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Two topics in general housekeeping

By Pontifus on 17 February 2010 | SFCentral | 4 Comments

First, note the series page. There may be a better way to keep track of series, but I don’t especially feel like messing with our category/tag taxonomy too much, and a dedicated page allows more control over presentation. If I’ve missed anything (that is, any series of posts that exists primarily on Super Fanicom), let me know.

Second, I have this project in mind, and I need you (yes, you) to let me know how viable it is.

I’m envisioning a series of free ebooks of essays on various topics in fandom. The goal would be to produce something more “professional-looking” than blog work — that is, the things would be copy edited proper-like, and made to conform with some style manual or another, to a degree. But I’d want the “kinds” of essays present in each collection to vary quite a bit. That is, a theoretical analysis paper on franchise x might be followed by a personal account of franchise x’s impact on the writer’s viewing habits — the point being that, as we’re free of the constraints of what approaches are in vogue in the popular press and academia and so on, we should take advantage of the opportunity to present a tremendous variety of angles on the things we enjoy in one mighty document.

What I need to know is, would anyone — bloggers, commenters, readers, or otherwise — be interested in contributing articles/essays/papers (I’m thinking 2000 words and up) to such a thing? As it’d be offered for free, there’d be no monetary compensation involved, of course. But I think the effort at letting ourselves run with a topic and compiling the results in a nice-looking package could prove worthwhile.

Moment(s) the [nth]: Honorable mentions, part 2

By Pontifus on 30 December 2009 | Anime, Manga | 31 Comments

Here I shall finish what I began — namely, the listing of things that might’ve made my cadre of moments, but did not, for whatever reason. And then I shall rest, satisfied in my yearly contribution to the grand ambitions of Master CCY (or is it Master Canon these days?).

Moment the First: First love

By Pontifus on 25 December 2009 | Anime | 8 Comments

[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]

Moment the Third: The girl who nailed the girl who ran

By Pontifus on 23 December 2009 | Anime | 6 Comments

[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]

Charming, really.

Charming, really.

By the time you read this, I’ll be on a plane to Texas. I’ll be out of town until the 30th, and mostly absent from the internet, so if I fail to address your comments in a timely fashion, that would be why. But keep an eye on this blog and pontif.us; I’ll have posts scheduled through the end of December.

With that said, today’s title references one of Schneider’s moments, which, if you’ve read it, may act as a kind of complement to this post. Though, as a Minori fan, he may not be too thrilled that I’m pointing to his moment as complementary to this one.

Moment the Fifth: True neutral

By Pontifus on 21 December 2009 | Manga | 4 Comments

[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]

Chia Pet scroll: do want.

Chia Pet scroll: do want.

If asked to identify the most enjoyable character I read about in the past year, I may not settle on Ginko, but he’d at least put up a hell of a fight.

Moment the Seventh: What being loved is all about

By Pontifus on 19 December 2009 | Manga | 3 Comments

[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]

Says the girl in the bunny suit.

Says the girl in the bunny suit.

I haven’t exactly neglected to mention Negima! in the past year. I’ve written about Nodoka and Yue, my favorite members of Negi’s unwieldy harem, and Ako, who starts out as a bit player, but comes into her own, and with a vengeance. What’s left to write about?

“What’s left to write about?” Ha!

I thought of continuing what I began with my Ako post, which just scrapes the surface of her character and then promptly ends. But let’s save that for later. Instead, because you asked for it, let’s talk a little about Chisame. And I do mean a little; we’re talking about a manga that’s currently over 270 chapters long here, and Chisame plays into quite a bit of it. But we can at least try to get a handle on what she’s about — which, I think, is probably the tallest hurdle a blogger writing about Chisame would need to jump.

Moment the Ninth: Sorry, kid

By Pontifus on 17 December 2009 | Manga | 7 Comments

[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]

Who wants to live forever?

Who wants to live forever?

Alright, this is the last of my Moments Twelve about death giving meaning to life, or allowing life to mean, or what have you. I’ve just been into that as a theme lately, I guess. And you may know that I can’t put said theme to rest without bringing Bokurano into it.

Moment the Eleventh: By her own fists

By Pontifus on 15 December 2009 | Manga | 5 Comments

[Read the previous moment here]

Hell, this is almost as weird as FLCL.

Hell, this is almost as weird as FLCL.

Talk about an underdog. I mean, let me lay this out for you: Hoshi no Samidare (otherwise The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer — yeah, I know) is about a giant hammer poised to smash the world at the whim of “the Mage,” Animus, and the dysfunctional crew assembled seemingly at total random to deal with this threat.

Multimedia adaptation and the act of consumption: an outline

By Pontifus on 24 November 2009 | Art and Culture, Literature | 5 Comments
Live action Tanyuu is...live action?

Live action Tanyuu is...live action?

Like Cuchlann, I find myself mired in schoolwork and related things. It’s Thanksgiving break, yes, but it’s still difficult to blog when I know I should be writing an essay about Darwinian rhetoric in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or researching transversal poetics and presentism. But fortunately, my research interests being what they are, schoolwork and blog-work overlap from time to time. More often than not, maybe.

What follows is the list of notes (and a few visuals) I used to give a presentation on adaptation and all it entails — or, rather, as much of what it entails as I could fit in twenty minutes or so. My research has centered on the novel-to-film variety, but most of it seems more broadly relevant. These being personal notes more than anything, I make no guarantees as to their cohesiveness, but they should at least be legible — and, with any luck, somewhat interesting.

Five rules of funny molestation

By Pontifus on 10 August 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture, Literature, Manga | 15 Comments

Alright, that's sort of awesome.

In real life, molestation isn’t funny, so don’t think I’m condoning your trip to Japan whereupon you will hit the subways, so to speak. But in anime and manga, sexual molestation is used in service of humor as often as it’s an agent of personal horror, and there seems to exist an unspoken code governing the line between the two.

Don’t think this is all about cultural implications, either. Such narrative machinations as humor can be deliciously structural. Not that the examples I look at here are off the social hook, per se, but we’ll look at that on a case-by-case basis.

(Edit 9/8 — Let this comment serve as a brief addendum in answer to those parts of this post that weren’t thought through as well as perhaps they should’ve been.)

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