, ten thousand witches…" Torture, the tongs and flames awaited them.³ A quote which calls to be read not just as the hatred of the church for abominable and uncontrolled dark natures the feminine inspires, but also the quantitative lack of males that could qualify as seducer.
Speaking to this Bataille summons forth La Sorcire⁴ by Michelet to illustrate these tendencies. Of almost primary concern in his discussion is the remedy of the misconstrual of the Witch as agent of good through a simplistic inversion. An act which Michelete justifies by correctly identifying her under the oppressive heel of society at large. No doubt the rites of the witches, the Black Mass etc. are the bastardized pagan traditions of a conquered people brought through to an air of survival in a perverse rendition as a chimeric christian mythos. Satyrical Satan, a resounding echo of the Bacchet’s frenzied Dynionisus. But in Mitchettes attempts to grant her a deserved justice in post-hoc treatment, where he ascribes evil to the side of the executioner, he has unjustly given her a tie to the utilitarian; and in so doing robbed her of her rightful entitlement to Evil and all the psychic flavourings its associations guarantee. Seduction, malifice, neither could be ascribed to utility. They rest as its resistance, exist in opposition. ...the evil which goes against our own interests and which is brought about by a passionate desire for liberty⁵ Actions which could never be construed as benefiting our own survival escape the orbit of an avoidance of death which characterizes conceptions of the good; these which play the constricting and controlling role at most times in a life. If human life did not contain this violent instinct, we could dispose with the arts⁶ An instinct which endlessly seeks after moments of intensity, intensities which love embodies and makes us helpless in its presence. Love which casts a spell igniting a flame in a space, another world, impenetrable by the common and mundane causes that direct action in the world outside it, so possessed are we as objects of this new realm.
In a similar way we come to be possessed by ... the horror of the Sabbaths…⁷ Certainly many of the accounts from which we pull their descriptions are inaccurate.⁸ The subject's confessions pulled from them under exhaustion and duress; a trajectory from recorded witchcraft become hysteria which Haxxan deftly plots. But even if the traditional accounts were to some extent imaginary, they have certain things in common with the true facts: they had the significanctive value of a myth or a dream.⁹ The malifice practiced in these spaces cuts in a way so as to expose the blunting of the expression of a nature covered over by , and this is especially true of christian, sacrifice. Wastage as sacrifice is always done for the greater good, regardless of its evidently criminal inclinations. It is done in high places to exalted things of regular or ritualized purity to accentuate this. That is, the fact that these costs must be endured for the greater good, to keep death at bay. Malifice, conversely, has no such inclination. If exaltation is to be had it is an extension, an eccentuation, of this criminality and its selfishness; actions unconcerned with the good and its placement at the opposite end of the scale as death. & in this way it stands as something more than a mere inversion of values developed in response to a declining Church. A marker of a time when people ... lost the power to requite their dreams by way of ritual. ¹⁰ a banishment of the dark feminine and unknowable mythical sense ...leaving us its final message, a black laugh. ¹¹ Still it recounts ...our world animated by our hearts,... ¹² These movements, in and out of anguish, bringing us to the limits of consciousness and the fusion of beings. Achieved through art, enacted when possessed by love and its legends. Possessed then by a desire to fuse with another, to absorb them into ourselves. Achieved by those who can observe themselves admiring themselves in the pool of the other, reflected in the mirror of another so this exchange of selves might be possible. And in this way what was thought to be a dream on the first day is made real.
Murder Princess, one of the legends of happier note, expresses this process in full. & while the relationship happens in the background, it is the subject and the shape of the tale entire. this action clearly established across several events and decisions made by Alita & Mirano. Though these same events serve the additional purpose of placing them in a juxtaposition with the other prominent couple, and so deserves to be read in contrast as well.
Love Theorist Shulamith Firestone finds a further threat to her topic beyond the economic; the love process is an exchange, a selfish enrichment through which we ...participate in the existence of another.¹³ the exchange between Alita (Faris) and Mirano (Alita) displays this being achieved nearly flawlessly. Beyond the initial meeting which we will return to a flirtatious string solidifies this within the first half of the series. The morning after our bounty hunter princess is caught boorishly snoozing into a royally distasteful afternoon. A neededly startled awake Alita jumps to her feet revealing “her everything” as the bedding sloughs to the floor. Paired with an immediate scolding from Jodo comes a flushed center frame Mirano, sheepish and unblinkingly enjoying her former nudity. A reaction readily returned scenes later by a bathing Alita. Feeling her promise to save the kingdom as fulfilled after dispatching the rebels, Alita begins to push back on the idea of staying on the throne to protect the land. Flustered, Mirano reminds her that if she were to leave they would have no defenses on case of the rebels return, and further that her promised reward was Mirano’s “life, her everything” And as thoughts of the kinds of violations of Mirano’s decency this would allow her begin to creep into her mind their evidence spread tintedly across her face. The following day Alita is again startled awake, this time by Mirano staring at her sleeping face in millimeter proximity. “It’s your own face!” she protests in defensive embarrassment “yes, but its different seeing it through someone else's eyes.” A piece of dialogue with resounding, if largely obvious, implications. A situation which breathes new life into the cliche “ if only you could see yourself through my eyes” A trust of your companions affection in you. An implication that they are seeing something different and deeper in their reflected self.
Juxtaposed to this exists a relationship problem that Alita and Mirano do not have. The masculine invested, emotionally denying, battle to reject the feminine in themselves which renders the afflicted incapable of loving in return. For the process that love is follows simple enough lines. A desire to become one with another, to take them and their qualities into ourselves, to integrate into a fixture indispensable in their psychic balance. In a successful process this becomes an exchange of selves, each able to care for the other as a new additional self. But this process cannot complete in an instance where one would deny what they see as enticing in the other. The rejection of the feminine makes this an impossibility, and even in long term relationships each remains largely locked within the cell of themselves. The Witch and the Prince serve to exhibit this traditional failure. A pair never brought to closeness, the Prince unable to integrate and the Witch satisfied to take advantage of this. A situation elucidated in the forest when the Prince encounters Mirano. He realizes she is Alita, begins to recollect childhood before the schism, before the rejection of feminine self was required, the hold on him loosens, but not enough. Men are right when they complain that women lack discrimination, that they seldom love a man for his individual traits but rather for what he has to offer (his class), that they are calculating, that they use sex to gain other ends etc. For in fact women are in no position to love freely. ¹⁴ Their relationship for an end other than each other, an illusion finally banished when Alita shatters the jewel on the Witch’s chest and her glamour fades.
Alita and Mirano’s relationship cannot suffer this complication, their flirtations and seductions, their trickeries and fabrications are intended to induce a closeness. There is not the same barrier to the rejection of the other. Any idea of a similar situation with the exclusion of the masculine* should be dismissed with the ease Alita displays performance of whatever those roles could be determined to be. In fact we can see this directly spoken to when she defeats the Prince with her superior sword play. Berating him “There’s only one thing that makes this world worth living in, and she's the only reason you're still alive.” unquestionable rejection of her life before Mirano and a respect for something Mirano finds important beyond her own feelings on it¹⁵.
This should in no way be read against seduction. For Alita and Mirano it is always in play¹⁶, and for the Witch and the Prince it is the element of evil which makes her; the feminine element which the Prince cannot integrate and the reason for their eternally failed union.
It also cannot be said of Alita x Mirano that their relationship does not also pivot around evil, their selfish desire to possess another. For even their most idealized and successful love tale is a devotion to a practice of violence and death, embedded on a deceit of their entire kingdom. Their meeting, one of shock and violence on the scale of immediate threat of death. Alita at her exit of the forest encounters a blade drawn with a swiftness to strike down a rapidly approaching and daunting foe. Stopped just close enough that the forged steel caresses her face rather than marring it. Stunned and off guard when the tellingly titled Jitterbug strikes, Alita jumps knocking them into freefall from their cliff edge perch {in a one way trip} to the clearing below. Their journey through the aerial abyss sees them engulfed in a golden glow. They exchange selves, bodies, souls, in a moment when they both approach death together. Aptly confirmed by Dominikov, ala Tusdere subs, “They say if two people are facing death simultaneously their souls will change places.” The goal of the love event, self enrichment through another, here literally; which facilitates the occulting of the otherwise neededly overt romance as subject of our gored up fairytale.
After crash landing into Pete and Dominikov respectively, Faris (newly Alita) wakes to slay the Jitterbug. Drenched in the massive critters blood she is met by the request from newly embodied Alita. Save my country she pleads to the re-souled self whom she saw so passionately fight in her dream. Royally gowned Faris initially refuses, she has no guarantee of pay, I have to make a living, not that that's something that someone with your spoiled upbringing would probably understand. and so the princess offers what she has, her life, her everything. A gesture made all the more meaningful with the possession of Alita’s appearance, she can really have everything of her life save the spoiled upbringing. And so here directly addressed, the economic restraint that taints love as diagnosed by Firestone is remedied. Faris is free to embody a ...will as blind fearlessness before death… for ...naive unconsciousness alone has the power to conquer the world of miracles where lovers meet.¹⁷ a world of impassioned unreason. A world where she sits on her lover's throne from which she dispatches all threats to their kingdom, earning the title whispered throughout the land Murder Princess.