Ki Sho Ten Ketsu

First I’ve made this playlist of a number of YT videos about Kishotenketsu, I haven’t actually watched all of them yet but the ones at the start I have.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4CWxmx4wepidrlF-PrpezIs-mVr3Q0Ls

In this post I’m going to talk about it in a few different ways.

First, as I've already said before, I think the common translation of Ten as “Twist” is unintentionally misleading. And one manifestation of that is how it’s applied to Attack on Titan.  Yes I think even Pause and Select is wrong in trying to argue the Kishotenketsu breakdown of Attack on Titan correlates to the official Season designations of the Anime.

This is largely driven by the confusion of Ten with being a plot twist, because Season 3 revolves around plot twists way more then the first two seasons.

The first 3 seasons were designated three seasons even though they functionally aired as 4 broadcast seasons and have slightly more than enough episodes to theoretically be divided into Five seasons because of the quirks of how it aired. I’m convinced the 5th Broadcast season was branded as the “Final Season” purely for marketing, because the Manga was about to end and they’d committed to adapting the rest of it. 

However, narratively speaking I believe the Ten begins when Reiner becomes the main POV protagonist for a while.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Ten at least when applied to long form stories like this is about the story being very different then it was before.  And that if there is indeed a Plot Twist that causes it, that plot twist isn’t always part of the Ten but can often happen at the end of the Sho.

And one precedent for that is the Evangelion Rebuild films.  

One reason I think some people have trouble accepting the claim that the Three Act Structure isn’t as big in the East is because so many Anime film series are made as Trilogies, but honestly I think that kind of is just the Japanese Film industry mimicking Hollywood. Take the Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 Compilation films, they are a trilogy but I feel would clearly have worked much better as four films with the second beginning and ending with the Ramba Ral and Crowely Hamon arc.

And that’s why the Rebuild films are special, they are a true Kishotenketsu Tetralogy.  Evangelion 3.33 feels almost like itself a Reboot, but why everything is so different now is because of what happened at the end of 2.22.

And this also fits how I feel Kishotenkestsu very intentionally applies to the Wachowskis Speed Racer film from 2008.  Basically each of the film’s four races are the culminations of each of the four acts, with the film’s main “Twist” if you can call it that happening alongside the second race.

Like many who are aware of Kishotenketsu I often get annoyed when seeing some Normie YouTuber try to force the Three Act Structure or some other Western Structure derived from it (any proposed structure with an Odd number of parts is clearly just trying to stretch out the Three Act Structure) onto an Anime or Manga.  

However I also admit it’s not entirely wrong.  There are natural things that led to the Three Act Structure that can make it not limited to the West.  But I think the reverse is also true.  One video in that playlist argued Kishotenketsu is a Rhetorical device not a Story Structure, I disagree with the “not” part, or rather would add an “only” after it.  Both the Three Acts Model and Kishotenketsu can be viewed as lenses through which to look at stories that are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  After all most 12 episode Anime are either 4 Acts of 3 episodes each or 3 acts of 4 episodes each.

Still there is a Western Chauvinism I think in how often the Three Act Structure is imposed on Eastern stories rather than the other way around.  So I figured I should try to even that out.  I already mentioned Speed Racer but as an Anime Adaptation it’s certainly not independent of Eastern Influence, rather it shows how the Wachowskis did their research better then a lot of other Hollywood Anime Adaptations. The Cynic Clinic video at the start of my Playlist cites examples of people in Japan seeing Kishotenketsu in Frozen and Little Red Riding Hood. 

JustWrite has a video on how Batman Begins actually follows a Four Act Structure, but a differently defined one then Kishotenketsu.  And yet I can apply a Kishotenkestsu lens to it fairly easily by simply saying its midway point "Twist" is the introduction of The Batman to Gotham City.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace certainly can be broken down into four acts instead of the usual three based on what Planet the main cast is on, Naboo, Tatooine, Coruscant, and Naboo again.  The question is how plausible Kishotenketsu is? It could be in this context the Midway Point Twist is the existence of Darth Maul becoming known to the Jedi. 

But also on the subject of Star Wars, each season of Andor is divided into 4 Arcs of 3 episodes each just like a lot of Anime.

I also think about how Superman The Movie and Superman II are meant to be telling one massive story across two movies and that kind of fits.  First Superman is introduced to the world, then stopping Luthor’s plan is the development, then the introduction of the Super Villains is the Ten and the eventual battle between them and Superman is the Ketsu. 

I recently rewatched It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and concluded it too can be given a four act breakdown.  The first ends when the race properly starts after the failed negotiation on how to split up the money.  The Intermission breaks up Acts 2 and 3.  And Act four begins with the finding of the money.  

A number of DC and Marvel limited series that get referred to as Graphic Novels were originally published as 4 praters.  The Dark Knight Returns might actually the easiest to apply Kishotenketsu to. 

I added an update to my post about Spin Offs that start with no prior connection to the main cast arguing how they can fit one way of defining Kishotenketsu. And that also got me thinking how Phase One MCU can be viewed as following that kind of Kishotenketsu.  The first Iron Man film is the Ki, Iron Man 2 is the Sho, Thor and Captain America are the Ten and The Avengers is the Ketsu.  

I also got to thinking how one could make a standard Hollywood Trilogy into that by taking a setting or character only in the third film and making a prequel about them placed on the watch order between movies 2 and 3.  For the original Star Wars trilogy I guess the Ewoks would be the best option for that, (and there are Ewok focused Spin Offs but I don’t know where they hypothetically fit on the timeline). [Update: I guess a movie about the Bothans could also work if it also gives screen time to Admiral Ackbar and Mon Mothma.]  For The Dark Knight Trilogy an origin story for Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman would be the best bet.

Four Koma Manga like Azumanga Daioh are often cited as the perfect way to demonstrate Kishotenketsu on a micro level. But strangely never actually contrasting it to the standard Three Panel structure of American Newspaper Comics like Garfield.  It perhaps says something about my biases that I think the Azumanga Daioh girls in a Three Panel comic would look weird, but I think Four Koma gags with Garfield and Friends could work pretty well.

But I also notice Internet Memes and Web Comics tend to be Four Panels instead of Three (but you have to read them Right to Left unlike a Manga).  Is it possible that is because of how indirectly Japanese Comedy has influenced Internet Humor from very early on via Video Games and Anime and the sillier Godzilla movies?

The most infamous Four Panel Webcomic is arguably Loss, but honestly I’m having trouble even forcing it to fit Kishotenketsu.  It is more like Western Storytelling where the “Twist” happens in the last panel.  That’s not me dissing it, frankly I’m sick of the unfair hate that author has received and honestly I think it's a brilliant piece of wordless purely visual storytelling and the way people have abstracted it to mock it only further proves that.

However what I do think shockingly conforms to Kishotenketsu is a Prequel Meme, the one based on that Padme and Anakin scene from Attack of The Clones, “You’re Joking Right”.  Because I can easily argue that the Ten is the implication that Anakin isn’t Joking. 

I honestly am shocked that much of this wound up being about Star Wars.  Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in. 

I’ve wondered if maybe Japan also has a more niche Six Act structure given how many OVA series (like Gunbuster, War in The Pocket, Tenchi Muyo and Murder Princess) and Anime Arcs (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and the first arcs of A Certain Magical Index, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Sailor Moon SailorStars) I’ve observed play out over exactly 6 episodes (and the School Days Visual Novel is structured as 6 episodes). But then I think about how the Freytag’s Pyramid Five Act structure is just the Three Act structure with a couple extra steps, and suspect these Six Part stories have a similar relationship to Kishotenketsu, with it probably most often being the Sho and the Ten that get an extra episode each. 

That allows the Phase One MCU model to fit even better. I'd already split the Ten into two movies and now I can add The Incredible Hulk to the Sho rather than ignoring it.

Can I make the 6 episode George Lucas Saga fit? Maybe.  The Phantom Menace as an Introduction to everything obviously works, then we have two episodes covering the Clone Wars, then two episodes of following the next generation before Return of The Jedi brings everything together. 

Update February 2026: It seems season one of A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms will be 6 episodes, and episode 3 ended on a Twist. 

Someone on BookTube finally covered George MacDonald's Lilith and I observed from how they described the structure that it kinds of works as KiShoTenKetsu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu61VYRn_yE

I've also remembered once watching a YouTube video that says in the original Rocky the inciting incident happens at the halfway point.

Screenwriters deserve more Credit

When I started my Writers tag for discussion of how often Writers don't get enough credit and/or blame and Directors get too much, I always intended for it to eventually talk about more then just Anime but Anime was already becoming the main focus of this blog.

The YouTube Channel CinemaSix has some good videos on the forgotten Co-Writer of Quentin Tarantino's early films, principally Pulp Fiction.  Tarantino of course is legitimately a director whos' also a writer being a credited writer even on films he didn't direct.  I however feel like most of the time the Director is only also given a writing credit because of the way he changed the script on set, meaning they didn't Write anything so much as ignore what was written.  Other times the basic idea of the film may come from the director but they still needed a professional writer to actually make a script they can start shooting.

I specified Screenwriter in the title of this post because obviously when a film is an adaptation it's not at all uncommon to suggest it's enjoyable in-spite of the director rather then because of them.  Or even when not hating on the director everyone knows Mario Puzo wrote much of what makes The Godfather so quotable.  

It's writers who write specifically for Film and TV that only get respect when they also direct.

In the very Director obsessed world of YouTube Video Essays some writers will only get mentioned when it's something the Essayist doesn't like.  JustWrite argues that David S Goyer explains what AppleTV's Foundation and Man Of Steel have in common, but no one will talk about how much credit Goyer deserves for Batman Begins, how he's also the one who kept Nolan's realism fixation in check and is also why Begins has more witty dialogue then it's sequels.  If you're one of those who likes Begins the most of the Nolan Trilogy you're probably actually a fan of Goyer's writing but simply don't know it.

And that's not the first time a Batman movie's writer was screwed over.  Sam Hamm wrote the script for Tim Burton's Batman, and every deviation Burton made from the script was for the worse.  Burton is a good director, his style is a big part of why his Batman movies work, but they could have been even better if he hadn't over estimated his ability to Write.

And on the subject of Batman writers Alan Burnette was important to Batman The Animated Series success and had before that proven his skill at writing Batman by writing The Fear an episode of the 80s Superfriends cartoon.

It's fine if the Villain isn't one of the best characters.

I myself in the past on this very blog have repeated the common notion that having a great villain is a requirement for a great Superhero story.  But a lot has happened to change my mind on that.

It would be pointless to go on about great Genre stories that have no villain at all like the third Pokémon movie or Star Trek IV or the book of Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  Because that's irrelevant to the argument that if there is a villain the villain needs to be a very engaging and/or entertaining character.

Now I do love great villains, from cartoon villains played by a charismatic actor having a great time hamming it up to complex nuanced psychological profiles.  SSSS.Gridman provided one of each of those making it perhaps the best Anime of 2018 in the villain department.

But there is no story where every character is going to be a super engaging stand out character.  I need some to be fun and/or interesting for me to get into a show or movie, but it's okay if not all of them are.  Even some characters who have a lot of screen time and narrative importance in a given movie are basically just talking plot devices.

This post is about the fact that we tend to see the role of antagonist as one that's uniquely not allowed to be of lower priority.  No one is confused when a Superhero film is well received in-spite of the love interest character not being all that highly regarded.  But I'd argue the person we're supposed to believe the Hero is In Love With should be more important to get right then the person the Hero is trying to beat up.  The old Batman movies got away with relegating Pat Hingle's Jim Gordon to just an exposition device, but when they get one of the villains wrong everyone loses their minds.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe was for awhile perceived as being pretty weak in the villain department besides Loki and maybe a few others.  But those movies were massively successful in-spite of that and certain internet critics were pretty confused, lamenting that society has lost something in allowing villains to get stale.

Now over the course of phase three there is a perception that the MCU has been getting better in the villain department.  I personally like some of the older MCU villains particularly Ultron, and am not as impressed with some of these highly praised recent ones, especially Killmonger and Hella.  But that's not the point today.

I would argue that in the early years of the MCU general audiences and even some Comic readers didn't consider the lack of scene stealing villains a bug and maybe even saw it as a feature.

The 90s Batman movies were largely treated like episodes of the 60s TV Show just now on the big screen and separated by years instead of weeks, and so the fact that each movie had a different villain was treated as the main thing setting them apart from each other.  And to a large extent the 2000s pre-MCU Marvel Superhero movies followed their example.  When Batman Begins came along and the marketing largely underplayed the villains for the sake of selling it as Batman's Origin Story a lot of us thought things would be different.  But low and behold for the sequels it was once again The Joker and Bane who were really selling them.

I think it's possible when the MCU got going many found it darn right refreshing that these Superhero films were not so villain driven, even if often the marketing was seemingly trying to be business as usual in this area.  Even the MCU films that critics weren't so kind to still did well at the Box Office.

Thor: The Dark World is constantly treated by YT Video Essayists as among the worst of the MCU films, but for me it's the best Thor movie by far.  And criticisms of the movie largely come down to finding Malekith a bland boring uninteresting villain with unexplained motives.  I can't even remotely understand criticizing anything else about the film.

The movie isn't actually about Malekith, it's about Thor and his relationships with Loki and Jane and Odin.  And in my opinion all of that is handled beautifully whether or not it was predictable.  Malekith being just an external threat to advance that narrative is perfectly fine and I would possibly even have disliked screen time being wasted on trying to make him more sympathetic or understandable.

Ronin in the first Guardians of The Galaxy is viewed as being the exact same "problem" as Malekith yet it doesn't seem to have hurt the overall critical reception of the film nearly as much.  In that film I think Ronin being a bland character was recognized as being actually thematically relevant, it contrasts him to the fun cast of quirky heroes being established, it even plays into how he's defeated at the end.  And maybe the same idea was at play in using him in a minor role in Captain Marvel.

Malekith's blandness may not be so thematically justified but I'd certainly argue it's narrativly justified.  He's someone who wants to destroy the Universe as we know it because he wants to eliminate all light and return existence to perpetual darkness.  Would it really make sense for that to be a fun one liner dropping character?  And knowing why he is like that or wants that would add nothing to what the film is actually about, it would only be a distraction.

Going outside of Comic Book Superhero movies I feel similarly about the aliens in Darling in The Franxx, and many of the villains of the Pokémon movies, and Count Dooku.  Some Pokémon movies have great villains, like anyone connected to Team Rocket (even if that connection only exists in the Dub).  But it's totally fine that the villain in Pokémon 2000 is just there to start the conflict and then become irrelevant, and that plenty of later ones were just basically that formula being recycled, because the villains are never what I watch a Pokémon movie for.

And maybe it's a problem that for so many Comic Book fans the villains are what they watch Superhero movies for?

Update July 3rd 2019: I have stumbled upon on old YouTube video that perhaps overlaps with the ideas of this discussion.  Though I suspect they're critical of more Plot Device Characters then I am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGtKCATsUuA

Batman Begins is a Prequel

Does anyone remember back when the casual audience thought Batman Begins was gonna be a Prequel to Batman89?  Even after the film had been out for awhile I remember people at my local video rental store still referring to it as one.

I don't think you even theoretically could do a Prequel to Batman 89, it wasn't an origin film as we think of it today but it was still presented as very early in Batman's career, it's heavily implied everything he did before it started was just more of what we saw in the cold open.  Gordon clearly didn't even think the Batman was real till the Axis Chemicals incident, so for that reason alone you couldn't do a Year One kind of story.

But you see all things considered, Batman Begins definitely is a Prequel, it's a Prequel to The Dark Knight.

I'm not just saying that because of how much TDK became a bigger film, I'm not gonna go around calling A New Hope a prequel to Empire Strikes Back.  There are only three Star Wars Prequels, and then two glorified Easter Egg Hunts.

You see it starts with how The Dark Knight doesn't seem like a sequel, there is no reason you need to have seen Begins before watching it, not even much of a reason why it would help to have seen Begins, it doesn't actually draw on the prior film's events at all.  People make fun of how the 90s Batman films didn't seem all that concerned with continuity, but the references to Vickie Vale in Batman Returns are more of a reference to the prior film then anything in TDK.  It helped for marketing that a lot of these actors were already popular in those roles, but that's it.

And the reason people thought Begins was a Prequel originally is because it was made like one, even it's title is a Prequel title.  It was like Gotham and Smallville in that it functioned as a vague prequel to a basic lore but not a specific already existing continuity.

Remember this was the first time non-comic readers had seen a not yet Commissioner version of Jim Gordon, now everyone takes it for granted that Gordon starts out as an ordinary cop, but he used to just mainly be Batman's M.

So when looking back at the Nolan Bat-Films now, Begins is a Prequel to The Dark Knight far more then The Dark Knight is a sequel to Begins.

Lex Luthor and The Joker

Since people love to contrast Batman and Superman so much (I could rant on that someday) in my view that parallelism/contrast doesn't entirely work without contrasting Luthor and The Joker also.  Because each of them is like every good Arch-nemesis should be the Antithesis to to the Heroes they oppose.

Batman embodies Order while The Joker embodies Chaos.  Superman embodies Selflessness while Lex Luthor embodies Selfishness.  There was a time when these contrasts were defined more superficially.  Superman is Brawn while Luthor is Brains.  Batman is good disguised as something scary, while Joker is evil disguised as something that delights children.  But nowadays no one wants Superman to be stupid and few want Lex to be a weakling (which is the complaint about Eisenberg not being Intimidating, but I'm all for it).  And Clowns are now universally considered scary in any context.

So if Batman and Superman are somewhat opposite kinds of heroes, and Joker and Luthor are their total opposites.  Logic dictates they should be in some way be opposite kinds of villains.

I prefer to define Superman as the Rebel Seigel and Shuster wrote rather then the stupid Frank Miller perception (Chaotic Good rather then Lawful Good).  The Joker obviously is Chaotic Evil, he's become the definition of it.

Lex Luthor I have always felt works as an evil counter part to Batman better then any of the failed Batman characters created for that intent.  Both are about Order in a sense.  Batman has the best rouges gallery over all, but not a good Evil Counterpart, The Joker is a perfect antithesis, and many others have some parallels.  But the ones made to be Batman if he were Evil (like Zoom is for Flash and Sinestro is for Hal, and the Phantom Zone villains for Superman) tend to flop.

I read this article on The Joker
https://ladygeekgirl.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/sexualized-saturdays-the-joker/

And I hate it.  The Joker is not about control, that is Lex Luthor.  The Joker is about making other people lose control (Batman first and foremost but he will target others from time to time).  That's his blatant objective in both The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight.  Seeing someone who says they've read TKJ so monumentally misunderstanding it really annoys me.

Also The Joker is Asexual in my opinion, perhaps Homoromantic in relation to Batman but completely without any sex drive.  So no he did not rape or sexually assault Barbara Gordon in TKJ.

Lex Luthor however is a very sexual "Alpha-Male", the early CEO Lex who was very unattractive was the embodiment of why we have sexual harassment laws, when he later morphs into being more attractive he's more of a womanizer, which is an unfortunate implication since attractive people can be rapists too.  And slash shipping Lex and Clark on Smallville works very well.

The Batman villain who is a Sadist is Crane/The Scarecrow, but he gets off on psychological torture rather then physical torture, which is what Cillian Murphy captured perfectly in Batman Begins.  His parallel to Batman is that both use Fear as a weapon, one for good and one for evil.

Writers haven't put the same thought into how to contrast Luthor and The Joker they have into Batman and Superman.  Many Comic stories using both wind up seeming randomly lame.  However the World's Finest story-line on Superman The Animated Series did a decent Job.  I also enjoy their moment in Infinite Crisis, and I rather like what The Joker Blogs is doing.

What about the Pre-Crisis Lex?  Isn't he less Lawful and more Chaotic?  Maybe, but he's still about power and control, in that era his methods may have seemed more similar to some incarnations of The Joker, but the goals were still different.  As far as doing the Pre-Crisis Lex in a more developed way I enjoyed the Allstar Superman animated movie.  How he was in official continuity between losing the Presidency and Infinite Crisis also worked well.

Here is one interesting article on them that I mostly agree with
http://comicsalliance.com/ask-chris-188-lex-luthor-the-joker/

One finale important difference, that the article I just linked to didn't get.  The Joker has wanted to kill Batman in some stories but I prefer The Joker to never want Batman dead, he's more interested in making Batman break then killing him.  While Lex may want Superman alive at some times but ultimately his goal to be the one who kills Superman, which is why he was PISSED OFF at Doomsday.