Oshiyama, and among those topics were the various branches of psychoanalysis, especially

those of both Freud and Jung. As a work very directly about the psychosexual realm and

its impact on development, specifically through the lens of queer awakening and the role of

relationships in subject formation, the influence of these thinkers, as well as other works

which drew upon them, like Neon Genesis Evangelion, is startlingly clear. Yet simply analyzing

the series along psychoanalytic lines misses something; the show's powerful pushback

against many aspects of psychoanalysis. Cocona's story, while certainly one of sexual awakening,

is not a cut-and-dried Freudian or Jungian process of therapy and actualization. Mimi,

despite clearly resembling an image of the Oedipal Mother, is not so simple. Rather,

through both narrative and animation, Flip Flappers elaborates a view of the world and

the mind which is much less singularly-focused than the thought of either Freud or Jung,

telling a story which encourages us to forge connections and improve ourselves through

an understanding of our fluidity and status as assemblages of disparate elements.

It's key to establish a few essential points in regards to my perspective here before we

begin. First, I interpret Flip Flappers as a queer text, and believe any reading which

doesn't do so is disingenous at best. This analysis will make no attempt to justify or

prove the queerness in the show, just as it will make no attempt to justify or prove Papika's

existence in it. Second, this is not a moral critique or a

review. Yes, the show has objectionable content, including a number of unnecessary shots which

sexualize the characters. While much of the sexualization in the show is important in

conveying the adolescent discovery of sexuality, not all of it is, and some of it is quite

jarring. Having admitted that, I have no interest in discussing it further.

Lastly, this analysis, while less personal in nature than many of my videos and not intended

to comment on the quality of the show, should be interpreted given the following facts:

Flip Flappers is my favorite anime, something I learned after beginning my fifth watch of

it just a few months ago. I relate heavily to Cocona, and her relationship with Papika

served as an important point of clarification when I began my current and only relationship.

In other words, I am very personally invested in the series, and whether that information

leads you to believe I'm interpreting it to fit my own ends, or makes my interpretation

even stronger, it does seem worth pointing out. Now, with those out of the way, we can

return to the scheduled program. Part 1: Freudianism-Jungianism

In an interview, Kiyotaka Oshiyama explicitly mentions his desire to insert psychoanalytic

elements into Flip Flappers, saying that “Pure Illusion is fairly similar to the idea of

the Umwelt, and one of the themes of the show is the multi-faceted nature of the internal

world we each have, so I felt like psychology would be pretty relevant”. Broadly speaking,

most analyses of the series break down into two primary camps, if you exclude those which

come at it from a vague, personal approach rather than one informed by specific theory.

On the one hand, there's queer analyses, specifically looking at what the show says

about queerness and sexualized or gendered difference, often focusing on Cocona's journey

as one of breaking heteronormativity. On the other, we have psychoanalytic readings, generally

of a Lacanian bent. These modes of analysis are not in contrast, and in fact a number

of pieces on the show dabble in both, but as a result of the series' clear priorities,

they have gained some level of dominance in the discourse.

In order to understand the series and the ways in which it challenges psychoanalytic

thought, therefore, we need to look at psychoanalytic thought, and how the series is generally believed

to engage in it. Broadly speaking, Freudian psychoanalysis

can be seen as a focus on sexual development. Essentially, Freud was concerned with how

the sexual development of human beings impacted their mental processes, and broadly discovered

that this development was primarily determined by early environment, alongside innate biological

drives which also fuel the unconscious. Perhaps as a result of being a bourgeois man from

Vienna, this led his analysis to primarily center the family, in particular the parents,

as the ultimate cause of most complexes and disorders. Lacan added far too much to summarize

in full, and I'm hardly educated enough to do so in the first place, but some of his

important contributions for the sake of this analysis are a renewed focus on ego or subject

formation, the reintroduction of the Other in a Hegelian move, and the conception of

desire as created by lack, separate from the needs of the drives, and dominated by our

existence in the symbolic order of society and language. Another Freudian concept is

obviously the tripartite model for the mind of the id, ego, and superego, but attempts

to connect these structures to the main trio are spurious at best, produce little in the

way of interesting analysis, and don't account for their development across the series.

It's not hard to see how this view of psychosexual development makes itself known within the

narrative of Flip Flappers. While Cocona is not a boy, and thus not the classic example

to be used in the well-known Oedipus Complex, Mimi, her mother, remains cast in that light.

Cocona desires her mother's presence throughout the series, and once she arrives is overjoyed

at finally meeting her. In spite of feeling embarrassed at doing so, she identifies with

her, taking on her appearance, though this is to a large degree due to Mimi's insistence.

To some extent, there is even a sexual tension in the scenes between the two, though not

one which rises to the surface at any point; the intimate body language is well beyond

what we'd normally accept for a parent-child relationship, and the animation in the series

conveys a lack of borders between the two that clearly harkens back to an earlier stage

of ego formation. During this period in which Cocona and Mimi

are together, Mimi occupies Cocona's body in the “real world”, signifying the association

between the two. Through a psychoanalytic perspective, this can be seen in two key ways.

In many works, it would reflect the traditional example of a “healthy” result to the Oedipal

relationship, identifying with the same-sex parent and moving beyond a desire to kill

them. However, the fact that Mimi attacks Salt, Cocona's father and her husband during

this period rebuts this: if anything, it's the father Cocona(because remember, it's

her body) wants to kill for taking her mother. Her Oedipus complex is, of course, a homosexual

one. However, not all Freudian thinkers cling so strongly to this directly binary and heteronormative

understanding of the complex, and some have encouraged us to see it as happening in all

genders and as a phenomena directed at both parents. Where, then, does that leave us?

Clearly, it establishes the fact that Cocona, despite being a middle schooler, has not properly

formed a complete ego; she has not passed through the “healthy” stages of development

in full. She exists and has a self, but she has not yet disentangled said self from the

need for validation from her mother through identification with her, and having failed

that, her sexuality is confused. A great deal of evidence exists to provide

support for this reading. Throughout the series, Cocona demonstrates herself as someone without

a clear idea of who she is, often behaving more as an object to be acted upon than a

thinking subject herself. She exists primarily through her relationships with others, and

relies on Yayaka and then Papika for direction, even as she often protests where that direction

leads. A sterling example of this is provided in the scene wherein Cocona is discussing

high school plans with Yayaka. She rejects Yayaka's choice, given its status as a boy's

school, in many ways objecting to the androgyny of queerness that Yayaka has already accepted

in herself, and yet she is not herself able to formulate another idea. Her desire is occupied

by societally-enforced needs for a “normal life”—she is, after all, an intelligent

and diligent girl—but her need for love and sexuality, particularly of a queer sort,

is entirely unconscious. And yet when it seems as if Yayaka wants to kiss her, she readily

accedes. As a result of her incomplete development, it's easy for those with cruel intentions

to get her to move as they wish. In this Freudian reading, what frees Cocona

from her complex is ultimately an overcoming of desire through association with Papika,

essentially moving her sexuality beyond the Oedipal target of her mother. The symbolic

marriage with Papika demonstrates this more clearly than anything else could: marriage

is, representationally, the leaving of the parents for another, and the “natural”,

“healthy” end-result of sexuality. Cocona's psychosexual development completes itself

at the end of the series in this reading, and she no longer needs to venture into Pure

Illusion, a world of dreams, in order to rectify her complexes and psyche.

But, this reading presents a problem. Not only does it treat sexuality and the family

as the only valuable site for analysis, but it ignores the fact that the ending of the

series is not one of departure from Pure Illusion, which is in many ways a reflection of Mimi

herself, but in reality a return to it, as Cocona and Papika learn to venture there for

their own enjoyment. If one wished to remain within a psychoanalytic framework to solve

this conundrum, they'd have to turn to Sigmund Freud's prodigal disciple, Carl Jung, for

another mode of thinking. Jung spent much of his early career following

Freud's lead, but with time he came to a decisive break with the man, feeling that

he over-centralized the sexual aspects of desire and disliking the formulaic analysis

it resulted in. Jung went on to found the discipline of analytic psychology, which while

accepting of some of Freud's ideas took a radical departure. Primarily, Jung based

his theories on the idea of instincts and imprinted tendencies from evolutionary history,

and developed the theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. For Jung, while

we all have an individual unconscious which makes up a part of ourselves, alongside our

conscious Ego, we also have the collective unconscious, an aspect of thought common to

all humans. While we can not directly grasp this collective unconscious, we can see its

effects work themselves out in various ways. For instance, Jung used examples such as the

commonality of Messiah figures across the planet, or other such archetypal figures to

argue that deep within us exist primordial ideas about saviors, a sort of conceptual

instinct. For Jung, we must grapple with these archetypes and the dreams in which they express

themselves in order to self-actualize and free ourselves of complexes and mental illnesses,

to live a good life. Pure Illusion itself is, through this framework,

a representation of the ways in which the collective unconscious merges with individual

consciousnesses in order to create people. Take episode 3, where Welwitschia—yes, that's

the name of the BDSM girl—acts quite obviously as a representative of the witch archetype,

and yet drawing from Sayuri's thought processes gains an appearance befitting a Mad Max-style

world; though Cocona's desire, always brought to Pure Illusion's fore perhaps by Mimi's

influence, is also an obvious factor in her existence. Similarly, OO-303 is a variation

of the mad scientist or witch doctor archetype. In this reading, Cocona would likely be diagnosed

as having an introverted thinking type personality—yes, Jung inspired Meyers-Briggs—though one that's

significantly held back by her failure to self-actualize. It's through meeting Papika,

a sort of misfit who breaks through her bubble, that she's able to free herself from that,

associating in a healthy way with aspects of her shadow, or the parts of herself which

her ego previously attempted to avoid identifying with, while adopting a less harmful persona,

one which does not stifle her so heavily, as shown in her willingness to enjoy herself

freely in Pure Illusion by the end of the series. To return to the earlier point about

Yayaka's mentioning of a boy's school, Cocona is able to accept the androgyny of

her queerness here, or, in Jungian terms, she is able to more heavily identify with

her animus, embracing her feelings for Papika. But this reading, too, seems as if it's

missing something. For one thing, it's not entirely clear that the archetypes of Pure

Illusion are responsible for her change. Of course, casting the series' players as archetypes

themselves, for instance, describing Papika as a wild child who disrupts the harmful status

quo of Cocona's life and thus allows her to engage with her problems, does something

to rectify this, but even then it feels wrong to treat all figures aside from Cocona as

mere representations of instinctual trends in human psychology. And while the question

of why Cocona returns to Pure Illusion in spite of self-actualizing is answered under

this framework, it's just as set of a framework, and like orthodox Freudianism, will only ever

produce an analysis which boils down to one thing: for Freud it may be sexual development

in the family, but for Jung it's simply an inability to properly reconcile the ego

with other parts of the capital-S Self without the help of archetypes. No, I don't think

either of these analyses are sufficient, even if they're useful for certain ends, and

I don't believe the show does either. But how is that, when it so clearly draws from

them? Well, for that, we'll need to discuss a series with deep intertextual relations

with Flip Flappers, one it draws upon heavily in both visuals and narrative: the one and

only Neon Genesis Evangelion. Part 2: Altering the Gospels

We all know Neon Genesis Evangelion, the seminal 1995 anime wherein Ikari Shinji is led to

pilot a giant being known as an Eva which—spoiler alert—is actually his mom. It changed everything,

without it shows like Flip Flappers simply couldn't exist as they do, and it cribbed

heavily from psychoanalysis. Like with Flip Flappers, there's a great deal of hare-brained

analyses attempting to tie each individual character in Eva to a specific Jungian archetype,

or to a structure in Freudian thought, but those aren't worth discussing. What's

actually interesting is that we know that Anno got deep into psychoanalysis as he worked

on the show, and this came about in the thematic priorities of its second half.

Similar to Flip Flappers, Eva is a show deeply concerned with subject formation, taking a

particularly Lacanian approach to the concept in using the theory of the Oedipus Complex

as an early developmental form of the Hegelian struggle for self-identification. Like Cocona,

Shinji is a character who's incapable of proper development as a result of sexual and

interpersonal complexes which keep him from going further. Just as Cocona uses the amorphous