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.

The reactions of those I’m following on Twitter have thus far proven predictably varied:

OneManga’s shuttering up too. Not sure if there’s any big sites left. I wonder what’ll happen. (canon_chan/CCY)

I don’t read scanlated Manga on the web but this made me sad T_T (UntoldHero)

Whoa, One Manga capitulates… damn (Kabitzin)

So Onemanga is dying…Mangafox/Toshokan then? (seinime)

Here’s hoping you come back legal One Manga, cheers. (chrisbzay)

Hahahhahaha YeS ! no more OneManga ! hahahaha Fuck yeah ! Fuck you onemanga, Fuck you ! Greatest way to start the day ! :D And now to hope that all the motherf*king online readers all fucking die and Never come back ! Learn 2 irc (Kurotsuki)

As for me — well, I’m with those who feel a little upset at how things have turned out. And not just because I have only a few more days now to catch up on some of my manga-reading, inconvenient as that is.

Yes, I resort to illicit fan-translated manga from time to time. I also put money into the industry, when I can…

…so, please, try to resist the urge to denounce me as a pirate or cancer or something.

Recently SDS offered an account relevant to the kind of fan I am:

I once told someone that I pretty much only buy DVDs of things with which I’m already familiar, to which he simply responded, “Why would you buy something you’ve already seen?”

Whereas I saw my ownership of DVDs as a testament of sorts to the shows I felt were good and enjoyable enough for me to have them in my collection, the other person saw DVDs simply as a way to try new things out. In the end, we agreed to disagree. [SDS, "Enter Animefan"]

(For a nice dialogue on the commercial aspects of fandom, see also the posts that led up to the one quoted, one by SDS and another by Omo.)

A purchase of anime or manga means something more to me than the acquisition of story data — it’s a modification of my physical collection, a statement about the kinds of things I like and would want to lend out to friends. And, besides that, money is hard to come by when you’re a graduate student, and with none of my anime-viewing friends nearby, how am I supposed to expose myself to things that I may later buy? And, hell, that’s not to mention that some things just aren’t available in the United States, nor will they ever be.

This is why the online piracy trade is so critical to that thing we do — and, I’d say, to the industry itself. I’m not going to say that online presentation and distribution represent the future of anime and manga, much as that seems a logical outcome, but I will speculate that legal and illegal distribution channels have achieved a kind of balance with one another, and things like the closure of a manga scan site represent shifts in this balance that could affect both sides.

Simply put, a decrease in the number of channels through which budding fans can, easily and at no cost, acquire the fix required of early fandom probably results in a loss of potential consumers somewhere later on. Where would the industry be without those who entered into the fandom, as I did, thanks to the illicit availability of Evangelion, Trigun, Love Hina, and (yes, even) Naruto — a body of fans who aren’t teenagers anymore, who can now afford to pour money into their hobbies? (For me this extends into related industries. My HDTV, Blu-Ray player, and external hard drive all owe their places on my desks and shelves to my having happened upon fansubs on Kazaa and Limewire, back in the day.)

I’m referring here to the process of a fan-via-piracy going legit, so to speak, which of course won’t always happen. But we’ll always have piracy, and I wonder whether, ultimately, the profit doesn’t outweigh the cost. Perhaps filesharing hasn’t been around long enough for us to know.

Mind you, none of this should be construed as an excuse. Watching or reading a licensed franchise illegally deprives the U.S. industry of needed money (assuming, of course, that you’re a U.S. consumer). But my point is that this in itself renders illegal viewing neither morally contemptible nor harmful to the industry in the long run. An illegal download now may mean a fan with a day job five years from now, a fan who may remember that show of five years prior with the kind of fondness that empties bank accounts.

Consider me and Aria, for example.

While not my single favorite franchise, the Aria anime is easily my favorite 52 episodes of animation. I’ve bought all of Aria that’s available in the U.S. — that’s four DVD box sets and seven volumes of manga. I’ve recommended and re-recommended the show. And I’ve blogged about it — here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

But would I have done all that if not for CrystalNova’s fan subtitles? Absolutely not — in fact, it’s Aria that made me a slice of life fan to begin with; it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I’d ever enjoy the thing if I hadn’t seen it for myself.

Maybe the fan translation business acts in some ways similar to how TV broadcasting of anime works in Japan — it’s our basic way of sampling things without having to pay for them — but I won’t go that far. All I mean to say here is that the closure of One Manga could, in fact, be a big deal relative to the U.S. industry as a whole, particularly if similar closures follow. We can only hope that, when the balance of power rights itself, neither the industry nor its consumers suffer terribly for it.

Of course, I’ve handily taken advantage of the situation to express the kinds of views I usually withhold, and so perhaps I’ve misrepresented the scale of things. There remain plenty of other means by which to acquire fan-translated manga. But when things happen as in the case of One Manga, one has to wonder.

warning: meta junk.

Brother ghost has written us another post, and a reply we shall conjure.

He writes:

Stories have become primary methodology of education. It’s not that really different now. We have enormous variation in terms of media, but stories perform many of the same purposes: to educate the listener/reader/viewer in language and culture, and to be entertaining while doing so.

As I interpret and extrapolate, ghost establishes a methodology of learning via stories. Here, media acts as a vehicle for stories, which themselves are vehicles for values and norms (i.e. I learn through the bible that raeping women is r..wrong).

I add that stories have a meta-value here. The original methodology that we speak of – that is, the simple transmitting of values – can form the foundation of what some theorists might call critical consciousness, or, in other words, awareness, reflexivity, etc. Reflexivity occurs when people are critical of methodology: “no, ur doing it wrong!” “____ is cancer!” “only weeaboo like teh Narutos.” etc.

Because we’re intrinsically speaking of people here (people are basically the operative factor in talking about “transmitting values”), we have to frame all of this in terms of populations. For the sake of anime relevance, and we’ve probably spoke about this already somewhere down the road, fans are those who partake in methodology but are not critical of other fans. Once, however, a fan becomes critical (or remotely aware of other fans and their methodological behaviors) of another fan, they enter the fandom.

Yet here is the central problem: can fandom exist merely by the nonverbalized consciousness of individuals? – or does fandom require discourse? This is kind of a Foucauldian take on Marxism: critical discourse makes up the material base upon which the superstructural “fandom” is situated. Because this is the internet, discourse is necessarily “material”. It’s significant to consider, however, that in this perspective, fandom is not a material entity but an ideology whose territory engulfs its own constituents. So to speak, the process of becoming conscious (entering fandom) then expands the “mass” of the ideology of fandom.

But anyway, I would say that fandom requires discourse to exist.

An interesting turn on this is what you might call the “counter-meta methodological faction”. Of course, we’ve seen the sections of fandom that scoff at critical discourse, instead emphasizing focus on methodology, without all the wwwwwww stuff. It’s a good point, but it’s interesting because it’s a discourse that runs counter to itself in order to end itself.

There’s some more to this, but I forgot, so that’ll be part 2, maybe.

Inspired by the non-shitty shitstorm here at Superfani called ‘twitter philosophy’ [->], I’m spinning the discussion off from lelangir’s epigram:

nihilism is knowledge/power; in most cases, it can only be realized/actualized within capitalist institutions, thus materialism is the means towards idealism, towards the construction of contingent truths, towards a philosophical happiness that grants material happiness.

Responses to this by the commenters abound, but I’ll get to them later. Meanwhile I greeted an important guest that invited himself into my media consumption schedule. I don’t mind because he’s a favorite of mine: the novelist and semiotician, Umberto Eco. He told me to tell lelangir,

“Listen to the fags that contributed to this supposedly non-shitty shitstorm first.”

So I was like, “uh, okay.” Let us then to the relevant responses:

Kaiserpingvin says:

23 March 2009 at 11:42 am

So, in capitalist society nihilism will arise more frequently. This will lead to idealism, since we can scribble what we want on the empty canvas of Everything. Since it has been brought about by knowledge and power, we will be able to realize our ideals, leading to idealism, in it’s own turn leading to material wealth (for… everyone? The nihilists?).

The ‘Empty Canvas of Everything’ Kaiser is talking about refers to my claiming nihilism as a powerful state wherein creation is possible rather than a bleak wasteland of no possibility. I try to build on Kaiser’s point…

ghostlightning says:

23 March 2009 at 8:57 pm

Most people are ‘trapped’ in constructs that they hold to be absolute truths. Nihilism holds none of these ‘truths’ privileged, and allows for power and freedom to create. Deconstructions: Capital/money is not necessarily morally repugnant. We can build a bigger needle within whose eye camels can saunter through – or just genetically engineer nanocamels.

Ideals can be constructed/pastiched/invented – and will not suffer from the hegemony of accepted traditions. Capital, which is coveted by the institutions that foment the accepted traditions is a great leveler.

But I don’t think I can establish a complete causal framework between nihilism and capitalism.

I didn’t think I could, but somebody else sure did:

animekritik says:

23 March 2009 at 11:19 pm

i think that causal connection between capitalism and nihilism is there. simply stated, money buys everything which means it destroys boundaries including boundaries of meanings. For example, last year my wife and I went to Germany and Greece. Let me say that again: last year, I, a simple islander and my thai wife visited GERMANY and GREECE. Our ancestors 100 years ago, not to mention 200 or 500, would have never been able to do so. And what happens? my wife says: oh, I want to go to Egypt next, and so on. The world becomes totally flat, totally accessible. There are no boundaries, and thus we start to realize that all of those amazing “constructs”, cultures are on the same plane. If i can have have anything i want with money, how i can put things and places on pedestals??? I visited Napoleon’s Tomb about 3 years ago. I!! What’s Napoleon now. Nothing. Then nihilism creeps in..

That’s clear enough, and I could totally get behind it after reading the ouvre of Thomas L. Friedman, particularly The World is Flat (2005) [->]. To reduce the points of the novel and consider animekritik’s, it boils down to capital provides access to the exotic and mystic, removing their mythological veneer (for some) — by extension, all the way to nothing (empty and meaningless), as with the artifacts of history that animekritik mentioned. Now lelangir steps in:

lelangir says:

24 March 2009 at 12:48 am

A psychological privilege such as Nihilism can only be enacted/actualized within capitalist institutions (universities) once you’ve accumulated the knowledge necessary to reconstruct your perception of the world. Maybe the pseudo-intelligent believe that there really is such an absolute truth as “equality”, but then why on earth does racism persist to this day?

The relationship between discourses is not hierarchical. A discourse of absolute truths (i.e. rich people are evil) cannot be so easily overturned by a discourse of contingent truths (i.e. rich people are not always evil). It’s amplified here because the discourse of contingent truths is situated in the very substance of the discourse of absolute truths. It’s like a patient in a straight jacket: you think you’re sane, and in your straight jacket, you say “I’m sane! Let me free! I’m sane!” – and the doctors look and say “of course someone in a straight jacket would say they’re sane!”. Thus, a rich person who has the education to say that rich people are not always evil says to a poor person “rich people are not always evil” will surely get some murderous glares from poor people who think that all rich people are evil.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Money and capital, while not the only enabler of education, is very powerful.

Umberto Eco would agree with this, it seems. He wrote (speaking about some functions of literature):

What use is this intangible power we call literature? The obvious reply is the one I have already made, namely, that it is consumed for its own sake and therefore does not have to serve any purpose. But such a disembodied view of the pleasure of literature risks reducing it to the status of jogging or doing crossword puzzles–both of which primarily serve some purpose, the former the health of the body, the latter the expansion of one’s vocabulary. What I intend to discuss is therefore a series of roles that literature plays in bout our individual and our social lives.

Above all, literature keeps language alive as our collective heritage. By definition language goes its own way; no decree from on high, emanating either from politicians or from the academy, can stop its progress and divert it toward situations that they claim are for the best. The Fascists triid to make Italians say mescita instead of bar, coda di gallo  instead of cocktail, rete instead of goal, auto publicca instead of taxi, and our language paid no attention. Then it suggested a lexical monstrosity, an unacceptable archaism like autista instead of chauffeur, and the language accepted it. Maybe because it avoided a sound unknown to Italian. It kept taxi, but gradually, at least in the spoken language, turned this into tassì.

Language goes where it wants to but is sensitive to the suggestions of literature. Without Dante there would have been on unified Italian language. When, in his  De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence), Dante condemns the various Italian dialects and decides to forge a new “illustrious vernacular.”

Twenty years of Fascist talk of “Rome’s fated hills” and “ineluctable destinies,” of “unavoidable events” and “plows tracing furrows in the ground,” have in the end left no trace in contemporary Italian, whereas traces have been left by certain virtuoso experiments of futurist prose, which were unacceptable at the time. And while I often hear people complain about the victory of a middle Italian that has been popularized by television, let us not forget that the appeal to a middle Italian, in its noblest form, came through the plain and perfectly acceptable prose of Manzoni, and later Svevo or Moravia.

By helping to create language, literature creates a sense of identity and community. I spoke initially of Dante, but we might also think of what Greek civilization would have been like without Homer, German identity without Luther’s translation of the Bible, the Russian language without Pushkin, or Indian civilization without its foundation epics.

And literature keeps the individual’s language alive as well. these days many lament the birth of a new “telegraphese,” which is being foisted on us through email and mobil-phone text messages, where one can even say “I love you” with short-message symbols; but let us not forget that the youngsters who send messages in this new form of shorthand are, at least in part, the same young people who crowd those new cathedrals of the book, the multistory bookstores, and who, even when they flick through a book without buying it, come into contact with the cultivated and the elaborate literary styles to which their parents, and certainly their grandparents, had never been exposed.

Although there are more of them compared with the readers of previous generations, these young people clearly are a minority of the six billion inhabitants of this planet; nor am I idealistic enough to believe that literature can offer relief to the vast number of people who lack basic food and medicine. But I would like to make one point: the wretches who roam around aimlessly in gangs and kill people by throwing stones from a highway bridge or setting fire to a child–whoever these people are–turn out this way not because they have been corrupted by computer “new-speak” (they don’t even have access to a computer) but rather because they are excluded from the universe of literature and from those places where, through education and discussion, they might be reached by a glimmer from the world of values that stems from and sends us back again to books.

From on literature, (2002)

Did you get that lelangir? Professor Eco seconds your assertion! He used a lot more words, but he said it pretty so I blockquoted him. This post is less about nihilism, than the utility of media/literature/cultural production, which actually means nothing in absolute terms (but not in contingent terms) anyway, so I guess nihilism stands.

I extend Eco’s point to our preferred medium, anime. I daresay that it’s changing people’s behavior outside of Japan, creating sub-sub-sub-cultures that we don’t wholly know or are even aware of. The distribution of anime internationally is never limited to the university setting, but the intellectualization of it, and most media occurs there. Intellectual activity can be located in the universities,  and it is through capital that this is possible: capital pays for labor, that is supplied by the intellectuals by either creating content for books, journals, and other media or teaching the students who can afford the tuition.

On a personal level, I’ve come to realize that I’m no longer in this center ergo my own thinking and work is far from where the ‘action’ is. It is through weblogs, particularly this one where I get an opportunity to intellectualize and reflect. It bears note that the proponents of Superfani are academics to some degree, and some of its participants are still of university/graduate school age. So I take this in and appreciate my good fortune.

My ability to participate is enabled by the university system of which I am a product of, paid for by the compensation for my parents’ labor in a capitalist system.

So with this ability to participate, knowing fully the ultimate meaninglessness of this effort and caring little for that ultimacy, I look at this captured frame:

…and derive that god is dead [->], at least in this image.

When it comes down to it, Twitter is just another way to create content. The problem is that it can really impinge the other content creation you should be doing. It’s not just the constant distraction it can be, but the fact that it’s too easy a way to throw out some of those random ideas and thoughts that you really should be saving to pull together in a far more thoughtful and meaningful way.

I think this is why I have had even less of an inkling to write rants than i used to. You only have so much time in a day, and so much attention. I really need to be more selective in how that attention is spent. Twitter, as good as it is, is not really the kind of content i want to be producing. It’s like throwing out one liners rather than writing a full story.

This is relevant to my fairly recent structuring of my content production. Fred sees Twitter as a distraction, insofar as it tempts the writer to throw out undeveloped ideas, and thereby “waste” them. I look at it more as the first step in a writing process that goes something like:

Twitter (brainstorming) –> pontif.us (drafting and annotating) –> Super Fanicom (relatively polished final products)

If a comment is too long for Twitter, or seems to warrant elaboration, I’ll go into more detail here; if I’m working on a post here that goes over 600-700 words, I’ll move it over to Super Fanicom (which is what happened with my last post). I haven’t had much time yet to give this process a thorough testing, this site being so new, but it’s coming together in bits and pieces. I suppose I have two reasons for doing things this way: I’m interested in seeing what good could come out of using the internet for full (or nearly full) disclosure of the writing process, and I figure it’ll help me later to have these brief notes to draw upon and refer back to when I’m writing longer and more complicated posts.

I’ll leave you with this: if you use Twitter, how would you say it fits into your writing process, if at all?

We’re nearing the last leg of Northrop Frye’s first essay in Anatomy of Criticism; this time we’re tackling the section called “Thematic Modes.”

Frye opens by citing Aristotle’s six aspects of poetry, and puts off three until later in the book — so the three we will be dealing with are “mythos,” “ethos,” and “dianoia” (whcih are plot, characters/setting, and “thought,” respectively).  He identifies “thought” as “theme” (52).  He points out that works may be more interested in one than another, but all works have all elements in them.   They also scale.  For example, Sense and Sensibility is strongly thematic, until compared with The Grapes of Wrath.

“All formal allegories have, ipso facto, a strong thematic interest, though it does not follow, as is often said, that any thematic criticism of a work of fiction will turn it into an allegory [...] Genuine allegory is a structural element in literature: it has to be there, and cannot be added by critical interpretation alone” (53-54).  I think this bears focus for two reasons — one is personal, in that I hate people trying to argue stories are allegories when they’re not, such as the people who claim The Lord of the Rings is an allegory of the second World War.

Also, and more importantly, it deals with people who refuse to believe that examination of themes in a work of art do anything other than paint another story on top of them — examining themes is not the same as attempting to overlay an allegory on the story.  I have been accused of this and (RE: my hatred of allegory in most cases) generally get irritated by it.  The comparison, as Frye illustrates with Sense and Sensibility vs. The Grapes of Wrath, alters our point of view toward the theme and the “plot,” but does not change what is actually there.

Frye illuminates an interesting dichotomy of creators, which he calls “episodic” and “encyclopaedic” (55).  These terms have to do, first, with how continuous the form of the work is (obviously “episodic” would be discontinuous).  He claims the creator communicating as an individual is episodic, while when the artist communicates “with a social function” the extended patterns of the encyclopaedic form is more useful.  Again, they’re not unrelated.

This, I think, has a lot of relevance to us in the otaku-rhombus.  First, go read Pontifus’s latest post.  We could consider the originating piece as episodic, whether it’s the first version of Arthur (whatever that is) or the first Toradora novel.  That is, the author was interested in committing the story to text rather than compiling the pieces and parts — Frye compares the encycopaedic tendency to the oracle or minstrel, who would, through his or her art, keep the stories of the entire culture (yes, any Arthur story, especially early Arthur stories, could be considered as a compilation of cultural folk stories; I’m more talking about versions by a person, shifting at least somewhat from the mythic to the romantic).

So what’s interesting to me, here, is to consider what the “encyclopaedic” artist would be in this case.  Which artist has the community in mind?  Well, critics, fanfiction writers, fan artists, doujinshi creators, they’re all likely suspects.  Here’s the typical classic example (I’m picking one I’m more familiar with):  Virgil, in The Aeneid, “re-compiles” the story of The Iliad and positions it within his culture, making it the origin of Rome — this is the minstrel using story to hold his cultural heritage in place.

The same thing seems to happen in all the forms of art I mentioned earlier.  Fanfiction isn’t just fiction based in someone else’s playground — the same is true of “shared-universe fiction,” such as the Star Wars novels.  A lot of people have wondered what separates those novels from fanfiction.  I think Frye offers us a way to figure that out — and let’s face it, there is some sort of difference.  I’ve read both.  It is the degree to which the artist keeps the community in mind.  George Lucas didn’t really, not in comparison to our other examples, when he made his movies.  The novelists keep the community in mind a little more, but so long as they follow the “Bible” (the collection of things that must be true in any work of a shared universe) they can do what they want.  Fanfiction writers, on the other hand, not only have to keep all that stuff in mind, they often have their own conventions, specific to the fanfiction writer community.  I’ve dealt with this a little in an earlier post.  That is almost pure community-focused art.

Criticism acts in the same way — most of it is community-centered.  I would argue that’s why a lot of people consider it “not art,” because we live in an era of ironic art, in which the individual artist is considered the new oracle, toughing it out on his or her own with no reference or bowing to anyone else.  Most of our culture can’t countenance an artist who makes obvious use of other sources in the art.

Herein lies, I think, our problems with adaptations.  It’s based on something else!  I’ll give you a moment to collect yourself.  It can’t be art, the ironic soul shouts, if it’s not original!  Brand new!  The artist’s pure, individual vision!  Well, wrong.  This just describes art that is primarily “episodic,” jointed only according to the artist’s needs and not the community’s.  We are left wanting to see, in a new form, the original.  Anything that drifts away from the original is violating the author’s vision.  Really, it is simply taking into account the community in which it moves, both creatively, as adaptations immediately create a community of creators (that is, author + director + actors +&c, for example), and in terms of audience (the community of television watchers have different cultural demands that the community-minded creator must keep in mind).

Frye goes on to provide a whole system of dealing with creators in the terms of the modes he set out earlier for comedy and tragedy.  I’ll spare you that, as it would nearly double this entry.  Interested parties should check out the book.

I’ll end with this bit:

[T]he poety never imitates “life” in the sense that life becomes anything more than the content of his work.  In every mode he imposes the same kind of mythical form on his content, but makes different adaptations of it.  In thematic modes, similarly, the poet never imitates thought except in the same sense of imposing a literary form on his thought.  (63)

This explains the origins, in the head of the artist, of mythic themes, according to Frye — they act as a method of structuring the stuff the artist wants to get out of his or her head.  The structure is easily adaptable to whatever it is the artist has in mind.

That’s the first essay!  Next in AiC will be, I believe, either the second essay, some of the stuff in the book I bought recently, titled Resistance to Theory (not quite what it sounds like), or some of the stuff in a book I got last month, Speculations on Speculation, which is a book of critical essays on science-fiction.  We’ll see how it goes.

←[108]  jpmeyer brings up a whole lot of excellent points:

There are so many aspects of the blog format…that subtly subsume the writer to the blog itself.

Yes, the author is inextricably subsumed in the blog because – by the very fact of their existence in the blogosphere – they cannot exist without a blog. Revisit this paragraph:

lelangir: …[I]n the ‘sphere, it is not communication that is most significant, but being. Being is not a prerequisite for communication – communication is a prerequisite for being. In the ‘sphere, you cannot be unless you write and are read. If no one reads your blog, that makes you not a digital individual but simply a person who keeps a private online journal. Our public identities are predicated upon this collective society, and it is a discursive system of acknowledgment that grants us individuality. So in a world intrinsically reduced to mere letters, what more can we do than produce these mere letters? [my re-emphasis]

As for my cross-posting, jpmeyer asks:

Why post at one of the over 9000 blogs you post at over another unless they are all indistinguishable?

To which I responded with this diagram:

The hypothetical circumstance “indistinguishable blogs” (as I am interpreting the phrase) has one large implication; it assumes that the focus of the content is the same (i.e. twelve blogs focusing on mecha).

What happens when content is all similar? You get a smaller readership because the perimeter of your broadcast is reduced. Let me re-articulate the previous diagram:

Now we have overlapping paradigms: the content paradigm (mecha etc.), the blog paradigm, and the author paradigm. This diagram isn’t to scale – nor is this a precise way of visualizing the complexity of the sphere (which is too complex to bother). But just to clarify this visualization, Crusader’s sphere is totally within THAT’s sphere. Crusader is also within the mecha sphere, etc. Visualize indistinguishable content-blogs:

In this hypothetical situation (and hypothetically insofar as the entire mecha sphere is comprised of three blogs), because the three indicated blogs all write about the same thing, the perimeter of their broadcast is coextensive with their content – they don’t write about yuri hentai, do they? The outlined circle is just a representation of the broadcast perimeter, and the space onto which that representative perimeter is displayed is the readership. White space outside the mecha sphere is constituted of readers, but not mecha readers.

jpmeyer: Why make an identical post on two different sites which have very different focuses? That’s brand dilution on multiple axes.

(1) The focus of the blog is irrelevant when considering expansion of broadcast perimeter, as was depicted in previous diagrams. (2) “Brand dilution”? – I don’t know if “brand” refers to blog or blogger…but in any case that also has little significance. If the representational power of my handle is diminished, then so be it, what good was such power anyway? I haven’t noticed any sort of effect after doing this since August.

jpmeyer: Why have ghostlighting make a post here rather than WRL about pedophilia here rather than somewhere else if what truly matters is who is saying it? Or, this would indicate to me that the importance is on what is said, not who is saying it. [my emphasis]

This is half true – ghostlightning constitutes the ghostlightning sphere – his own entourage. If he didn’t post it, digiboy probably wouldn’t read it, so you lose reader[s] there. Then, ghost in part constitutes the [oh, say mecha] sphere, which is author-independent – readers of the mecha sphere read mecha posts, not ghostlightning posts, so a mecha reader reading ghost writing on mecha is just incidental.

jpmeyer: Thus, [the] reason that different readerships exists is because the different blogs provide different things. This would imply to me that the blog and its branding is more important than the author when dealing with [aggregate blogs].

He got me there – revisit this:

Which can be succinctly countered with: you’re not a reader until you’ve read.

So my previous thoughts on readers exist before the fact that they read doesn’t make any sense because I was confusing the author paradigm with the content paradigm. It’s like saying a reader that reads mecha is intrinsically a reader of Crusader before Crusader existed. Nope.

…however, because some readers of mecha read Crusader not for the fact that he’s Crusader but that he writes on mecha, that seemingly author-centric reading is merely incidental, as I said before. In this respect, the creation of Crusader functions as an insertion into and expansion of the greater mecha sphere.

Dr. Lolikit (PhD in lolikiteanism) gives us his last remark:

[W]ho’s saying it and where it’s being said BOTH matter.

Yes, and this is the only benefit of nomadic blogging: I have my own author-paradigm lelangir sphere, the entourage that follows my centralized feed, and I also appropriate the THAT sphere, the Cal’intents sphere, the F’aizen sphere, those blog paradigms.

Viewed this way, the internet is fractal – the previous diagrams in part constitute the sphere we are familiar with. But it is reducible to one circle that shares the same paradigmatic space with other content-oriented spheres, technology, news, porn, etc. What syntagmatically connects these spheres is cross-posting authors, trackbacks and links:

Maybe it boils down to that we need to recognize the author (unlike the plethora of bitches who don’t distinguish between authors in team posts) as the content-producer of the blog, the readership as an equally important component, and the blog as a significant, integral, intrinsic and inextricable part of the blogosphere (hence BLOGosphere, or what have you). Anyway, thanks, jpmeyer, for shoving a whole bunch of flutes up my ass…it was fun.

And chew on this for some idiolectic food for thought

With a new season of Maria-Sama ga Miteru (alternately marimite and The Virgin Mary Watches Over Us), it’s on everyone’s minds again.  I might have already entered the fracas once, but here we go again, this time not on the new season, or even the OP, but the show as a whole and why we love it so (if we do).

I have this theory about certain entertainments…  that they get their strength from weaknesses.

That’s suitably oblique to be quotable when I’m dead and famous, so I’ll explain myself now.  Some stories, be they movies, books, or something episodic, have holes in them.  These are different from the gaps Wolfgang Iser talks about — which are the same as Scott McCloud’s gutter (you know, the one all the blood runs in).  These holes are just spots where there isn’t something that should, by all rights, be there.  Sometimes it’s necessary to leave it out.  Even after all these years the X-Men comic can’t afford to give us every detail of the characters’ lives, so there are holes.  Sometimes it’s down to lack of sense — I hold this is why all the holes are present in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, but even great writers like Arthur Conan Doyle are guilty of it, and for the same reason (specifically, Watson’s old war wound kept moving because Doyle ended up disliking working on the Holmes stories, so he never bothered to look it up and didn’t remember).  These holes allow the audience, if they’re willing, to nestle in and build their own little world, like the miles of abandoned subway in some major cities that are inhabited now.  There’s a third type, but I’ll get to that in just a bit.

There’s a danger in this kind of enjoyment.  I know, you must be crying out at this point:  how can you, you, ever claim there’s a danger to enjoyment?  Aren’t you the populist?  Well yes.  But it can lead to perfectly happy people not enjoying themselves when things take a turn.  Despite how inadvisable it is (I tell me students generally not to do it unless they have some more evidence), I’ll use a personal example:  I have a friend who really liked Psych, the USA network comedy about a Holmesian detective who has to pose as a psychic to get any work.  This friend got so used to “fandom” entertainment that she never seemed to enjoy anything that didn’t have the holes required by such things as fanfiction or even simple speculation.  So she started writing Psych fanfiction, slashing the main character with his antagonist, a detective on the police force who loathes him.  Let’s never mind, for now, this inexplicable tendency to pair characters with people who genuinely hate them, and focus on what happened later.  Eventually the show sort-of capitulated the very obvious and very telegraphed interest between the main character and, gasp, a lady.  My friend nearly swore off the show because it had violated her speculations.  Now, I have all sorts of personal reservations about this sort of thing, but what’s relevent here is that it curtailed her enjoyment of something she could have merrily continued watching (I did, and it continued to be as funny into the next season).

Now I can get to the third type of hole:  the kind that’s there deliberately.  Marimite has these kinds of holes, it seems to me.  The setting is fairly friendly to yuri, as the stuff with Sei and her old flame illustrate.  However, it never comes through — and from what scuttlebutt I’ve heard about the latter novels, that’s basically true to the end.  It tantalizes the reader with pretty obvious yuri implications.  I’ve read (if “read” is the right term for my stumbling, dictionary-referencing actions) the first marimite novel in Japanese, and there’s a moment when Yumi starts breathing heavily and her heart pounds, while she blushes and has nearly all the other trademark signs of arousal, all while thinking of Sachiko.  She then wonders why she’s responding that way, doesn’t get it, and wanders off to be a cute raccoon somewhere else.  But nothing ever happens.  It seems a lot like my aforementioned holes to me, emptied-out spaces in which the audience can fill their own versions of events.  And they have. Marimite is one of the few things I still read fanfiction for (by the way, while I still do not “ship” anything, sometimes I do want to read Yumi x Touko stories, and where the fuck can I find more than, like, three of them?); the fanart and doujinshi runs fast and strong, like the Mississippi, from the fandom; communities, strangely well-mannered — like the show itself, I suppose, where walking slowly is preferred — have gathered to simply discuss the characters, their relative pairings, and then link to yummy fanfiction where skirts are raised and characters stutter “onee-sama” a lot, usually breathily).

So.  Marimite is, for lack of a better term, a kind of lesbian clit-tease.  That’s okay.  I enjoy filling in those spaces like everyone else.  There is one application of this post to the new season, though, that I’ve thought of.  This idea of all the spaces (you’ll notice I abandoned the term “holes.”  If you haven’t figured out why, I’ll tell you when you’re older) being filled runs into certain problems, much like Psych did in my above example.  People have this picture that, due to the text’s reliance on empty spaces, is very vibrant, basically the entertainment itself.  But as I’ve pointed out, the show never quite capitulates on the promises it seems to make.  Guys do enter the picture.  So the furor about guys showing up to act in the play might be an extension of this.  The picture most of us (me included) have doesn’t involve guys; it involves cute ladies having make-outs.

First, I had a response to lelangir’s thoughts on the otaku-rhombus’s blogging teams.  He speculated on grouping similar-minded people together and bringing in like-minded readers, so on.  I happened to think a little while ago that this phenomenon isn’t exactly strange.  It’s magazines.  When a reader picks up a magazine, certain things are going to be set in — if we’re talking short fiction magazines (which is what I’m most familiar with), there’s an editor who decides what does and does not go in — and besides looking at “quality,” editors have a vision for what sort of content the magazine should have, what focus it should use.  One of my professors, who used to edit for a few different magazines, always told us that if an editor thinks the piece you’ve submitted isn’t right for them, that’s what they mean, they’re not trying to veil comments about your piece sucking.  My point is that, as a reading people, we collate things into groups that make sense to us.  It’s not strange that group blogs do the same thing.  This doesn’t mean everyone involved is exactly the same — any given issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction will have humor, near-horror, drama, (obviously) fantasy and sci-fi, so on, so forth.  There’s variety, just a basic guiding direction in the background.  I’ve stopped sending my parodies of epic fantasies to them, for example.  Of course, since Blood, Blade, and Thruster closed, I’ve stopped sending those out altogether.  Hm.

Anyway.  That’s my thought on the process lelangir describes.  The internet makes getting things easier, but I don’t really think it will change content all that much, save where content is at least partially defined by delivery method (please note that provides for things like Zero Punctuation, where the delivery method defines the content quite sharply).  

With that out of the way, let’s get to Stanley Fish.  If you’re not aware, Fish is a big name in reader-response criticism, a school of criticism that, according to my copy of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Fish said, is concerned with the “analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time” (1373).  Now, I have one problem with the reader-response critics:  they only regard the responses of readers who have the “correct” backgrounds to read the text.  I was told by a professor that Fish finally broke down and admitted, once, that yes, you had to be basically like the reader-response critics to read “correctly.”  (That is, one does not have to buy into their theory, but have the same background, inclinations, and ways of thinking.)  

Anyway.  Fish also wrote about a bunch of odd stuff, and I found, through JSTOR, an article he wrote for The Yale Law Journal titled “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory.”  I found this article when I thought the reader-response critics would be useful to that Gothic in Video Games paper I keep mentioning.  Fish describes this scene where a sports reporter spotted Martinez, a pitcher, after a game and asked him what the coach said to him on the mound at this one critical juncture in the game.  Martinez responded [and I'm paraphrasing here] by claiming he said, “throw strikes.”  The reporter was looking for critical advice, but, as Fish argues, at that moment critical thought wasn’t required, and would have gummed up the works.  He mentions another story concerning a similar situation where engineers were trying to improve a prototype of a synthetic brush, and could only, after the fact, describe cricitally the process they had gone through to do so.  

Fish goes on to apply this to law practice, but I think it’s useful (not necessarily analogous, but useful) in dealing with writing — and keep in mind, no matter what they say on Fox News, that blogging is writing.  Well, most of it.  Fish, in capitulating his anecdotes with his proposed topic, says

First, what they [the examples] together suggest is that performing an activity — engaging in a practice — is one thing and discoursing on that practice another.  Second, the practice of discoursing on practice does not stand in a relationship of superiority or governance to the practice that is its object.  (1777-8)

There are two good things and one caveat that we must discover to do anything with this.  First, the second part of his statement is absolutely true — criticism is not superior to the original act it uses as a springboard (that statement, that criticism uses the act as a springboard, is of course contentious, not universally believed, and counter to what Fish is claiming here).  There is a perhaps mythic story of a scholar presenting on some topic, let us say a theme present in a novel.  In the audience is the novel’s author, and he or she stands during the question and answer period, then says he or she never put any of that in the book, it was never in his or her mind.  The scholar responded that he or she understood the book better than the author, that it was the scholar’s job to do so, and the author had no real business in the discussion.  Now, as true as this is in many senses — if you haven’t figured out by now, I usually hate the Word of God — the sense of superiority is misplaced.  If the author shows up, he or she has just as much right to discourse about the book as anyone else.  A local Memphis author came to visit one of my classes, and revealed that he wrote his book with the sense that the characters were people, and as such he didn’t quite wrap up every plot line, because he didn’t know what had happened to some of them; at a reading a woman asked why one character had killed another, and he was stunned to find out that was precisely what had happened, but he hadn’t known it until then.  So authors can discourse, but I don’t believe they necessarily have any extra clout in the conversation — at least, not when the conversation concerns interpretation.  

Now for the first part of Fish’s statement.  It seems obvious — talking about something is not, in fact, doing it.  And the act of criticism takes a different skillset than the act of creating — whether it’s an anime or a novel we’re talking about here.  However, Fish’s apparent attitude that the act of criticism is something else entirely is false for our discussion here.  It’s prevalent to view criticism in this way, and this attitude is basically what I’m here to try to counter.  Because while talking about baseball isn’t at all like playing baseball — imagine how much more fun those terrible ESPN analysis shows would be if the critics had to throw their critiques — writing criticism about writing is still writing.  And narrative subjects are, ultimately, writing; at least, read them as the same if I switch the words around.  

Simply, someone had to write that episode of Kannagi you want to write a blog post about, and your act of blogging it is similar to the originating act of creation behind the episode.  The difference is in method and execution rather than kind.  When we’re dealing with prose writing, of course, there is almost no difference at all.  There is, supposedly, an originating “spark” of inspiration that drives creative work that is, also supposedly, not present in critical work.  However, as Harold Bloom recognizes, even though he claims it’s not so good, all creative work is colored by what he calls “the anxiety of influence.”  Michael Chabon is more to my liking — in an essay in Maps & Legends he directly responds to Bloom, claiming he is comforted by the reach of influence, that all writers are, essentially, responding to other writing.  Clarifying that makes it sound a lot like criticism, in that criticism is accepted to be writing responding to other writing.  

What I think the real trick here is — we ought to extrapolate and really get to some awesome conclusions.  If writing is like criticism, then criticism is like writing.  Hopefully I’ve at least provided enough of a groundwork for you to accept that long enough to drive forward to the end here.  

So, the two arts here (criticism and writing) have similar methods, similar inspirations, and similar forms.  Should it not be true, then, that they would have similar goals?  I’ll refer to Chabon again, here, as he puts this very succinctly.  In the first essay of Maps & Legends, after claiming that he reads and writes for no other reason, ever, than entertainment, he says, “I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature” (14).  Glorious.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating (like a Freudian compulsion):  criticism is entertainment.  It stimulates the brain.  The audience of criticism enjoys thinking over things in the way criticism does, and makes the audience do.  As Fish said, it’s not better, but it’s not worse either.  It’s fun.  Not all kinds of fun are for all kinds of people.  Don’t like criticism?  Don’t read it.  Don’t like shounen?  Don’t watch it.  Simple.  

The point of criticism, its goal, is simple:  to entertain a group of people who are entertained by criticism.  That is, it has the same goal as every other kind of art.

Anyway.  This “moment” refers to being accepted into Super Fanicom.  Yes, I actually had to apply for this job — or, given the very low rate of pay Pontifus is offering, perhaps “task” is a better word.  Anyone know the story of Sisyphus? 

It’s rough, going out into the seas of uncaring blog-readers on your own.  Even if people do read one’s posts, they might not comment.  A team-blog generally guarantees a handful of readers, as the other bloggers are (assumedly) interested in what one has to say.  Also, it expands one’s pool of friends, which is always a good thing, I hear.  

My head, it pulses like a blazar.  So huzzah for being accepted into the biggest circle-jerk this side of Oi, Hayaku!

It was this or NSFW. Damn fanart.

As Pontifus already told you, we’re diving hip-deep into the twelve moments of anime project for 2008.  However, I will warn you in advance, I’ll be “cheating” a little and doing some video game moments as well — I don’t think that’s too much of a problem, as Super Fanicom is about gaming as well.  Moving on!

As you might have gathered, my first entry into Superfanicom’s ultimate, giant Christmas extravaganza is Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu.  The trick here — the one that explains the questions you’re hurling at your screen right now — is that it isn’t the show that I’m entering here.  It’s the phenomenon.

I know things turned sour, yes.  I know the show went awry.  I know I haven’t even finished watching it, despite my maddened oath to blog every episode (I believe what I said was, “By God I’ll finish this show if it breaks me“).  But can you cast your mind back to that moment when the first episode had just come out of your local fansubber’s hot little queue?  Your cursor rested lovingly on the file icon and you prepared yourself for. . .  something.  I’m sure my following statement includes people who didn’t even watch, but it seemed as though we were all excited.  And for a few episodes it paid off.  The Akihabara episode was actually pretty great.  This is a show, we felt, about us, about the sometimes-crippling sense of alienation that we have, to greater or lesser extents, put up with.  Some of us maybe for all our lives.

Perhaps the part that hurts nerds (of all stripes) the most is that gnawing anxiety that underlies every reminder that we’re different from those around us — we chose this.  It may not actually be true, by the way.  Some people think biology determines our personalities.  If that’s true, then I have generations of other people to blame for the way I swoon when Luke turns off his targeting computer.  But unlike people discriminated against for their gender, race, or sexual preferences, most would agree that nerds, in some way, chose to be nerds.  That is, at some point I was (metaphorically) presented with a football and a lightsaber toy.

So Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu seemed promising to a lot of us.  Some otaku are still self-conscious about being nerds.  I’m not, but that’s because of my circumstances in a grad. program.  So for someone so demonstratably-popular among the “normies” to be an otaku did a lot of things.  It let the still-self-conscious feel better, because even the popular kids like moe.  All of us can identify with the social estrangement Haruka fears, and so the show, in some ways, functioned as a microcosm of our lives.

Bloggers, fans, and anime-watchers all came together to talk about this show, to wonder what was going to happen, and to be fascinated by someone’s attempt to chart the really painful moments of an otaku’s life.  Sure, we had Genshiken and Lucky Star already, but those are after the fact — sure, some people still make fun of the Genshiken, and even Konata’s friends think she’s a bit odd, but the nerds in both shows were basically in safe zones, where they could do whatever they wanted and only their actions, not their predilictions, would be judged.  Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu put its characters in the worst pit of arbitrary judgment and bias imaginable:  high school.

So that seems to me to be a great moment for this year.  Personally, at least, and this is meant to be my twelve moments.  My reasoning stands this way:  I rarely know anything about the state of the otaku-rhombus, but I was made aware of it by this show and the giddy discussions about it.  We seem to have risen up as one and said we need some kind of figure to rally behind.  And getting that many nerds to agree on anything is nothing short of a Christmas miracle.

A lot of people, recently, seem to be writing about the nature of the otakusphere.  I would link you to all of them, but I don’t remember them all.  I haven’t particularly bothered, as I really view my place, at Super Fanicom and the otakusphere generally, as the doggedly-obsessed one who starts discussing Derrida at cocktail parties (yes, Friday night, what’s your point?).  Self-reflection would take time away from writing about minutiae.  Also it would require me to have a vague understanding of the miniature society we’re all a part of, and like the bigger version, I’m just not paying attention.

Anyway.  Instead of trying to make something up, I’m telling you to just read this post.  Not only does it seem good, and true, and all those things our Gurren Lagann tells us to appreciate — it also came next in my rss after a sweet post about Forrest Ackerman, who has just died recently.  So, the post in question isn’t specifically about anime, but then again, neither is Derrida.  Here’s a bit of it if you haven’t already clicked over:

Fandom’s about not being alone anymore. Maybe you started as a fan-inna-box, two hundred miles from the nearest con and farther still to the nearest fan, but you came here to find friends, and to share your squee, and to create things together, and to say, “I was here, and I loved this thing, and these are the people who will remember me.”

So if you want to know what I think the otakusphere is, there.  I’m pointing to that.  Go, and frolic.