Love and Other Neuroses

It seems I'm thinking of you
But I'm still thinking of someone else
- The Exponents, Why Does Love Do This To Me?

One thing it's easy to make fun of, when discussing Allen, is the fact that he's so creepily inclined to get involved with fifteen-year-old girls. (Admittedly, Millerna doesn't look fifteen, but he surely knows when her birthday is, he has no excuse.) In fan circles, his fondness for younger girls takes on the status of a running gag. The cry of 'Rorikon!' goes up. Rorikon is a Japanese word derived from the English phrase 'Lolita complex' (think 'RO-RI-ta-KON-pu-re-ku-su - no wonder they shorten it), referring, of course, to the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It refers to that species of paedophilia which manifests in an unhealthy attraction to pubescent girls, or 'nymphets.'

I always used to protest that this was really unfair to Allen, since by the terms of Lolita itself, as set down by the narrator Humbert Humbert, fifteen-year-old girls do not count as nymphets. The cut-off age is fourteen. (This means Merle is still eligible, and, worryingly, strikes me as very much Humbert's type.) Because I can never leave a subject decently alone, I kept thinking about all this and came up with the following notions.

It's suggested by Princess Eries, who is generally pretty astute and level-headed, that Allen is attracted to Princess Millerna because as she grows up, she is reminding him increasingly of her sister Marlene, who was his first love. 'A-ha!' I cried. 'There is the secret! Allen is attracted to younger girls because the traumatic ending of his first intense relationship arrested the development of his romantic nature. He wants to find a girl who is like Marlene was then, so he can feel as he did then, and retreat from the more mature but by necessity sadder understanding of the world at which he has arrived through experience. That is very like Humbert Humbert, who attributes his paedophilia squarely to the fact that his first love died in adolescence and he has never moved on from her as his ideal, but seeks her in others and feels that he finds her reincarnated in Dolores Haze. In Allen's case it's just that the girl was fifteen in the first place. I am such a clever girl. I have him all figured out. Freud has nothing on me. Allen's ideal relationship is one in which he is significantly the older partner.'

Then something else occurred to me. Allen and Eries are the same age, twenty-one (in the present day of Escaflowne). And Marlene was Eries' elder sister by several years (we are not told exactly how many, to my knowledge). Therefore, she was older than Allen too. So much for my theory, so prettily embroidered! (It had even occurred to me that Humbert grew up living in the Hotel Mirana, and Millerna's name, phonetically, sounds like 'Mirana,' creating an echo like that between Poe's Annabel Lee and Humbert's Annabel Leigh - literary conspiracy theorists love stuff like this.) Allen was fifteen or sixteen when the affair took place, but his fair lady was older still, presumably in her late teens. (When I pointed this out to my friend Kevin, his cryptic comment was 'And junior high school boys everywhere are cheering for him.') If I tried to pursue the logic of my original theory, that would leave Allen fixated on older women, which he transparently is not. Reluctantly, I threw Humbert Humbert out the window (he screamed all the way to the ground, and serve him right) and looked for another explanation.

What I think is the real truth of the matter is suggested by Allen himself. After Hitomi leaves him, he comes to the conclusion that his attraction to her was based on the fact that she reminded him of his long-lost sister, who would be about her age by now; that he was transferring his feelings of protective fraternal love onto her, and interpreted them as romantic because of course she wasn't actually his relative.

Wellll... I think Allen is letting himself off the hook a little too easily there, but this does allow me to salvage a vestige of my theory. Because what this still shows us is Allen seeking the happiness he knew in the past, the security of a more innocent time before all the women he loved most - his sister, his mother, his first girlfriend - were taken from him. This pattern has obviously had a profound effect on the way he relates to women. He wants someone who will make him feel safe, someone who will not find fault with him, someone who will look up at him with shining eyes and make him feel like her hero. He has never had the opportunity, as an adult, to get to know his mother and sister as adults (well, young adult in Celena's case) and as a result his ideals of femininity are based on an immature understanding of the gender.

I think ultimately he goes off Hitomi because she does question him, and does start behaving in a way that doesn't fit his mental template for the perfect girl. I like how he manages to see part of the truth while still deluding himself a little - that's very Allen. It's debatable whether he'll ever develop a normal relationship with a woman as long as his idealised image of his lost sister, the only survivor of his childhood he could hope to find, occupies such a central place in his heart. Once he has to interact with her as she really is in the present day, there could be either a breakthrough or a crisis... it all depends on what she's like and how he deals with it. (*chanting* Se-quel! Se-quel!)

One of my favourite evocations of this theme is the song 'Arcadia' from the For Lovers Only soundtrack CD. There's nothing in it to say explicitly that it is an 'Allen song,' but can you think of anyone else in the show who has a little sister and feels like this about her?

Why is it that people repeat their mistakes?
Why, having tasted blood, do they like to fight?

Ah, but even more than that,
Please protect my little younger sister.

Fighting, injuring, dying.
Please protect my little younger sister.

At least do this one small thing for me.
From the depths of my heart I pray:

Even more than beautiful Arcadia,
Please protect my little younger sister.

Those lyrics were found for me by my friend Lizzard, at this page. Thanks, Lizz! Well, any god who ignores a prayer like that is a bit of a bastard. Arcadia, for those who don't know, is a region of Ancient Greece enshrined in pastoral literature, poetry and art as an innocent place of the Golden Age, inhabited by shepherds and shepherdesses, nymphs and fauns, who spent their time skipping about, wearing flowers, singing and dancing, not really doing any work, and in the naughtier branches of pastoral, having rather enjoyable sex. (See Aphra Behn's poem about a juniper tree. Phworr! Seventeenth-century English literature has some surprisingly saucy bits.) I think it's the innocent, Edenic side of Arcadia that Allen is invoking here *^.^* Arcadia is childhood... Arcadia is gone with the wind and the years. But Celena might yet be salvaged.

In conclusion, Dr Déesse prescribes at least a year's celibacy and a bit of quality family time.

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