Why I (Should) Hate 'Chobits' (and you should, two!)
On the second day of hate, I decided to elaborate further.
Did I tell you, dear reader, that its been 10 years since I actually watched Chobits? I assure you, you’re not really getting a sophisticated examination, and I’m just hoping the quality and strength of my memory is good enough to let me write about it. However, if D.G.D Davidson isn’t going to write about it, then someone has to.
Where were we? Yes, the other day I cited Chii and her child-like nature as a troublesome element of the show. I’m sure it was controversial because, even within the show, Chii is one of the few sole sweet android cinnamon-rolls among a rather warped bunch. In fact, if anything, assuming she was a true person, she’s just a victim of the humans around her. And I agree with this. Which brings us to focus on her prime victimizer.
#2. Hideki Motosuwa
At the beginning of Chobits, Hideki Motosuwa was your typical 18 year old young man, living the life we all should. Living on a farm, leading a life of virtue, modesty, and discipline by working the land that his parents possessed and that one day he would inherit and enjoy. And by God, if He so wills, he’ll pass that good land on to his own descendants as well…
Nah, just kidding.
This is Japan, and his maker is CLAMP.
Hideki Motosuwa was an 18 year old Japanese young man who couldn’t get into a college, and narrowly avoided becoming a NEET through the luck of having parents who owned a farm. On the positive side, he had a will to change his circumstances, and value work. On the negative side, he’s not exactly passing the hump of the IQ bell curve, and he’s fascinated with internet porn. In real life, when Chobits was written, it was the early 2000’s. A time that many who reside in First World nations might remember as being the tail end of a period of technological innovations. Some of that sentiment was carried over into the show, and was written into Hideki’s excitement when leaving the rural space for the city and seeing Persocoms in person. But the real selling point of Persocoms for him was potentially using them to surf the internet for porn. He even shouts this out this desire while dwelling on getting a machine of his own, before the plot sees fit for him to stumble across one.
Now, Hideki has built enough “face” to be considered by friends and neighbors to be a nice guy. In general, as far as they and the world are concerned, he’s a harmless, well-meaning, and minimally productive member of society. But, most of the point of “face” is that outsiders only see that image of one performing themselves in that context. If anyone overheard Hideki doing what he did and saying what he had in the image above, he’d lose face for being exposed as a pervert. Which is what Hideki is in the long run of the show, in both the modern sense of having odd and unsettling sexual interests, and in the classical sense of having personality defects that convinces him to commit to an improper way of life. And Its important to keep in mind that the environment he lives in is already somewhat twisted by the number of people who think, to some degree, that their robot companions are human souls.
This brings us back to Hideki’s relationship to Chii. Almost immediately after activating her, he begins to see her less as a machine and more as someone to be cared for and protected - you could say, “raised”. And the idea that anything about her could be suggestive was at first embarrassing and shame inducing to him. But, over the course of time, these barriers that he should’ve maintained towards someone he was caring for had begun to melt away. And the Hideki that was eager to get his hands on a girl android, so he could consume internet porn with it, starts to spill through. These urges on his part are dressed cutely, and expressed gently through romance and affection, as is apparently traditional for CLAMP. However, partially and vitally, its still him turning a sexual feeling on to his charges. At least, this is what should register to him and everyone around him if they took the idea seriously that robots are human, and that Chii was actually a person.
The problem is that the human shaped robots allows him to “have it both ways”. Hideki in the end would never have to worry about saving face when it comes to Chii. Because she’s a persocom, no one has to worry about Hideki’s corruption of a generally benevolent and warm relationship to someone dependent on him, in the service of his want for sex. He’ll never have to think all that deeply about his actions up till that point with regards to her — the relationship he started with and the morality of him altering it like this. At the same time, she’s “human” enough to let him live out a sexual fantasy, while he’s not left looking like a gross dude with a sophisticated and technologically dense blow-up doll or sex toy.
Wikipedia has some information on Hideki’s creation as a character and the plot of Chobits, by one of the members of the CLAMP crew, “The characterization of the protagonist Hideki proved to be difficult for her; in the beginning, she considered an "aloof" man who gradually warms up emotionally or a sex-obsessed man. She decided that neither characterization would be a good fit for Chi and settled on one of a penniless and benevolent student.”
She still ended up getting the sex-obsessed man, though. Loving a robot was never going to not be weird or not sexually disordered.
Meanwhile, because his friends and neighbors share that same mentality, all they do generally is just enable him in being a freak.