Marcel H., anime killer?

This is the second blog post of a series on the occasion of ‘100 Years of Anime’. Read the first post here.

On this day three months ago, the memorial service for Jaden F. was held in Herne, Germany. Jaden had been the first of two victims stabbed to death by Marcel H., whom the media has linked to anime. One German news magazine in particular, Stern (No. 12, March 16), has emphasised the ostensible connections of the murders to anime.

The events were also covered by international media (e.g. Daily Mail, Telegraph, Independent), but none of them even mentioned anime. Therefore, the (thankfully limited and short-lived) ‘moral panic’ regarding anime doesn’t seem to have reached the Anglophone anime blogosphere either, which is why I’ll sum up the story here.

These are the facts: Marcel H. is a 19-year old NEET who had unsuccessfully applied to join the Army in February. On March 6, he lured the nine-year old neighbours’ son into his house and killed him with a knife. Then he went to an acquaintance’s, 22-year old Christopher W., and killed him early in the morning on March 7. Marcel H. stayed at Christopher W.’s apartment until March 9, when he set it on fire, went to a Greek diner, told the owner to call the police, and let himself be arrested.

So far, these events have nothing to do with anime. But Barbara Opitz and Lisa McMinn, the authors of the Stern article, point out the following details: when Marcel H. was arrested at the diner, he carried an umbrella and a bag of onions with him. These items are mentioned in other news articles too, but only Stern offers an explanation, according to which the umbrella and the onions refer to two cards from the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, “Rain of Mercy” and “Glow-Up Bulb” (“Aufblühende Blumenzwiebel” in German; “Zwiebel” can also mean “onion”), respectively. Furthermore, on one of the pictures Marcel posted online on which he poses with a knife, a poster of the anime series Yu-Gi-Oh! GX can be seen in the background. (Interestingly, in the Daily Mail article, the image – pictured below on the right hand side – was altered so that the poster doesn’t refer to Yu-Gi-Oh! anymore.)

Another connection to Yu-Gi-Oh! is Christopher W., Marcel H.’s second victim, who ran a Yu-Gi-Oh! site on Facebook; apparently they got to know each other through the game and used to play Yu-Gi-Oh! video games together. Finally, Stern points out that there are two characters in the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime with the same first names as Marcel H. and Jaden F.: Yu-Gi-Oh! GX protagonist Jaden Yuki and his antagonist Marcel Bonaparte. Stern implies that Marcel H. identified with the villain and acted out the Yu-Gi-Oh! story by attacking Jaden. The only detail that doesn’t quite fit is that the Stern article also says that Marcel H. had been learning Japanese in order to be able to read manga and watch anime in their original language; in the Japanese original version of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, however, Jaden is called “Jūdai” and Marcel “Marutan” or “Martin”.

Apart from the Yu-Gi-Oh! connection, there’s not much that links Marcel H. to anime. Some chat messages have surfaced in which Marcel H. talks to another person about the murders at the time when he committed them, and in one message he says, “See you space cowboy”, which indeed is a quote from the anime Cowboy Bebop.

The other things mentioned in the Stern article are rather vague connections to Japan than to anime specifically: at the time of committing the murders, Marcel H. posted a picture of a handwritten note on which he had signed his name in Japanese, and he owned “bamboo swords which he kept under his bed like a treasure. Furthermore a wooden bow and five Japanese ceremonial knives” (all translations mine).

The sad and disturbing thing (apart from the murders themselves, of course) is how Stern chose to focus on Marcel H.’s anime fandom, instead of e.g. his obsession with martial arts, computer games, or 4chan (as other news outlets did, sometimes inaccurately calling it “darknet”). For instance, the entire Stern article is titled, “‘Viel Spaß in der Anime-Welt” (“‘Have Fun in the Anime World'”), which isn’t even a quote by Marcel H. but by his unnamed chat partner. The way in which the Stern authors desperately try to link the content of anime to the murderer is simply journalistically unethical: “‘Space Cowboy’ refers to a character from the anime series, ‘Cowboy Bebob’ [sic], in which a hero says sentences like this one: ‘I don’t go to die, but to find out if I’m still alive.’ Marcel H. is obsessed with the world of anime, Japanese animated films, often dark dystopias, the protagonists have spiky hair and shiny, big eyes. […] the heroes […] are often outsiders, but with hidden powers. Quirky, awkward and at the same time infallible. Outsiders like Marcel H.”

Luckily, the Stern article has failed to start a witch hunt on anime fans like the ones that e.g. video gamers and heavy metal fans have had to endure in past decades. But the article shows that anime has still a long way to go before it can be said to be part of the mainstream.