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(I would like to preface this review by stating that my babysitter with an invader zim tattoo showed me this anime when I was 12, and it gave me brain damage. I wore cat ears in my grade 8 school photos. 10/10. Would recommend.)

Loveless is a surrealist-emo anime that any kid who spent too much time online in the early 2000s can relate to. The main character, Ritsuka, is a 12 year old Neitzsche-reading emo catboy with an abusive mother, an incompetent predatory therapist, and a mysterious- also predatory- man grooming him and making him fight battles that Ritsuka doesn't understand. Ah, middle school- some ... things never change. Every adult in Ritsuka’s life is utterly failing him, he constantly lashes out in fear, and the one person who he cares about- his older brother- is now missing. It fully encapsulates the urgency of the 12 year old experience.

Right off the bat, Loveless shows you that it isn't afraid of getting accused of doing what it is, in fact, blatantly doing. It doesn't waste time making excuses. It just does what it does and depending on your age you'll either think "somebody call child protective services" or "I am 12 and this is the best thing I've seen since I google searched emos kissing yesterday." It establishes itself quite openly as a fucked up story about fucked up people and death and love and, most of all, sex. The entire story is about sex, and the trauma involved in living in a world where you're surrounded by things you can neither escape nor fully understand. From the moment we learn that the characters’ cat ears represent virginity, to the erotic fight scenes, we are quickly thrown into having to grapple with what this show is about, and left scrambling trying to figure out what message it's conveying. Is this an endorsement? An indictment? Is anyone else uncomfortable- is that even intentional, on the part of the artist? Or is the unsettling knot in my stomach just a by-product of being spoon-fed simple clear-cut moral messages in cartoons?

Maybe media should be wrestled with.

Maybe it's just a story about being a tween for those who have been there, with the black emo bangs, cat ears, depressed pout, withdrawn eyes, unaddressed trauma, and social struggles. Because back then you didn’t think about how weird it was that adults were flirting with you online while your parents fought in the kitchen, and it didn’t feel weird to watch Loveless and connect deeply with Ritsuka's alienation, to sit there watching it and wishing some beautiful older person would whisk you away into another realm, even if it was scary or painful or gay- maybe that's what you secretly wanted all along, or maybe that's just what you're comfortable with because instability is all you’ve ever known, oh, and also, you're gay.

Watching this as an adult, it's clear just how naïve, immature, and traumatized Ritsuka is, and that the way the older man- Soubi- behaves towards him so incredibly, obviously creepy it would almost be funny (in the flabbergasted 'I cannot believe this was such a popular anime- how did they get away with this?' way) if it wasn't ultimately just... unsettling. It might be easy to brush all this off as a typical Yaoi Moment, but this story goes out of its way to establish itself as ambiguously as possible. Ritsuka *also* seems heart-wrenchingly uncomfortable with everything happening to him, and unable to cope with any of the ways Soubi treats him... Even after he develops feelings for the guy. After all, he is a child, and as the title itself suggests, this is not a love story. This dramatic clash of shoujo with shounen, yaoi and yuri, Neitzsche and catboys, bondage and sadomasochism, and the immense power of words, all flows together so coherently in a way that neither suspends nor engages our disbelief, but rather forces one to translate what's happening beyond the disorienting haze of anime magic and into the jarring reality of the situation being presented before you can fully grasp the true horror and- dare I say- camp, that is the glue which holds Loveless together... and if all of that goes over your head, well, then it's just another questionable anime where some creeps wanted to draw a tsundere shota being preyed upon by an older bishie--- and I'm unwilling to sit with something so pointless and gratuitous being one of my favorite anime series’ as a tween. There has to be something good I can take away from this, god dammit--- and it cannot just be my grade 8 school photos!