I’ve been having odd thoughts lately, mostly when I walk to and from class — but also in the shower (both places from which ideas emerge).  Where does moe come from?  That’s the question underlying our work here today.  I’m not going to quibble about the definitions of what moe is, I’m going to try to examine where it comes from.

Moe is typically viewed as a structural element.   Simply, fans view moe as something in the text that they decode.  It’s an emotional reaction fans have with the text, but the beginnings of moe itself are within the text.  To be a little more precise, the text does something, performs some action or makes some reference (whatever it is we view as moe), and we read it there and respond appropriately, according to our interests.

Here’s my thought:  moe isn’t a structural element; it’s a phenomenological element in the space around the text.  That is, we read into a text the moe we feel, rather than read from a text the moe we feel.

This construction might sound like it’s splitting hairs, but the implications of each view are very different.  If we view moe as structural and a constituent part of the text then we must feel the moe to read the text.  Besides being authoritarian, this stricture is also theoretically problematic.  If one fan does not see the moe that is, apparently, inherent in the text, that fan has actually not read the text.  This is different than seeing it and not enjoying it.

Consider horror, an entire genre based (generally) on the emotional response of the reader.  Can we say “horror” (however we define it) is structural?  I think so.  We can point to the elements of horror that always happen in texts (or almost always), even if we don’t feel any fear or disgust ourselves.  Some examples, taken at random, would be the attempts to undermine the typical societal view of our own well-being or strength; the highlighting of the horror of birthing; or the horror of the body (check out I Am Legend, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Three Imposters respectively).  We may not feel the emotional, phenomenological aspect of the horror, but we can see horrifying elements within the text.  To not feel horror is not to mis-read the text, but to not see the undermining elements is.

Back to moe.  Let’s pull out an example of moe.  Pontifus has some interesting examples here.  The urge to protect these girls, if in the text — that is, structural — means it is equally “solid” within the confines of the text as the guns and the music.

Can moe be, instead, phenomenological?  Might we consider it a reaction within the fans, or the fan-group, and not something woven into the narrative, imagery, &c.?

I think we can.  I am not suggesting moe is entirely woven in the fan-space, like many slash relationships.  Certainly there are typically markers in the text on which moe is built, but those markers are not, in themselves, moe.  We have coded them as such in the fan-space, the viewing gestalt.  Hence the arguments as to the definition of moe.  We cannot define something concretely that is entirely phenomenological; in turn, we cannot insist on readings that deal with moe structurally.

[written during a class's library instruction period and the break immediately afterward -- in short, sorry for the short post]

But you’re not here to listen to me whine (or are you?  Maybe we’d get more hits if I just whined about things).  I’m going on an adventure through an essay by Robert Scholes called “The Roots of Science Fiction.”

So I suppose the format’s changing a bit here.  I’m using Scholes as a springboard to bounce my own thoughts from, hoping it provides a trajectory powerful enough to deliver them to you.  So:

All fiction — every book even, fiction or not — takes us out of the world we normally inhabit [. . .]  even the new representational media that have been spawned in this age cannot begin to match the speculative agility and imaginative freedom of words.  The camera can capture only what is found in front of it or made for it, but language is as swift as thought itself and can reach beyond what is, or seems. . .  (205; 212)

What’s the difference between a book and a movie, a trilogy and a miniseries?  For Scholes, it’s in the nature of the consumption of the media in question.  Film must present what’s there, while books can present anything — and, in fact, present what isn’t there even in the novel of social realism.  In more traditional media that’s pretty unarguable, I think (you may disagree), but animation changes the picture somewhat.  How much?

Animation of any sort presents what wasn’t there.  Someone invented it, first as a movie director might, and then as an illustrator does.  Animation occupies a hypothetical space between books and movies, I would say.  Hence the humor of the very first episode of Haruhi:  animation portrays what is really there very often — terrible filmmaking, with nervous actors and crappy camera work.  If one doesn’t view animation as more hypothetical than film, then there’s no humor to that juxtaposition.

However, books are more hypothetical still.  We consume animation in the same way we consume film:  with our eyes and our ears.  That is, in two-fifths of the way we consume reality.  Books aren’t consumed in the same way.  We must see the pages, but seeing them is not enough.  Whereas a certain level of film- and animation-making functions outside language and semiotics, books never do.

Let me go into detail with that last statement.  Yes, both film and animation have codes, standard signs, and the like.  I’m not denying that.  The so-called “Dutch angle” means something very particular.  But on a certain level we are watching people do things in ways similar to the ways we do them.  The semiotic (sign-making) structures may lie so thick on the screen that it’s almost impossible to separate the two levels, but I think we must all admit that there is some core, in a film, of non-signed activity.  This is different from significant activity — a low sigh in an empty room can indicate that a character is sad; that is, we’re not told directly that he is sad, we are shown.  Is that a sign or an indication?  Both?  Hard to say.

Books, on the other hand, do almost nothing outside the realm of signs.  You must be able to, presumably in this order, speak/understand the language of the book, know how to read, and read the language of the book.  The white (negative) spacing of the text affects us in a slightly less semiotic way, but that adds to the mood rather than delivers the narrative/characterization/whatever.  If you can’t read, you can’t read a book.  But you can watch a film.  Many of the filmic conventions won’t make sense to you, but you can watch it and understand the story.

Animation does a little of each.  The disconnection wrought by the unreality of the figures, their “drawn” nature, moves us toward the hypothetical realm of the book.  Their visual and aural nature, consumed like the prattle of the person next to us in line, moves animation toward the film.

Of course, animation is an umbrella that shelters anime, but how does anime specifically function in this continuity?  I am tempted to say it is slightly more hypothetical than western (or, at least, American) animation, but is that true?  Or is it really that I am so familiar with the conventions of western animation that fewer of them strike me as hypothetical?

Scholes splits “fabulation” into two major components:  dogmatic and speculative.  Dante’s Divine Comedy is dogmatic and More’s Utopia is speculative.  He ties them, very loosely, to religious and secular thought, indicating that dogmatic fabulation was more prevalent throughout history, while speculative fabulation will necessarily rise with the secularization of society.  But as time goes on, the speculative passes into dogmatic (I’m oversimplifying here).  Think of the once-avante garde SF that is now not only rear guard but conservative-reactionary.  I’m thinking of course of military hard-SF.  It was once a mode of fiction out of the norm; it is now the gold standard many use to judge others by.

The time of kings was the time of drama.  When ministers ruled and history got its “capital H,” the novel rose.  Now that we know ourselves as part of a natural pattern, inextricably tied into the world, “we are free to speculate as never before” (Scholes 208-211).

So we are not put into place, or positioned by the long flow of History.  We are part of a pattern, affected by it and affecting it.  And SF is born, essentially.  When everything is manipulable, a writer can conceive of manipulating it all, even the laws of physics themselves.

All the forms of adventure fiction, from western, to detective, to spy, to costume — have come into being in response to the movement of ’serious’ fiction away from plot and the pleasures of fictional sublimation.  Because many human beings experience a psychological need for narration — whether cultural or biological in origin — the literary system must include works which answer to that need.  But when the dominant canonical form fails to satisfy such a basic drive, the system becomes unbalanced.  The result is that readers resort secretly and guiltily to lesser forms for that narrative fix they cannot do without.  [. . .]  Thus the vacuum left by the movement of ’serious’ fiction away from storytelling has been filled by ‘popular’ forms with few pretensions to any virtues beyond those of narrative excitement.  But the very emptiness of these forms, as they are usually managed, has left another gap, for forms which supply readers’ needs for narration without starving their needs for intellection. The ‘letdown’ experienced after finishing many detective stories or adventure tales comes from a sense of time wasted — time in which we have deliberately suspended not merely our sense of disbelief but also far too many of our normal cognitive processes.  [. . .]  We require a fiction that satisfies our cognitive and sublimative needs together, just as we want food that tastes good and provides some nourishment.  We need suspense with intellectual consequences, in which questions are raised as well as solved, and in which our minds are expanded even while focused on the complications of a fictional plot” (212-13)

That’s a long quotation, but read all of it.  I’ll wait.

What Scholes is describing is what many people view as a bifurcation or (at worst) a disruption between the methods of our literatures (whether they be film, book, or anime).  That is, something entertains us.  We are gripped by the action and emotional drama of, say, Shinji.  Robots and monsters swarm around Neo-Tokyo, and we thrill to the action.  At the same time, the “intellection” is whetted by the moral and ethical concerns, as well as the conceptual space.  What does it mean for the Eva unit to be able to function on its own?  Does that make Shinji part of a machine?  Or has he been piloting something that isn’t really a machine?  Is it right to treat it as such?  What about the scenes where it appears to try to break through the restraints and kill the technicians?  Does it view them as torturers?

There are loads more, of course.  For all that I feel NGEvangelion should handle itself with more finesse, it introduces tons of interesting questions and themes.  So it’s doing both things that Scholes describes, having moved in to fill the gap produced by the shift of the traditional literature away from decent plot and the shift of popular literature away from decent “intellection.”  So far so good.

Except that many in the audience experience these two methods entirely separately.  Eva’s not the greatest example (it being the standard-bearer for the “anime is srs bsns” crowd for years), but think it over.  How many other shows can you think of, where both sides of Scholes’s equation are present, but the audience avoids the intellection because it ruins the fun of the sublimative (that is, the plot and emotional stuff)?

According to Scholes, both are really necessary.  I happen to agree with him, but that’s just me.  Again, springboard:  how are two experienced separately, as though, like time in Hamlet, they are out-of-joint?

I won’t quote chapter and verse here, but Michael Chabon, in an essay, pointed to culture itself.  We’re told that entertaining stuff doesn’t make us think.  Then, because we all believe that, media producers produce along that dividing line, and we get only awesome-stuffs that have no thought or mind-bending stuff with no entertainment value.  You’ve seen the typical art-house flick with no redeemable entertainment value at all, admit it.  Garden State, for me, despite all its pop-culture cache, what with Zach Braff making it and all, was that for me.  You probably have your own.

Eventually you get people over-reacting when the two finally come together, claiming that one’s peanut butter shouldn’t be in the other’s chocolate.  And if you’re a fan of Reese’s, you know that, really, it’s awesome.  If you’re also a fan of Robot Chicken, you know it’s worth killing over.

But as Scholes points out, too much of one without the other strangles the audience — or, to carry his metaphor over, it gluts us.  Everyone will gladly agree that too much thinking is bad — it gets in the way of the story.  But, oddly, few people are willing to admit that too little thinking is just as bad. It leaves us wanting more, even while the “calories” pile up.  Proper entertainment must contain an admixture of the two, or why bother?  Mazinger Z seems like the ultimate entertainment-only property, but in its new iteration at least (I have yet to read the manga) it hinges its awesome robot fights on questions of morality, ethics, lineage, and obligation that really bear careful examination (I’ve tried to do so on this blog, in fact, over here and also here).

To view Scholes’s “sublimation” and “intellection” as drastically separate — even to the extent he views them — seems to me fundamentally damaging.  It implies several things:  that one can’t enjoy intellection, but requires it every so often, like a dose of castor oil or such like.  It also implies what many academics (especially MFA types) espouse regularly, that the “sublimation” is secondary, and to some degrees unimportant.  I would like to think we know better.  But to believe one essentially implies the other.

Joining them, on the other hand, sets us free.  If intellection is a form of entertainment — and what else is it, really? — then we can enjoy it.  And we can deal with the challenging parts of sublimation that often get put aside; hence, I would say, comes the interest much of us share here in revising Formalism.  We’re attempting to get a grasp on the “intellection” of “sublimation.”  How does plot do interesting things?  At the same time, we revel in a sublimative way in the joys of intellection, having nerdgasms when shows decide to let themselves be smart (see my last decent attempt at a 12 Days post, concerning the unlabored but willing intelligence of Bakemonogatari).

Work Cited:

Scholes, Robert.  ”The Roots of Science Fiction.”  Speculations on Speculation:  Theories of Science Fiction.  James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, ed.  Lanham, MD:  The Scarecrow Press, Inc.  2005.  205-217.

Awwww yeaaahh!

I’m actually squeezing two things in together here [joke cut], but you’re grown-up, you’ll deal with the inevitable heartbreak.

The first thing that made my heart well up in all sorts of happy glee, in this show, was the awesomeness.  I think it actually contains some two metric tons more awesome than Mazinger Z, but then I was always a sucker for awesome-physical fighting — and Sengoku Basara doesn’t space out the awesome with twenty episodes of grunting, like some shows I could name.  It helps that Production I.G. animated this show; they’re not fucking around when it comes to animation, those guys.  It helps the show achieve a kind of fighting aesthetic only a few things can call a personal thing — Cowboy Bebop, again with its animation, alongside the music, had its own fighting aesthetic, that managed to cross through martial arts, gunfights, and space combat.  Bruce Lee’s oddly formalized, frozen-to-hot-handed-combat style is also a kind of personal aesthetic.  You can think of others, I’m sure, but my point is not everything manages to do this.  This show manages it, and it’s filled with so much GAR and awesome and ass-kicking that it’s simply a joy to watch, even when someone’s not actually fighting.

The second “moment” is more specific.  It’s that melange of scenes, once Date gets his people back from the crazy old man guy.  Everything in that episode and the two following can be described as “loyalty-porn.”  Lots of shows, movies, and books all throw around loyalty, and if it’s not entirely cliched we feel a little warm and satisfied inside.  But Sengoku Basara does it so damn well I’m tempted to say I’ve never seen anything do it better.  The show makes you feel that these people know they need each other, but would do their damnedest to keep their honor cleared anyway.  It’s a network of obligation that doesn’t really use guilt — one could argue any kind of obligation implies a kind of guilt, but what the show does is remove what may be true from the equation.  For these people an obligation is something you’re almost glad to have.  It’s a kind of sign showing they’re who they say they are.  It’s one of the primary sins of their enemies, Nobunaga and his people:  they entirely ignore their obligations, to one another and to everyone else.

As almost everything else on the list so far, I haven’t finished this show.  I hope to once I finish Mazinger Z.  Sigh.

12 Days 9 (of twelve):  awesome people and the love of honor that binds them!

Oh Lord, you’re probably thinking.  This again.

I never had the problem with the Endless Eight arc that most people did.  I thought it was a pretty cool move to examine the fundamental experience of a SF classic, the time loop.  Did it get repetitive?  Of course.  Did I let some of the scenes run while I checked my e-mail?  Sure.  But the final moments of the final episode are as sweet and wonderful as anything, and are the reason I watch Haruhi to begin with.

Let me take you back — mind you, I didn’t watch them all when they came out, I ended up sitting on them for months — back to the arc itself.  Haruhi wants to do something before summer break is over, but can’t quite figure out what it is herself.  Kyon definitely can’t.  Time loops back on itself more than 15,000 times.  In the end Kyon guesses — sort of — and demands everyone come over to finish homework at his place.  It’s a traditional summer event Haruhi has never had.  It fixes the problem.

The ending of the arc has three particular “moments,” if you want to call them that, all tied together into one.  The first is the mental flood during the climax, when Kyon’s memories are mashed together into a kind of vision that’s very compelling for its oddity.  The second is when he proposes his plan, as everyone sees what he’s doing and Haruhi sounds fairly hurt that she wasn’t invited.  The third is when Kyon and Koizumi discuss the past loops and Kyon considers the “gifts” of deja vu that his past selves left for him.

He’s not too far off from what a lot of philosophers say.  Derrida, for instance, described the “present” simply as the point through which the “future” strains to become the “past.”  It’s a kind of focus or fulcrum, and any sense we make of the “present” exists more in the past than the present, because by the time we figure out X event, Y event is already here.  Memory, then, is a gift from the past.  Haruhi, in unconsciously meddling with the nature of the universe, accidentally robs the world of much of its philosophical underpinning, like the past-present-future connectivity derived from memory.  Remember, this is the show that posits time as independent planes we pass through, rather than an “analog” river that flows continuously.  And the show’s all about connections.

That beautiful feeling of personal connectivity that Kyon creates, both in himself and, less tangibly, between the SOS brigade, makes the end of Endless Eight a beautiful moment of its own.

Moment 5 (of twelve!): connections in time, connections in people.

Yes, MFing Mazinger. Burn it up!

Giant robots and the like are what got me into anime, so while I’m not the biggest afficionado of the genre I still love it.  And Mazinger did it right by me.  It had Gothic themes, action, and sweet-ass robots that weren’t so damn complicated.  Like a lot of things this year, I have yet to finish Mazinger, but my moment for this entry is kind-of simple:  the whole first episode.

The first episode is like someone raped my eyes with an awesome-laser.  That’s a laser made of pure awesome, probably on a lightsaber handle or something.  And then they fucked my eye sockets with it.  I don’t know who “they” are, probably the makers of the show, whatever.

I’ve been managing to have some nice Mazinger-like moments in the past few years.  I continue to love a lot of things, and find things to love even in my wide-ranging attempts to consume things, but every so often something reminds me of EXACTLY why I love something.  Last year I re-read The Lord of the Rings and it reminded me of exactly what fantasy does to me.  In the same way, Mazinger’s first episode showed me all the super-action-SF things that make me cream my nerd pants.  Robots, monsters, monsters that are also robots, violence, mad scientists, awesome!  Uuunnnghhh!

Seriously.  Watch that first episode, if you’re into giant robots, and find a single scene that doesn’t bleed fucking awesome!

Sorry I am late with my first 12 Days post.  I had to spend yesterday studying for my final exam, which I took this morning.  So here I am, hat in hand, to do two posts in one day — as Pontifus and I are alternating, the even days I’ll be posting here and Pontifus at his site, then the odd days I’ll be at my site and Pontifus here.

So anyway.  Rideback.

It may not have left the best impression on everyone.  If I understand correctly, everyone was super-excited about the show and that excitement tapered off over time.  Apparently supporting that view, I haven’t even finished it yet.  But I do that with shows I like as well.

But that first episode of Ride Back did what I demand of my entertainment, whatever that is.  I remember walking to class right after watching it; it was the beginning of the spring semester and the only class I was taking (while working on my thesis) was Science Fiction.  So I left the house after watching Ride Back to go to SF.  So the whole day seemed to be themed on my beloved genre.

The “moment,” of course, is the end of the first episode, parts of the ED included.  Not only did Rin’s first flight on Fuego manage to be visually interesting, emotional, beautiful, and all that other stuff, it also got SF right!  A lot of people, SF authors included, forget that their SF ideas are literary ideas, not scientific ideas.  The beauty of the symbol gets lost under the attempts to explain why NASA should be doing what the author says.  But Ride Back, both through the series and in the first episode, allows the ridebacks to be literary, to provide a multiplicity of meanings without highlighting one as more important.  I include the ED because it allows us to see more of what Rin sees:  of course the rideback can stand in for freedom, but it also lets her have something to rely on the way she might have relied on her mother.

So.  Number one (of twelve)!  Ride Back ep. 1:  letting SF be itself, through beauty and emotion.

Fanservice!  We all know it, we all, ah, have a strong opinion about it.  Is it good, is it bad?  Is it neutral?  Can we even say that about something so polarizing?

[note: I wrote this back in July. My semester continues terrible, and I should really be reading theory, Dickinson, and James Hogg right now.  But I've decided to post this, which is really unfinished.  I wanted to make this a post of three sections, examining a show in each.  As it is, it works as the beginning of a mini-series, and hopefully once the break arrives I can write parts two and three.]

I once had a professor tell us never to think of scenes such as the porter scene in Macbeth as “comic relief.”  The term implies that there’s nothing else going on in the scene, and in Shakespeare, at least, the “comic relief” scenes can tell us the most about the themes of the play, if we pay attention.  You might also classify the gravedigger scene in Hamlet as the same sort of thing.

[Here's a link directly to the Porter scene, which is Act II, scene 3 of Macbeth].  What happens in the scene is that in the latest stretches of the night, someone knocks on the door to Macbeth’s castle — this is the same night Macbeth kills Duncan, his king.  The drunken porter shambles out of his room and takes his sweet time answering the door, talking about what it would be like to be the door-warden of Hell (if you’re up on your Milton, you’ll recall that would be either Sin or Death).  It’s a hilarious scene, especially when well-played.  I tried my hand at it once, for my last Shakespeare class (the third thus far), when a friend asked me to.  I saw a performance where the actor came out into the crowd and picked on likely members, choosing my friend Brooke (who was busily knitting as she watched) to fill in for the imaginary English tailor who stole “out of a French hose.”  He begs Macduff, the man who vanquishes Macbeth, to “remember the porter,” and Shakespeareans do indeed.  The list of professions he rants about is infamous, including the “equivacators,” who were likely Jesuits.  Juxtaposed with the great sin of the play, the murder of Duncan, this scene illustrates how minor sins are welcomed into Hell just as much as major sins — providing a wealth of interpretative data:  is Macbeth’s crime greater?  Or is it just the same, and not to be worried about?  Does Macbeth fall because of his crime or because he never gets over it?

Well, you see what I mean.  I told you that to tell you this:  fanservice can work the same way, and incurs the same risks.

What I mean by “risk” is that fanservice is often considered as separate from the rest of the show (or comic) we find it in.  The general problem with a lot of readings online is that a lot of time is spent on whether or not something is “good,” which often becomes an argument about whether or not certain elements should be in the show.  The reason that’s a problem is that the element is in the show — it’s a little too late to jump in front of that problem.  More useful is the approach of asking why something is there:  what it does and how it does it?  So, with your indulgence, I’ll use a handful of examples and take a crack at what the fanservice adds to the show.

Crest/Banner of the Stars

I’m starting with Crest of the Stars because fanservice isn’t usually what springs to mind when we think of it.  But, oh, the fanservice is there, and we couldn’t be happier.  Over on my post about Baron Febdash, Kadian makes the point that the dinner memorial “mostly consisted of long pans of the Admiral’s and Lafiel’s lips, legs, and cleavage” while mentioning it was a favorite scene — which would imply it isn’t any longer?  (Incidentally, replying to Kadian, Ghostlightning makes the “comic relief” argument, claiming the fanservice is a way to break up the data-heavy dialogue for easier consumption)

Let’s look at that scene first, then.

So…  yes.  There’s a whole lot of fanservice going on.  I didn’t get any shots of Lafiel, because I didn’t spot any moments when the camera just stops to focus on her breasts or something.  I did opt not to get a screenshot of Commander Atosuryua’s leg fanservice, as I’m not convinced they would show up in a screenshot from my copy of the episode.

Anyway.  If we go by the binary I’ve described already, this scene gets thrown right out:  it has fanservice in it, and thus, has no other content.  Of course, I don’t believe that, so what else could the fanservice be doing?  Again, let’s assume it’s there on purpose.  If you’ve watched Banner of the Stars, it’s very easy to do so; the camera shots are carefully composed throughout the series.

So what’s the scene about?  It’s the memorial dinner for Baron Febdash, and the only people in calling distance who can help Atosuryua (Klowal Febdash’s sister) celebrate it also happen to be the people responsible for his death.  In true Abh fashion Atosuryua doesn’t worry about it, as it was Klowal’s fault.  They go to a fancy restaurant and discuss Klowal.

That’s the summary.  What’s really happening here?  Banner of the Stars begins with Lafiel taking command of her own ship, and the struggle she goes through in trying to command them well.  So BotS, moreso than CotS before it, is about life and death.  War, in short.  The dinner memorial comes in between the two major battle arcs of the series — this scene is in episode six of a thirteen episode series.  The placement is important, as a memorial for the dead falls in the center of a story about trying to keep people alive.  Jinto and Lafiel call back to the memorial near the end of the series, when danger strikes the ship.

We also see the “human” side of Klowal, as well as some of Atosuryua’s as well.  There’s a running thread of birth to contrast the death that starts the memorial; Jinto jokes about Abh evolutionary practices, only to be corrected:  the Abh did not evolve, they adapted.  That is, they weren’t the product of the typical system that springs from birth, but from scientific alteration to suit an environment (known in SF circles as “autoplastic adaptation”).  The birth strains back the family ties vibe underrunning the scene.

The conversation also serves to make “human” the figure that, until this point, has been a rank and a vague threat:  Commander Atosuryua.  Before this, we know two things about her:  she is Lafiel’s commander and the sister of the person Lafiel killed.  In turn, we learn a little more about Lafiel and Jinto as well.  The dinner works all around to humanize these figures.

And then there’s the fanservice.  Except not really.  It serves to underline each of these themes.  Life and death is fairly obvious, and so is birth:  the fanservice adds a sexual dimension, and there are three things that define the living:  a fear of death, a need to eat, and a need to copulate.  Add in a need for shelter and you have all the spurs behind life (it’s interesting to not that ultimately the show does include shelter, showing us that Jinto identifies the Basroil, not his home planet, as his home).  The sexual dimension of this scene underscores the desire for life that these people feel.  We’re used to seeing all three of them as relatively staid.  Most of this show we see them in uniforms, and the other outfits they sport (like Jinto’s “nobleman” duds) serve to highlight their societal placement rather than their biological needs (that is, their sexual identities).  It’s significant that this blast of fanservice happens during a meal:  two reining desires are coupled here, healthily and without issue.  Not only does this underscore what the entire series is about:  illustrating warfare as something performed by people; the alien as human; and the personal lives of these developed characters, it also shows us these two women, generally so controlled, still behaving in a controlled manner while enjoying their sexual sides in a familiar way:  wearing nice clothing that reveals them to observers.

The empty chair is Klowal’s, and the conversation centers on him, humanizing him further; we already saw his sexual side in his choice of servants and his mad Gothic desire to rape Lafiel.

Ekuryua’s insertion into the scene is then easily explained, where some feel it’s random.  She’s interested in Jinto, and Jinto clearly notices that and, while remaining devoted to Lafiel, realizes how attractive Ekuryua is.  Jinto can’t wear super-revealing clothing, it’s not typical, either in the Abh culture or ours (especially in male evening wear).  But we can see the figure of the person who he has noticed sexually more obviously than he has Lafiel.  She’s also tied in through her care for Diaho, which is the reason she’s in the shower to begin with.  Caring for Jinto’s cat is her way of getting closer to Jinto himself, and while she isn’t doing any crazy bestiality with the cat, he does serve as a surrogate for Jinto — so the scene also illustrates Ekuryua’s sexuality as well, through a steamy shower scene with a surrogate for Jinto.  The cat does run off, too, probably showing the frustration this is going to leave her in (we already know by this time Jinto’s sticking with Lafiel.

Further Reading:

Owen tackles the way people write off shows for having fanservice, assuming it inherently makes X show “bad” over here: ["Fanservice and the Blinder Effect. . ."]

The Tick protects. . . The City.

Where does Bakemonogatari take place?  In a city, that’s in Japan, which is a country in a world that has gods and ghosts.  But the city is strange.  Not on its own behalf — it’s not a warped place, like Sunnydale or something.  It’s stranged for the inhabitants by the events that take place within it.  Or really, perhaps it is stranged by the people themselves, making their own surroundings into mystery.

Araragi used to be a vampire.  But he got better.  He met a girl who weighed almost nothing, but she got better.  Then he met a younger girl who’s dead, but she’s okay with it now.  Like living in a Decemberists song, Araragi’s life inverted one day and now he’s trapped in the weird underbelly that, it turns out, lurks below everyday life.  Who knew, right?

The second story arc of Bakemonogatari has the characters wandering the city for three episodes, lost in old neighborhoods they should know and following a girl who isn’t really there.  Where are they?  They spend time in a park that behaves too much like a prison for comfort, then find an empty lot that used to be Mayoi’s house.

All the park fence needs is one of Foucault's panoptic eyes

Araragi is moving through other spaces.  He used to be a vampire.  He used to be dead.  But he got better.  Araragi fell onto the path worn by a great many mythic and romantic heroes:  he passed into and back out of death.  He still bears boons from his passage, as he heals quickly when injured.  But like anyone who has truly been of two worlds, he can’t get one foot out of the world he left:  the spiritual realm is, for Araragi, now overlaid on top of the mundane one.  He doesn’t just see dead people, he sees gods and monsters and cursed girls drawn up into their hard shells like crabs, pinching anything that gets near them.

It’s interesting that Mayoi keeps stumbling over Araragi’s name in a story about forward motion:  Araragi seems trapped in time, stuck in that moment, that single time — that one time during summer vacation.  Every episode opens with a flash of his remembrance of it.  Even Araragi’s identity is caught in time, his very name, looping or cutting short.

So the city changes around him.  Not literally — we should probably assume most of the other students at Araragi’s high school commute home every day without ever being led astray by dead girls.  But not all of them, it turns out:  Hanekawa ran across Mayoi as well, while Senjogahara only ran across Araragi.  Araragi’s world is now one of doubling.  Every park is a ghost town, every empty warehouse is a temple.

Navigate this maze

The story takes place, to a great extent, within a sympathetic reality that reflects the internal conditions of Araragi, which is appropriate for a ghost show that isn’t about hunting down ghosts, but about dealing with the ghosts the characters create or call to themselves.  And Araragi is confused.  Just look at his eye:

Spin spin spin

We get this shot fairly often, even over only five episodes.  If you haven’t seen it yourself, the lines all spin like a hypnotist’s wheel or a stylized version of a stylization (that is, the traditional spinning eye of confusion).  The oval background shading guarantees that this abstract representation still looks like an eye.  This is the mirror moment for the show:  most everything is, in one way or another, from Araragi’s point of view.  We hear his thoughts and narration, but no one else’s.  This is our direct look at Araragi from outside.  And it’s useless motion, motion turning back on itself.

The show, then, is an internal one.  The landscape represents Araragi’s psyche more than it does a city.  This isn’t exactly new for anime.  A lot of shows use the scenery to reflect the characters’ internal lives.  Think of any GAINAX show, with its street lights and road signs.  Bakemonogatari even engages in a little of that:

A path splitting: Araragi makes a decision

Mayoi went where Araragi isn't allowed

At first glance, then, the show looks like a kind but confused teenager, rescued from his supernatural problem, helping others.  But that’s not really what this is about.  Araragi isn’t human yet, not entirely.  He wants to get back to that world, but all the signs point to him being stuck.  Not only little hints like his name, but bigger ones:  why did his school performance wilt?  It was in the transition between middle and high school.  That time also marks his transition from human to vampire and (ostensibly) back again.  His life isn’t going forward.  It’s stalled.  That’s how he got caught by the snail.  All the other figures are prey to the confused geography until they work out who they are and what they want:  Senjogahara is now able to move through a normal world.  Before, she was falling through a weightless abyss.

weightlessness implies drifting, or motion without purpose

Mayoi also is free now:  still dead, granted, but she can control her own motion.  She chose to pass by Araragi’s house at the end of episode five.  She’s no longer trapped in a labyrinth of her own memories and regrets.

Araragi, on the other hand, he’s stuck.  He’s going to keep running into these things himself until he makes his way back to the normal world just as Senjogahara and Mayoi have.  Until then, he’s going to be walking through a land more like a confused vision quest than a city.

Where are we?

Maybe the most striking image in the series so far, this map is not only accusing (the locations on the right, apart from the obvious, are also weighted to “guilty”), but confusing:  the alphabetic labels don’t refer to anything; the map is labeled with numbers, not letters.  So Araragi needs to map his feelings, his sense of guilt or not-guilt, because right now the space he’s in isn’t mapped at all.  He’s wandering in a wilderness.

Yes, it’s been hard, and like any relationship ours has gone through its share of rough patches, but we’re still together after a year.  It’s remarkable.  A lot of people said it would never work.

We’re here to celebrate my beard.  It’s a fine beard, really; a little thin around the edges, but strong and upstanding, moral and virtuous, where it really counts.  It’s SF.c’s mascot, remember, and only the finest of folicle growths could possibly represent this finest of blogs.

On the first of August, in 2008, I shaved for the last time, so on the second my beard was born.  No, it did not spring, fully-formed, from my brow, as legend says.  It did not drag with it, into its existence on this lower plane, brimstone and clouds of fury, as the Hindu tradition has it.  It was truly an American dream story, starting with a lot of itching and ending, as ordained, with righteous patriarchal power.  Some say I look like Jesus.  It is only right.

For the edification of those unblessed with personal experience, I provide pictures, both before and after the ascension of my face:

That is all.

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!”

Here’s the “request” I was talking about, culled from Google Reader Shared Items comments (whew):

Yeah this is not a filler ep. This is a love story in the gothic tradition with faithfully (?) Go Nagai moron characters. Right Cuchlann?

[Later]

Cuchlann, yessss! My hunch is on course. Validate it when you’ve done watching the ep!

Well, I watched it, and as you might know, I’m pretty amenable to requests (let the record show the Haibane Renmei debacle was the result of public opinion: ["SF.c Call-In Podcast Poll"], I recently ran a poll determining my next long-term project ["Agenda"], and my very first SF.c post was spurred on by Pontifus’ strong reaction to a throwaway comment I’d made during my application ["An introduction, of sorts" -- with twice the tentacle rape!]).  So away we go!

Really, I’m some sort of magical prognosticating machine.  A machine, I tell you.  Was there an episode with better imagery with which to prove my point?

We’re even seeing corpse-lights, an old standby of the Gothic genre, developed perhaps from the will-o-the-wisps that lead travelers astray?  Anyway, between that, the references to Frankenstein, the resurrection concerns, and so on, this episode is rife with Gothic elements.  Much of the Gothic was set in Germany, actually.

I also noticed a kind of transition, that one could plot through the shift of the Gothic itself.  When Shiro finds out Heinrich is supposed to be dead, he wonders if they’re dealing with a ghost.  Kouji replies that they know what they’re dealing with if something’s come back from the dead, flashing back to Baron Ashura.  The shift from supernatural to scientific (or, dare I say it, SUPER-SCIENTIFIC!) explanations follows the line of the Gothic itself, which moved (generally in a line) from the ghosts of Castle of Otranto to the resurrected piecemeal man of Frankenstein. This could maybe indicate that Shin Mazinger Z is at the head of this progression in its own, GAR-robot way.

And in this very Gothic episode we find Shiro falling in love with the mysterious Lorelei.  Do I even need to warn you, at this point, that we’re dealing with a myth here?  The Loralei (depending on which version you’re reading/hearing, that’s either singular or plural) lured sailors on the Rhine to their death with their beauty and singing; they’re roughly analogous with the Sirens of Greek myth.  Have a wiki link: [->].  Shiro’s in love with her (as much as he can be, I suppose); Lorelei seems to like having him around; her father is a big (evil?) scientist guy in Germany who wants revenge on the Kabuto family.  Good times.  It’s like Romeo & Juliet, but with fewer emo wordplay gags about Rosalind.  If you’re a fan of the old Batman animated series, which went through several iterations, you might be reminded of the amazing episode where Robin, himself a boy about Shiro’s age in the show, falls in love with a cute little girl who turns out to be made from Clayface, though she doesn’t know it.  It’s a really horrifying episode, and I’m left to wonder if the same sort of thing might happen here.

Now to the question at hand:  does this sort of love story jive with the robo-Gothic awesome of SMZ, or is it just (that dreaded word) filler?  I would say yes.  Love stories are the norm in Gothic, be it in the slightly twisted marriage of Theodore and Isabella, the standard, if untrusting, marriage of Emily and Valancourt, or the crazy RAEP of Ambrosio and, uh, any woman he wanders across.  Let’s not get started on the weird shit Victor Frankenstein sees in his dreams.  Freudian readings of the Gothic are still popular for a reason, folks.

One has to wonder if things are going to work out for Shiro.  I do notice that both Loralei and the Gamia robots (objects of Ankokuji’s desperate and dedicated lust) are blondes, while Sayaka is a more typical Asian hair color (which, uh, looking at some images, varies according to version — Brunette-ish).  Does this indicate the “wrongness” of the first two relationships, and the rightness of the third?  Hard to say.  Lorelei shows up in the OP, so I’d hope she’s not just a two-episode-arc-throwaway.  On the other hand, she is the daughter of a crazy scientist who doesn’t have the good grace to be the greatest motherfucking grandpa ever (hint, it’s Juuzo); that’s not bound to end well.  Doomed love affairs are certainly Gothic, but can this relationship tell us anything more about what’s going on in the show?

With the exceptions of any female lieutenants Dr. Hell might be keeping around somewhere and Dr. Hell himself (Shiro could like some hot dude-on-littler-dude action, we don’t know), Shiro has chosen just exactly the worst person in the world to fall in love with.  This is in a family that already has a history of poor emotional states.  Kouji is almost in a perpetual state of vengeance rage, Juuzo labored for years to remedy what he sees as his destruction of his family, and there’s some sort of weird shit going on with the missing segment of the Kabuto family that we’re seeing next episode.  It’s almost as though this is another heritage passed down to the brothers alongside Mazinger Z.  It could also illustrate a kind of familial alienation:  until everything is resolved and the boys make their choices for the future, post-Doctor Hell, this normal world, represented here by cute girls, is verboten.  They can’t take part in all the regular stuff they’re protecting until they figure out what’s going on.  Finally, it represents what they could be giving up.  In becoming either god or devil, Kouji (and to a lesser extent, Shiro) would be leaving behind this world — again, represented here by cute girls.  If you’re going to be a Byronian hero, you don’t exactly get the happy relationship (unless, I suppose, you have a willing sister handy, but even that didn’t go so well).

Further Reading:

The original post by Wally Xie, on which all the comments were made in GRSI: [->]