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.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou

Somehow I can't call YKK out on its anthropocentrism.

YKK is, in a manner of speaking, Aria at the end of the world. It isn’t some grand and glorious apocalypse — there are simply less people than there used to be, and though humanity lingers on, who knows how much longer it’ll be around? Otou-san explains:

What’s pervasive in your mind throughout YKK is an almost-overwhelming sense of melancholy, of sad nostalgia. The earth itself seems to long for the glory days of humanity, even as it’s in the last phase of reclaiming itself from them. As 2DT mentions [here], it seems very Japanese to quietly accept the end of the world like this; after all, we don’t see what anyone’s doing elsewhere on earth, but something in YKK does give the impression that this is… just how it is. After all, what can you do? Nothing. It’s over. This is the twilight of humanity, and I only hope that we go with such grace and poise. [Otou-san, "Twelve Thingies: A whimper, not a bang"]

In one sense, humanity is charged with dying well. But in another, it needn’t concern itself too much with death, as it has produced successors — humanoid robots, one of whom is the story’s central character. Are they effectively successors, or are they a plot convenience, allowing us to witness longer periods of time in more consistent settings than might have been practical with a human narrator? I’m not sure it matters, as YKK makes the end of the world — or, because the world will certainly carry on without us, the end of the reign of humanity — seem like an okay thing at any rate. We have to wonder if we’d be better off if there were fewer of us.

I can’t really specify a single moment of note here, as YKK is too…fluid, maybe. It feels more than anything like a coherent and consistent whole. And that is by no means a bad thing.

Clannad ~After Story~

I stand by my final verdict on Clannad’s second season (mostly). Your mileage may very, obviously, but I found the ending downright annoying — it made the whole thing feel disjointed. But still, I have to give it some credit for a few great moments.

All conflict should be resolved like this.

I liked the entire Sunohara arc, but the ending was especially good. I mean specifically the part where Tomoya and Sunohara lay everything out on the table while punching the hell out of each other, then laugh about it the next day. This kind of resolution — total honesty, total retribution, total forgiveness — strikes me as very brotherly. And that’s how I wanted to see the two, ultimately. I couldn’t help feeling a little let down when Sunohara barely showed up again after the graduation.

Don't hesitate too long, Tomoya; you only have 22 minutes.

And how about that Kyou Chapter OVA? This and the Tomoyo OVA were both executed brilliantly, I think, especially considering the constraints of a 22-minute episode. And anyway, a focus on Kyou is pretty much an instant win.

Haruhi 2009

Kyon-kun, denwa~

I really enjoyed Endless Eight. Yes, honestly.

Is it because so many people didn’t? Maybe, insofar as E8 gave us all something to talk about, and I can’t fault it for that. Or maybe it’s because E8 was a pretentious move on KyoAni’s part. I can’t deny my admiration for the size, shape, and luster of the balls of whomever greenlighted the thing, and I certainly enjoy it as an experiment in episodic story structure. I’ll admit that I, too, felt the tedium during those uneventful eight weeks, but I suspect it’s the sort of thing that’s best enjoyed in retrospect. I realize that’s arguably more a fault than a virtue, but what can I say? One of my favorite novels is Ulysses.

And you have to admit that the ending is pretty satisfying.

At that, I can now call it a year. Don’t hesitate to check out other bloggers who have paid homage to the highest and lowest points of 2009 — including Otou-san, Schneider, doctordazza, Gargron, Scamp, zaon47, kevo, rabbitpoets, drmchsr0, ghostlightning, 53RG10, Vii, Seinime, Eternal, FuyuMaiden, Eater-of-All, Shinmaru, calaggie, yumeka, Nazarielle, Cuchlann, Jinx, Janette, stringedsonata, animewriter, prototype27, and probably others.

Before you can remember love, you have to feel it for the first time. Such was my motivation when, early in the year, I decided to watch as much of Macross as I could manage — which, in the end, meant pretty much all of it.

You may wonder, given my preferences, why I didn’t give Aria the number one spot again. After all, last year I had seen only the first season; this year I watched the latter two and read half the manga (that is, two volumes of Aqua and five of Aria). Surely I’m much better equipped now to praise the hell out of the thing. But, after the first season, Aria’s effect on my preferences, or on me as a fan, had already run its course. I was guaranteed to like the rest of it.

On the other hand, I did watch something this year with as profound an effect on my fan-hood as Aria had in 2008 — Macross. It’s hard to pin down precisely what it did for me, though. It probably did several things: it demonstrated the power of the franchise as both an artistic and marketing apparatus; it added to my foundation of Important Anime or Anime One Must See; it served as a gateway into older and longer shows; it was just pretty damn cool all around, equal parts humorous and serious, with its commingled themes of love, war, coming of age, and music. I can never claim to be one of those people who have been fans of Macross (perhaps by way of Robotech) practically forever, but I think I get what they’re on about, to some extent, when they profess their love of the franchise from on high. I rated none of the individual installments in the series higher than 9 on MAL, but if I could rate the whole thing cumulatively, it’d easily earn a 10. It’s about the combined experience, I think.

The SDF Macross opening isn’t my chosen moment, but it seemed an appropriate opener to this post insofar as it encapsulates all the things that make the series great. It’s got music as great as it is ridiculous, it’s got transforming plane-mecha and spacefaring capital ships, it’s got bridge bunnies and staid captains and even a hint of tenuous romance. It’s easily one of my favorite openings — how much better could it be? (Well, alright, a little, but not much.)

To choose one moment from all of Macross would be to slight its component parts, in a way. What I’ll do here, then, is choose a moment from each major installment in the franchise. Well, each installment except Macross Zero, which wasn’t bad, but left me vaguely dissatisfied. Maybe someday I’ll be able to remember love for that one, too.

SDF Macross: Pinpoint barrier + Daedalus = ?

I was tempted to write about the show’s ending here, but if I did it’d mostly be out of spite for Minmay, and she isn’t that bad — she’s a teenager, and much of what she does can be attributed to youth. So instead, I’ll write about the most awesome thing that has ever happened.

Just to clarify, the Macross itself is pretty much the most awesome thing that has ever happened. It’s a capital ship (check) that can transform into vaguely humanoid form (check) with smaller capital ships for arms (check). Of course, if you happen to find yourself vastly outnumbered by aliens you’ve accidentally pissed off and whose motivations you aren’t entirely sure of, there’s only one thing to do with all this. Executive officer (or something) Misa Hayase knows what that one thing is.

If that doesn’t simultaneously melt your face, blow your mind, and cream your jeans, I can’t imagine what would.

Macross Plus: Reversal

One of my complaints about Macross Zero is that it doesn’t feel much like Macross, and I suppose one could field the same complaint about Macross Plus. For my part, I think it’s great; it darkens and distorts the conventions of Macross without rendering them unrecognizable. Everything — the love triangle, the music (Yoko Kanno!), the pilots, everything — is more sinister somehow. Even the SDF-1 itself.

The powers that be tend to thwart our (anti-)heroes as often as they provide aid, if not more often, and the protagonists find themselves facing monumental odds with few allies. This becomes most chillingly clear when the Macross, damaged as it is by the events of the first show and some thirty years of weather, is commandeered and turned against Isamu Dyson, who, in the end, stands alone between it and Macross City (though the real conflict is much more local, you may know).

Under other circumstances, such a “resurrection” would’ve been fist-pumpingly epic. Here, it’s horrifying. Or, no, it’s probably both. That tendency to throw your emotions into disarray is what makes Macross Plus my favorite individual stretch of the franchise.

Macross 7: And still Basara sings

Macross 7 was first described to me as a show in which people fight space vampires with the power of their rock, and by God that’s what it is. If you happen to enjoy the “tangible power of rock” theme as it appears in, say, metal mythology or anything by Tenacious D, you’ll probably like Macross 7. It’s ridiculous, yeah, but it has a lot going for it — Nekki Basara is easily my favorite of Macross’s dense but skilled pilot protagonists, and Mylene Jenius is probably my favorite Minmay.

My moment of choice comes from the 27th episode, and, in a way, it marks the upturn of the show — not that it starts out terrible, but it is somewhat repetitive until about halfway through. In the previous episode, Basara launched a giant speaker into the enemy bridge…

…and rocked the commander so hard that his space-vampirism went wild and stole Basara’s voice. And yes, this is exactly as cool as it sounds, and by the time you’ve seen 26 episodes of Macross 7 it’ll seem perfectly reasonable.

The villainous Protodeviln strike again in episode 27, and the Macross 7 fleet’s most effective defense, Basara’s voice, remains out of commission. Now, in accordance with Macross 7 logic, there’s only one solution to a problem like this — namely, rock at it until it gets better. And that’s exactly what happens.

What’s the first thing Basara says when he gets his voice back? Nothing — he rock-screams a beam of song energy.

This is crazy and ridiculous and everything that makes Macross 7 great. And it is by no means the only scene of its kind; it’s simply the one I most remember.

Macross Frontier: Sheryl/Ranka

My kneejerk reaction to Macross Frontier is that it introduced into the franchise two things that Macross really could’ve done without — Alto Saotome and Ranka Lee. Now, let me qualify that — I don’t hate either character by any means. Ranka is fine, and Alto is…tolerable, anyway. In fact, I think Frontier does a fairly good job of making its characters feel like people. It’s more about what these characters represent. It’s strange seeing 21st-century moe in Macross (as opposed to late 20th-century moe, admittedly), and I’ve never liked the brooding emo kid protagonist mold into which Alto fits quite nicely. But again, this is just a kneejerk reaction, and I can’t fault Macross for changing with the times.

Now that I’m done being a curmudgeon, I’ll say that Frontier does have its high points. For one thing, the interaction between the show’s two pop idols is always enjoyable. And I’m fascinated by Sheryl Nome, or by how the show handled her — I was ready to hate her the moment I saw her, and before the end she had captured my heart in that way she’s so famous for. Generally fiction isn’t able to do that for me, and I keep on disliking those characters I peg as unsavory in the beginning, and so I have to give Frontier credit on that account.

The concerts are good (especially when they coincide with battles), and the many little interactions between Sheryl and Ranka are good, but my favorite scene with the two is this one — the pop-off. And for this, it’ll have to be video.

(Yes, the conversion process did something terrible to the subtitles — sorry about that.)

Check Alto out. He looks terrified — as if he doesn’t know what’s going on here! But then the Macross protagonist usually doesn’t, does he?

Oh, and for the record, Sheryl is great, but I still think Ranka is better for Alto. Or that Alto is better for Ranka. Either way, Alto/Ranka.

So! We’ve done My Neighbor Totoro, Hoshi no Samidare, Casshern Sins, Bokurano, Onani Master Kurosawa, Mahou Sensei Negima!, Yotsuba&!, Mushishi, Gunbuster and Diebuster, Toradora!, Aria –and here, at the pinnacle of my twelve moments of 2009, the venerable Macross. From where I’m sitting, it’s been a good year for anime and manga; I hope it’s been the same for you.

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.

I always liked Minori, actually. I was prepared to like her from the beginning. Yui Horie had something to do with it, granted, but Minori was generally just a fun character. And that thirteenth episode — I mean damn. I watched it last Christmas, in the late morning or early afternoon, and I remember thinking that Japan and its media-producing machinery had given me a fine gift, and being annoyed that I hadn’t seen it early enough to include it among my twelve moments of 2008.

But this post isn’t about that episode. This post is about Ami.

You may recall the cadre of bloggers who threw their support behind Ami nearly as soon as the show introduced her. I was not among them. Toradora! seemed to posit her as a wrench in everyone’s gears, a generally not-very-nice person, and I bought it wholesale. But as the show progressed, something happened. Ami changed — either the “real” Ami began to emerge from behind her stalwart shield of bitchery, or her two personalities, the public and the private, began to merge into a more “complete” Ami. Possibly I changed, too. I finally began to get a sense of her depth. I realized at some point that her criticisms of her friends’ romantic foibles were my criticisms. She was my voice personified as a high school girl.

And when, during the eventful twenty-first episode, she just couldn’t stand for Minori’s bullshit anymore…

Goddamn this scene is uncomfortable.

Someone should make a Toradora fighting game.

…her fist was my fist.

But by the same token, Minori’s face was my face, her chest was my chest. I didn’t realize this until it occurred to me how much this scene hurt.

Minori’s tactic for dealing with Ryuuji’s feelings is simple: “If I ignore it, maybe it’ll go away.” It’s rough, being on the receiving end of that. I get how Ami feels; I tend to be a little upset, too, when I see my friends being jerked around by people they have feelings for. Ami’s way of dealing with her frustration here is not exceedingly mature, no. But to her credit, Minori hit her first. And it’s not as if she hasn’t been embroiled in this tangled and sometimes melodramatic web of teenage romance all along — she just succumbs to a moment of exceptional weakness here.

But I get how Minori feels, too. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve employed her tactic. Oh, have I employed it — my talent for avoiding telling people how I really feel about them has become legendary. I’m not proud of myself, but it is what it is, and so I think I understand Minori’s reasoning. As long as she’s able to ignore it, things don’t have to change; everyone can remain friends, and everything can carry on as it always has. What’s more, she doesn’t want to cause problems for Ryuuji and Taiga, regardless of what form their relationship takes in the end. Minori certainly isn’t acting out of ill will; if anything, it’s the opposite. I’d guess that she simply doesn’t know what else she should do.

You can see how problematic this scene is for me when I relate to both characters involved. Ami, my more jaded, self-aware, reasonable side, attacks Minori, my well-intentioned but cowardly side. Who do I side with? Well, neither, ultimately, because I’m both. It was a little shocking to see one of my internal conflicts represented in animation like this. And it’s still difficult to watch; I never know whether I should laugh or cry.

[Read the next moment here]

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.

Let’s talk about the D&D alignment system for a minute — not the oversimplified gradient of fourth edition (what the hell is “unaligned,” anyway?), but the 3×3 grid that came into being with AD&D. Or, because a lot of you are aware of the D&D alignment system already, let’s talk about my relationship with it. As a teenager I fancied myself a rebel — this was no more true of me than it is of any suburban American teenager, but that’s what I wanted to be, and so I liked to think I was chaotic good, champion of the people in spite of the law. But as I grew older, I grew more moderate, or at least I realized I was more lawful than I had admitted to myself. Chaos was overrated anyway. Thenceforth I was neutral good, an opponent of villainy above all else. Neutral good seemed a reasonable place to be, for a while.

I’ve changed quite a bit in the past few years, however, and though I still tend to get neutral good on the alignment test, I’ve developed a healthy respect for true neutrality. Perhaps this is my way of acknowledging that the world wouldn’t be what it is without good things and bad, that balance is paramount, or perhaps it indicates my awareness that such a thing as an alignment “system” could never adequately describe human inclinations (though I like to think I knew as much all along). Whatever the case may be, I’ve come to enjoy characters who are equal parts order and chaos, good and evil, characters who seek to understand things as they are. Kino of Kino’s Journey is one such character. Mushishi’s Ginko is another.

Yes, I know Ginko makes his living as a traveling healer, of sorts. I don’t think he’s unconcerned with the lives of people; that isn’t really what true neutrality is all about. But he values equally the lives of Mushi, it seems, or he simply doesn’t judge life in terms of worth at all.

When I think of Ginko’s approach to things, I think firstly of the manga’s tenth chapter, Ginko’s encounter with the Watahaki. What we have here is a bad situation all around: a woman who desperately wants a child is infected by a mushi that gestates in her womb, emerges, secrets itself away under the house, and produces “limbs,” of sorts, which take the form of the child the woman would have borne. (Again, I have to scan my own manga here, so the quality won’t be great.)

Maybe it'll grow up to be a perfectly handsome gelatinous cube.

Kill it with fire?

Ginko is called in when the false children begin to die. They have short lifespans, he explains, and, upon death, they will disseminate countless Watahaki seeds; it’s best to do away with them before that happens, or else more families could suffer the same fate. But Aki has come to identify the things as her children.

First rule of Mushishi: always listen to Ginko.

At the behest of Aki and her husband, Ginko leaves the situation alone for the time being, urging the couple not to neglect to kill the children before they release their seeds. But before that becomes necessary, things take a strange turn, one Ginko could not have predicted — the Watahaki becomes self-aware, or it learns enough language to demonstrate that it has been self-aware all along. It’s clearly too dangerous to leave alive. But Ginko holds no malice against it; he does away with it because that’s the only thing he can do.

Makes sense.

The mushi want to live; humanity wants to live; when the two end up at odds with one another, one side will live and the other will die. That’s nature.

But, again, Ginko doesn’t especially want to kill the Watahaki, and in the end he allows it to live as long as it can in a diminished form.

That thing is still pretty creepy.

I suppose I respect Ginko for his ability to do what needs to be done. And I have to give him credit for not reveling in it, even if his victory is a victory for the human race. He’s about as impartial and logical as he can be while upholding his responsibility to his species and his general respect for life of all kinds. I doubt I could ever manage such a balance; perhaps that’s why I’m fascinated by Ginko’s having done so.

[Read the next moment here]

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.

(And yeah, I know this isn’t a “moment,” per se. If I were to choose one moment, it’d be something from my Nodoka/Yue post, but I don’t want to repeat myself. Still, I have to give Negima! credit for being generally momentous somehow.)

Negima! handles most things rather metafictionally. Characters are established within archetypal (or perhaps stereotypical) frames only so that they might comment upon or subvert these frames as they develop. Ako is the generic minor character; Nodoka is the timid one; Yue is the quiet and strange one; Asuna is the tsundere and the magic-canceling swordsperson, the dense fighter — the list goes on. Here we run into our first problem. What type or trope is Chisame supposed to represent?

When we’re first made privy to her thoughts (in chapter twelve), we might assume she’s another kind of tsundere — that quality has been bestowed upon Asuna already, but it’s hardly homogeneous.

They, uh, need the exercise?

Tsundere is old enough and prevalent enough that it takes a number of forms. There’s romance-tsundere and friend-tsundere; there’s oldschool tsundere (the character warms up over time, with relative permanence) and new-school tsundere (the character switches from cold to warm and back throughout); there’s local tsundere (which applies mostly to the character’s relationship with one other character) and global tsundere (applying more generally to the character’s interactions with others). And of course there are all sorts of things in between, since absolute extremes are rare in any case. Asuna’s tsundere is more local, while Chisame’s is more global; Asuna is more representative of the new school and Chisame the old; Asuna’s tsundere is more about romance (I’d say, though I guess that’s debatable) while Chisame’s is not so specific. The difference here is that Chisame’s tsundere is mostly played straight (so far), and that sets her apart, in a way, from the heavily self-referential cast. For comparison, Asuna’s is undercut by the fact that the object of her conflicted feelings is ten years old, and it’s complicated to some degree by her relationship with Takahata. The former might be true of Chisame, but not until quite late in the story.

So I suppose Chisame might provide for tsundere fans who aren’t buying what Asuna is selling. But she’s hardly the tsundere character of the cast insofar as she doesn’t really act as a nexus of commentary thereupon. But then what is she?

srs bsns is srs

She usually has her serious face on, at least in public. She’s not one for nonsense, and this renders her contrary, most of the time, to most of the class; her potential allies in this regard (Evangeline?) are themselves loners, for whatever reason. And she’s an impressive skeptic with impressive powers of deduction — well, no, her deductive abilities may not be that impressive, but she’s allowed by the narrative to figure things out on her own when most characters aren’t, as the festival arc demonstrates.

Seriously, she can't be the only one able to work this out.

Negima! isn’t hesitant to poke fun at itself for its conceits. Chisame may be one of the ways it does so; while most are willing to attribute the veritable miracles of the school festival’s tournament to “special effects,” Chisame essentially uses them as evidence to figure Negi out. Perhaps this is less impressive, so to speak, than the fact that nobody else can do so — but then, if I remember correctly, Chisame becomes instrumental in ensuring that the secrets of the magi aren’t revealed to the world. The point is that she’s no idiot. She may be a little genre-savvy, even, albeit not as much so as Haruna — or perhaps not about the same things.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Returning to chapter twelve, we find that Chisame also values normalcy.

If you want 'normal,' you may want to try another manga.

This may be a natural extension of her seriousness, granted, but it probably deserves mention on its own. Hers is an impressive shell. I mean, this is the class that got Ako to relax and open up a little, the class in which even Nodoka feels relatively comfortable. And here Chisame keeps herself separate, condemning the lot of her classmates for ruining her “normal school life.”

Also, she’s a net idol.

Er...surprise?

Well that comes out of left field — but does it really? For one thing, there’s been a connection between computers and the supernatural in the Akamatsuverse (if such a thing can be said to exist) since A.I. Love You/Ai ga Tomaranai. It isn’t so surprising that the internet would feature into Negima!, a comic ostensibly about magic, as long as Akamatsu-sensei’s at the helm. And, really, if she can’t express herself in “real life,” or if she doesn’t feel that she can, why wouldn’t Chisame turn to the internet? It’s served as a haven for many who are too disillusioned or too reticent for human interaction in their “normal” lives.

But that she’s skilled with computers and knows a few things about costumes brings us back to her genre savvy. Or perhaps, given her otaku inclinations, we should call it audience awareness. She knows something of moe…

Moe is, after all, part of the basic repertoire of the manga female.

…and is evidently no stranger to cosplay.

Chisame, president of Genshiken, Mahora Branch.

Ah, but she’s no straightforward, brazen otaku.

It's maybe a little late to worry about that.

True colors?

I think I’m finally starting to get a handle on what makes Chisame tick. She’s Negima’s commentary on its audience — and, as commentary, I suspect she hits rather close to home for some of us. Perhaps branding her “tsundere” does her a disservice. She’s simply insecure. She doesn’t know what people will think of her if her hobbies become common knowledge, and she doesn’t want to know; her fear that the “real” Chisame isn’t good enough keeps her from forming meaningful relationships. In all likelihood her insecurity isn’t even tied inexorably to her hobbies. That she’s into things that aren’t “normal” just gives her a convenient focal point for her worries, worries that are in fact more fundamental.

I understand her position (perhaps all too well). And I think I understand why, to Chisame, internet stardom is “what being loved is all about.”

Quite a transformation sequence, this.

But I don’t agree.

Here’s what Ghostlightning has to say about love in Macross and its fandom.

… All these Macross fans who supposedly ‘love’ the Misas and the Sheryls of the franchise talking about ‘loving’ a character who ‘deserves’ it. I like these characters a great deal. But love? PFFFT. That ain’t love. That’s too easy. It’s easy to appreciate excellent qualities such as maturity and strength, decision-making and competence under pressure. Loving a character for those qualities is safe and conservative.

If it fits in the pocket of one’s preferences. That’s not love at all! That’s like saying I love anime and only mentioning Ghibli films, and maybe Legend of the Galactic Heroes. That’s not love! Appreciating such excellence is what you’re supposed to do. [Ghostlightning, "Discovered Deculture: My Fair Minmay ~ Dreaming Prelude"]

And in a reply to my comment on that post, he added:

Rather than overlook, I’d rather choose ‘forgive’ as the operative recourse [regarding the flaws of the object of love]. I’m not into the ‘blind’ kind of love that overlooking may lead us to adopt, not that some amount of overlooking will inevitably occur.

Chisame seeks “love” in a place she knows she’ll find it, and at any rate what she gets from her fans isn’t any kind of love. These people don’t know her. They haven’t accepted her quirks and her flaws for what they are. They’ve never seen a picture of her that hasn’t been doctored in Photoshop, and they don’t know her real name. What Chisame presents isn’t Chisame, but Chiu; the fans love, or think they love, Chiu. Perhaps this love is indeed “real,” but the object of love is not. Chisame remains a spectator, living vicariously through her creation.

Genuine love is not so easy — I don’t doubt that Chisame realizes this on some level. Perhaps this realization is itself the source of her insecurity; perhaps she knows, or thinks she knows, that the greatest threat to her “normal school life” is herself. Or perhaps she has erected her shell to keep in the illusion, or the delusion, that such a thing as normal school life exists at all.

[Read the next moment here]

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.

I mentioned Bokurano during a panel at a convention recently (not my panel — they rejected my panel idea, actually), and got a roomful of blank stares for my trouble. But I suppose that’s not surprising; its American print run doesn’t begin until February of next year. It may also have what OGT identified recently as a tendency toward the “centripetal:”

…[T]here are some works that are more amenable to the vagaries of an individual fan than fandom at large. Again, regardless of the relative quality or popularity of works that possess this trait, they tend to be complex and focused in their appeal. They are the works that are difficult to like or dislike, and more likely to leave a strong, positive impression on the viewer; they are our Serial Experiments: Lains, our Kaibas, our Sky Crawlers-s, our The Girl Who Leapt Through Times. For whatever reason, the centripetal response that manifests as a personal response to the work comes naturally, leaving them to be more subdued when discussed in a social context.

At any rate I have difficulty talking (or writing) about Bokurano for the reason OGT identifies here. Structurally it’s not so complex — it’s structurally interesting, mind you, but not difficult to follow — and so my difficulties with it are not those I have when I throw my patchwork critical theory knowledge at, say, Ulysses. It’s just that Bokurano is so damn personal that it’s difficult to share the experience you’ve had with it with anyone else. I wrote a brief post about it a few months ago, but I didn’t say much beyond “I liked it.” How can I? You have to feel it, and I can’t really convey that adequately, barring simply telling you that you have to feel it.

I suppose you should take all that as a disclaimer. I can’t promise you that I’m skilled enough with words to make you get why this moment hit me so hard (I can’t promise you that I even know for certain). But I think you’ll know where I’m coming from if you’ve read Bokurano. (By the way, if you do indeed get nothing else out of this post, get this: read Bokurano.)

Of all the children chosen to pilot the Zearth, Takami Komoda may be the plainest. She doesn’t seem to have any major complexes. Her dad isn’t so good at expressing affection, but he tries, at least; compared to the parents of some of the other kids, he’s veritably saintly. In fact, her plainness seems to be her biggest problem in life: she’s downright boring.

Like, yawn.

More than that, she has no passion for life. Or, rather, she has no interest in having a passion for life. Life is unreliable. She prefers the dependable world of literature to human interaction — which would have made a lot of sense to me when I was her age, I must admit. Growing up, she’s had a grand total of one good friend.

'Books don't betray you?' I don't know...

But by now, Maki’s turn at the controls of the Zearth has come and gone. Maki is dead. Komoda knows she’s next, and she knows acutely what that means.

And yet she doesn’t fight it. She’s afraid of death, but she’s prepared to die, and to die well, so the sacrifices of those who piloted the life-stealing, world-saving machine before her aren’t rendered meaningless.

She's taking it better than I would, I can tell you that much.

And from within the very depths of tragedy, the beauty of the world is made evident. This, to me, is what Bokurano is all about. This is perhaps what tragedy itself is all about. Tragedy invokes catharsis, that emotional blank slate — but how does that work, exactly? I suspect catharsis is little more complicated than the realization that, if such a thing as “bad” exists, so must such a thing as “good.” Catharsis is perhaps less of a wiping-clean than a balancing, a realignment of something within us, some obscure worldview-related cog that we tend not to think about much of the time. Bokurano scrutinizes this balancing process, going so far as to counter its own bad with good, its ugliness with beauty. And, in the end, it manages to be a very hopeful and even happy story.

And what an exquisite story it is.

This is only the first chapter of the Komoda arc, covering the time between Komoda’s designation as the next pilot and her being whisked away to sacrifice herself for the continued survival of the Earth. But to me it’s easily the most memorable; somehow it manages to affect me more profoundly than even the arc’s conclusion, which is itself rather intense. It’s the simplicity of it, I think, the simplicity of a girl faced with death who finally understands her place in the world. She achieves this understanding without congratulations and without fanfare. And yet it’s such a monumental achievement that, for me, this simple chapter is the emotional high point of a profoundly emotional story.

[Read the next moment here]

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.

Only the leader of these defenders of the Earth wants to smash the world herself, and Amamiya Yuuhi, the Knight of the Lizard, has decided he’ll do whatever it takes — even if it means fighting his allies — to help her fulfill her dream. Oh, but Samidare wants to wreck the world not because she hates it, but because she loves it. It’s hers, by God, and she intends to possess it by freezing it at a point in time, so to speak. And all this puts Yuuhi at odds with his “pet” talking lizard, Sir Noi Crezant, who would much rather go the route of the more traditional champion of justice.

If you are not yet convinced beyond all doubt to read this manga, you are saner than I.

At any rate, all this results in much more interesting character dynamics than you’ll find in most contemporary fantasy shounen/seinen action manga. And this one happens to be very good at demonstrating the commingled horror and beauty of the world — later on, when other animal knights start showing up, it begins to feel like a crazier Bokurano — so you never hate Samidare and Yuuhi for their crooked goals. In fact, it’s not terribly hard to see where they’re coming from.

I won’t explain in too much detail, as I’d rather you read it and work through the nuances yourself. But I will show you a moment that made me feel good, and bad, and everything else. The context is that the animal knights are assembled at last, and it’s time for Samidare to give the requisite Epic Speech.

Yeah! Let's...wait, what?

Because if you don't, they'll kill you first!

Inspiring, maybe, but not very heroic. That is, “fight to save your own asses!” is not such a heroic credo, in the traditional sense. Then why are these people so quick to buy it? Because they’re too human to be heroic in the traditional sense, of course. None of them wants to die; self-protection probably sounds like a fine thing to fight for, and anyway, it’s hard to say at any given time how many of them would really sacrifice themselves to save the world.

It’s not that Samidare isn’t much concerned with the fate of the world. She’s especially concerned with it; the world must end by her hands alone, and to make sure that happens, she has to get rid of Animus. In fact, she knows she’ll probably end up at odds with most of these people, and if they happen to get themselves killed in the line of duty before she reveals her plans, it’d save her (and Yuuhi) the trouble of doing it later. But she’s seen people die at this point, and she probably doesn’t want to watch these people die as well. They may become her enemies, but they aren’t yet, and she doesn’t hold the future against them. Maybe telling her knights to protect themselves at all odds isn’t the best tactical maneuver on Samidare’s part, but then she isn’t an impartial machine.

'What do you think they're talking about up there?'

Here, specifically, is Moment the Eleventh. Loving the world and hating the world — I don’t think that’s paradoxical at all. It just amounts to appreciating all the world has to offer. There are good things and bad things; there are good things because there are bad things, and vice versa. And the line between love and hate is thin, at any rate, or so I tend to think. Love/hate, good/bad — these are binaries. Each term gives its opposite meaning by contrast. Is it possible to love the world without hating it? Is it possible to love anything without also having the capacity to hate it? Basically what I’m trying to say is that I get this scene. It makes perfect sense to me, or it resonates with me emotionally, or both, I can’t really tell which.

Play the game, everybody play the gaaaame...

Love, like life, is fleeting; Samidare just wants to be in control of how it all ends, which is, depending on how you construe it, the most important part, the part that allows the rest of it to have meaning. If she’s responsible for the end — for death — she’s responsible for everything. Of course she’s totally crazy, and mostly unconcerned with whether her plans might inconvenience anyone else, but that’s part of why she’s so enjoyable to read about.

[Read the next moment here]

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.

• I’m trying to figure out how adaptation across media works in terms of narratology and phenomenology, which sounds highly theoretical and irrelevant to actual consumers of media, but I’m trying to approach it in a way that brings in cultural factors.
• Provisionally I’ve thought of writing about Ulysses and its film adaptations, mostly because of the obvious formal changes required in adapting Ulysses to film, and also because I’ve worked with Ulysses before, but that may change, especially given that I want to come up with ideas that are applicable to adaptations of all kinds — including novel and film, but also theater, sequential art, video games, and other media gaining popularity as vehicles for adaptation (it seems like any TV show that reaches moderate popularity gets its own board game now) — so most of my research at this point has been on adaptation in general.
• Mouvance, introduced by medievalist Paul Zumthor, specifically regarding medieval oral tradition [which I've discussed previously; thanks again IKnight]
• Zumthor uses the term “author” to refer to writers, reciters, and scribes, considering medieval authorial anonymity; the text is, in one sense, a representation of the “author’s relationships to the world;” what matters to Zumthor is not the “extratextual” author, but the author as “textual persona,” and thus he is concerned primarily with the relationship between author and world as represented in the text
• If we understand the text in the usual way as one instance or representation of the work, the “work” with which Zumthor is concerned is not the hypothesized archetype of a stemma [in other words, the imaginary ideal manuscript -- an author's draft or fair copy, perhaps -- that each text tries or purports to reproduce]; it’s instead the composite of all related texts, and it changes with each text produced; the text achieves a degree of independence from the archetype, rather than being simply a corrupt representation thereof

Mouvance

• Mouvance is problematic as a way of dealing with medieval texts; the process of compositing texts into a work can only take place in the mind of the reader, and while this may function for contemporary readers with access to multiple manuscripts, medieval texts were often highly local, and readers would have had access to one or few; with that said, mouvance may be useful as a way of dealing with contemporary narrative production, particularly regarding adaptations of a core plot produced within a relatively short period of time for similar audiences
• I’m appropriating mouvance as a way of thinking about how a franchise or intellectual property works as a composite of its texts, particularly in terms of consumption
• Probably my central concern here is how consumers value the texts of a franchise relative to one another.
• One popular idea is “adaptation decay,” the notion that, in the transition from original text to derivative, something will almost unavoidably be lost; this may or may not result in a perceived loss in quality [see TV Tropes]
• There may be some merit to this; critical writing on adaptation has generally focused on the concept of fidelity to an original, whether as a means of determining the value of a derivative or in a reactionary way as a concept that critics should not weight too heavily, if at all; it depends in large part on how we conceive of form and content, but, whether we’re poststructural about it and concern ourselves mostly with form, or believe that there is some tangible transfer of “content” between related texts regardless of form, differences in form will certainly result in differences in reading
• I’ve looked at several models of the transition from source to derivative, and I’m interested in three in particular:
• The narratological or “genetic” model describes the thing transferred as a “deep structure,” a basic relative arrangement of signifiers; these signifiers will certainly be altered individually during the shift from one medium to another, but their relationship to one another will be recognizable from the source narrative, though rarely identical, if ever; I’m interested in this model simply as a way of describing how adaptations are made

The genetic model of adaptation

• This is related (I think) to the question of whether an adaptation is (or should attempt to be) an imitation or an entirely faithful copy of its source; the genetic model leans toward imitation, if we define “imitation” as the act of drawing enough but not too much from the source material; this seems reasonable, considering that formal differences essentially render copying impossible
• The decomposing or recomposing model describes the process by which, once consumed, adaptations are decomposed into a common pool of signs, and the boundaries between them become uncertain; essentially I’m using mouvance to suggest that, for the purposes of reading, the franchise functions as this mass of indistinct signs, to be drawn from and added to when reading any text of the franchise

The decomposing/recomposing model of adaptation

• The trumping model is concerned with which adaptation is “best;” investigating this model may reveal insight into how consumers value adaptations (a contrast to valuing fidelity to the source above all)

The trumping model of adaptation

• As I research, I’ll look for evidence of these three models operating simultaneously, as they don’t seem mutually exclusive.
• I’m also interested in how various media happen — how they’re read or consumed. So far I’ve only looked at novels and film [during this bout of research, anyway; otherwise I've had some ideas].
• I’ve come across a few possibilities: that film and novels are both essentially visual media (which I don’t buy); that film and novels share the medium of the human consciousness, and differences in physical mechanics are of little importance (which discounts the importance of form relative to content too much, as far as I’m concerned); that, despite the apparent relative immediacy of film, the film and the novel both take place in the “present tense” during consumption (I more or less agree)
• Any similarities in the reading process between two or more media may help me determine how one text affects another
• Ultimately, the only way to get a clear sense of how adaptations function within a franchise is to consult the responses of consumers — both academic consumers and the “lay” audience.
• The case of Ulysses (1967)
• Before its release, it achieved publicity as a rallying point for the cause of free speech (likening it to the novel); director Joseph Strick maintained publicly that he would not pollute Joyce’s vision with his own (possibly as an appeal to viewers who valued fidelity)
• Film reviewers expressed concern as to whether an audience with no experience with the novel could appreciate the film (the film was, perhaps, less an autonomous adaptation than a directorial “reading” [implying a spectrum with reading at one end and adaptation at the other?])
• Critics who valued fidelity considered the film a failure [but it's rated 6.4 on IMDb, which could certainly be worse]
• It’s probable that the relative function of related adaptations in the reading of a given consumer — that is, how great an impact each previously-experienced adaptation has on further reading in the franchise — is related closely to how the consumer assigns value to individual texts. By consulting individual consumers, we might be able to draw conclusions about the social factors associated with various ways of reading, and, with any luck, patterns indicating the underlying interaction of adaptations will make themselves evident.

References

Elliott, Kamilla. “Literary Film Adaptation and the Form/Content Dilemma.” Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004: 220-243.

Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008.

Griffith, James. “Introduction.” Adaptations as Imitations: Films from Novels. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997: 15-75.

Zumthor, Paul. Toward a Medieval Poetics. Trans. Philip Bennett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Images

First edition Ulysses — http://www.theworldsgreatbooks.com/ulysses_wraps.htm

Ulysses (1967) film — http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Barbara-Jefford/dp/B00004W1A9/

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.)

So, when in anime, manga, etc. is molestation used to serve humor, and how? Let’s try to establish some flexible guidelines. We may not agree on the specifics, but not to worry; you can usually count on me to be as noncommittal as possible.

In short, I mean to suggest that:

1. Molestation serves humor when it’s accidental.
2. Molestation serves humor when the molester is too young to appreciate it.
1. Molestation serves humor when the (male) victim is too young to appreciate it.
2. Given two young characters of similar age, refer to rule 1.
3. Molestation often serves humor when the victim is male.
1. Rule 3 is especially true of harem protagonists.
4. Molestation often serves humor when everyone involved is female.
5. Rape is never funny.

Whether any of these should or shouldn’t be the case isn’t my primary concern, but if anything along the way particularly bothers me, I’ll no doubt tell you.

1. Molestation serves humor when it’s accidental.

This is the case we see most often, probably, that tried-and-true recurring gag of comedic harem romance. Rarely the cream of the male crop, harem protagonists may be pitiable for other reasons, but their tendencies toward inadvertent groping and somehow always finding the best angles for upskirt views are the most physically evident of their failings, not lastly because they themselves often suffer physical retribution as a result.

Because I snagged the show and the OVA on the cheap recently, because I’ve been all about Ken Akamatsu lately, and because it’s basically harem canon by now, let’s turn our attentions to Love Hina. It’s very nearly all the exemplification we need here.

Responses to inadvertent gropes vary (as in real life), but for the most part this one’s easy to call. The molester didn’t mean it; he (or she) probably isn’t a certified creeper, and, if the victim spends enough time around said molester, she (or he) will normally come to her (or his) senses about it. Perhaps it makes light of a serious thing, but an accident’s an accident, and an accidental grope can really only go so far once the groper grasps the situation. No harm, no foul, shikata ga nai — after a megaton punch or a Shinmeiryuu secret technique relieves the heroine of her frustrations, at least.

I apologize for all the parenthetical gender confusion above; as you may well know, it’s normally safe to assume that the accidental molester in these situations is a straight male, so the resultant set of gender role assignments is what I tend toward in discussion. But I suppose it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t always the case, as Akamatsu reinforces in a certain later effort of his.

With that said, what makes accidental molesters funny? Or, even if you don’t find them funny, what makes them forces of humor?

Why, hello there, ironic mode! We’ve been seeing a lot of you lately. And that makes sense, this being (as I’ve seen one uncharacteristically entertaining Joyce critic put it) a veritable age of irony. Maybe that’s lamentable at times, but regardless, we’re talking about characters unusually prone to embarrassing situations and compromises of morality, who are in that regard lesser than average, and lesser-than-average is the bread and butter of ironic characters.

That’s not to say ironic characters (or the ironic mode) are doomed to be humorous¹; consider also the plot structure of those harem-laden shows which so commonly feature accidental molestation as a source of humor. In terms of Frye’s mythoi, we can usually call them comic (they end basically happily and indicate such all along, so we can be amused at them and not tense, and their societies are rather inclusive) or ironic (they fit familiar situations into unexpected schema, minus the comparatively clear goals of satire — and, given the ironic mode as well, we could call this “ironic irony,” however redundant that may be), and the ironic and comic mythoi (figuratively Winter and Spring respectively) are inexorably linked, so there’s generally something to laugh about even if the Mythos of Winter dominates.²

In short, the humor in accidental molestation (and in the inevitable reprisal of the molested) comes both from its unexpectedness and from our foreknowledge that everyone involved will probably shrug it off without suffering lasting trauma anyway. And it seems that both conditions must be met for a given event to contain humor potential; ef omits the latter, and I feel fairly confident in claiming that molestation in that franchise is most certainly not funny.

By extension, the humorous molestation in question likely must exist one or two removes from our experience of the reality of sexual harassment. Animation itself works through (and with) a layer of distortion, which helps, as do the trappings of the situations: the lack of ill intent, the often slapstick outcome, the pervasive comedic sense of well-being, and so on. Given too much familiarity, we move into the realm of horror, or tragedy (with which irony also shares a border, so to speak).³ I’ll cite ef again, though it probably belongs first and foremost beneath a heading that will show up later. Elfen Lied would work, too, provided you aren’t one of those who can’t tolerate it long enough to get to the part I’m thinking of.

2. Molestation serves humor when the molester is too young to appreciate it.

It’s widely acknowledged that sexual attraction isn’t a significant motivator of sexual assault (which is ultimately an assertion of power), and so we might say that the undercurrent of attraction in some animated acts of molestation sets them further apart from the viewer’s experience of reality. With that said, an honest lecher can still appear threatening, or at least unsettling. Kazurou Inoue’s Ai Kora stands out to me in that its protagonist seems almost dangerous compared to other harem leads; his active devotion to his assortment of fetishes renders certain of his acts of perversion somewhat more deliberate than what I’m used to from characters afflicted with sheer bad luck. Love Hina’s Keitaro Urashima collects photo booth pictures; Hachibe Maeda collects covert photos of his housemates. Both characters are pitiable, in a way, and both manage to be funny, but I have some difficulty relating to and laughing about a character whose ultimate intentions worry me. Hachibe is mostly harmless, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that the manga’s outcome won’t include some success of his that I don’t especially approve of, that he’ll definitely change into someone I can legitimately like.

There’s an obvious and easy way to remove that concern altogether: give us a protagonist who is not yet old enough to really worry about sexual attraction, at least in the same way a young adult would — and, as an added bonus, have the cast disarm him of sexuality every so often.

“You’re just a kid,” the cast of Negima! reminds Negi, and in doing so reminds itself of Negi, to some degree. Sexually and socially, he isn’t really a “threat,” and while the latter may change during the course of 260 chapters (as of now), the former really doesn’t; he remains his usual innocent self even when shape-shifting into the middle of puberty. As an extreme point of comparison, we have Evangeline MacDowell, who knows how to play up her sexuality as typically befits her fictional race; the libido spectrum of class 2-A/3-A more or less stretches from her to Negi, with everyone else falling somewhere between.

It follows that Negi’s acts of molestation can’t really be anything other than accidental; none of his motives suggest malicious intent. When he does show interest in girls — say, by noting that Nodoka is “very cute” in his class roster — it’s hard to interpret such actions as anything but innocent. In fact, Negi’s a victim as often as he’s a perpetrator — as often, if not more often. But we don’t really worry about him, thanks to a variant of the present rule: molestation serves humor when the (male) victim is too young to appreciate it.

This caveat spills over into rule 3 — really, all these rules are connected in some way — because I have yet to see an example of a rather young girl molested in the name of humor by an older assailant (excepting Kanamemo, maybe). Now, it’s not unreasonable that Negi might suffer some lasting trauma due to his…unique relationships with older girls, but the manga doesn’t push that. Just as he’s harmless to them, they’re harmless to him.

Unless you count suffocation/drowning, I guess.

But they have good intentions, or at least not bad intentions. As far as I can tell, this mostly serves to compound the victim’s status as ironic, or at least emasculate (as per rule 3; more on that in a moment). As far as his students are concerned, Negi is so innocent (biologically, even) that things like this couldn’t possibly bring about an indecent thought on his part. I just wonder what it’ll do to his conception of women in ten or so years.

It’s worth noting (albeit obvious) that this rule doesn’t really hold up with characters of very similar age, even if they’re all fairly young. We might say that, given two young characters of similar age, refer to rule 1, which is what most matters of humorous molestation hinge upon anyway.

3. Molestation often serves humor when the victim is male.

There seem to be few situations in the anime and manga I’m familiar with in which molestation of male victims is dealt with in a serious (that is, non-comedic) way. And when it is, the act is often ambiguous; it may be negative or it may not — in some cases, it may be molestation or it may not — depending on how we choose to read it. The most ambiguous example I can think of hails from the Welcome to the N.H.K. novel; Satou, our troubled protagonist, says of his high school crush (minor spoilers):

A few days before graduation, she even let me do her once.

It moved me deeply to think that the payoff for having kept on her good side over two whole years was that one single act. It was randomly exciting, yet it was also sad. In the end, I was able to do it just that once.

I felt like I should have done it a few more times. But then, I also felt that it might have been better for me not to have done it even that one time. I wondered which would have been right.⁴

Satou tells her later that “The fact that the one time we did it, we parted soon afterward…that was rather hard on me.” And, given the condition of said drug-addled hikkikomori at age 22, that may be a bit of an understatement. But the crush wasn’t especially right in the head, either, and we never learn the specifics of her advances. Maybe she pressured him; maybe he pressured her. Was it molestation of a sort? An act without much thought behind it? A genuine gesture of affection? Should we think of it (as I tend to) as simply a thing that happened, more passive than active (insofar as she “let him” do it)? It’s nothing if not ambiguous. See also FLCL, if you haven’t; I won’t even begin to spoil that one.

More commonly, though, harassment of men is played for laughs, even when intentional.

As the young man in question is, yet again, everyone’s favorite punching bag Keitaro Urashima, this particular scene also demonstrates that rule 3 is especially true of harem protagonists. And that makes a good deal of sense, given their previously-established ironic status. These incidents (like the one above) often take the form of a woman manipulating the easily-manipulated protagonist through sex appeal. It’s perhaps a bit difficult to say whether a male character’s susceptibility to these tactics demonstrates his healthy manhood or proves that he isn’t such a strong contender in the sexual arena — both could be true, and so I’m inclined to think that both probably are true, but in any case the latter is yet another diminishing force acting upon the character in question. It doesn’t help Keitaro’s case that he’s paralleled by Seta, who attracts half the regular female cast without really realizing it.

Lurking beneath this rule is, quite likely, the unfortunate fact that sex crime against men isn’t nearly as widely publicized or recognized for what it is as that against women. Consider the possible implications of molestation used to render a male character ironic; there’s a sense that a victimized man is somehow less of a man, or simply somehow lesser, for having been preyed upon and having been unable to do anything about it. Of course, haremettes generally don’t bear harem protagonists any genuine ill will, and whether these situations could or should be called molestation can be debatable, but the implications may be worth considering at least cursorily.

4. Molestation often serves humor when everyone involved is female.

Most shows that take homosexual relationships seriously are exempt from this rule. But, really, there aren’t too many of those. And, interestingly, the show from which I’m pulling my example does take at least one homosexual relationship relatively seriously.

Under rule 1, it’s accidental. Under rule 2, the impact on all involved is deliberately minimized. Rule 3 situations are at least marginally ambiguous, and they do serve the cause of irony. What’s your excuse, Kanamemo?

Not that I’m trying to single this rule out (well, maybe I am); I just think it works better when one or more other rules are in effect as well. And I’m not trying to fault anime as a medium here, as there are shows in which same-sex molestation is treated as a serious thing. It’s just that, in some cases, everyone involved being a girl seems to be the only justification I can find for these kinds of situations being employed for humor.

In Kanamemo’s case, this probably serves to make the molester ironic; in a way, it’s opposite rule 3. But, here, creators tread an uncomfortable line. Kanamemo’s execution just didn’t really work for me.

5. Rape is never funny.

I hope this one is self-explanatory.

I’ve never seen outright rape played for laughs in anime and manga — which is good, as I doubt I could stomach it. It is in reality too dire a thing, and I don’t know how a creator might render it sufficiently far from our experience to make it a laughing matter. The threat of SURPRISE BUTTSECKS and such might be a kind of exception to this; again, I don’t think there are a whole hell of a lot of franchises that take homosexuality too seriously, which is by no means a trait unique to anime and manga. But, generally, nothing ever comes of such threats.

I’ve tried to maintain a balanced perspective, neither discounting the seriousness of sexual assault nor making something out of nothing, but that’s hard to do when opinions on this sort of thing vary so widely, so I apologize if I’ve offended you somehow; it wasn’t intentional. You may notice, also, that I didn’t really deal with the issue of fanservice here, but I have a good excuse: that sort of thing is the topic of my next “What the hell is art?” post. Which I will finish. Eventually.

Endnotes

¹“Comedy is…a representation of people who are rather inferior — not, however, with respect to every [kind of] vice, but the laughable is [only] a part of what is ugly.” (Aristotle. “Poetics.” Trans. Richard Janko. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 94.)

²I know, I know. I’m considering changing the Northrop Frye tag to Fryesturbation. In case you really need it again, here’s the SRS BSNS citation: Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

³“For the laughable is a sort of error and ugliness that is not painful and destructive, just as, evidently, a laughable mask is something ugly and distorted without pain.” (Aristotle. “Poetics.” Trans. Richard Janko. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001: 94.)

⁴Takimoto, Tatsuhiko. Welcome to the N.H.K. Trans. Lindsey Akashi. Los Angeles: Tokyopop, 2007: 105.