Archive for July, 2009

Mari, the righteous mom

By Pontifus on 29 July 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture | 13 Comments

Heroic moms are cool and all, but...This post is a quickie, as it’s more about getting feedback than positing some position and buttressing it with evidence. I don’t have that evidence, see, and you lot may be able to help me more than conventional research. Not to worry, it’s not about something arcane; it’s about Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, which every fan and his/her (righteous) mother seems to be watching right now.

Mari Kusakabe has a few levels in awesome; she makes that much clear to us early on. She’s also a single mom, which is fine by me, as I think single mom heroines can have depth that your average action lady tends to lack. She has a daughter at home, and the titular earthquake happens to coincide with said daughter’s birthday, and she grapples the ordeal with a magnificent poker face, adding to the dramatic tension in a nice way. We know that her daughter could be dead, or that Mari could (hell, probably will…if she doesn’t, she’ll trump Kamina threefold as far as I’m concerned) suffer a breakdown at some point, and neither is an especially pleasant prospect.

We also learn, in episode three, that Mari is a widow. Now, it’s not certain that her husband was the father of her child; we can only assume as much from the dialogue. Nor is it certain that Mari didn’t do her fair share of gallivanting before her marriage. The point is that Mari presumably didn’t come across her child accidentally, and she isn’t a single mom due to divorce. Her situation seems to be the outcome of the most “correct” sequence of events, according to a conservative/traditional morality. I wonder, then, if she’d be such a heroine if it were otherwise — how many single mom heroines in anime and manga entered into single momhood in “questionable” ways?

The adoption/de facto adoption/non-literal parent-child relationship route seems to come into play with some frequency. I haven’t seen Seirei no Moribito, but isn’t that the case there? The protagonist of 20th Century Boys (which I just started, so go easy on the spoilers plzkthx) is, as of chapter four, a kind of righteous dad insofar as he acquired the child under his care without even the use of sex (it’s his niece). Then we’ve got widows like Mari; a recent example that comes to mind is Soyon from Kemono no Souja Erin (though I didn’t get far in that, either), and there’s…er, [classified information] from Clannad, of course. But are less “respectable” single parents often relegated to Minor Character Land? My main problem is that I can’t think of many at all. And is my perception somehow off-target to begin with?

Help me out here, O wise internets. Share your experience so that the gaps in my experience might be rendered irrelevant.

GARhetoric: [aː] and [r]

By Kaiserpingvin on 22 July 2009 | Anime | 16 Comments

As I chatted with ghostlightning, this post was born. It is at least 13% his fault, and 87% my love for phonetics.

Bear witness to something which may be more GAR-exuding than the relative inactivity lets on:

you know the drill.

Sidelines

By Pontifus on 21 July 2009 | Manga | 4 Comments

Ako considers the problem.

I wrote my first Negima! post (here on Ghostlightning’s joint) about Nodoka and Yue, as I was bound to do so by favoritism and other darker things in the crevices between human comprehension. It was almost physically painful to have to pick two characters out of that cast of worthies…and as I was mulling that over, it occurred to me that blog-space isn’t exactly about to run out, so here we are.

A Terrible Darkness addendum: on Lorelei and Love

By Cuchlann on 9 July 2009 | Anime, Literature | 3 Comments

mazinger_loralei

As the title indicates, this is an addendum of sorts to my last post, which you can find over here: ["A Terrible Darkness"]. At Ghostlightning‘s (sort-of) request, I’m revisiting Shin Mazinger and the Gothic in light of the thirteenth episode, “First Love?  The Beautiful Lorelei!”

The Otouto Research Logs: an update (downdate?)

By Pontifus on 7 July 2009 | SFCentral | No Comments

For the time being, I’m un-publishing and putting a hold on our (my brother and I, that is) joint audio project, while I think of what should be done with it — not that it was oft-consulted, but I don’t especially want to pull a handful of posts without explanation. Simply put, I’m unsatisfied with it as Super Fanicom content for a number of reasons; it may be insightful every once in a while, but it’s also rougher than I’d like in terms of audio quality, and most of it isn’t very useful (unless you especially enjoy listening to me complain about how I wish Gurren Lagann would end already). I may move it over to pontif.us at some point, though I’d really like to (and I really need to) focus on getting some written content done for the time being — and besides, there’s faint murmurings of a Voice Module on the horizon. At the very least, I can say I’ve learned a fair bit about audio editing from it all.