[Read the previous 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.
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.
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.)
Update 8/9: I’m going live with the new theme now, after making some changes based on the feedback I got here. You’re welcome to keep commenting with suggestions (and bear in mind that I have yet to decide what else to do with the header, so there may be a place for more color up there).
Lest you thought my Twitter comment about revamping the site was an act of impulse, mere offhand rambling, I present to you the basically-finished prototype of Super Fanitheme 3.0, a simplified, cleaned-up affair compared to what we have now. All I need now are thoughts on how it might be made better.
The front page, with image caption formatting
More sections offered for your perusal after the break.
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.
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.
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.
Is our pithy protagonist making a daring fashion statement here, in wearing pants that closely match those of his younger sister? Are man capris popular enough in Japan that the artists responsible for the above would’ve included them in Kyon’s wardrobe without giving it much thought? Or is this just visual evidence of Kyon’s slowly losing his edge?
Breaking into the super robot genre has proven difficult for me, so I asked the wise OGT to point me toward a few shows that might help. Among other things, he recommended Gunbuster (aka Top wo Nerae!) — you may already know this, given all the fanboying I did over the show and its sequel. Gunbuster was probably just the sort of thing I needed, tempered as it is by enough drama and pain to sustain my interest through the genuinely awesome moments, which I can in fact enjoy on the level of genuine awesome if I stay interested long enough.
Diebuster, though.
You want to put it into words. You really try. But the last episode explodes your mind, and you’re left with assorted pieces, slightly charred, floating through space. You could leave it at that, but these pieces practically beg to be reassembled, and I’m nothing if not tenacious when it comes to weaving my webs.
What is art?
Yeah, I went there. Trepidatiously, maybe, but it’s not as if we haven’t talked about it before. Besides, it’s bound to be fun if we pull relevant examples from the reader communities to which we belong. So strap yourselves in, my magnificent comrades; you’re in for some unusual posts.
Each post in this series will begin with a question, and this one seems as good a starting point as any: can an object with a use, such as a tool or a piece of furniture, be considered art?