Bakemonogatari tries to be a smart anime. Yet I think Bakemonogatari is moreso an example of the death of parody.
Parody has a function. Parody is a form of critique: a way of deriding the status quo. A critique is successful when it introduces a new way of thinking. Bakemonogatari tries to be a parody. It tries to critique, and yet rehashes and strengthens the templates it borrows from.
What exactly is the point of the one-note cookie cutter characters like Kanbaru or Hachikuji or Senjougahara or Araragi? They seem to be critiques, over the top parodies of tropes that exist elsewhere in anime. Yet, Nisioisin paradoxically celebrates their tropic and generic qualities. It is supposed to be unproblematically funny when Hachikuji is a brat or when Kanbaru is a pervert, the reader is never challenged for liking the tropes that these characters represent. Perhaps the viewer has a light hearted chuckle to herself when Araragi sexually assaults Hachikuji, self-abasing herself at how dark her humor is. Yet this is hardly subversive in any way. We do see dark aspects of the character's lives: perhaos showing a more subversive side to the novels. For example, Senjougahara has her parents roped into an evil cult. Yet the darker themes and deeper aspects of the show are not something that are not used in other stories in Japan, in other words, even at the stories darkest moments, we rarely see anything particularly ground breaking or subversive. Even movies like Akira dealt with the topic of cults for instance, so do many Japanese horror flicks like Higurashi. Even in those moments where Bakemonogatari tries to break the status quo, it borrows from pop culture in ways not particularly subversive. Yet seemingly parody seeks to critique the status quo. Bakemonogatari is not parody, it is simply referencing a pop-cultural phenomena, similar to other forms of modern pop-culture like the Simpsons or Big Bang theory. It is not an intelligent show in this regard then. So, Bakemonogatari does not use its characters for parody: a means of subversion and like many other light novels it reuses basic templates... That's fine, not everything needs to be parody or particularly subversive. Yet are its characters at least deep or good, even if ultimately reused templates?
When we do see a character's back story, it is often glossed over, not affecting the character at all. It is often basically window dressing. For example Hachikuji does not act particularly different from when we first see her even after being reunited with her home which was found to have been destroyed. All this to say that Bakemonogatari is not particularly subversive when it delves into dark themes and nor is its character writing very good. Its treatment of Hanekawa's abuse is just incredibly overt and forced at times which took me aback. There is really no room for ambiguity which I think makes the characters come off less deep than they should have. When it is not talking about dark themes, it is not very subversive.
There is word play, yet the word play is often using merely utilising references or the punch lines can be seen a mile away. It is sometimes funny yet not enough for one to consider the series particularly clever.
Quite fairly, people might suggest that I am reading the story wrong: Nisioisin has no agenda, he is simply presenting over the top characters based off of templates for entertainment value. If that is the case, the story is not an intelligent story, it is doing something similar to the Big Bang Theory or the modern Simpsons. These are shows often critiqued for a lack of intelligence. It merely references with no mind to that which it is referencing which is intelligent writing. This is of course fine: not every show need be ground-breaking, yet for a series that tries to be smart, it is quite a jarring viewing experience. Maybe we should ask:
Is bakemonogatari entertaining?
I do not think the books are very entertaining. The books have the same structure. There is a mysterious girl who has feelings for Araragi. Araragi saves the girl, the girl is thankful and the story ends. Hachikuji is an exception, not confessing love for Araragi. Yet the other girls are all uniform, loving Araragi for no reason. I do not critique this on the grounds that this is not intelligent writing. I critique it on the grounds that it is boring and charmless. When one can predict the story perfectly each time, the story just gets very very boring.
What makes the story more boring and charmless is the lack of characters other than Araragi and the girls + Oshino (maybe Gahara's dad if you'd consider him relevant at all). While this is certainly an authorial decision -- and a brave and commendable one at that -- it makes the story very claustrophobic and tiresome. So I'd say it isn't entertaining.
