Hey guys, Eryn here. You may be wondering what the hell is going on here, and why this isn’t a new podcast episode. Well, I decided that since I want to get more of my writing out on the internet, I’m going to start posting text reviews and articles here at Robomiko.com, making it more of a fleshed out website and blog rather than simply a front for podcasts. Hopefully my writing isn’t incredibly boring compared to my speaking. You’ll have to let me know if it is or not. My hope is that the sheer “dude, what the f***”-itude of the show I’m about to cover will carry the review in the event that I’m boring.

So, what show might we be tackling today, you ask? The show in question is a six-episode anime OVA from 2008 called Mnemosyne, aka Mnemosyne ~ Daughters of Mnemosyne, aka RIN ~ Daughters of Mnemosyne, aka Mnemosyne ~ Isn’t Mnemosyne a Totally Awesome Name For Series Guys? Seriously, Mnemosyne. I Wonder How Many Times I Can Work Mnemosyne Into the Subtitle of Mnemosyne.

Oh god. What to say about Mnemosyne? I actually watched this show a few months ago thanks to a LiveJournal roleplaying game, in which two of the consistently awesome roleplayers I knew played the main characters from this series. I was interested after seeing the characters interact both on their own and together, and sought out fansubs (this was before the series was licensed by Funimation). Before getting into the review proper, I just want to say that that’s definitely one of the things this show has going for it: Rin and Mimi are good main characters and I like following them. Rin in particular is both likeable and bad-ass despite the degree to which her bad-ass-ness is dependent on her non-fighting abilities, which I’ll get to in a minute. A good part of her appeal comes from the voice performance provided by seiyuu Mamiko Noto, who gets to show a bit more range in this role than she normally gets to. Most people who know Mamiko Noto are used to hearing her as either a cute moé girl or as a monotone, Hell-born moé girl (you might be surprised at just how much moé there is out there for Ai Enma). As Rin, she gets to use her lower register a bit more since Rin is an older woman, and she gets to explore both the playful and serious sides of her character, which she does very well.

Anyway, best not to get too far off on that tangent before proper introductions. As the main character of our series here, Rin Asougi appears to be a tall twenty-something with long, puke-green hair, glasses, large breasts, and a shapely ass. What an original concept: a modern anime female lead who has real adult sex appeal and isn’t appearing in a porno! And here I thought it was mandatory nowadays for female leads to look no older than twelve and wear skirts no longer than crotch-length. Anyway, Rin has her own consultation/private investigation business, Asougi Consulting, which she runs with the help of her younger partner/friend/sometimes lesbian lover, Mimi, and their sheepdog, Genta. She knows some kick-ass martial arts moves for those times when the men in black just gotta get curb-stomped, and carries around little knives, garrotte wires, and little knives on garrotte wires as her signature weapons. She’s an independent woman who always wears a suit and tie, and doesn’t cow-tow to men the way Japanese women are often expected to. Sounds like a great character, right?

There’s just one little thing that ruins all of this: Rin is an immortal. Because of this, Rin can recover from pretty much any injury imaginable. You can blow her up, tear her to pieces, cut off her head, destroy the brains, shoot her with silver arrows, throw her in the Star Wars garbage compactor – anything you care to imagine, and she will eventually regenerate and come back to do the same water and vodka joke with Mimi the next morning.

You might wonder why this would ruin anything. You might even think that immortality only makes her cooler. You would be WRONG. You know why? Because Rin’s immortality gives the series creators license to repeatedly subject her to the worst tortures imaginable for the pleasure of the viewing audience. In fact, the opportunity to watch Rin suffer, often while either naked or in minimal amounts of clothing, is one of the main intended draws of the series. The kinds of violence that Rin falls victim to are often on the level of torture porn movies like Hostel and Saw, sometimes even beyond that.

There are also some unique things about immortality in this series that may or may not raise an eyebrow. Immortality stems from the tree of legend, Yggdrasil, which is constantly releasing spores that it uses to gather information and memories from the world. Occasionally, Yggdrasil will release special “time spores” that can be absorbed into the bodies of people and sometimes animals. Thing about these spores? Only females can gain immortality from them. Males will instead turn into what are called “angels”, named such because of the giant red wings that sprout from their backs. Angels are 1) ugly as f***, and 2) mostly mindless animals who only live to kill people and devour immortals. And here’s the sticking point: when a female immortal is in the presence of an angel, her body will be overcome by insatiable lust, and she will feel an overwhelming urge to go to the angel and let it devour her. Aside from feeling excruciating pain when the angel begins to eat her alive, she will also feel a shamefully large amount of pleasure from the experience. This is the only way in which immortals can die.

So yes. The immortal women in this series – especially the strong, independent ones – are often terribly brutalized only to regenerate and have it done all over again. Their judgment can be completely clouded by sexual desire. When they’re eaten to death, they writhe in ecstasy and beg for it to continue.

Do I even have to say it? Do I?

This picture doesn’t even begin to get across how degrading this series can get.

I’ve heard it rationalized on fan forums that perhaps the Yggdrasil spore stuff is set up that way so that the women can spend lots of time in the world gathering memories and experiences for the tree – hence their being “daughters of Mnemosyne,” the Greek personification of memory. The spores then eventually end up being brought back to the tree by the male angels after they devour the female immortals. That does make some sort of sense, I guess, but it still reeks of an excuse for misogyny to me.

Also, if that wasn’t exploitative enough for you, the series creators threw in more excuses for gratuitous rape with the inclusion of a female informant that Rin knows. We don’t know her name, only that she seems to love grasshoppers (the drink, not the insect). If the series is to be believed, this random skanky woman knows ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING EVER, even top secret information that no one else in the world knows. And here’s the kicker: if you want to get anything out of her, she demands lesbian sex as payment. …Yeah. So this leads to one consenting sex scene between this woman and Rin (admittedly not so bad), and at least two non-consenting sex scenes between this woman and Mimi. Did I mention that Mimi looks no older then sixteen or seventeen, by the way? No? Oh well, that’s okay since she’s actually supposed to be a couple hundred years old, right? Right. (Shoot me.)

Last, we have Laura, a red-headed assassin in a cat-suit who is hired repeatedly to take out Rin for the amusement of the series’ main villain, Apos. Compared to everything else that Rin has to go through, Laura is actually not so bad. She doesn’t savour torturing Rin or dragging her pain out. She just likes to shoot Rin full of bullets, drop her off buildings, or explode her with claymore mines. Painful ways to die, sure, but at least they’re quick and don’t stink of that torture porn element I mentioned earlier. Oh, and possible spoiler, but it’s too bizarre not to mention: at one point in the series, Apos converts Laura into a cyborg so that she can keep up with Rin’s immortality. …Except it’s revealed in the last episode that she’s also an immortal. At the same time that she’s a cyborg. I think? The fansubs might have been off. I’m not sure. All I know is that I was confused as hell by that point.

Anyway, if it weren’t for all of that, Mnemosyne would be a somewhat decent anime series. The plot gets a bit tangled sometimes, which is frustrating, but thankfully, those moments of confusion are mostly found in episodes 1 and 6. The time that’s spent not stringing Rin up by barbed wire is enjoyable enough, especially when Rin is with Mimi or one of the various Maeno family members she comes across throughout the course of the series. The initial investigations in the early parts of the first three episodes, while a bit pointless, are nice diversions. Also, any action that doesn’t directly result in more exploitation of Rin is pretty well-done. For example, in the first episode, when we see Rin take on some men in black who are attacking Kouki Maeno, she pulls out some decidedly bad-ass moves that I would have liked to see more of throughout the series.

The major thing I like about the series, I think, is the passing of time. The first episode takes place in 1990, and by the fifth and sixth, it’s 2055, with each passing episode jumping forward a different number of years into the future. We get to see non-immortal characters age, have kids, move up in the world, and sometimes die while Rin and Mimi move on, frozen in time as they are. In the last three episodes, we get to see the rise of near-future technology, which I’ll admit looked pretty well-designed and fairly realistic given the path of current technology. The virtual reality internet elements of episode four were believable, and the idea of being able to download virtual clothing and items into the real world in episode five was more than believable and even a bit awesome. Maybe the murderous sex android premise of the fourth episode wasn’t quite so inspired (do you know how many times I’ve groaned writing this review so far?), but the more mundane future technologies at least were pretty well-done.

I ended the series kind of torn. Sometimes the things I liked about Mnemosyne were enough to justify me watching through the more reprehensible parts. During other times, however, such as the infamous piercing torture scene in episode one or any scene featuring Apos’s impalement bitches, I felt like I wanted to throw up and turn off the show altogether. I also was not sure what to think about the ending, which makes me wonder just how worth it it was for me to get all the way through the show. On the one hand, I liked elements of the ending, mainly Rin and Apos’s ultimate fates and the revelations about certain people in Rin’s past. On the other hand, the construction of that last episode is unbelievably haphazard, ludicrous, and more exploitative than ever, so I can’t actually bring myself to say that I liked it.

I would say to try episode 1 of Mnemosyne if you have a strong stomach. If you like the characters and can get past the awkward segue from “Ha ha, Rin’s ass is too big to slip under the laser alarm!” to “Oh shit, piercing torture!”, continue from there and see how you feel. At the very least, like I said, Rin and Mimi are good characters, and I can see why those roleplayers I mentioned would have chosen to play them. In fact, I think I’d like to see a lot more done with these characters in the hands of people who aren’t actively out to demean them. Maybe if more people watch this series, more people can create Mnemosyne fanworks that are more worth reading than the original source material.

So I guess that’s going to end up being my bottom line for Mnemosyne: go watch this series, strip it of the horrible rape and torture porn, and then go create a bad-ass action doujinshi where Rin gets to totally punch out anyone who dares mention angels, grasshoppers, or retrograde amnesia.

More of this please.

Less of this.

[P.S. - Anime Utamiko episode 3 and Phenakistoscope Beta episode 2 should both be out within the week.]