Beautiful Fighting Girl

Summary

In the first chapter, Saitō begins to analyze otaku psychology and culture. He summarizes and critiques the descriptions of the identity by writers such as Akio Nakamori and Toshio Okada, and presents his own definition of an otaku, disputing their common characterization as immature or psychologically undeveloped. He argues that instead of preferring fiction over reality, they accept fictional worlds as separate equivalents to it, "finding reality in both fiction and reality". He describes the creation of desire in the audience as essential to making a fictional world seem real, writing "once that world takes on a sexual charge, it will attain a level of reality no matter how shoddily it is drawn".

The second chapter analyzes a case study, an email from a young adult otaku describing his sense of empowerment from being able to control fictional characters within an imagined sexual context. To Saitō, sexuality is a core aspect of otaku psychology, writing that the ability to gain sexual release from fictional characters is the core difference between otaku and other forms of fan. He argues that this can coexist with conventional, real-world sexuality, as the fictional environment can provided an outlet for what he describes as perverse fantasies. The following chapter analyzes the sentō bishōjo archetype and compares representation of similar characters within Japanese and Western popular media, featuring anecdotes from self-described otaku in the United States. Saitō argues that the sentō bishōjo is a phenomenon exclusive to Japanese media, designed to "pervert and make a profit". Conversely, he cites Western psychologists to reaffirm that fictional sexual deviance does not affect real-life sexual actions.

The fourth chapter is a case study of Henry Darger, an American artist and writer who created a massive volume of work centered around the revolt of child slaves, facing torture and mass killings by their former masters. Saitō aims to dispel the interpretations of Darger as a sadistic pedophile by contemporary scholars. Using Darger's work as an example, Saitō argues that the "beautiful fighting girl" archetype is created by the effect of popular media on an adolescent mindset. Saitō posits that the presence of penises on the young girls in Darger's work represents a rejection of castration, a symptom of Darger's continued adolescent mentality.

A genealogy and history of the "beautiful fighting girl" within Japanese popular culture from the 1960s to the 1990s occupies most of the fifth chapter. Saitō delineates thirteen subgenres or lineages of sentō bishōjo fiction. He argues for the distinction of the sentō bishōjo to Japan, dismissing western heroines as unrepresentative of it, and claims that Japan represented sexuality within animation, which allowed the archetype to form. He argues that the sentō bishōjo figure has spread from Japan since the 1990s, and predicts that it will become a global phenomenon.

The final chapter, entitled "The Emergence of the Phallic Girls", continues Saitō's argument for the sentō bishōjo as a Japanese figure, characterizing manga and anime as a representative form with no direct equivalent within other countries' popular culture. He outlines the psychological concept of a "phallic girl" and a "phallic mother". Phallic mothers are figures which adopt an authoritarian role (thus possessing a "metaphorical penis") due to trauma, leading to empathy from the audience which fosters attraction. In contrast, the phallic girl (a category which includes sentō bishōjo) are hollow figures free from trauma; this leads the characters to achieve jouissance through fighting, thus embodying the traits of the metaphorical penis themselves, cultivating interest and erotic attraction from the audience.

The 2011 English translation features an extensive introduction by Vincent, as well as Saitō's afterwords to the two prior editions and a commentary essay by the critic and philosopher Hiroki Azuma. In his introduction, Vincent describes Beautiful Fighting Girl as a "baggy monster of a book" but defends it as a useful work, emphasizing its potential value to disciplines such as queer theory.

Reception

Azuma responded to Beautiful Fighting Girl the following year with his own monograph, Dōbutsukasuru Postmodern: Otaku kara mita Nihon Shakai ('The Animalizing Postmodern: Looking at Japanese Society Through Otaku'). Azuma rejects Saitō's focus on otaku sexuality, arguing instead that otaku have rejected the intersubjective experience of sexuality in favor of an animalistic attraction to moe qualities in the media they consume. In a 2002 discussion with Saitō, Azuma argued that "masturbating to a picture doesn’t add up to anything", claiming that it was more similar to self-soothing behaviors like thumb sucking than conventional sexuality.

A 2012 review by Paul T. Beattie in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts criticized the book for what he described as "uncompromising adherence to an arguably outdated model of Lacanian psychoanalysis". Beattie also characterized the book as Japanocentric for dismissing examples of "beautiful fighting girls" in North American and European works. Raechel Dumas described this focus on Japan as inconsistent and poorly-researched, pointing to the extensive discussion of Darger, as well as Saitō's denial that sexualized women existed in pre-1990s American animated media; she praised the book's fifth chapter for its genealogy of the fighting girl archetype.

Several scholars criticized a lack of coverage of female otaku in the work. In 2013, Michael Moon wrote there was a lack of consideration of female otaku, with Saitō briefly mentioning them to discuss their attachment to the genres of yaoi and shotacon, and described his analysis of Darger's sexuality as lacking in nuance and focused on a defense against charges of sadism and pedophilia, a viewpoint which became outdated among Darger scholars since the initial publication of the work. The scholar Kathryn Hemmann said that Saitō's characterization of bishōjo being unrelated to real women ignores characters such as Sailor Moon, whom she argued positively influence the attitudes of young female fans towards both themselves and other female characters.