Archive for October, 2008

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“I close my eyes, and can see…”

By Pontifus on 23 October 2008 | Anime | 11 Comments

Side note: how the hell is that thing a cat?

Aria the Animation — just typing its name gives me a sense of peace, both because of its predominant themes, and because there exist human beings capable of producing something like this, which means there must be hope for our species after all. I wanted to sum this one up in a single post, but I realized around the end of the fourth episode that a mere one post would not be enough, could not possibly be enough by any stretch of the imagination, so consider this the first in a series of indeterminate length. And the funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have liked Aria at all a few months ago, back when I was writing off Lucky Star and Hidamari Sketch, or at least I probably wouldn’t have liked it enough to see past my dislike and run it through my infernal criticism machine.

a few more random ideas on game criticism

By Cuchlann on 21 October 2008 | Art and Culture, Video Games | 3 Comments

I was just decompressing after watching the trailer for the new Prince of Persia, and had a few thoughts about game theory.  

[By the way, just so you know -- I still cite Sands of Time as one of the best video games I've ever played, so, you know, I'm probably biased.]

Nothing like practicable ideas, I should say.  But perhaps some that will open routes of inquiry.  

When I’m absorbing art, and that’s any kind of art, I’m looking for a feeling of beauty.  I’m going to wax maudlin at you for a moment.  The best kinds of art instill in me feelings like I get almost nowhere else.  I’m in the middle of some kind of perfect storm of great stuff here, too — the new Decemberists song does this for me, as does a book I’m reading, Dhalgren (in between the frightening dystopia bits).  I just started Silent Hill 2 in a bid to write a paper on the Gothic in video games (yes, you’ll likely hear more about that as the semester wears on).  

What I’m getting at, and not very well, is that some video games have given me that same feeling.  Prince of Persia did it, and so did Shadow of the Colossus.  So I may try to write critiques, proper entries here, for those games, to try and get at what makes them what they are, rather than choose-your-own-adventure stories with prettier pictures.  I know, somewhere inside me, that some video game stories couldn’t be told any other way, while others (much as I love it, Legend of Zelda springs to mind) could.  They wouldn’t be as good, but they would still work.  But writing up Shadow of the Colossus for a novel version would involve so much new writing it would be a different thing, whereas you could write up Wind Waker and the effect of the story on the audience would be unchanged.  Not that I have a problem with that, I’m not asking every game to fuck me up like a new Lord of the Rings.  

I feel like I have a way to tackle this problem through my genre and myth criticism ways, too.  Certainly there are enough romantic elements in the games I’ve mentioned to get me started sometime.

[I should say that whenever I use the word "romantic" I mean it in the original sense, that of a story of medieval style romance.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, think King Arthur.  Those stories, especially those from the French tradition, were romances.]

Blurbing…fashion in Japan, from the Japanese

By lelangir on 17 October 2008 | Art and Culture | 1 Comment

So you read it – there is an implicit cultural emulation within the inundation of Western fashion in Japan. To the Black-Face (Ganguro), Western fashion serves as a counter hegemony against the traditional and conservative past Japanese masculine ideology that has been imposed upon women. While the past is usually associated with national identity, these new trends also serve to reconstitute the national imagination – there is a dialectical relationship between the economic base (people) and the ideological structure.

Pretty interesting.

Art imitates more art, life, the universe, and everything

By Pontifus on 15 October 2008 | Manga | 5 Comments

He is more than a man, he's a shiny golden god.Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai (which moonlights on weekends as The World That Only God Knows or The World God Only Knows, depending on who you ask) is a manga about a guy who wears a cravat for no apparent reason. Now, that in itself makes it worth reading, I think. It’s a proven fact that cravats are far manlier than the common necktie — they’re so manly, in fact, that certain non-profit organizations exist to promote their survival in a tie-centric society.

Though the cravat is clearly the main character here, it happens to be worn by one Keima Katsuragi, who, thanks to his bragging on the internet, is recruited by the forces of Hell to round up escaped evil spirits hiding in the hearts of young women by luring said young women into falling in love with him. The problem lies in that Keima’s online bragging applies only to his uncanny skill at clearing ren-ai games, and that real girls care as much for him as he cares for them, which isn’t very much. In a nutshell, we’ve got a story about a hopeless otaku and his cute (moe, rather) female demon companion manipulating the emotions of teenage girls for the greater good, and it somehow manages not to be harem romance. That’s impressive in itself.

Even more impressive, though, is the sheer reach of Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai’s story: at times it seems to attempt commentary on everything, or at least everything the otaku label might entail. Metafiction it is, certainly, but I can’t shake the feeling that its goal is the presentation of an outright metanarrative of the subculture, a light-hearted but thorough investigation of the fandom proper — it’s a fictional, graphical version of our blogosphere, if you will. It’s entirely possible, if not likely, that I’m tossing all its elements into a basket of my own weaving and evaluating them as a whole when they logically shouldn’t be evaluated thus — but hey, I’m enjoying it all the more for doing so.

[LWC 71] Umbilical Severance: on the nature of the text

By lelangir on 13 October 2008 | Art and Culture | 5 Comments

This isn’t really about literary criticism, something I’m not really literate in anyway. But I’m going to share my thoughts on the origin of the text and its context, as Chuchlann enjoys how Frye “strips away the historical and political meanings from texts.”

Madness in the Lens — a theory of criticism

By Cuchlann on 13 October 2008 | Art and Culture | 13 Comments

At IKnight‘s request, and because I couldn’t think of anything other than a post about the new Lucky Star OVA (which wasn’t serving much of a purpose), I’m going to take a stab at illuminating my theory of criticism, here, in front of the fives of you who read my posts.  We’ll, uh, we’ll see how this goes.

The Otouto dialogue: an addendum (or, How to avoid working on those daunting drafts)

By Pontifus and Otouto-kun on 12 October 2008 | Art and Culture | No Comments

This is analogous, only I'm cooler than Kamina.Pontifus: I’m telling you, the writing process is a learning experience in itself.

Otouto-kun: True.

Pontifus: I finally realized that the purpose of critical writing isn’t to share a critic’s knowledge, it’s to teach a critic something and give other critics something to bounce their ideas off of. Remember my whole approach: there is no knowledge, only questions.

Otouto-kun: NO, NOOOOOOOOOO, DON’T SAY THAT, I just got done being pissed at critics. This brings me back to…CRITICS ARE A WASTE OF SPACE!

Pontifus: You’re a waste of space.

Otouto-kun: You’re a waste of space.

Pontifus: You are.

Otouto-kun: No, you.

[LWC 69] The Archaeology of the Text: more philosophy of criticism

By lelangir on 11 October 2008 | Art and Culture | 4 Comments

I posted this on a different non-anime blog of mine some time ago:

You can interpret the effect of technology as an archaeological study. Technology, a product of society – society, a product of technology – says and objectively states something about its influential parentage, its social pedigree, the conditions under which it was wrought. It’s objective: or rather, its subjectivity necessitates that very objectivity (lest we revert to simple-minded sophistry), because it was born of that exact subjectivity. It is pristine, virgin, unadulterated, unaffected by extra-sapient cognizance, which in itself is impossible at the moment. It is a direct product of the cultural womb from which it came, and thus is liable to be read textually; its inanimate authors leaving absolutely no ambiguity, no connotation, only denotation, because it is a mere fossil, a relic, a speechless artifact. That is the, for lack of better wordage, subjective objectivity of archaeological sociology.

To flesh this out, I mean to say that when reading anime (or anything specifically as text) it is possible to define the conditions from which that anime was produced because such a product was generated by those very circumstances. We can solve an equation in terms of y {34x + 5b/2y = 4c}, but “in terms of” doesn’t necessarily state what those terms are since we don’t escape the circular logic of recursive semantics; what is y? – it’s not x, b, or c; what’s x, b or c? – anything but y. Y is not concrete, it’s an abstraction.

Anime is subjective, we can never really know what it means in its entirety, even if we ask the animators. Perhaps the animators themselves don’t even know (or antecedent authors of adaptations). But I think we can know what an anime means in terms of the conditions it was produced from. Socio-historical context. Anime can’t precisely mean much besides y when y equals the history from 1xxx-200x, and even then it’s still going to be ambiguous to some degree. It’s not even really saying what the anime means (if such a thing exists), but, rather, what society means. What does anime say about the society that created it – where else could it have come from? Thus texts are archaeological, society is the hand that crafts text, criticism the excavator.

It’s a more refined way of spelling out what I meant by the objectivity of subjectivity and the subjectivity of objectivity.1

1 http://lelangiric.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/presentation-the-problem-with-reading/

Celestial Being, Fuck Yeah! [to the tune of "America, Fuck Yeah"]

By Cuchlann on 10 October 2008 | Anime | No Comments

Comin’ again to save the mother-fuckin’ day, yeah!  

Obviously, I am pleased about the new Gundam 00 series.  My gibbering, tea-soaked thoughts, as well as pretty pretty pictures, under the jump.

The Otouto dialogue: a philosophy of criticism

By Pontifus and Otouto-kun on 9 October 2008 | Art and Culture | 10 Comments

Here's my incentive to be a critic. What's yours?

I’ve been meaning to make a fairly straightforward post about criticism and my thoughts thereupon, as that seems to be a step in the average critical aniblogger’s acquisition of internet tenure. But when an alternative presented itself, I resolved to do something a bit different. What follows is an IM conversation between myself and my younger brother, hereafter referred to as Otouto-kun (he wanted the -kun, don’t ask me why), an enterprising young hikikomori-type with game design aspirations. We got on the topic of criticism somehow, and I ended up spilling all my most recent thoughts on the subject. Being an IM conversation, it’s a bit spur-of-the-moment and rough around the edges, but I’ve cleaned it up for the sake of readability — and I think it makes a little sense, anyway. There are certainly enough of you out there to correct me if I’m mistaken.

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