Or, Whence the Urge to Burn and Protect?
I’ve been having odd thoughts lately, mostly when I walk to and from class — but also in the shower (both places from which ideas emerge). Where does moe come from? That’s the question underlying our work here today. I’m not going to quibble about the definitions of what moe is, I’m going to try to examine where it comes from.
Augh. Obviously, if you bothered paying attention to my efforts to engage in the now-traditional “12 moments” project, you know I failed. Mostly I blame my too-busy semester, during which I watched almost no anime. As my professor (who sometimes reads my blogs — hello, if you’re reading this one!) said, it was indeed true that I had to put my anime blogging aside for the semester. I’m going to try not to take four full classes like that again… it’s, uh, a little extreme.
But you’re not here to listen to me whine (or are you? Maybe we’d get more hits if I just whined about things). I’m going on an adventure through an essay by Robert Scholes called “The Roots of Science Fiction.”
Live action Tanyuu is...live action?
Like Cuchlann, I find myself mired in schoolwork and related things. It’s Thanksgiving break, yes, but it’s still difficult to blog when I know I should be writing an essay about Darwinian rhetoric in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or researching transversal poetics and presentism. But fortunately, my research interests being what they are, schoolwork and blog-work overlap from time to time. More often than not, maybe.
What follows is the list of notes (and a few visuals) I used to give a presentation on adaptation and all it entails — or, rather, as much of what it entails as I could fit in twenty minutes or so. My research has centered on the novel-to-film variety, but most of it seems more broadly relevant. These being personal notes more than anything, I make no guarantees as to their cohesiveness, but they should at least be legible — and, with any luck, somewhat interesting.
In real life, molestation isn’t funny, so don’t think I’m condoning your trip to Japan whereupon you will hit the subways, so to speak. But in anime and manga, sexual molestation is used in service of humor as often as it’s an agent of personal horror, and there seems to exist an unspoken code governing the line between the two.
Don’t think this is all about cultural implications, either. Such narrative machinations as humor can be deliciously structural. Not that the examples I look at here are off the social hook, per se, but we’ll look at that on a case-by-case basis.
(Edit 9/8 — Let this comment serve as a brief addendum in answer to those parts of this post that weren’t thought through as well as perhaps they should’ve been.)
As the title indicates, this is an addendum of sorts to my last post, which you can find over here: ["A Terrible Darkness"]. At Ghostlightning’s (sort-of) request, I’m revisiting Shin Mazinger and the Gothic in light of the thirteenth episode, “First Love? The Beautiful Lorelei!”
You should probably expect this from me every once in a while — that is, in this post I am going to trace some of the Gothic tropes in Shin Mazinger Z. The Gothic is sort-of my thing — or it’s becoming so. Seriously, though, it all makes sense. Trust me.
Actually, it’s the seventh, but I figure now’s as good a time as any to stop numbering them and just admit they’re a (semi-)regular feature. Woo!
Anyhow, this time I’m doing an essay called “Coming to Terms” by Gary K. Wolfe. It’s short, so hopefully I can get this entry done before the scourging weather wipes my house out of the valley in which it nestles.
Breaking into the super robot genre has proven difficult for me, so I asked the wise OGT to point me toward a few shows that might help. Among other things, he recommended Gunbuster (aka Top wo Nerae!) — you may already know this, given all the fanboying I did over the show and its sequel. Gunbuster was probably just the sort of thing I needed, tempered as it is by enough drama and pain to sustain my interest through the genuinely awesome moments, which I can in fact enjoy on the level of genuine awesome if I stay interested long enough.
Diebuster, though.
You want to put it into words. You really try. But the last episode explodes your mind, and you’re left with assorted pieces, slightly charred, floating through space. You could leave it at that, but these pieces practically beg to be reassembled, and I’m nothing if not tenacious when it comes to weaving my webs.
I’ve recently been badgering nearly everyone I know with this quandary I’ve landed myself in: how does science fiction work, and what does that mean for my study of anime? (go all the way to the end, it has a happy conclusion)