Bonus Podcast (with Transcript) 2023 April: Made in Abyss Season 2 and Abuse Survivor Narratives

Toni returns to tell Vrai and Cy about Made in Abyss, and how the second season finally uses all its child suffering to tell a compelling story about abuse, survival, and justice.

As always, these special focus episodes (or "Infodump Corner," as we sometimes call them among staff) are still new, so we'd love to hear your feedback!

Content Warning for discussion of child abuse (sexual/physical), ableism, bodily fluids, and fetishization of minors.

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VRAI: Hi there, patrons. Welcome back to another bonus podcast! Thank you so much for supporting the site. We really couldn’t do this without y’all. Because folks responded so well to the last round of what I am calling “Infodumping for Fun and Profit,” where I talked at length about The Untamed and its source material, we will be doing that again! And Toni has volunteered to talk about their baby, their very problematic baby.

TONI: [Laughs] Oh my goodness! It is a baby. And it’s funny that you call it a baby because, you know, very bad things happen to babies in this particular show. So, you know, it’s appropriate.

VRAI: Exactly. Yes. Once again, I am joined by Toni and Cy.

CY: Hi.

VRAI: Thank you very much for your time.

TONI: [prolonged] Hello…

VRAI: [crosstalk] And as perhaps you have—

[Chuckling]

VRAI: Toni, what are we talking about?

TONI: We are talking about my favorite show of the last year, the show that truly took a dip and then got back up and was like, “No, I’m just gonna be good again,” Made in Abyss.

CY: Okay, okay. Okay.

VRAI: All right. We hashed this out in team chat a little bit, and the decision was reached that this will not be a spoiler-dense chat, but in order to free things up to talk about the broad strokes of what makes particularly season 2 interesting, there will be general broad spoilers to the tune of “Bad things happen to children,” because no one should be surprised about that with this show.

TONI: Nope! Nobody at all, if they’ve seen the first season, should be surprised at all that terrible things continue to happen to children in this show.

VRAI: So, for folks at home, I have seen the first season of Made in Abyss, was extremely mixed on it, and got really soured between learning things about the manga (I’m sorry, I think the manga artist is a creep) and the general reception to the film, so I just kind of gave season 2 a miss entirely. What about you, Cy?

CY: So, I have seen the first six episodes, which did make me request all of the manga from my day job, because… free. And I did not know that the manga author was a creep. But I do sometimes have an easier time digesting things by reading. But let me tell ya. Here’s the thing. I know three things about this anime: (1) bad things happen to children; (2) the soundtrack is a banger; (3) everyone is obsessed with this little robot boy’s pee-pee, and it’s very uncomfortable!

TONI: [Laughs]

CY: It’s very uncomfortable! It’s very uncomfortable!

TONI: Okay, in fairness, it’s not just his pee-pee; it’s also his belly button. So… you know, if that makes you feel any better.

CY: I don’t know! I don’t know if that makes me feel better. Also, I’ll—

VRAI: The camera is also deeply obsessed with this small girl’s bodily functions.

CY: It’s weird!

VRAI: Mostly piss but also shit!

TONI: So, I guess this brings us to the caveats. [Laughs]

VRAI: Yeah, I promise we’re getting our dunking out of the way to let you talk about the broader themes, because I know they’re there.

TONI: Yeah.

CY: Yeah, so, give us some content warnings for this series because I feel like…

TONI: Sure.

[Chuckling]

TONI: And this list is going to be very, very, very long, okay? I can give you a full list of content warnings if you really want it.

VRAI: No, no, let’s just… big ones.

CY: Yeah.

TONI: What? Big ones.

VRAI: Big ones.

CY: [crosstalk] Big ones.

TONI: Okay, cannibalism…

CY: What?

TONI: Yeah, you heard me right. I would say body horror, to an extreme degree. Terrible things happening to small and cute animals. Sexual violence up the wazoo. It’s rough! It’s rough. Here’s the difference, though, between season 2 and season 1 and the movie. It feels purposeful in season 2 in a way it never felt before. But I will still also say, if any of those things are a big turn-off to you, if you’re not about wanting to see babies get… well, terrible things happen to them, if you don’t want to see, perhaps, weird things happen to anuses, I would not watch this show. I will say that.

CY: You know, normally I try to come up with a witty response to things, but I don’t have it.

[Chuckling]

TONI: This show’s gross! What is there to say? It’s gross! It really is! And there’s no getting around that. There’s no getting around that.

VRAI: Oh, no, I was gonna say, I think… because, Cy, you mentioned picking up the manga (I don’t know that you’ve read the manga), the anime tones down a lot, a lot.

TONI: Big time. Big time, especially in season 2.

CY: You know, in this life we are grateful when we get things for free and we do not pay.

VRAI: True.

CY: It’s normally the reverse. Normally the manga is where all the “Whew!” is, but okay. Okay, in for a penny, in for a pound. Let’s dive into this labyrinth. [Chuckles]

TONI: All right, well, here’s the thing. Okay, so let me give you my pitch. So, Vrai, I felt very similarly. When I heard about the movie, I was skeptical. I was like, okay. I already found Bondrewd to be not a particularly compelling villain because he’s just like Mrs. Coulter from His Dark Materials, only without any of the interesting motivations. Very like “I’m experimenting on children for science!” and immortality, which is not a particularly interesting thing.

And in the movie, I found— I watched the movie, and I found it intensely exploitative of the characters. I was very frustrated. A continual problem in season 1 and in the movie is I feel like the characters are largely devoid of interiority. Things happen to them, but they don’t really process the things that are happening to them or try to make meaning of them. And I think that the problem with that is, of course, that the author is fetishizing this idea of the child as being… you know, their lack of interiority protects them from the violence they’re experiencing. That’s what I perceive in season 1 through the movie. And that’s my main gripe with the show.

VRAI: I would agree with that. Yeah.

TONI: The good thing about season 2 is that season 2 is where thematically suddenly things start to cohere. And it really recontextualizes the violence that happened in the movie and in season 1 of the show within a larger thematic thing of “What demands can survivors of oppressive systems make on the people who’ve oppressed them? What demands can people who are being exploited by community make upon that community for real justice?”

And the characters are so much more interesting and so much more well-realized. I’m obsessed with Vueko. Vueko is like… Oh my God, what an amazing character.

So, I’m just putting it out there. Season 2 for me actually is really where the show stepped up the game, whereas before, you know, the Cartridge nonsense just made me so angry. It was just so grotesque and unnecessary and bizarre. Whereas season 2, it felt like anything that happened was dealt with in a meaningful way and in a way that had the weight of what would be necessary for justice to actually happen, versus the movie, which totally chickens out on killing Bondrewd. It’s like, “Oh, you can live!”

VRAI: Boo!

TONI: “You can live.”

VRAI: Boo!

TONI: “It’s fine!” Boo. Yeah.

VRAI: Boo. Okay. Yeah, it… My understanding is that the good stuff kind of kicks off once it arrives at the central setting of season 2, and the elevator business less so?

TONI: Yeah. Well, the elevator… So, there’s kind of two major narratives. The narrative is set in this community that can be best described, I think, as “Omelas: The Anime.” So, you know, there’s this Ursula K. Le Guin story about a community where it’s happy and everyone gets everything they desire but it’s all run on the suffering of one child who is in this disgusting space of… essentially covered in shit all the time and being constantly tortured.

VRAI: Oh, if you folks at home watched Vampire in the Garden, it also uses this device. Carry on.

TONI: Right. And so, season 2 of Made in Abyss essentially replicates that both through imagery and through just the conceit of it. There’s multiple characters who kind of play that role.

First is Vueko, who is literally— The imagery around Vueko is very much a callback to “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” She’s kind of in this pit covered in goo, miserable and alone forever. It’s impossible to not see that as a direct reference, right?

But the thing about this story that I think is really interesting is that it’s answering one of my problems with the “Omelas” narrative, which is— The ending of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin is the people walk away from it. They’re like, “I cannot be a part of this community anymore that is so exploiting this child.” But they don’t take revolutionary action to bring down the community that is exploiting the child.

And to explain the central conceit a little bit, this town is full of Hollows. And they’re all getting everything that they desire at every time point in the most hedonistic way possible. And the town is kind of organized… it was created through the mind and body of a child who is being exploited.

So, Made in Abyss kind of answers this problem through having a character who is effectively the daughter of this child who is being exploited so much, Faputa. She’s the daughter of the person who’s being exploited. And Faputa really wants more than anything to destroy this village, this village that so exploited her mother.

And the big moral arc and moral question of the show is “Ethically, does Faputa have a right to destroy this place?” Does she have, as the person who’s carrying on the lineage of the person who was tortured and disfigured by the community—for the community to benefit, and exploited—to destroy that community? Which has so many parallels to different… Like, you know, whether we’re thinking about the descendants of enslaved people, the survivors of sexual violence, right? Like, what right do people have to destroy a society that’s exploiting them?

VRAI: That definitely interests me as somebody who… I hadn’t put it in quite those exact words until listening to you describe season 2, but I think one of my big problems with season 1 is that the child characters are very… You know, they persevere, they survive, something something…

I just rewatched Night of the Hunter the other night. Children abide. The world is harsh to little things. But they’re not really angry. They’re horrified, they’re curious, they support one another, but it’s as though their innocence disallows them from being angry or vengeful or having those emotions that are deemed adult or ugly.

TONI: Right! Absolutely. And Faputa is the exact opposite of that. She is mad and she’s going to do just anything that she can to destroy this village.

And what’s interesting is that there’s aspects of Faputa that feel more adult than childlike, right? She’s a little bit more sexual than a child probably should be in terms of… It kind of—

VRAI: Made in Abyss!

TONI: Yeah, because this is Made in Abyss, it sexualizes her, right? And it’s implied that she and Reg had some sort of sexual connection, which is a lot. [Chuckles]

VRAI: [strained] Okay!

TONI: Yeah, yeah.

CY: [Chuckles]

VRAI: [strained] Reel me back in!

TONI: Yeah, but…! I know, I know, but it’s portrayed in a very innocent and sweet way. It’s not like… You know, okay, that’s not true. She does take her talon and put it right through Reg’s belly button, so, uh…

CY: [Groans]

VRAI: [Sighs] See, I feel like I would mind that less if it was off screen. I’m going to guess it’s not off screen.

TONI: It’s definitely not off screen.

CY: I don’t think Made in Abyss knows how to put something off screen from my six-episode experience.

VRAI: No, that’s fair.

CY: That—

TONI: But you know that does put off— Okay, you were saying? [Chuckles]

CY: No, you go on, you go on, because I want to hear what you’re gonna say next [Chuckles] before I say something.

TONI: Well…! But I mean, when it wants to be sweet—

VRAI: We love and support you!

TONI: When it wants to be sweet about the relationship, it can be. There’s a really magical episode that… I forget who it’s directed by, but it’s directed by somebody really awesome. But it represents the arc of Faputa’s relationship with Reg and it creates this narrative of somebody who is trying to navigate the injustice that they are experiencing or have experienced and come to terms with what they must do to right that injustice and think that they have somebody who’s their ally in righting it. And it’s a really beautiful narrative.

And we haven’t even gotten to Vueko, and Vueko is such a wonderful character. The show opens… And this is not a spoiler because it literally opens with a scene of Vueko being sexually abused.

CY: [Breathes heavily]

TONI: Which sets that tone— I know! Which sets the tone for the rest of the series, because it is about Vueko’s journey to claiming her ability to love other people, to claiming her ability to protect the people she loves and cares about in the only ways that she can and support other survivors of these kinds of exploitative violence, because she acts as almost a mother figure.

VRAI: Listening to you talk about what you like about Made in Abyss reminds me of listening to my partner talk about what they like about Loveless, which we have all 13 volumes of, because they find Soubi to be such a poignant portrayal of a child sexual assault survivor. Yun Kouga’s work is a lot. And that is a series that does definitely exploit its 12-year-old protagonist!

TONI: To give you an idea of who Vueko is, Vueko was part of the original— She and this whole team of people— This is not a spoiler, by the way; this happens in the first episode.

She had a whole team of people, of people who are outcast from society, people who have nowhere else to go, survivors of violence, survivors of capitalism, survivors of all these different exploitative systems come together, and they travel into the Abyss, believing that at the center of the Abyss is a place where they can make a home for themselves, where their dreams will come true.

And she meets along the way a little girl named Irumyuui, who is outcast from her village. The village on the edge of the Abyss sends children who cannot bear children into the Abyss because they’re viewed as worthless, specifically girl children. And Vueko, probably because of the sexual violence that she experienced, it’s implied, also cannot bear children, because that’s what happens, often, to people who experience all of that, right? And Vueko develops this bond with Irumyuui as a fellow survivor of that kind of violence, because, I mean, how would you learn that a 11-year-old or 12-year-old can’t bear children without violating them, right? And so, they develop this bond where she is committed: “I’m going to protect you at all costs.”

To me, it is such a powerful representation of somebody who is trying, even in spite of a system that is designed to exploit them, because what ends up happening… She does not succeed in protecting Irumyuui. I’m not gonna explain how but she does not. And so much of her arc is contending and coming to process her failure to protect Irumyuui and what that says about these systems and what it says about cults and being a survivor of sexual violence, that we can’t magically protect each other, as much as we try, without creating systems and creating a new society in which that’s possible.

But yeah. And so, to me, season 2 actually really recontextualizes so much of the violence that the characters experience in the preceding volumes because it makes it clear that the systems that are exploiting Riko, that would string her up naked… You know, and as much as the camera will ogle that in weird ways… But those systems were unjust. The system of cave-diving is unjust and exploiting children.

So then, what do you do with that? Do you burn it down? Do you destroy it?

I remember I was listening to another podcast where… I think it was Lynzee Loveridge and Jacki Jing, and I think they were joking around that their most satisfying version of the Made in Abyss finale would be “The Abyss is destroyed! No more Abyss!”

VRAI: Yeah, I… I am left wondering whether the structure of the narrative allows for any kind of cathartic conclusion, because it’s like, how can you find hope if you’re digging to the bottom of the well? And I don’t know, but that, I suppose, remains a concern of mine. Is there places for it to go except darker and worse?

TONI: Yeah, and that’s the question, right? And it makes me think of… as I was saying earlier, I think part of the question that it’s asking is “Even if the end result is actually really bad?” Burning down that community means everybody in it will die, right? It’s a community that is exploiting people, right? But burning it down means everybody’s gonna die, right? But is that still more just than for them to continue to exploit this one child?

And it really makes me think of the demands that we see coming from certain segments of, for example, Black studies. There’s a school of thought called Afropessimism which talks about, you know, we have to be ready to destroy the world if it means that these systems that exploit people are no more. I often think to myself, well, if we destroyed all prisons and carceral systems without necessarily… you know, people often talk about “We have to replace them with something.” Well, what if we didn’t and it ended up in destroying the US nation-state? For example. Knowing that that nation-state was predicated on and dependent on this exploited labor and exploited bodies and re-enslavement of people through the prison system, is that not, in some ways, justice for it to come all crashing down, right? Even if the end result is actually kind of miserable!

And I think that Made in Abyss is actually asking a very similar question, weirdly enough, to that strand of theory, which I’ve also talked about a little bit in my Madoka Rebellion essay. Now, do I necessarily side with that? No. Do I think it’s an interesting question? Yes.

VRAI: I was gonna say, I think that is a kind of narrative that I respect, but it’s not one that I value when created accidentally, if that makes sense. Pessimistic narratives I prefer to be purposeful, where the writer is attempting to say something with this catharsis and knows what that something is, whereas a scavenged or discovered pessimist narrative.

CY: So, as I’ve been listening, the thought that has come to mind is being Black and existing in a nation where every bit of a… I shouldn’t say “every bit of culture,” because that does ignore indigenous folks, but where a lot of culture, especially modern Gen Z culture, and a lot of architecture and a lot of things that are the foundation of our country were literally built on the backs of my ancestors, right? Thinking about that in comparison to Made in Abyss is actually kind of turning me because I find it interesting as a narrative about upending systems.

I’m kind of with Vrai, like, I am not a pessimistic person and I struggle with pessimistic narratives but I kind of want to give this a try again. I kinda want to dive into the Abyss.

VRAI: [Chuckles] Yeah, I—

CY: Do they stop talking about his pee-pee, though? Please! Do they?

TONI: [Shouts]

VRAI: [Chuckles]

TONI: Um…

CY: And I’m using that language because I watched the dub and I believe they said that verbatim.

TONI: [Laughs] Well, I will say no more adults talk about his pee-pee.

CY: I guess we can take what we can get in this—

VRAI: That’s better?!

TONI: [Laughs]

CY: —we get in this life.

TONI: No more adult creepy-old-uncle type character is like, “Ooh! What do we have in here?” looking through and down his pants.

CY: [crosstalk] That’s a W.

VRAI: That is a W.

TONI: It’s no more of that.

VRAI: Okay, okay.

CY: [Chuckles]

VRAI: I have two questions, which are… First, does introducing all of these small angry children allow Riko and Reg to have more interiority? And (B) how is Nanachi? How is my baby? I do miss them.

TONI: I have not mentioned Nanachi this whole episode! Dang! I guess that unfortunately does tell you something.

VRAI: [Cries in alarm]

CY: [Chuckles deeply]

TONI: [Chuckles] But okay. Um, so… Sorry, Vrai. So, I would say that Reg is the emotional heart of… Reg and Faputa are the emotional hearts of this season. Reg, Faputa, and Vueko, I would say, those three characters.

And Reg really has to make some very hard choices, and with hard choices in any show comes interiority, always, I think, if it’s done well. He has to think about, like, “What does justice mean for me? How am I going to understand justice against this system? How am I going to understand my identity when my memory of this person, Faputa, has been completely wiped? And she says that we have this commitment to her, right? But I don’t remember making that commitment. She’s just a person to me. You know, she’s just some person who seems to be really into me. Whoa.”

And so, I think that Reg is given a humongous amount more interiority than he’s ever had previously, and I really loved that about the season. I suddenly felt like I understood who Reg was a little bit more as a character.

Um… Ah, Riko, Riko… Oh my goodness, Riko. I just… Riko very much frustrates me. Riko will always frustrate me.

VRAI: Aw.

TONI: I’m a little bit more lenient on this season because there’s so many other female characters who I think are so interesting and so well-written, you know, Vueko and Faputa, who have enormous amounts of inferiority and are—Irumyuui, who all… So, that makes me much more lenient.

And Riko does get some moments where she gets to be an awesome action hero, which you all have talked about in previous podcasts, that it’s frustrating when Reg kind of steals her thunder. But I would not say that she necessarily gets the kind of interiority that I’ve been waiting for her to have, because it’s really Reg, Faputa, and Vueko’s story. And, you know, it’s worth noting two of those are girls. So, gender parity is still a thing.

VRAI: Bonanza.

TONI: But Riko is— [Chuckles] But Riko is still kind of not… kind of— Honestly, the conclusions that Riko comes to at the end of the arc just make me a bit frustrated! So, I would say Riko’s arc is one of the weaker parts.

And then Nanachi… Oh, God, Nanachi. [Groans softly] But they are… Well, they’re still they/them, I think, if I remember right.

VRAI: [faintly] Yay.

TONI: [Chuckles] You sound like… [Groans] “Yay, the one thing I could hope for.”

VRAI: [Laughs]

TONI: So, the thing about Nanachi is that Nanachi for much of the season is kind of plot-holed, where they are put in a position where they are pretty much denied agency and where it’s a little bit of a rehash of previous stories in a sense. But I also think that that gives them some time to actually process the decisions they made, right? Because those decisions they made before were from a place of crisis and emergency, right?

Whereas now they’re actually making decisions about… I’m not gonna spoil it. But they’re making decisions much more from a place of “I need to fully process the grief that I feel and the love that I feel, and this can’t any longer be this thing that I’m holding on to that’s driving me so much. I need to fully embrace the people who are in my life, Riko, Reg.” So, I think they have a good arc in terms of interiority and in terms of actually meaningfully developing as a character.

Do they contribute to the plot in the ways that I wish they would? No. But they do have a role to play towards the end of this narrative that’s really meaningful and really beautiful.

VRAI: I’ll take it.

TONI: Yeah. And they are… You know… I think this season actually really… I have a lot of problems with Made in Abyss’s season 1 specifically in how it relates to euthanasia…

VRAI: Boy howdy!

TONI: … and disabled people. I once heard a podcast that was like, “Season 1 of Made in Abyss is a really great argument for why disabled people should sometimes be euthanized because it’s just better for them.”

CY: [Exhales in alarm] Wow, wow, wow!

TONI: I was like, “Way to wildly, wildly misinterpret everything about this show in every possible way, but also I can see why you said that.” I feel like season 2 starts to maybe unpack that a little bit more and really contend with that choice in a more meaningful way than season 1 perhaps did, where it was kind of a foregone conclusion.

VRAI: Okay.

CY: This anime is a lot. [Chuckles]

VRAI: Yeah, I must unfortunately wrap us up. But sincerely, thank you, Toni. I may be forced to… This may force me to recategorize Made in Abyss from its current box in my head as the 2010s version of Elfen Lied that we’ll all be embarrassed of in a decade.

CY: That one also has a weird thing—

VRAI: [crosstalk] Because season 2 sounds more—

CY: That one also has a weird thing about piss!

TONI: [Laughs]

CY: What is it with these anime? [Chuckles] Continue! Sorry! Sorry!

TONI: [crosstalk] Listen, I think season 2 really knows what it’s saying about sexual violence and about violence against children and how children process that violence. I genuinely do. I don’t think it’s accidental! I think it’s quite purposeful. Season 1 and the movie, those were a mess. But season 2, I feel like, has so much to say and says it very well.

VRAI: I am prepared to give it a shot on your recommendation.

CY: I mean, I have the Switch game because I got it free from work, so, like…

TONI: Oh, no! [Chuckles]

CY: … I gotta watch the anime! [Chuckles] Gotta watch it.

TONI: I have heard nothing good about the Switch game, so, my condolences.

VRAI: Oof, oof, oof, oof!

CY: Emphasis on “free”! [Chuckles]

TONI: [Laughs]

VRAI: Wait. Gameplay-wise or narrative-wise?

TONI: I’ve heard neither!

VRAI: Oh, good, good!

TONI: It’s bad! It’s a bad game!

VRAI: Very cool and fun!

All right, well, tell us your thoughts down below, folks at home, and if you would perhaps be interested in sort of a long-form discussion of Made in Abyss building off of this on the franchise— (Not the franchise; God) —on the anime as it exists as a whole to this point. But yeah, I am very glad that we did this.

And thank you again, Toni. I like doing these.

CY: This was fun.

TONI: Yeah, it was fun. I just like getting to talk about season 2. I’ve been trying to get people to watch this for a while now.

VRAI: I support you.

All right, well, thank you so much, AniFam. Let us know your thoughts down in the comments. And we will see you next month. Thank you again for all your support.

CY: Keep on dungeon-diving.