Monogatari is one of the most interesting and unusual series to come out of the anime scene over the last decade. The story is pretty simple, following a young man named Araragi who encounters a vampire and becomes part-vampire himself. After this occurrence, he gets roped into various occult mysteries and situations with the various girls and women in his life.
The series does a lot to play with form, helping it to stand out from other supernatural vampire series in the anime space. But there are definitely things about it that haven’t aged well upon revisiting. Here are five things from Monogatari that still hold up and five that don’t look great years later.
10 Aged Well: Characters
Monogatari has a million characters. They’re mostly women, with the major exception of Araragi, who is pretty much the only regularly appearing male character in the series. While all of the women and girls in the series definitely have weird things about them, which are discussed below, they are all also well-defined characters that are really different from each other. It would be easy for this type of show to let the character traits of the women bleed together, but their distinctiveness makes them easy and fun to watch.
9 Aged Terribly: Araragi And Children
Monogatari is a harem anime, the problems of which are discussed in more detail below, but one major problem is that some of the girls in the “harem” are actual children. And two of them are Araragi’s sisters. Araragi has some really weird, questionable encounters with these characters, a lot of which have a weird sexual tone to them. It’s problematic in a number of ways, not least of which is because they’re very young characters and the nature of the teasing (like saying he wants to grope a girl who is in fifth grade) isn’t really presented as being just teasing. Plus, two of the girls are actually related to him, which really ups the creepy factor.
8 Aged Well: The Music
The score of the series is very interesting and low-key, with a real sense of timeliness and consideration of place for each piece. For example, when the characters are walking around talking, a composition called “Stroll” might be playing.
The opening themes are also catchy and seem to consider the tone of the particular season they represent, with some being upbeat and poppy and others being moodier to reflect the changing scenarios.
7 Aged Terribly: Suruga Kanbara
It’s hard to take issue with lesbian characters when there is so little LGBT representation in anime. But when it's a bad representation, it can be almost as harmful as not existing at all. Suruga Kanbara is a character like this. She self-identifies as a lesbian in the series, which is pretty unusual in anime. The problem is that she constantly flirts with Araragi and talks about becoming his lover. This seems to imply that she’s faking her sexuality or that it only matters when the “right guy” isn’t around, which is a harmful stereotype of lesbians, that they’re just waiting for the right man to come along to change them back to being straight.
6 Aged Well: Dialogue Driven
Because it’s an supernatural occult mystery series, and the main character is a vampire, it seems understood that it would be at least somewhat action-oriented, with a focus on exciting occurrences between the characters. But the story actually focuses almost entirely on dialogue. It’s an interesting way of storytelling, and it creates a very intimate atmosphere between Araragi and the girl who is the main subject of the season at hand.
5 Aged Terribly: Women Needing To Be Saved
As a rule, the trope of women needing to be rescued by a man has gotten pretty stale by the year 2020. There are too many interesting, full-fledged female characters who are able to problem-solve on their own for viewers to not find this a little bit boring.
And since there are so many women in this series, it seems a little bit suspect that Araragi is always saving all of them from their problems.
4 Aged Well: Experimentation
The series does a lot to experiment with various storytelling methods, which are really interesting since this could otherwise be a pretty straightforward series. One of the coolest things about the series is the use of text bumpers between scenes. Sometimes, they’ll say a color or a word which will set the mood for the following scene. Other times, there are whole sentences which might be the internal monologue of Araragi as he responds to situations before him.
3 Aged Terribly: Harem Anime
The harem anime is a pretty popular genre. It features a male character, usually one of the only male characters in the series, who is constantly surrounded by women and girls, most of whom are interested in him romantically. It’s not a great look in any anime, but it feels especially egregious in this series, since there’s so much interesting stuff going on. The series ends up spending more time on this aspect of the story than on a lot of the more occult happenings.
2 Aged Well: Animation
The animation in the series is really impressive. Everything feels very specifically done, with the choices in mind made to draw the viewers’ attention to specific areas. For example, the characters were often colored in bright, high-contrast tones against otherwise fairly dark or monotone backdrops, making sure that the eye is always drawn to the characters and the intensity of the conversations happening between them.
1 Aged Terribly: Fan Service
Anime is very prone to fan service, which is essentially just adding elements to the series solely for the sake of the way fans will respond to them. This particularly happens with the way female characters are drawn or how they behave. Many of the female characters in Monogatari are incredibly busty, and they’re often talking about or behaving in a sexual manner that is clearly meant to titillate male viewers.