Oral pleasure has been a recurring theme throughout the anime. This week’s episode simply takes things up a notch. To give credence to my assertion, I’ve screenshotted most (but not all) of the moments throughout the anime where pleasure through the mouth is featured.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

What becomes quite apparent from all of these screenshots is that young people in Mawaru Penguindrum consume a lot of food. These characters derive a lot of their pleasure from the act of eating. Even if the two brothers are too busy to partake in a meal, i.e. they’re in the middle of a mission, their penguins can afford to eat. In fact, the penguins’ appetites are absolutely voracious. Since one can reasonably imagine that the penguins are extensions of the brothers themselves, one can also reasonably assume that the brothers have voracious appetites for food as well.

One of the cautionary lessons that can be gleaned from “Hansel and Gretel” is that oral aggression is destructive. The children’s parents are unable to fulfill their desires for food, which leads to their abandonment in the woods. When they come upon the witch’s house of gingerbread and candy, Hansel and Gretel descend upon it like animals. This thus leads them right into the witch’s trap. Throughout Mawaru Penguindrum, the idea of over-consumption has been played off for laughs here and there. The penguins sometimes get themselves into trouble for trying to eat each and every single thing they come across. Still, like all fairy tales, there’s a more sinister undercurrent to the characters’ oral fixation.

Episode 6

Ringo’s fondest memory of her parents exists in the form of a photograph. The photograph contains four significant subjects: Ringo herself, her father, her mother, and a plate of curry in Ringo’s hands. Her family has since fallen apart and she can only eat curry with her father on specific visitation days. Last week, I talked about how Ringo hopes to symbolically cannibalize her sister’s traits and memories in order to bring her family back together. If we take a look at her actions, we will also see that she constantly plies Tabuki-sensei with food.

We’ve seen from the Takakura brothers that boys will consume a lot of food. Ringo’s fondest memories of her father also involves consumption. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to imagine, therefore, that she thinks the shortest trip to Tabuki-sensei’s heart is through his mouth (or stomach). In any case, nearly all of Ringo’s attempts to feed Tabuki are foiled in some particular way.

• When she cooks Tabuki a pot of curry, Yuri technically beats her to the punch. Although Tabuki does end up eating Ringo’s curry — if he ate anything at all that day — he eats it with Yuri instead of Ringo.
• Ringo tries to put together a delicious picnic meal, but her best laid plans fall apart and she is forced to watch Tabuki (and Shouma) enjoy Yuri’s picnic meal instead.
• Ringo tries to bring Tabuki his favorite dessert (a montblanc) only to see that Yuri has already treated the man to the same dessert.
• As we can see in the latest episode, Yuri’s star power means she can take Tabuki to the fanciest restaurants.
• Yuri can also throw an extravagant parties, like the engagement party in the latest episode, where one of the key attractions will be expensive catering.

Ringo’s clearly fighting a losing battle, but it quickly becomes apparent to her that there is more than one way to satiate Tabuki’s oral appetites. At the fancy restaurant, Ringo imagines Yuri to be some sort of harlot, preying on older men (father figures?). In Ringo’s eyes, Yuri’s a duplicitous anti-sister who charms men through oral sex. Of course, we never nor could we ever see this explicit act (this is broadcast television, after all), but it’s obvious what the anime is trying to hint at. This wouldn’t be the anime’s first attempt in hinting at oral sex anyway. What’s more interesting, however, is that Ringo links this sexual act to Yuri as a killer whale.

Episode 7
(At first glance, the egg-laying scene might not fit, but Ringo is hoping to feed Tabuki-sensei with a love potion concocted from said eggs.)

After all, in oral sex, pleasure is derived from the mouth but in the opposite direction. While Ringo has been attempting to feed Tabuki to win his heart, she imagines that Yuri is trying to do the same but the key difference is that Yuri is feeding herself. Perhaps to Ringo’s still-young mind, there’s something fundamentally wrong about this reversal of mechanics, so to speak. As a result, Ringo sees Yuri as a dangerous woman who will snatch Tabuki-sensei away from her with killer whale jaws.

Why have things suddenly become sexual? I think this has been a gradual process. At the most recent visitation lunch with her father, Ringo notices that her father’s phone strap has changed. No longer does he have a penguin strap to match the one on Ringo’s phone. Instead, he now has an eel strap. While Ringo’s father is on the phone, it’s reasonable to assume that he’s talking to his new family, including a new daughter by the name of Aoi. What becomes clear is that the eel symbolizes how Ringo’s father has been seduced away from Ringo and her mother by another family. In the following episode, Ringo has a feverish dream where her parents are arguing when an eel crashes through the scene and permanently puts the entire family into disarray.

Ringo’s emergent sexuality (e.g., she has breast envy at the start of the second episode, she wears frilly underwear although she is yet to be sexually active, her suggestive attack on Shouma in the sixth episode, etc.), and her anxieties that another woman has stolen her father away from her, might contribute to her sudden demonization of Yuri as some sort of seductress. To counteract Yuri’s perceived plans, Ringo will thus offer up her own sexuality to win Tabuki over. We must, however, contrast how different her potential sexual act compares to Yuri’s imagined engagements with oral sex. If Tabuki sleeps with Ringo, his oral pleasure will be mostly symbolic, i.e. he partakes in her “fruit” a.k.a. virginity, but this will lead to maternity — maybe Ringo thinks she should be a better mother than her mother ever was. On the other hand, oral sex leads to no creation — it is a destructive act of consumption and, in Ringo’s mind, thus immoral.

Of course, we can just assume everything’s a red herring and Ikuhara is just BS-ing all of us. Either way….

Everything else
Boy, what else can I say? I’ll just use this section for some not-too-serious observations.

• Is it just me or is Yuri’s singing horrible? Interestingly, and this probably has nothing to do with the anime itself, Marie Antoinette, who Yuri plays on stage, was accused of incest.

The anime is probably just referencing Rose of Versailles, a fact that my Twitter timeline loves to make quite apparent to me.

• So… does Ringo’s mother never check up on her when she’s asleep? I mean, just exactly how many nights can Ringo spend underneath Tabuki’s home without being busted?

• Like Himari, we continue to see less and less of Kanba. The more charismatic brother never gets to the main character! Again, he receives an envelope full of money from a shady man on the subway. This time, Masako can be seen spying on Kanba from another afar. She, too, is trying to complete a “Project M.” Are there more than one “Project M?”

• I’m curious, I guess — we see Masako’s penguin in her lap. Had Kanba noticed Masako spying on him, would he have seen her penguin as well?

• I have no words for the egg-cellent scene.

It was definitely something to watch. :I