↩[LWC 52]
Introduction
Perhaps Japan is rather ethnically homogenous, or I am under the impression of such a fact. So then maybe the lack of blacks in slice of life anime is justified not because animators envisage an utopian, ethnically homogenous …

It’s definitely a great idea to take to Kaiba because the episodic experience, the cast, even our idea of its genre, mutate so much. In some ways I think that the long wait between fansubbed Kaiba episodes has inevitably made the episode/series relationship a more apparent part of the experience for the viewers – in fact that’ll almost certainly be the conceit I base my end-of-series summary on. Although, for some reason, I’d be inclined to replace the word Kaiban with Kaibacious.

…the misconception of the genre I perceive to be is that it is a simple classificatory system based on first-glance prejudice, again the homogenization of the entirety of its serial structure, and the consequent politico-cultural representations and reputations (”shounen” is the be-all-end-all of terms that describe Bleach, per se).

True, and this is something I’m trying to overcome, or, if that’s not possible, to understand relative to myself. My avoidance of almost all mecha shows nearly made me miss some very good ones.

I’m inclined to agree that episode 16 is indeed describable as slice-of-life, which suddenly seems like a much more useful term when we free it from the weight of genre label. It was also my favorite episode of the show, and now I think I understand why; I’m a fan of those interjections, whether they be episodes of anime or chapters of a novel, which say, “But if you look at it this way, what we’re doing is crazy.” It seems to lay bare the hand of the author in that it’s the very basic argumentative method of acknowledging one’s opposition — though it may not be so if we take Ergo Proxy as basically postmodern. A postmodern work taking a step back and claiming that its journey through a world with no inherent direction or meaning is inherently meaningless strikes me as…doubly postmodern, I suppose.