There’s a constant kerfluffle in the otaku-rhombus, and everywhere in nerddom, actually, concerning criticism. Specifically, many nerds want it kept out of their entertainment — despite the fact they engage in it constantly. Academics have similar kerfluffles, honestly; many’s the time I’ve heard a professor complain about “jargon.” Inevitably only the schools of thought they dislike use “jargon;” their preferred schools of thought don’t engage in it. Anyway, this is the first in a series of entries meant to extend an olive branch in the best way a scholar knows how: through teaching and learning together. In this series, we’ll be describing different “schools” of critical thought, how they work, where they came from, what they do, how they’re useful, and so on. We’ll even apply a bit of the theory to familiar texts to illustrate how this is supposed to work from a literary point of view — and remember, literature is just entertainment, so criticism is simply thinking about entertainment. Why? To be further entertained! This post specifically is part of that most dreaded (as most [un]familiar) world, the post-something-or-other. This time, post-structuralism.

Carl Sagan once posited that many Americans (he not having a lot of experience being a citizen of any other countries) distrust science because it requires background reading. To engage in science one must do the up-front work. Literary criticism is similar: many people avoid it simply because they don’t want to do the background reading to know which post-structuralist said what and what we people think of it now. Of course, really, criticism is simply careful and loving thought about something you love, but the background reading provides a platform of similarity from which everyone can begin.

That paragraph serves to introduce this paragraph, specifically, structuralism. As the name implies, post-structuralism is a response to structuralism (these names are awkward yes, but at this point they’ve stuck). So. Ferdinand de Saussure was a French linguist who lectured on the nature of language. If you only take one thing away from Saussure, it must be this: language is arbitrary.

For us, in the year of our flying spaghetti monster 2010, that seems obvious, perhaps even trite. We’ve likely all had that moment of realization, that a word only means something because we decided it does. If you’ve studied a language not native to you, you almost certainly understood this at some level. However, back in the early 1900s this was a little revolutionary. Linguistics was a branch of history, studying where a word came from — all the way back to Latin or Greek if it’s a respectable word. Most people thought of language worked in the way that’s sometimes called the “Adam” principle. That is, Adam named the beasts and the bird and the seas. So a thing’s name was a part of the thing. Think of any fantasy you’ve read or seen where someone’s true name is a handle to the person. It’s the same principle. Saussure described the system of thought on language that, which, with modification, rules today.

Specifically, language is arbitrary. But also specific. Language isn’t simply “made up” in the way nonsense words are. Language is arbitrary, but at the same time everyone must agree on the arbitrary decisions. Imagine a game where a move counts for three points in player A’s rules, but five points in player B’s. A and B can’t play a game until they agree on one common system.

Saussure used a famous diagram that, as a whole, represents a sign — a sign is a language unit, basically. The signified is the thing to which the word is applied, like a tree. The signifier is the word applied to it, such as “tree” or “ki” or “arbor.” Both together actually make the sign, because when we hear the word we designate as appropriate, we think of a tree. Not some Platonic ideal tree, but a tree, maybe one we’ve seen every day, or a special tree (maybe the one you climbed in as a child, or the one that was blasted by lightning in your back yard).

That’s how an individual sign works. All of them work in a system, where each one means something because it doesn’t mean anything else.

That’ s a little weird, but think on it for a moment. “Tree” means a plant with bark and leaves because it does not mean an animal with four legs that chases cars. Without contrasting words, a single word would be useless, as it could expand to be everything. In fact, that’s why we have so many binaries. “Everything” itself is what isn’t “nothing.”

Now, the sign is fine, as far as it goes. But poststructuralist theorists focus their magnifying lenses upon the signifier in particular, assuming in part that signifiers are all we can really work with. This may sound like an almost existentialist argument, but, in “…That Dangerous Supplement…” (or, more affectionately, “…That Highbrow Essay About Masturbation…” or “…That Essay Titled Kind Of Like an Aria Episode…”), Derrida turns it into a matter of “mere” linguistic mechanics.

The basic idea here is that, in attaching a signifier to a signified, or a sound-image to a concept, or what have you, we’re doing two things: 1. creating a relationship between ourselves and the signified, which can only exist via the supplementary signifier, and 2. creating another “terminal” signified, to which we can only relate with another signifier. Of course, your mileage may vary regarding how “basic” an idea this is, but it’s really not that wild, and we can apply it to many fandom concepts with which we’re already familiar.

Consider, for example, one binary that anime often approaches: life/death. Many of us have encountered the idea that death gives meaning to life, and while the idea as it shows up in anime probably has more to do with Eastern philosophy than with Derrida, it’s a good example of what Derrida means by supplementation. A deconstructionist might tell you that death gives meaning to life precisely due to the arrangement of the two words-and-or-ideas in the life/death binary: life happens for a while, and then death substitutes for (absent) life.

We might lament death as the absence of life (as we might lament writing as the absence of speech, or masturbation as the absence of sex, or absence as the absence of presence). But death is useful insofar as it allows us to conceive of life as a thing with certain qualities; sans death, life simply is, but, in light of death, life is z, y, z, etc. As Derrida puts it, when presence becomes absence, the quality and worth of the absent presence becomes apparent. We often say that people lead good or bad lives, but we can only make such judgments — we can only conceive of such a thing as “a life” — with death in mind. This, I imagine, has much to do with the explorations of mortality conducted by such things as Casshern Sins and Bokurano.

So far the territory we’ve crossed hasn’t gotten too thorny. In fact, this all seems like an extension of Saussure — i.e. things “mean” relative to one another. But here’s the strange part: as absence fulfills its role as absence, it becomes another presence. Simply put, death describes the state of a thing as does life. The problem with death specifically is that we can’t exactly substitute something for it — there is no “post-death” at the end of death — and so it’s hard to say anything about death as such other than that it simply is.

Fortunately the hypothetical world of fiction gives us such things as undeath; we might say of a zombie that it had a foreshortened or interrupted death, a death that wasn’t peaceful. And there’s always religious afterlife, I guess. But I digress, and I really shouldn’t in a post that will be long enough anyway. What we end up with is a great chain of supplementation:

This convenient model can be applied to all kinds of things, and it gets particularly interesting when there’s more than one person doing the conceptualizing. Consider translation:

And, as implied however many hundred words ago, this process bears upon Saussure’s basic signified/signifier model, which is, in a sense, a variation on the presence/absence binary. The thing signified is our idea of a “presence” in the world, and we discuss these presences-as-conceived via signifiers, symbols that imply the “absence” of the signified in collective discursive space. Working with signifiers may be about all we can do, but that’s not the whole of it; we also have to consider that the very existence of the signifier gives us a sense of the “form” of the signified — hence the poststructuralist interest in the signifier.

Of course, one of Derrida’s strangest ideas is about the space between the signifier and the signified. Derrida, in his “Différance,” described what one could describe as what Saussure didn’t bother with: how signs work. That is, the actual mechanism of them.

Essentially, différance is that line in the signifier/signified diagram. Here’s the deal: the word différance combines the words “differ” and “defer.” All words both differ and defer, and in doing so they create meaning.

A word differs because, as we saw earlier, a dog is a dog because it’s not a cat. We have lots and lots of different words for things because that’s part of how language works — each signifier is different from every other signifier. That’s the simple part.

A word defers as it sends you both away and back. When you hear the word “dog” you think of a dog, but a dog is not actually summoned into the room with you. You are thrown back in your memory and call up an image of a dog — perhaps a particular dog, perhaps an amalgamation of many dogs — that is in the past, because it is a memory. At the same time, save in rare occasions, the dog(s) you’re thinking of were not in the room you’re in when you hear the word “dog,” so you’re also deferred out to somewhere else.

Now. It is a joke among academics that only two people ever understood deconstruction (the literary lens that grew out of Derridian post-structuralism): Derrida and Cixous (his wife). This is a common joke because Deconstruction is pretty wild, and we’re never sure if we’re doing it the way it was originally meant to be done. But really it doesn’t matter. So.

You may be able to see already how différance is useful when reading a text. A sign in a text, most often a metaphor, symbol, or such-like, works the same way a Derridian sign does. It both differs and defers. I think first of the famous traffic lights and road signs in anime — my favorite examples are from Kare Kano. They are literally things: a traffic light flashing yellow. It is also a representation of a thing, a signifier, as the thing is actually a real traffic light, the thing we’re seeing actually being a series of drawings of a light, and not the light itself. So we’re being sent out and back to traffic lights in our past, and what that meant to us (to slow down). Slowing down, or the need to, is also the import of the sign on the symbolic level, and so we’re being deferred through our deferral into another signified: danger/caution. But the show uses that series of deferments instead of another. We’re constantly sliding back out of the show into our own lives. Coupled with various other elements in the show, such as the shifting art style, the music, the painstakingly realized (and only mildly cliché-ridden) school setting, we can see the show as something that constantly pushes us farther away, with its method, even as it draws us closer with the story and the characters. We’re positioned always as viewers, never as fellows of the characters. There is, in fact, one possible implication in the way the show slides us, defers us, with the sorts of signs and signifiers it chooses: the show could be implying that we are beyond the problems and the timeframe that the characters live in. We can think of other examples of shows that behave as though they’re for one audience and really deal with another (Nanoha springs to mind). Kare Kano acts as though high schoolers are the entire world it deals with, but the signs are both more complex than usual (the art style) and defer us to places that are out of character for high schoolers (traffic lights only mean something that powerful to us when we’re driving, and the typical high schooler hasn’t driven much).

ALL signs, according to Derrida, function with différance within them — fortunately for Roland Barthes, who, for a while, made a living analyzing the signs of day-to-day French life. Barthes did literature, too — he wrote “The Death of the Author,” for one thing — but his Mythologies is founded largely upon such miscellanea as advertising campaigns and strippers. This may be notable in itself, as it demonstrates that (post)structural practices have applicability beyond strictly-defined art; we might analyze as symbols or signs such things as vendor booths at conventions, anime-related clothing, and yes, even anime blogs.

But this notion isn’t particularly poststructural. Barthes is, in fact, something of a transitional figure; he became more poststructural with every essay (which, really, may just mean that his position became more nuanced — if we reduce it to its essence, poststructuralism is more like an extension of structuralism than a radical reaction). The post- begins to come into play when Barthes points out the contradictions inherent to things.

You may have surmised at this point that, thanks in large part to Derrida, poststructuralism concerns itself with contradiction and paradox in ways that structuralism did not. We see this in such concepts as différance, which, again, relies upon levels of separation, but we might also call contradiction the motive of the poststructuralist — in short, if the meaning-values of things come from the ways that binaries function, we may as well reveal and scrutinize relevant binaries.

Barthes, for example, demonstrated that the striptease is a fundamentally chaste act, reinforcing the distance between erotic dancer and viewer. And this isn’t in spite of the particular features of the act — it’s a direct result of them. Everything from the layout of the typical gentlemen’s club to the final article of clothing that the dancer does not remove suggests separation (or suggested as much to Barthes in mid-20th-century France). Such elements as partial nudity and the sexualization of the dancer may imply intimacy, but there’s more to consider beyond what seems most obvious.

We might say that striptease demonstrates a structural contradiction, that it is, perhaps, the binary of intimacy/separation in action. And, if we’re Derridean about it, these contradictions are fundamental to everything — they are, as we’ve seen, the reason things are able to mean, so to speak.

But what good does that do us? The life of the fan is, of course, as rife with contradiction as any other sort of life; these contradictions seem to turn up in practically any sustained examination of the fandom, Azuma’s Otaku being a prime example. Azuma (who, by the way, made a name for himself as a Derrida scholar) deals with how fiction can feel more real than reality; he explains how pornographic visual novels really aren’t about sexual gratification; he investigates different parallel ways of engaging with different parts of texts; he even brings up the topic of otaku sexuality, pointing out the gulf between crazy 2D fetishes and relative 3D conservatism. And yet another contradiction emerges in Otaku that the book doesn’t deal with explicitly: the very idea of the postmodern database seems strange when postmodernism is evidently all about doing away with such all-encompassing structures. We could do this all day, really, but the point is that fandom, as anything, is made of binaries — reality/fiction being perhaps the biggest and most visible — and, in revealing and examining these binaries, we stand to learn something about ourselves.

Well then! With poststructuralism out of the way, we’ve handily dealt with the vagaries of mid-to-late-20th-century literary and cultural theory. Haven’t we?

No. No we haven’t. You know we haven’t. For, alas! there’s another feared and reviled body of critical work to consider, one that may prove even more difficult to wrangle than poststructuralism, insofar as it’s considerably vaguer.

I’m speaking, of course, of postmodernism.

…つづく!

This is the part you’re familiar with. Azuma posits that otaku, and postmodern media consumers, have stopped consuming in the traditional manner and have adopted, instead, a kind of database consumption. An aside: if you like Azuma, you’re contractually obligated to be OK with random philosophy/theory references; this chapter is full of them, from Freud and Lacan down to Zizek and Hegel. It was pretty crazy. In fact, Azuma’s theory is indebted to Hegel and readings of Hegel by Kojève. Hegel claimed that once history died (history being the phenemological struggle for self-hood against a similar-in-kind Other), only two routes would be available for the actualized person: animalism and humanism. Hence the database animal. Hegelian animals live in harmonious co-existence with their environments, as contrasted to humans, who fight their environments and shape them.

The database is a collection and collation of material from media, spread out in a kind of nebulous web from which creators and consumers alike draw. Indeed, Azuma claims the database is the fundamental way in which fan artists, such as doujin creators or amv remixers, are able to do their work. Without a sense of connectivity between elements that aren’t actually connected in any way (for instance, at no time does Linkin Park actually do soundtrack work for Naruto), such remixes, fan creations, and even “official” peripheral creations would be impossible. His example of the latter is the Eva spin-offs, created by GAINAX but just as removed from the show as anything else. In fact, remember all that good Baudrillard stuff from last time? Azuma brings him up specifically, and claims the media itself (the show, NGE) and the fan art are equally simulacra – that is, hyperreal, removed from “original” and “real” as opposed to “fake.” He has good reason to say this… but he doesn’t use his good reason – the contemporary manufacture and consumption process. He claims they’re hyperreal because they draw from the database. But he also brings up something that, in Japan, is called “anime realism.” It works on the prevalence of anime ideas. They’re so widespread, the habit of thought goes, that referencing them is like referencing reality. The viewers accept it as something that appears.

This, especially, doesn’t seem like something specific to anime or Japan. It’s the whole of the backing of genre theory, it seems to me – the understanding in the audience that some things simply appear. Suvin’s theory of SF talked about nova, or estranging things. Space ships might be an example. And that makes sense, but the concept of “anime realism” points out that fans of space ship shows or books simply expect the space ships to be there. They’ve read/seen so much of them that it’s simply a facet of the genre that’s true.

The database is supposed to be Azuma’s illustration of how we no longer use grand narratives. And in the nineteenth century way, he’s right – there is nothing comparable to, say, the Victorian grand narrative of one’s duties, privileges, and obligations. But between this chapter and my experience, both personally and with other fans, is that the database allows people to build a different kind of “narrative.” It allows them to build an identity. Think of all the people you know who, as fans, identify themselves with certain database elements. Some people go with whole shows, like giant robot fans, or romance fans. Others identify as loli-con, or glasses fans, or even zettai-ryouiki fans. Instead of grand narratives, society-wide, users of the database build personal (or small in-group) identities based on certain specific cullings of the database. This has a lot to offer the studies of genre, specific genres, and, of course, anime.

Anime is a genre, of course.

Yes yes, don’t boo me just yet. Let me drop the tiniest amount of Derrida on you. He pointed out that the term “genre” had been stretched too far from its original base. Now, in light of that, I’m not trying to reclaim the term. We use it the way we use it. However, the original meaning of the word was a particular kind of media. For instance, in the original sense one couldn’t read more than one genre of novel – novel was the genre. The distinctions of what happens inside them are actually, in the traditional sense, “modes.” So in the classical sense anime is a genre, and there are many modes within it.

So what? There are a lot of arguments about what makes up certain genres. That’s genre in its modern sense; mode, in the traditional vernacular. The distinction allows us to see that there are database markers that have to do with the way something’s made – animation styles, designs, etc., as well as database markers that have to do with content – character behavior (GAR is one example), plot points, so on.

That’s the argument Azuma makes that works but is most alien to me personally – that plot and setting are database elements as much as characters. But it makes sense. Into the database go traditional plots, like the “meatball” structure of a shounen, or the young woman gets pulled into another world thing. The database is basically the undercurrent where our knowledge of tropes lives.

I’m used to thinking of plot as something that emerges from the bringing together of characters and setting, even though I know many plots are shared across stories and even across media.

I do think Azuma goes a little too far in some of his claims. His historical account of the shift from grand narrative to database doesn’t take into account the different reading habits of different sorts of fans over time. That is, no postmodernist would deny that the grand narrative was strong in Regency-era England, yet Catherine Moreland and her friend, in Austen’s Northanger Abbey, read Gothic novels more like database animals than any fusty “grand narrative seeking” reader. I suspect what’s really going on is that fan behavior adheres to the database, no matter when it’s happening. If one is a fan of something, one follows it through all its permutations, even when it looks different or does something out of the ordinary. Scholars trying to define SF in traditional terms have flailed around for years because there’s no single shared element. But there is a database pool of things that are associated with SF, including certain plots. That’s how Peake’s Gormenghast novels can be fantasy even when nothing unrealistic happens (at least, not in the first novel). Because the characters and setting are drawn from the sub-database of fantasy as much as from anything else, and the plot is, well, odd.

Can there be many databases? I think Azuma does imply there is only one, though he is specifically examining otaku culture, so he may not have felt the need to discuss any others. However, in a book claiming otaku culture is a microcosm for all postmodern culture I would have expected at least some work connecting the two in that particular way.

As I said, I suspect this is more fan behavior than any new postmodern thing, though I certainly believe the postmodern condition shaped the rise of mass fandoms. The otaku look like microcosms for everyone simply because, in our postmodern world, most everyone is a “fan” of something. Not just a follower, but a fanatic. C.f. Genshiken.

Click here to get episode six!

The intro song is “I am Stretched on Your Grave” by Abney Park.

The insert is “Yakety Sax” by Boots Randolph.

The ending song is “Holland 1945″ by Neutral Milk Hotel.

We found this at a B&N while I was editing this very podcast!

Yes, that’s right, ages after Pontifus made that post you surely remember, and my threat to do an AiC, I’m finally here. Woo?

You know the book. Otaku, by Hiroki Azuma. OGT has kindly lent me his copy, and I’ll be doing a series of posts, one for each chapter – hopefully they’ll be reasonably short that way. This is chapter one, “The Otaku’s Pseudo-Japan.”

Azuma covers some of the history, both of otaku culture and postmodernism, and highlights the connection of the two historically, through Japan’s “narcissistic 80s” in which they were the greatest. He also points out that otaku culture is American culture hybridized – in the beginning, at least.

He also also points out that his theory is just as applicable everywhere, and he’s simply focusing on otaku. Something some commentators should have read before trying their hand at claiming this theory solely for the provenance of Japan’s sacred animus.

What’s fascinating about this framing chapter is that Azuma claims that otaku build an imaginary Japan out of elements such as miko, depictions of Edo and other historically appropriate cities, and social structures. All these elements are pre-war, when Japan was Japan, and not the loser of the Great War. Now, whether or not we agree that such a rationalization was or is necessary, it happened. Otaku, then, are in a way nostalgic for a time they never lived in, and much of their entertainments focus on building the image of such a time to inhabit themselves, through decidedly postmodern interactions. We can think of a few he doesn’t speak of specifically – doujinshi, fan writing, forum discussion (one he does mention), etc. Otaku entertainments, then, create an image of a beautiful world and are consumed in such a way that the otaku get to live in this beautiful world. He brings up Urusei Yatsura as Japanese folklore in space, allowing modern views of ancient, Japanese icons such as the monsters, priests, and heroes of legend.

Azuma points out a peculiar claim of the 80s in Japan – that Japan was inherently postmodern because they had never fully incorporated modernity into their culture. That was why the belief propagated that Japan was poised to rule the postmodern world. He equates this formulation – which led to a faddish popularity outside academia for postmodernism – to the pre-war claim that Japan would “overcome modernity.” Both seem fallacious. I haven’t read all the postmodernism – fiction or theory – that I’d like to, but one of the founding stones of postmodernity is the modern phase. One can’t shift into the hyperreal world of copies with no original without first experiencing a world where copies are made with no original. The best example nowadays is the desirability of the ipod – good aesthetic, quality building and support, and they’re all exactly the same. No one has the “first” ipod. People want their iphones early not to get the “real” iphone, the “original,” but to be among the first-wave adopters. The word adopter is used, because it isn’t an obtaining of an item, but membership into a group. Whose ID card is the original, in the club? Yours or mine? No one’s.

So Japan had to experience modernity or there would have been nothing to react against. And of course they have. They have factories, don’t they? Baudrillard, in a strange retcon of postmodern history, claimed that the introduction of the industrial factory marked the beginning, not of modernity, but of postmodernity. Modernism, for him, was simply the beginning of postmodernism.

However, Azuma has pointed out that this postmodern world, with no originals (he goes so far as to describe the production process of early anime, re-using original cels with minor changes for new scenes), is directed toward building a world wherein the consumer feels original. I posited something similar in my piece on Aria, about comfort, but Azuma takes it to the next level, describing the whole of otaku culture as an attempt to build a world. Not a safe world, but a familiar world. The thrust of a postmodern movement is to escape postmodernity.

What about fansubs? Azuma doesn’t talk about them, at least not yet, but I want to. There’s no original in the fansub chain – they begin with a copy of a copy. An episode of, say, HotD, gets sent in to a broadcasting company. Already a copy, because the animation studio isn’t sending their cels or computers to the company. The company broadcasts it, copying it ad infinitum into TVs across the country. Some enterprising person copies his or her specific copy, running it into their computer and encoding it into what we call a raw. This is already a copy multiple times removed from the possibility of an original (which didn’t exist to begin with), but it’s used as an original onto which subtitles are layered. The subtitled version, usually broken into different formats and, now, qualities, is copied out again in farther proliferation.

And yet many of us build a picture of nostalgic originality around this process. Either we watched the raw – the original for the fansubbing process – or we got the subbed version when it dropped – like picking up an iphone on release date. Maybe we have a sub group we prefer, because they’re more “accurate” (in a field where accuracy must always be sacrificed for the field to exist), or we like their font better, or they do karaoke and the other one doesn’t. Out of this variegated field of copies we build a picture of genuineness, of originality, which is no less powerful for being illusory. I stay mostly out of sub group fights, but I hear about them sometimes after the fact from friends who pay attention.

Azuma also mentioned, early on, a problem he had when beginning his book: serious academics were horrified he was interested in otaku, and otaku were horrified that he hung out with serious academics. I don’t want to get into the problem of nerds hating on academics, which makes no sense, but I do want to talk about the reaction of the otaku.

Azuma said this about them: “otaku, who usually display an air of anti-authoritarianism, distrust any method that is not otaku-like and do not welcome discussion on anime and video games initiated by anyone other than an otaku” (5). Does this sound familiar at all? 8C ran into it recently. I talked about it when I wrote about Delany spanking 70s era SF geeks who reacted the same way. Subcultures of all stripes, from goth and emo kids to Fruedian and Marxist academics, tend to distrust any method not born out of their camp. What this means for anime fans is that any attempt to deal equally with anime, to talk about it in the same ways people talk about books and movies, appear to be coming from an alien outside. They’re doing it wrong, it’s often said, when someone seriously considers a theme found in an anime or the patterns of a manga.

Not every method is alien. As Azuma points out, methods seen as originating inside the subculture are OK. You can surely fill in for yourself which methods are stamped with approval within the otaku-rhombus. Mostly they’re formalist in nature, looking at the production methods and internal patterns. Attempts to deal with patterns outside the text itself have gained currency even in the few years I’ve been around and blogging. What was once “doing it wrong” is now, perhaps in the face of Azuma’s database text itself, the best new way to deal with the texts.

It does amuse me to some extent that many people are using a postmodernist theory to construct a “grand narrative,” which it is the mark of postmodernism to explode when found, and deny when asked about. But that’s an aside.

The most distrusted methods of dealing with a text are those that are obviously not from within the otaku discourse itself. What’s called “theory” always has its origin elsewhere: psychoanalytic criticism comes from Freud, not Eva; Marxist theory comes from, well, Marx, and not Aria. The irony is that “theory” means coherent method, and the formalist approach is just as marked by its own history, the theory simply doesn’t use the names of Cleanth Brooks and the other American critics who built it, or the Russian critics who built what the Americans stole and built on more. Dealing with the historicity of an anime is generally kosher, but because that theory isn’t called “Greenblattism,” it’s OK, even though it’s similarly as alien to otaku culture (less applicable? Of course not, it’s delightfully applicable. I would go so far as to say Azuma is really doing postmodernist New Historical readings, especially when he describes something like Saber Marionette J as a microcosm of the 80s).

For Japanese otaku themselves, according to Azuma, this break is between what’s truly Japanese and what isn’t. Interestingly, though, the same image can produce different responses because of the same impulse. He speaks of the miko, whom otaku love, and whom non-otaku are repulsed by when within the confines of anime or manga. The miko is an image of Japanese culture, and for the otaku the miko creates a line that runs all the way from Edo-era “merchant culture” all the way through Sailor Moon. For a non-otaku, though, the non-Japanese SF is alien to the image of the miko; the two can’t be used together, and a disruption occurs which causes the non-otaku to react violently against the miko. The otaku, having created an image of Japan that includes the SF elements as Japanese – the fake Edo of Saber Marionette is one of his examples of this co-opting process – experience no disruption and, in fact, enjoy the fiction of their Japan more. The conflation of the SF (or fantasy, equally alien to non-otaku, according to Azuma) and the miko buttresses the faith otaku have in their “pseudo-Japan.”

It’s an interesting back-and-forth process he’s setting up. I can’t wait to get to more.

Below the cut you may gaze upon its splendor, as well as the photo from one year ago illustrating its vigor then, and its increased power into the present day.

My current state

Lo, it is true that my beard is fearful, but anger it not, and it will withhold its smiting follicles.

My state one year ago.

Celebrate! For its power is devoted to you! The beard nurtures and protects SF.c.

If you would like, you may post pictures of your own facial states, as homage to the beard, either in comments or your own shrines (twitter, blogs). Link here and remember the #bycuchlannsbeard hashtag.

This podcast was recorded during a storm, with the cracklings of the heavenly violence disrupting a certain party’s internet service (mine, it was my service that was disrupted). You shouldn’t notice.

Listen to episode five, Loss of Sanity, here.

Scant show notes below cut.

The opening song is “After Dark” by Blue Oyster Cult.

The closing song is “Sweet Dreams are Made of This” by the Eurythmics.

Jean Paul Sartre on Wikipedia.

Title IX was brought up in the course of a digression that had to be cut for time considerations. However, it’s worth knowing about, so you can check out the wikipedia link. It’s why schools have to have sports for men and women (in short).

A year after I wrote the first entry, I’m finally getting around to the second. Hurrah! Unsurprisingly, I want to take on the fanservice in High School of the Dead, the new zombie anime that’s taking the world of awesome by storm.

There are a lot of different things I can say about the fanservice of the show, even from the two episodes I’ve seen at this point. In fact, most of them I thought of during episode one, and two simply didn’t change my mind. Many of them are obvious, some of them are easy, but a few might be particularly fascinating.

Freud, high school, and zombies

This is one of the obvious ones. Any time service is juxtaposed with teenagers we could take the Freud angle — and with the undead and violence involved? Ha!

High school is a boiling pool of hormones. We all know this. It’s why even someone like me, who doesn’t spend too much time reliving high school, still likes high school anime — it makes for great drama. Everyone’s angry all the time, shit’s going on in the body no one understands — and that reminds me: NO ONE UNDERSTANDS, MAN! It’s also representative of the traditional time we all went through our awakening sexual drives.

It can be easily argued in any show or comic following a high schooler that any fanservice serves to outline the thought processes of the character. Biological urges take focus away from other applications when you’re seventeen and full of testosterone. The old biological saw is that males are at their sexual peak at seventeen. So even if it doesn’t seem to make sense for the show, fanservice can be viewed as a way of easing the reader into the place the main character inhabits, and part of that place is a maddening inability to stop focusing on sex.

HotD runs full force with this, coupling it with a Freudian angle. Freud generally comes up whenever sex and horror go together (and they usually do go together). I could do a bunch of different things with this combination now. There’s Freud’s dichotomy between the Pleasure principle and the Death principle, abandon and control, generation and destruction, and how the two are constantly interacting.

Indeed, much of the zombie craze (of which I’m a part — love zombies) can be attributed to our desire for control. Monsters with carefully crafted kill points give us ways of using knowledge to exert control. A professor of mine once brought up in class why Van Helsing spends so much time on how to kill Dracula, given that they never do any of those things to him. It’s the same as the zombie survival guide and the rules in Zombieland; follow the rules, keep your head, and you survive, proving your strength and your worth. You trample down the Death principle in all of us; you exert control over your strange desire for death, you keep away from the voice telling you to jump, wondering what it’ll be like to shamble. Poe called it the “imp of the perverse” decades before Freud wrote. Fortify yourself, the zombie tale says, and you will prevail over this thing inside you. Compelling stuff in a story set in a high school, where one’s insides are sometimes one’s own worst enemy.

Then there’s Freud’s id/ego/supergo complex. Literal translations from the German would be it/I/over-I. the id is the hungry one, the bad angel on the shoulder of Marlowe’s Faust, the one that wants. The ego is you, you as you conceive yourself, the open, conscous part that sees things thinks about stuff. The superego is the instilled, subconscious internalizations of external, societal and familial things. Your “conscience” that happens to coincide with what your parents taught you, imported from outside and placed within.

These things fight inside us, so fiction dealing with them would externalize them so we can watch. Zombies feed, zombies want and desire and take and eat and never sleep and never think and never look or watch or second-guess. They’re the id, the “it,” the terrible Other within us. They’re consumers (not just in Romero’s sense); they eat. Let me stop being so general.

The love triangle of HotD is between the normal, slightly nervous kid, the average pretty girl, and the controlled, talented overachiever. Said controlled kid is the one who becomes a zombie. His id, we could say, is let loose and he becomes something that feeds. We all have to eat. It’s Cartesian dualism — we don’t like to be reminded that our bodies are machines. Disgust with eating or crapping is often disgust with the mechanical parts of ourselves. Suddenly the controlled kid is trying to assault and consume the beautiful woman, and she is an object of consumption — her breasts bounce, her panties show. The controlled kid is suddenly not so controlled, and in his undeath he seeks what he was repressing in life.

Phenomenological squick-out

Of course, the zombies aren’t the only ones seeing the panties and the boobs. We are, too. Those of us who feel any degree of arousal are perking up, and those of us who aren’t see the sexual nature of the teens, and then zombies are eating them, consuming them like objects of lust or food. Sensuality escapes in one form or another — except that suddenly our consumption of the characters becomes a grinding of their sinews and bones between zombie teeth. I was freaked out, at first, by the immediate pairing, all through the first episode, of service and gore. Violence and sex may be somehow cross-coded in our brains — or our entertainment — but whoa. Of course, we’re the targets of horror. We sympathize with the characters under assault, enjoy their breakaways — why else the fine tradition, here upheld, of improvised weapons in zombie lore? Power drill? Nail gun with a plywood stock? Fuck yes!

Dude, have you seen Dead/Alive? Watch this shit, I’ll wait:

Awesome. Not only do we experience the horror through the sufferings of the characters; we suffer too. Characters we like die; horrible things happen to innocent teenagers just trying to live their lives; best friends turn on each other like rabid dogs; blood gouts; eyes flatten and the soul leaves the body.

Where’s the fanservice here? Doesn’t it freak you out, to see someone’s panties as they’re screaming and zombies are ripping them apart? It freaks me out. That is entirely the wrong time to be looking at a lady’s underpants. But then, anything we look at during this violence is inappropriate. Isn’t it? What do you look at, when someone’s being mutilated? Their face? Their feet?

Blazoning and vulnerability: a touch of feminism

Blazoning is the traditional poetic technique of breaking the subject of a love poem into parts and, each in turn, talking about how wonderful each part is. Shakespeare plays with two variations of this Petrarchan theme: in Romeo and Juliet, act two scene two — the balcony scene, silly — Juliet blazons Romeo. This isn’t how it works, not in a patriarchal poetic tradition. Blazoning is the poetic version of objectifying a woman. T&A, yes? Rather than M.A.? The woman is there for the parts we can look at, rather than the person. Blazoning compares teeth to pearls, lips to rubies, but never really talks about the person, either wholly or personality-wise.  You should be able to guess Shakespeare’s other attempt to mess with blazoning: c’mon, say it with me. “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun.”

Traditional sexist views of women, including fanservice, focus on the parts of the woman. There’s the genital area, covered by panties. There’s the outline of a breast, or a bra revealed under a rain-soaked shirt.

Do you see where we’re going yet? Blazoning and fanservice — focusing on the parts of a woman. Taking her apart. Feminist criticism has called blazoning a poetic “dismemberment” of the female form. HotD, then, is doing the same thing over and over: dismemberment. It dismembers the female form by taking it apart shot by shot: boob, panty flash, boob, thigh. Then it takes the form apart literally, with teeth and fingernails. Ghastly spurting blood. A literalization of the figurative theme underlying fanservice, that we, as consumers of the product, revel in the dismemberment of the subjects before us.

This isn’t just along gender lines, of course, though that’s the easiest thing to see (and the one that follows the fanservice). The boys are taken apart as well, right? The protagonist is, to us, a bundle of parts: he’s the typical lead, nervous, eventually vocal after too much radio silence. Suddenly he switched, broken by a situation into a badass, a different creature altogether marked by different behaviors. He’s the same person, but we view him differently.

This happens fully in-scene with the delicious tensai and her bumbling gun-fanatic companion. Not only does his facial set and expressions change when he gets a “gun” in his hands, she sees him differently, as we do. Transformations happen through focusing on different aspects of personality, rather than the personality as a whole. Through the database, rebirth.

Except, as of yet, no one’s been reborn into anything. The director of Shaun of the Dead, in a commentary, described the scene where Shaun and Ed kill two zombies and bash them so hard blood spatters up from off-screen all over them as a “baptism of blood.” The cast of HotD may be in for a similar baptism, but this early on they’re vulnerable, and the fanservice highlights this as well. In normal circumstances a public, accidental flash of someone’s underwear would be about as vulnerable as they could get… unless they get ripped apart by a mob of mindless eaters.

We are viewing these characters as building blocks, like a blazon or a pile of body parts. HotD portrays the turmoil of sexuality and the accompanying objectification as a violent dismemberment of those objectified, both male and female. The fanservice not only highlights this, it is it. By bringing to our attention, in a traditional method found in anime, of the parts of the characters through character traits and the fanservice, the show puts on display the act of dismemberment by the audience itself. Those who watch are those who consume, those who break apart. The audience is the hungering horde.

And given the love of the zombie, that’s OK.

And the epic adventure ensues…

Show notes under the cut. As usual, please comment. We have read everything so far, and would love to read more!

Music used in this episode:
“Bloodrocute” by Dethklok.

“Princes of the Universe” by Queen.

“Every Breath You Take” by The Police.

“I Wear My Sunglasses at Night” by Corey Hart.

“Talking in Your Sleep” by The Romantics.

As always, show notes under the cut, and leave us comments or questions! Due to the production schedule I’m afraid episode four will be the first place we’ll actually have response time, but look forward to it!

Also, the sound quality’s a bit strange; nothing’s unlistenable, but it’s not up to our usual (lackluster) standards.

Here’s the audio link

First, our hand-crafted illustrations for the novel:

I was taken with the bear.

Thekittymeister diagrammed how electricity actually works.

The intro is by the Cemetery Surfers and is titled “Vampire Desire.”

OGT is referencing this Monty Python sketch.

This is the entirely ridiculous cover we spotted in Borders last week.

Sean Connery insert obviously from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Zangief-themed tune by The Grammar Club. It’s titled “Red Cyclone.” Apparently Capcom got a bunch of ocremix folks to do the soundtrack for Street Fighter II: HD Remix. This is the vocal version of Zangief’s stage music. Hell, I own that game and didn’t know that until now. Awesome.

Thekittymeister is referencing The Spoony One’s comment in the first part of his Final Fantasy X review.

This is the abomination that resembles Bella Swan not a little. See the manga for a more terrifying version.

If you need a reminder as to what Strike Witches is…

Pontifus means the Project Gutenberg page for The Mysteries of Udolpho. One of the most famous and most written-about Gothic novels. It’s awful. Have an excerpt. It’s the very first paragraph, the way the book thinks it should open.

On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert. From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of Guienne and Gascony stretching along the river, gay with luxuriant woods and vine, and plantations of olives. To the south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrenees, whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and lost again, as the partial vapours rolled along, were sometimes barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of air, and sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept downward to their base. These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose. To the north, and to the east, the plains of Guienne and Languedoc were lost in the mist of distance; on the west, Gascony was bounded by the waters of Biscay.

Have a cartoon explaining the Mormon cosmogony and such like.

You can watch the full “All About Mormons” episode of South Park on the official website. If for some reason that doesn’t work or you don’t want to watch the whole episode, you can hear the Joseph Smith song here.

If you don’t know, Pokey’s a liar and a douche. A huge douche. Here’s a fan video clippingout three moments of true douche-dom from the game (Earthbound).

Sin Eaters.

Scenes from True Lies. Weird fan-edit montage, but Paxton’s horrible lines get featured partway through.

And of course the finale music is from Family Feud. You can get the theme as well on the official site.

A great distraction.

I haven’t been watching much anime recently.  I mean to post soon about the reason why, but the basic problem is that I’m doing something cool next semester that requires me to do a lot of advance reading over the summer.

I have, however, been playing a lot of video games, mostly Oblivion and Chrono Trigger, with some Pokemon Blue thrown in.  Given that I’m playing an Elder Scrolls game, my mind’s been on side quests a lot.  If you don’t know, all the Elder Scroll games are famous for having more sidequests than storyline – it’s not a sandbox game, but a game with a similar mindset, that you can go live in the world as an adventurer of sorts.  You can enter the Mage’s Guild and work your way up the ranks or become an assassin (or, as thekittymeister has decided – to my wholehearted approval – to become the world’s greatest thief, in the grand tradition of Lupin III and Garrett).  Everything’s a quest, from the rare plant behind the guild house to the missing artist in the little village a day’s ride from the capital.  It’s good times.  But given the contrast in the games I’m playing, it got me thinking.

As you already know, I watched my GF play Earthbound recently.  In addition, I’m playing Final Fantasy XII, Oblivion, Chrono Trigger, Pokemon, and am in the middle of a playthrough (with the GF) of Final Fantasy VIII, inspired by Spoony’s review of the same.  So I’ve been messing around with a lot of RPGs recently.  Nearly all these games have sidequests.

When I think of sidequests I actually still think of The Legend of Zelda; specifically, I think of Ocarina of Time.  That Biggoron sword is still one of my favorite sidequest items.  Even though it wasn’t really practical and didn’t do me a whole lot of good, I loved that thing.  It was huge, man, huge!  I had to roll across half of Hyrule, because I could never get up on my horse quickly enough to get those ingredients to the old lady in Kakariko.  That would be one of the first games I ever played with sidequests, I believe.  I didn’t actually get to play many games until the Playstation/N64 era, and even then I got a lot of them late.  I played FF8 before 7, and finished 7 just as 9 was coming out.

Sidequests serve a lot of different purposes.  I’ve been asking this afternoon on Twitter and Facebook about sidequests, and the (admittedly small, you guys should have gotten on the ball) consensus is that sometimes they’re padding and sometimes they’re great opportunities to develop a character.  Granted – it always comes down to how good the game is, in its writing and its gameplay.

But Oblivion continues to stick out.  Its sidequests aren’t bad (or I don’t think so), but they don’t really develop a character, as the character in an Elder Scrolls game is basically you – there aren’t any dialogue trees where you can choose how you respond.  I guess there are a few, but they don’t ever appear to have a huge effect on things.  There’s a fame/infamy score adding up in the background, but I have to dig into several menus to see what’s going on, it doesn’t throw the results in your face.

So what are the sidequests doing in Oblivion?  What do they do in general, given that they don’t always develop character?  I didn’t learn anything about Cloud by raising chocobos, and all I know about Tidus, given his chocobo racing, is that I’m terrible at catching balloons.

For the most part sidequests don’t actually teach us anything about the character(s). If they did, we’d have to do them, because we need to know as much about the character as we can. Sometimes they can tell us stuff about the setting, though sometimes it’s not what the developers want – for instance, what do we learn when we leave Sin’s insides to go race chocobos? At the very least we learn people will continue running frivolous games underneath the apocalypse. Also, we learn that said people will withhold valuable quest items (Tidus’s crest, remember, is what you get if you get that chocobo in in less than 0.0 seconds), in the face of destruction, until you jump through their hoop.  Oops.

Of course, games are only now getting so they can contextualize. Oblivion changes what’s going on depending on what’s happening in the world, but only to some extent. For instance, the Mage’s Guild missions focus on a story that could actually be the A story of a game; you have to save the guild and the world from a dark necromancer returned from the grave to wreak vengeance. And no one notices outside the guild. I suppose the gag is that it all happens behind the scenes, but still, it’s a little odd. I just saved the world, and outside the guild hall I’m still just a “citizen.” Indeed, I went back to a Mage’s Guild to do a Fighter’s Guild mission, and the person I was technically boss of ordered me around like a moron, because my quest switched her dialogue to “talking to Fighter’s Guild dope.”

Despite all that, the potential seems to be there for context-sensitive worlds.

And anyway, that still doesn’t illustrate why some of us bother with sidequests. Certainly if we love a game we’ll try to milk every drop of actual play from it, but sometimes we do sidequests in games that are, at best, OK.

I suspect it’s this: we choose to do sidequests. They are entirely optional. In a medium defined by our input on the system, sidequests represent the ultimate expression of our input (outside a sandbox game; more on that in just a bit). A sidequest is, by definition, something that happens outside the parameters of the game itself. It may even take you to places where no storyline stuff ever happens (the Deep Sea research facility in FF8, for instance). We do the story because we’re following it, but we do the sidequest because we’re following nothing but our own will.

There is always the truth that someone has been there before you, when you play a game. On a practical level, you probably just weren’t the first person to beat it. But deeper still, you always know a programmer did this stuff, and a tester somewhere did what you’re doing. Even the sidequests aren’t actually new. But that’s not the point. You are entirely free to ignore the sidequest. You don’t actually need Cloud in FF: Tactics, not at all. But any accomplishment that happens within the sidequest is your accomplishment. The game is built for you to beat it, as is the sidequest, but if you choose to do the sidequest, your victory is contingent on your choice. You wouldn’t have succeeded if you didn’t start. That, I think, might be what makes sidequests somehow different than the story they’re appended to – they’re up to you. You exert your influence on the world.

Sandbox games could have made the sidequest obsolete. I don’t believe that, but a lot of what I’m saying we get out of sidequests appears to be delivered, and more fluently, by sandbox games. But most sandbox games, by their nature, can’t have you succeed. Again, that’s changing as programming develops and systems get beefier, but in GTA I can’t actually change anything in the city. San Andreas allowed the player to take territory, but if you steal that plane and slam it into a building and escape to save? Nothing will have changed. You did nothing. You had fun (God knows I don’t want to knock random acts in GTA; I especially like to see how extravagantly I can wreck a car). But you didn’t alter anything, you didn’t achieve a victory, as a sidequest will allow you to.

Also, a sidequest usually appears in a more linear game. Can you have sidequests in a game that doesn’t insist on its own narrative? Everything’s to the side, isn’t it? But if you’re playing a game that’s essentially linear (and the strong narrative of any rpg makes it linear to some degree), then the sidequest is a valve, a way for you to escape that linearity while still playing the game. It’s no longer true that the only way to beat the system is not to play: you could just breed a gold chocobo.