The Fleeting Beauty of Youth and the Persistent Beauty of Youthfulness – Pretty Boy Detective Club

When I started high school, some friends of mine told me that our school building had a tunnel system that could be accessed from some of the classrooms. When the campus was first constructed in the mid-1950’s, it included a nuclear fallout shelter; that’s what these tunnels were originally for. Calling them “tunnels” was generous, too, because they weren’t meant to accommodate the height of a person standing (I suppose the assumption was, if they were getting used, the folks inside would be huddled heads-to-knees while the bombs went off outside).

When I heard about the existence of these tunnels and saw the few grainy photographs my friends had taken during their time investigating them, I immediately wanted my own opportunity to explore. We all picked a day to stay after school and hoped that there wouldn’t be too many teachers around to thwart our efforts. Unfortunately we seemed to get caught during every attempt we made to poke around shelves and move potted plants in order to uncover access panels, and were continually shooed away. After a while we just gave up on the effort and moved on to other shenanigans.

I’ve never really forgotten about those tunnels and my desire to poke my head inside them, but like so many things that happened (or didn’t) around 9th grade I kind of made peace with the fact that I’d probably never see firsthand what was hidden down there beneath the floor. It was kind of like when I tried out for the fall play and was the only one of my friends who didn’t make the cut, or when my undiagnosed learning disabilities and complete lack of study skills finally caught up with me in math class, despite my aspirations of becoming a “game programmer” – I was forced to wrestle with the reality of what was and wasn’t possible for me to accomplish by my own skills and gained some sobering perspective on my limitations.

I think that’s probably why I connected with the recent anime adaptation of Pretty Boy Detective Club, a pretty good anime series nestled within a season that was overflowing with them. The show is ostensibly about a mysterious group of boys at an elite school who solve mysteries together. Each of the boys has some special trait that expresses their own sense of what’s beautiful, and having this special appreciation for beauty is one of three important requirements for being a part of the club (the other two rules are “be a boy” and “be a detective,” naturally). Mayumi, a fellow student, encounters the club by chance (or perhaps by design) as she ponders a mystery from her own past, and after the boys help her to realize the truth about it she’s been searching for, she’s so impressed that she decides to be a boy and join their club herself.

When Mayumi joins the club, she takes on a masculine presentation – she wears a boy-style uniform with slacks rather than a skirt, and wears her hair short. This gender transformation could be interpreted as a trans narrative; when Mayumi takes on the presentation that she spends the bulk of the series in she seems to open up as a person. That said, I’m somewhat unwilling to make any hard statements to that effect since I’m not an insider to the trans community, and some of the revelations of the final episode seem to suggest that all the characters’ specific “quirks” are more a phase than permanent state of being. Yet, it’s that idea of Mayumi’s freedom found within that impermanence that I found intriguing, because I think it speaks to the experiences of being unable to conform within an environment that strongly encourages conformity to very arbitrary standards, one of the many struggles of youth and especially within a formal school system.

I can only speak with authority on my own experiences, but as a young girl I often felt very pressured to act more maturely than my own mindset typically allowed. I say this fondly, but my younger sister and I were like animals, fighting, roughhousing, scraping our knees and bruising our bodies while my mom got upset at me for getting my long hair tangled and knotted (she eventually forced me to cut it off short – something I remember being mildly traumatic in the moment and which differentiated me from other girls in my first grade class). I earned a reputation for being a “tomboy,” and despite now feeling a little grossed-out by the concept, that label actually became my ticket to freedom for a long time. I began to self-identify as “not like other girls” which gave me leeway to goof off and avoid some of the social pressure I wasn’t ready to deal with. Eventually in doing this I began to vilify girlhood and femininity, which was a mindset that took me years to shed. But I also don’t blame myself entirely for behaving like an ass, because if the role you’re “supposed” to fulfill seems shitty, then what kid wouldn’t feel compelled to rebel a little bit if they had a way to do so? By a certain age, youthful defiance takes on a certain appeal, a fleeting beauty that feels like justified passion.

At the outset of the series, Mayumi is burdened by her parents’ expectations for her. It’s only her second year of middle school, yet she’s been ordered to quit dreaming her silly dreams and get her head out of the stars. In that sense it’s not difficult why she’d see this group of boys indulging and reveling in their own ridiculousness and suddenly want to take a detour into their beautiful, frivolous world.

I could probably spend quite a while dissecting the specific use of gendered terminology and how the emphasis on “boy” as an identifier of potential club members is messy and potentially problematic, but as much as my general criticisms of media tend to orbit around that kind of analysis, I find in this case that I honestly don’t care that much. From the first story arc I’ve always gotten the impression that the use of the term “boy” is more a placeholder for a concept that’s a lot more difficult to pin down in a succinct way, but which ultimately serves as the core of the series’ themes.

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Late in the series, we meet club president Manabu’s older brother, Odoru. Odoru, the founder of the Pretty Boy Detective Club, is spoken of as this legendary member who expressed his sense of beauty through song and dance. Considering the flamboyance of the other boys in the club, including Manabu in particular, this seems more than plausible. Yet when Mayumi meets Odoru, now a high school student, he seems exceedingly normal. Painfully normal, as if some spark has left him in the transition between middle and high school. Mayumi is then faced with the prospect of her own death when she becomes a target for violence during the school election, and nearly decides to quit at the behest of the other club members. Manabu remarks, “this is just child’s play, after all.” It’s from his line that it all clicked into place for me.

Youth is fleeting. There are only so many years where a kid can get away with acting completely bonkers before society’s pressure to settle down and get serious starts to become a heavy weight, whether by their own decision or by outside influences. I think this idea is reflected well in the idea of Chuunibyou, the peak expression of the idea that kids in their early teens, freshly-pubescent and beginning to stretch their wings, can still manage to get completely lost in their own fantastical illusions of grandeur. In series like Love, Chuunibyou, and Other Delusions, characters attempt to wrestle with their cringe-worthy past in settings where “growing up” means dropping the fantasy of having magical powers and becoming “normal.” In Outburst Dreamer Boys, the characters’ unique cringe-worthy-ness becomes a kind of personal superpower that allows them to help others, despite finger-wagging from the school authorities.

I like both of those shows quite a bit, and yet Pretty Boy Detective Club carves out a unique spot among them because of its understanding of the bittersweetness of this time period in kids’ lives. It doesn’t spend its time pointing fingers at the characters’ goofiness or inviting the audience to laugh at them knowingly. Instead it conveys the bittersweet beauty of what can only exist as a limited-time mindset. Amusements that one graduates from as life carries on.

I sometimes like to assure myself that, while I may have lost my youth somewhere along the way, I’ll hopefully never completely lose my youthfulness. There’s an arrogant thought that many geeks like to hold dear, that somehow their love of media that’s historically been seen as the realm of children – video games, comic books, and animation – sets them apart from “normies” that have since “grown up” and become boring. With geek culture now extremely mainstream I don’t necessarily think that’s the case, but I do think that there’s something to be said for putting in the work to keep one’s mind flexible and “childlike,” whatever that might mean to anyone specifically. Learning new ideas and information and being open to new, fresh art and music. Changing one’s opinions when new information is learned and verified. As my body starts to creak and groan more and more, I at least try to keep my brain nimble by feeding it new and novel things on a regular basis. I like to have fun, and whatever that means to me in the moment, it is definitely not just the realm or right of children.

When Mayumi is facing the prospect of dropping out of the student council race and accepting that her fun and games are meant to come to an end, it’s difficult not to think back to the previous episode and her disappointing meeting with Odoru Sotoin. There is beauty even in giving up on one’s dream, after all; beauty in the sadness of grieving something that’s been lost. Yet instead, Mayumi defiantly decides to go ahead and fight for her silly desire, and there’s beauty in that, too. Beauty in not accepting false limitations. Beauty in refusing to grow up, at least in the moment.

I’ve driven past my old high school many times in the past twenty-something years. It amazes me how much it’s changed – parts of the building have been remodeled to the point that I don’t recognize them, and another wing of it was torn down to lay a new parking lot. I wonder if the tunnels are even still down there waiting underground, woven beneath the linoleum floor like an alternate landscape. Yet, my longing to explore them firsthand faded away long ago. It’s not as if the desire to seek them out in spite of our teachers’ wishes was wrong in the moment, but it was a youthful desire that lacked the perspective to fully-form and express itself. As an adult, I find that there are so many more avenues of exploration open to me because I have the resources and foresight to take advantage of them. But it’s the youthful curiosity, the desire to know the things I don’t already know and to be in places I’ve not yet set foot in that still remains important as I continue to accumulate more years beneath my belt.

In the final moments of Pretty Boy Detective Club, we get glimpses into each of the characters’ future lives. Although each little still frame portrays a moment steeped in normalcy, at least in comparison to the adventures the characters have experienced throughout the anime series, each also portrays a continuity of personality for each of the characters that demonstrates a hopeful perspective on growing up (I especially enjoy the fact that Hyouta seems to become a gym teacher). The boys all enter “normie” careers, but carry forward the sparks of personality and talent that they brought to the Pretty Boy Detective club.

When I was in school, I was a little proto-weeb with a love for Japanese RPGs and whatever small scraps of anime and other Japanese entertainment I could get my hands on. I was also defiant about my femininity and took it out on other girls who I saw as boring, and was probably pretty disruptive in general. I think the hope is that, in time, experiences will buff out all more and more of our imperfections – our bad attitudes, our lack of social skills, our sheltered perspectives – and allow us to become our best selves. I can’t really make an unbiased judgment about myself in that regard, but though I’ve settled down quite a bit and have an established career now, my love of Japanese media has led me to continue writing and to indulge my curiosity by seeking out new anime and allowing myself to have opinions about it. Memories of my youthful actions are just that – memories. But memories are moments that can, if you allow them to, positively influence your present and future. Youth may be fleeting, but youthfulness is a gift – a beautiful gift – that we can grasp onto and hold in the palms of our hands as we continue to walk our own paths.

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Pretty Boy Detective Club is available streaming at Funimation.