Kore wa Watashi no Ichiban Warui Kettei desu

Kore wa Watashi no Ichiban Warui Kettei desu.

I do hope that, with what little dregs of Japanese that still remain in my mind after my desperate trying to forget it all and the events that brought me to learn it, the above line was understandable; or, if not, at least grammatically correct. But even if it was not, its meaning should become clear as you read on through this story.

Aside from the customary words of warning—this is a work of fiction, any resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental (repeated twice for added security)—I feel it is my duty to caution you, as reader, of the story which will soon unfold. Do not take these slim, unimposing pages lightly, I beg of you. They contain within them a tale to harrow up your soul and freeze your young blood. If you yet remain to read onwards then I shall claim as my right the assumption that you are stout of heart and strong of will, and will not blanch or faint too easily at the events I am to describe; and indemnity for your deaths, should they occur, as a result of the perusal of this text.

I must, however, request your pardon for the seemingly unnecessary delay before the meat of the matter—or perhaps, the worm-bored blacked core of the issue. Such a fruit as forbidden as this must not under any circumstances by unleashed upon the world without, or the collective human race would find shame in even the most innocent of material joys. As a wise man once said, “Brevity is the soul of wit”; so, too, I must offer my deepest and most sincere apologies for an introduction so lacking in brevity though, as I fancy it, not wit. Now there exists a paradox to perplex the minds of our greatest philosophers!

Attend.

As all good stories aimed to appeal at select audiences between the apparently arbitrary ages of eighteen and forty (most likely arbitrary in actuality too), this particular tale is set in a schoolyard setting. No sakura-stained spring school-opening ceremony, though, nor class divisions, homeroom sessions, club activities, lessons omitted in the telling, student councils of extraordinary power, or cultural festivals: this particular school-life was one made barren by a schedule full to overflowing with examinations and essays and assessments and practicals and every sort of thing with an impossibly long and unpronounceable name that education authorities have a predilection for tormenting students with.

Indeed, this was the IB Diploma.

But, owing to a particular propensity of mine to always be the very best like no one ever was, my school life was passed in considerably more bearable a fashion than those of the hoi polloi who populate every school in uncountable numbers, bemoaning their painful lives that they must grunt and sweat under their weary lives filled with all the aforesaid encumbrances. You might call me clever, although that would be quite off the mark; intelligent, though that would be a miss; destined for success, though that would still be an inadequate description.

I myself prefer “clever, intelligent genius predestined for success by all the pantheons of classical religion”—for, of course, it is only the classical gods which are worth putting your faith in and thus showing yourself to be a man of decent upbringing and class.

It was that time of the year when the year 12 student body is gathered together and frightened with falsified telling of forty hour research times and forty-hundred word limits. The extended essay was upon us, and the student body was induced, as humans are to snakes, to a collective, unconscious fear of it.

I, of course, stood quite apart from them, for I could tell a hawk from a handsaw and knew when a cigar was just a cigar. Upon perusal of the various documents we were told to avail ourselves of, I decided to essay an extended essay in the even-esoteric area of English. A most wickedly delicious thought had taken foot in my idled-to-desperate mind then, and I was anxious to see it put into motion.

There is a curious clause regarding the first language essay pathway which stipulates that, should a translated work be attempted for analysis, it must be analysed in conjunction with another work written in an English-speaking, and presumably God-fearing and church-going, culture. Not wishing to be fettered by a text I had no interest in, I cast about for other options. Literature was a path closed from the start, since it would only admit texts in English; but Language and Literature…

I had a quick discussion with the head of the English department, who, by the very cunning of the scene I depicted, was persuaded to allow me access to the IBO forums. In I went, sweeping my figurative hat on in salute to the great ones that oversaw with painstaking care the every lesson and course of my academic life. Putting on my very best internet manners—this being the exercise of restraint in the use of emoticons—I contrived to persuade the IBO that light novels did, in fact, have sufficient literary merit and were closely enough tied to the Japanese culture to warrant their being used as subject material in an extended essay on Language and Literature; and of the fact that their lack of an official translation as of yet was no issue, owing to the vast repository of fan-translated editions to be discovered on the internet. I left the meeting very satisfied, with my plan of action clear in my mind.

I would compose an essay on the very worst light novel I could find, the very nadir of intellectual literature, the epitome of pulp and little substance, if at all—

—And I would get an A.

For my essay I chose a series whose name I presume will be more than familiar to a few of you reading this. After scanning reviews and descriptions of various series and ranking them in grades of unnecessary fanservice, character archetypes, and filler plotlines; frequenting anime forums for recommendations from veterans of their field; and browsing in bookstores I passed on my frequent walks about the city—

—I decided upon Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai.

Nothing, I told myself, could be further from the material of quality needed to attain the grade I desired. Nothing would pose the greatest challenge to my expansive intellect and skills of that much sought-after but little attained talent, the one of bs. Nothing—no, the anaphora grows a little musty.

So I set about my work. Naturally I could not accept any of the translations that drifted desultorily upon the currents and waves of the internet, having lied of this to the unsuspecting IBO forum-poster who approved my essay. If you happen to be reading this, i_liek_mudkipz123, I do most earnestly apologise. If I was to do this well, I would have to read the novels as they were originally written, in Japanese.

I thus set about obtaining mastery of that language by watching through Endless Eight with the determined continuousness of the stars wheeling in the heavens and the valiant implacability Shimogamo Souichirou must have shown as he confronted his nabe. When it was inconvenient for me to watch it, owing to reasons such as my not possessing a tablet or phone that could withstand the strain of the fifteen thousand repetitions in those episodes; and also of school, I played the audio in an infinite loop and listened to it whenever I had a moment to spare. All this until I knew every line and their meaning off by heart.

That was enough Japanese to last me a lifetime.

With my newfound linguistic prowess I began to plough through the chapters of Oreimo. I finished so soon—my Japanese having greatly surpassed that of native speakers—that, to fill up the rest of the required forty hours, I went and translated all twelve volumes of the series into English fit for consumption by the human mind. Go and check if you don’t believe me: my translation has since become the de facto official English translation of the series, although the publisher that has since brought them to the West maintains that they own it. Legally speaking, they certainly are not in the wrong, for it was some time ago ruled perfectly permissible by law to copy fan creations of a Wiki and claim it as your own.

Legal  disputes notwithstanding, I went and wrote my essay, completed it within an hour of starting, and spent the remainder of the two EE days beneficently allocated to us by the school composing alternative endings for Kyousuke’s choice near the end of the series. I wish I could say that they were equally appreciated; but fandom is a fickle thing, and one particular route grew, like the tyrannical firstborn of a litter of cats, to dominate the rest in popularity. For fear of angering fans of the less popular routes I shall not reveal the identity of this one supposedly superior ending.

I completed the final draft at the same time as I did the first, needing no opportunity to make corrections. I daresay my supervisor was fairly blown away by the amount of depth in this work, so obscure outside the otaku circle; for he gave me an immediate A and full marks before leaving right away to procure his own copy to read through.

So my essay was done. Viva voce; citations, half of which, I must admit with no little mirth, were credited to me; formatting; Turnitin… and my essay was submitted to the IBO for the final judgement. Would my hours of effort finally pay off, or would I be doomed to a life of shame as the man who tried the cross the IB and failed? Would they be blinded by my hoax or see through it? Would I get an A, or would I not? Find out in the next episode of—

—The paper came back.

I got an A.

I had done it. Passed off pyrite as gold, a mongrel as a pedigree, scribbling as art.

I had attempted and succeeded in the greatest hack performed since the days of that great triumvirate of Roth, Kim, and Schwartz.

Little did I perceive the chain of events which would unravel from this.

---

I got my 45 with a Bilingual Diploma in English and Japanese, and graduated on a fancy into an obscure local university. I enrolled for an Arts major and, out of curiosity in the subject matter, joined a course on Japanese literature.

You can hardly imagine my shock as I entered the lecture theatre and beheld, projected on the auditorium wall, the inflated monstrosity of a zoomed image which, upon closer inspection, resolved itself to be the front cover of the Oreimo’s first volume. Incredulity soon took the place of shock, and as I sat down for the lecture I was buoyed inwardly by a strange anticipation, though from what I did not know. The professor, a seasoned fellow dressed in old-fashioned college robes who spoke in quavering tones, as if his words had first to test the air to ascertain its sturdiness for walking upon, began to lecture the assembled students on the deep themes of family love and sacrifice present within the novel series. I found myself recognizing as if from a dream every point he made; but surely that was not possible; surely it had not, could not—

The lecture ended with him setting for next lesson’s homework the reading of the first few volumes, and students began to file out of the hall. I hurried down to the lectern where the professor was gathering his things.

“Professor, I have... a question I’d like to ask about that lecture just now,” I said, affecting that aspect of awed meekness which opens as many doors at educational institutions as it does wallets at family gatherings.

“Well, well, go on and ask, lad,” quavered he back, unplugging his laptop from the projector.

“Could I see the works used in the writing of this lecture?”

“Well, by works I suppose you’ll be meaning work, since there exists—and only needs to be—one seminal paper on the works of Fushimi Tsukasa.” He turned his laptop toward me. “Why, right here you go, lad. It’s short, that’s true, but the author has this… this excellent concision of language with which he, believe it or not, says a thousand words in the space of ten.”

I looked, peered at the screen which now seemed too small to be read from, and flickered distractingly in the auditorium’s half-darkness.

It was my extended essay.

Somehow it must have been passed hand to hand, mouth to ear, and possibly mouth to mouth too, across the international body that was the IBO, and from there leaped off some academical springboard into the world of university literature. And where it landed it had sat and gathered renown as wealth does interest, until now it was one of the century’s greatest triumphs of technical writing, and the novels that were its subject now required reading for all the best universities along the American east coast.

Unable to believe this turn of events, I searched through the university journals and academic papers on my computer back in my dormitory, and affirmed every word that I have told you above. There was no mistaking it. My essay was famous. Oreimo was famous. I would be famous too, had I not enrolled into this small university situated on the northern border of the little city in which I resided; and also had I not, on a sudden, wild whim, enrolled with a false name.

Then I decided, out of curiosity as to what the general internet populace thought of it, to visit an otaku forum I hadn’t been to since my foregone rose-coloured high school days.

And there I found a completely different story.

News of my essay had coasted along the sound waves of academia until a particularly young professor’s sibling-or-other took note of it and spread it, as a vector a virus, from the stuffy world of libraries to the infinite space of the internet, pinging here and there with free thought transferred at a hundred megabits per second.

Perhaps there were those among the first receivers who had surmised that what I did had been done as a joke, and so forgave it. And perhaps there were others simply keen to win anime a legitimate place for itself among the worn busts of prose and drama and poetry and film that lined the leaden halls of academia; and still others who found humour in this joke and supported it with all the might of 4chan that they could rally behind their backs.

Perhaps.

Joke or not, it had been taken too far, and the intelligent otaku community—the one which, despite being the minority, wielded power on the internet; certainly more power than their riffraff counterparts, the fanboys—exploded with rage at the travesty this made of all intelligent anime. Oreimo? Deep? What of Evangelion, of Utena, of N.H.K, of all the other infinitely more intellectual and thought-provoking franchises that dotted the firmament of the anime sphere as thickly as stars on a summer’s night? There was Deneb, Altair, Vega; there was Kino no Tabi and Mushishi and Spirited Away. So many of them there were that one only had to remember to look up at the sky to find them—so why Oreimo? And worst of all, why , why had the academic world accepted this glaring lie as truth with so much ease?

And so I went from the college’s champion to the internet’s enemy.

As all problems left untreated when small tend to do, it got worse. So oft it chances that the academic world is blind to all but its books, and so now it saw not the anger which seethed in the electromagnetic waves made palpable by sheer force of emotion that traversed the city day after day. And so my essay grew more famous, as did Oreimo.

A year into college, they had turned my essay into a fully detailed course, complete with assessments and activities, for high school use.

A little while after that the series entered the bestseller lists, and interest for it multiplied like a fast-spreading bruise. Perhaps it was my sophistry, or perhaps it was the power of mainstream opinion; either way, the general public soon concluded that Oreimo was without a doubt the finest piece of literature the world had ever seen.

Both seasons of the anime were collectively named the greatest anime of all time.

The author, seeing yet another possibility for profit, wrote sequel after sequel, spinoff after spinoff, until Oreimo came to dominate the entire otaku industry. Take the opportunity to walk the streets of Akihabara and you will see that I speak only the truth. There exist now Oreimo mahou shoujo, Oreimo mecha, Oreimo shounen, Oreimo shoujo, Oreimo moe, Oreimo yuri, Oreimo yaoi, and Oreimo every other genre of anime, manga, or light novel you can imagine.

So now you can witness the power of human hubris in all its glory. Behold! Here is I, who singlehandedly toppled the titan of the otaku trade. Behold! Such is the strength of the perverseness of human nature, that magnifies to smallest intentions to exponential size and sets them to interfere with the very courses of the galaxies! Behold this worse decision I have ever, ever made! Behold!

---

I fancy I hear clapping; and I when I look about me, I find I am surrounded by numerous people: adults, children, in uniform and in civilian attire, all standing upon a boundless world of blue skies stretched above and reflected below. They are clapping, clapping, clapping.

“Omedetou!”