So a conversation on Twitter got me to thinking. This is not uncommon. The issue? Notes in translations and other works. The players? Myself, 8C, and LowOnHitPoints.

I won’t try to sum the whole thing up, but 8C started things off with the claim (quoted, I think) that notes during a fansub are an admission that the subber is a failure. Hyperbole, certainly, but let’s clean it up a little now that we’re not limited to the old 140. A note in a fansub fails in its very purpose because the point of the translation is to communicate the story / show / plot / what-have-you.

This claim isn’t too complicated. I joked about scholarly editors apparently being failures as well. LowOnHitPoints rejoined that he insists on no footnotes, even in something like Shakespeare.

There’s a lot more, most on their part – I was in class for part of the discussion. But here I am now. Woo hoo!

We’re actually dealing with two separate issues – translations and scholarly works. Obviously. But there’s a signpost for you. Footnotes during an anime sub can distract from the act of enjoying the anime itself. This is true, given that it’s a qualified statement. It can. Footnotes distract me at times, in all forms (book, show, whatever). But I always – always – prefer footnotes to endnotes. Most of the people I know prefer footnotes to endnotes. Endnotes are just sort-of useless. They have the information you need or want, but they’re somewhere else. So if you want to glean it for your phenomenological experience, during the act of reading or watching, you have to either wait until the end or go to the note right then. Most of us wouldn’t wind through a fansub to read a translator’s note at the end. Neither would most of us page through a book to read an endnote.

By the time you get to an endnote, then, your experience with the text is sort-of over. You can add to it, and maybe even rewatch / re-read it, but you’ll never get the same emotional response as you did the first time through. And your lack of knowledge of something will effect that.

My silly example on Twitter was Hamlet. LowOnHitPoints said he wouldn’t mind if he just missed a few puns or something. But the pun on the word “nunnery” is essential to plumbing Hamlet’s mental state. He tells Ophelia to go to a nunnery in the middle of a speech about both he and she are both horrible, sinful people. So we read the line and are content. He wants her to go somewhere clean and pure. Simple enough. Except during Shakespeare’s time the word “nunnery” was slang for a brothel. So he’s simultaneously telling her to go to a whorehouse – in the middle of a speech about how horrible and sinful they are. It’s a pivotal moment in the play. It helps explain why Ophelia kills herself (if she does – see the years of debate on whether she’s responsible for her death).

These, though, are scholarly footnotes. While my example is a translation aid, most scholarly footnotes aren’t so much. So are the two acts different? Yes, but not by much.

A translation footnote is theoretically meant to help one get what has been lost in the act of translating from one language to another. All translation is the act of producing another work. Works in languages are tied to those languages. It’s why I technically teach a translation of Waiting for Godot to my undergrads: the translation is in English, but the author made it. But he wrote the original in French and then translated it. So I’m not teaching the original, even though the author himself did the translation work. He created a new, second work, titled Waiting for Godot, that is really an adaptation of a French original. The act of translation is the act of adaptation. So the footnotes are in a weird position. 8C rightfully points to this fact when he says the translation is where that information is really supposed to appear. Theoretically, anything necessary to the work must appear in the work, or else it’s by definition not necessary.

Here’s my bold hypothesis: fansubbers aren’t only translating / adapting. Those who include translation footnotes are, in a sense, curating the anime in the same way Greenblatt curates Shakespeare. They are including information not vital to following the show, but vital to interpreting it. They are creating a scholarly document of sorts. This actually helps us understand the fansub wars, the bickering over groups, the long posts by subbers on their art and craft – these things are odd in the light of translations, as people usually only have preferred translations, not translations they go to war over. But scholars have scholarly editions they will bicker, backbite, and fight over. A professor once told me of an honest-to-God social snub he got at a conference because he went with one typical copy-text of a book over another for his scholarly edition of a work. Someone felt strongly enough about this to come up to him, in person, with friends, and call him out over it. Sound familiar?

I still haven’t really weighed in on the debate at hand. Translation footnotes during an episode? Yea or nay? I say yea. I take this form seriously, as I think most of us do who are bothering to do this blogging thing, and I don’t find footnotes intrusive – unless they’re huge, poorly typeset, or something else weird. I pick and choose when to read them, when I already know things (just like I don’t have to look at footnotes on the word “an” in a copy of Shakespeare’s plays any longer). I’ve done translation work myself in the past, in Japanese. I can understand others being distracted, though. What the debate has made me realize, though, post hoc, is that anime fansubbers aren’t engaging in the act of translation just as, say Seamus Heaney did when he translated Beowulf. They’re engaging in the act of translation someone like Greenblatt does when dealing with Shakespeare, or with Goethe – not only translating, but building an edition capable of supporting the scholarly debate and criticism that will rest on it in the future. Because at this point the fansubbers are working for the bloggers too, just as the bloggers are working for the fansubbers.

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.

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.

People compare Scalzi to Heinlein, and for good reason. The basic gist of his SF universe is thus: the galaxy is full of habitable planets, but it’s also full of intelligent races, most of whom prefer mutilating one another over any sort of diplomacy (this includes our own humble race). In some cases, this is unavoidable; when two species simply cannot comprehend one another, and they’ve both decided they want a particular plot of land, what’s to be done? Even a fairly recognizable race of bipedal mammalians might prove culturally impenetrable. This lends Scalzi’s setting moral complexity, and that’s good; shades of gray are interesting.

For me, however, moral grayness becomes problematic when it’s little more than a lesson in moral grayness. Old Man’s War seems to suggest that anyone who starts wondering whether it might be a good idea to come up with a moral code that doesn’t involve razing all the diverse cultures of the universe is either suffering a temporary lapse, deluded, or an asshole. I can think of one exception, and it isn’t the protagonist.

Look: this isn’t the era of Milton. This isn’t Victorian England. This is postmodernism — and, in fact, it has been for quite some time. I really don’t need to be told outright that morality can’t be reduced to a binary, or that “killing is bad” is an oversimplification. You may as well write a novel about how people can’t escape their circumstances, or about how the American Dream is dead, or about one day in the life of an “ordinary” but remarkably self-aware protagonist.

It’s not that I actively disliked Old Man’s War, and I’ll grant that, in just over 300 pages, Scalzi didn’t have time to do much besides set up his universe. The included excerpt from the followup book suggests that we might get a broader overview of subjective morality if we continue on. I’m just a little dissatisfied that Old Man’s War dwelt for so long upon the notion that we may want to stop and think before we hold soldiers responsible for returning fire when fired upon.

My point here is that moral complexity has been done to death, and while I’m highly skeptical of the notion that originality is automatically good, I do think that stories benefit from not repeating the same old lessons to the point of banality.

My preferred solutions to the “stark gray” morality problem are just that — my preferred solutions. But, with that glaringly obvious disclaimer out of the way, my position is thus: while the character who simply becomes accustomed to a morally gray universe feels like old hat, the character who rejects the notion of moral grayness through force of will or personal failure, who operates beyond morality, or who undertakes a nuanced journey through an established moral system has the potential to fascinate me endlessly.

I’ve only just begun Otsuichi’s Zoo, but the protagonist of the first and eponymous story in the collection is something like a moral adventurer — or, if he isn’t quite lucid enough to explore morality himself, he serves as a vehicle for our own moral self-exploration. He’s like a good Poe protagonist in that regard; crazy as he seems, we have to wonder whether we can really hold his objectionable actions against him, and, if so, to what degree. For much of the story he engages in a kind of act, filling a social role that allows him to maintain a certain degree of self-righteousness while avoiding whatever moral judgments he has made about himself, and this bizarre interplay puts the reader in a strange position. But I won’t go on for fear of revealing too much, as the story is well worth reading.

What I will do is talk a little about an especially fabulous Gundam villain who has recently earned a place in my heart: Paptimus Scirocco.

I wonder what it is about these complete bastards that so appeals to me. You may have noticed that I’m not one of those people who takes pride in being a dick. I usually try to avoid conflict altogether; when I take a stand on an issue, I often attempt to do so in a way that appeases all involved. Hell, I don’t even like to see conflict. Being so peaceable (yeah, let’s go with that), I shouldn’t be predisposed to enjoy characters of Scirocco’s ilk, but I am. With a vengeance.

Now, Scirocco isn’t quite the sort of villain I lovingly deem a “real fucker.” But he isn’t exactly an upstanding dude, either. Most notably, he has a talent for seducing every woman in a ten-mile radius, and he abuses this superpower to build himself a loyal harem of skilled mobile suit pilots. And he isn’t much concerned about who he has to kill to accomplish his goals — goals which, in the end, make him an interesting character, as he seems to want the same thing everyone else in Zeta Gundam wants, namely a more peaceful and generally better universe. Granted, his approach to the problem renders him almost Nazi-esque, but it goes to show that Scirocco isn’t operating in spite of a moral code; he’s doing things in accordance with a moral code of his own.

We don’t have to agree with Scirocco, to be sure, but it’s easy to see that, from one standpoint, he’s one of the good guys. The same could be said of everyone in Zeta Gundam, really. It’s not as if any of them simply wants to go around in an ugly transforming robot and cause some shit (well, maybe Yazan, but…). Morality only becomes “gray” when we let numerous individual moral judgments blur into an abstract bigger picture, and while a bigger picture is fine, I guess, I really prefer a more nuanced treatment of morality, one where each “pixel” in the gray slate is enlarged to allow for scrutiny. Someone like Scirocco — a character whose moral code differs vastly from that of the protagonists, but who is allowed to live for more than five minutes anyway — aids in the zooming process, demonstrating that the personal moral frameworks that contribute to the gray mass are not simply and uniformly gray.

To put it in D&D terms (because, you know, I do that), maybe I’m saying that I don’t really believe much in “true” neutrality, and that everyone probably acts according to whatever they consider “good,” whether that be societal improvement, personal gain, or something else entirely. Old Man’s War’s doing-what-needs-to-be-done justifications make sense, I guess; I just wasn’t satisfied that the novel didn’t give much of a voice to those characters who didn’t quite agree on what needed to be done. Only now do I realize that I may be complaining about the novel’s kind-of-anthropocentrism and resultant lack of moral complexity; a single shade of gray can only be so interesting by itself.

I’m aware there’s another episode of Durarara!! out, but I haven’t seen it yet; it may show up in my next bout of catchup posts, after my next post-schoolwork marathon. Or maybe that won’t be necessary — spring break is coming up, and it’s not as if I have any plans.

Katanagatari 1-2

From Twitter:

2.26.2010 5:08:20 Katanagatari 1: So, uh, what keeps them from just killing their opponents during those 5-minute speeches? Dramatically convenient bushido?

2.26.2010 5:09:20 Katanagatari 1 cont.: Stupid complaint, since it’s sort of played for humor, but I like plausibly brief fights to the death these days.

2.26.2010 5:39:41 One thing I’m coming to love about Nishio Ishin: really twisted romance.

2.26.2010 6:45:24 Katanagatari 2: Haven’t decided how I feel about the author surrogate thing, but I definitely like this enough to continue.

As it says. There’s enough for me to like about this — the art, the music, the humor and general delivery, the fact that Shichika is basically Sabin/Mash from Final Fantasy 6 — that I’ll be trying to keep up with it. But I do want to talk a little about the author surrogate issue.

I raise a brow at Katanagatari’s author surrogate with the understanding that, in my current fiction-writing project, I’ll need to introduce an author character some 35,000 words ahead of where I am. And I want very much to avoid turning him into an author surrogate, so it’s probably worth considering at this point what, exactly, constitutes such a thing.

Consider Stephen Dedalus — not the mopey one from Ulysses so much as the…somewhat less mopey one from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is, quite literally, a surrogate of James Joyce; the Portrait is semi-autobiographical. And he gives voice to a good bit of metafiction, some of which is probably concurrent with Joyce’s opinions on fiction and the writing thereof. But what keeps Stephen from being an author surrogate of the sort I mean here is that he never really comments upon the texts in which he appears. As far as literary art goes, he holds drama in the highest regard, so he doesn’t talk about novels much at all. Togame, on the other hand, remorselessly kicks the fourth wall down — and it can be funny, I’ll grant, but it can also be distracting, and the line between the two is thin.

So, what I mean by “author surrogate” is a character who (being written by the author) speaks with an authorial voice on matters of the text at hand, and does so in a moderately explicit way. This is problematic for me for two reasons. Firstly, until I’ve finished reading a thing at least once, I generally don’t want to know what it means to the author, lest my reading be affected. I’d rather not have my hand held. And secondly, I consider it a little irresponsible on the part of an author to indulge those readers who would limit their readings (and those of others, when possible) based on the author’s opinions — but, as that basically amounts to a complaint that writers too often give the majority of readers what they seem to want, I’ll accept that I’m being somewhat unreasonable here.

Or perhaps what I’m complaining about is simply the inward-looking text. A text’s commentary on itself is text, isn’t it? But a text can look inward, I think, without “reading” itself — without telling its reader how things should be interpreted. One reason I generally don’t read high fantasy anymore is the tendency of some authors in that genre to make all the requisite moral judgments for the reader. Perhaps, then, I’m leveling a complaint at unambiguous texts specifically. Or texts unambiguous in a specific way.

Suffice to say that I think Katanagatari is doing okay so far, but that I have my concerns.

Durarara!! 3-7

What was the last episode I wrote about? I guess it was the second, regarding all that interstitial mapping business. Which has more or less carried on as expected, but I haven’t felt the need to write a post for each episode telling Durarara!! to keep up the good work.

The third episode was good. But, I have to admit, the fourth put me off for a while. It occurred to me that I didn’t want any backstory for Celty — I didn’t want her to have a definite name, even. Episode seven gives another supernatural entity human roots, but I’m alright with Shizuo being half-human. Celty, on the other hand, is the ur-faerie. She doesn’t do extraordinary things with mundane objects; she doesn’t throw vending machines, or move quickly and knife people — she rides a motorcycle that’s actually a spirit-horse, and she pulls a scythe out of her smoking neck-hole. Somehow I wanted her to remain wholly magical, and by that I mean I wanted her existence to be a matter of “just because.” She’s less impressive now that we know how she got to where she is, and what she means to do there. But maybe that’s the point, as she’s made more human with each episode, it seems. We may as well let her be human, or humanized. It’s not as though we have anyone to blame for magic and myth but ourselves.

Speaking of ur-faeries and half-humans and such, I’m noticing a hierarchy of mysterious characters emerging. Toward the bottom, or human, end, we have Kida, who knows more than he lets on, but doesn’t seem to be actively involved in the unusual; the Dollars are somewhat higher up, and Simon, Shizuo, and Izaya higher still; and at the top we have, perhaps needless to say, Celty, the dullahan herself. With each episode the strange elements of Ikebukuro look more like a proper mythology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work Cited:

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

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.

• I’m trying to figure out how adaptation across media works in terms of narratology and phenomenology, which sounds highly theoretical and irrelevant to actual consumers of media, but I’m trying to approach it in a way that brings in cultural factors.
• Provisionally I’ve thought of writing about Ulysses and its film adaptations, mostly because of the obvious formal changes required in adapting Ulysses to film, and also because I’ve worked with Ulysses before, but that may change, especially given that I want to come up with ideas that are applicable to adaptations of all kinds — including novel and film, but also theater, sequential art, video games, and other media gaining popularity as vehicles for adaptation (it seems like any TV show that reaches moderate popularity gets its own board game now) — so most of my research at this point has been on adaptation in general.
• Mouvance, introduced by medievalist Paul Zumthor, specifically regarding medieval oral tradition [which I've discussed previously; thanks again IKnight]
  • Zumthor uses the term “author” to refer to writers, reciters, and scribes, considering medieval authorial anonymity; the text is, in one sense, a representation of the “author’s relationships to the world;” what matters to Zumthor is not the “extratextual” author, but the author as “textual persona,” and thus he is concerned primarily with the relationship between author and world as represented in the text
  • If we understand the text in the usual way as one instance or representation of the work, the “work” with which Zumthor is concerned is not the hypothesized archetype of a stemma [in other words, the imaginary ideal manuscript -- an author's draft or fair copy, perhaps -- that each text tries or purports to reproduce]; it’s instead the composite of all related texts, and it changes with each text produced; the text achieves a degree of independence from the archetype, rather than being simply a corrupt representation thereof

Mouvance

• Mouvance is problematic as a way of dealing with medieval texts; the process of compositing texts into a work can only take place in the mind of the reader, and while this may function for contemporary readers with access to multiple manuscripts, medieval texts were often highly local, and readers would have had access to one or few; with that said, mouvance may be useful as a way of dealing with contemporary narrative production, particularly regarding adaptations of a core plot produced within a relatively short period of time for similar audiences
• I’m appropriating mouvance as a way of thinking about how a franchise or intellectual property works as a composite of its texts, particularly in terms of consumption
• Probably my central concern here is how consumers value the texts of a franchise relative to one another.
  • One popular idea is “adaptation decay,” the notion that, in the transition from original text to derivative, something will almost unavoidably be lost; this may or may not result in a perceived loss in quality [see TV Tropes]
  • There may be some merit to this; critical writing on adaptation has generally focused on the concept of fidelity to an original, whether as a means of determining the value of a derivative or in a reactionary way as a concept that critics should not weight too heavily, if at all; it depends in large part on how we conceive of form and content, but, whether we’re poststructural about it and concern ourselves mostly with form, or believe that there is some tangible transfer of “content” between related texts regardless of form, differences in form will certainly result in differences in reading
  • I’ve looked at several models of the transition from source to derivative, and I’m interested in three in particular:
    • The narratological or “genetic” model describes the thing transferred as a “deep structure,” a basic relative arrangement of signifiers; these signifiers will certainly be altered individually during the shift from one medium to another, but their relationship to one another will be recognizable from the source narrative, though rarely identical, if ever; I’m interested in this model simply as a way of describing how adaptations are made

The genetic model of adaptation

• This is related (I think) to the question of whether an adaptation is (or should attempt to be) an imitation or an entirely faithful copy of its source; the genetic model leans toward imitation, if we define “imitation” as the act of drawing enough but not too much from the source material; this seems reasonable, considering that formal differences essentially render copying impossible
• The decomposing or recomposing model describes the process by which, once consumed, adaptations are decomposed into a common pool of signs, and the boundaries between them become uncertain; essentially I’m using mouvance to suggest that, for the purposes of reading, the franchise functions as this mass of indistinct signs, to be drawn from and added to when reading any text of the franchise

The decomposing/recomposing model of adaptation

• The trumping model is concerned with which adaptation is “best;” investigating this model may reveal insight into how consumers value adaptations (a contrast to valuing fidelity to the source above all)

The trumping model of adaptation

• As I research, I’ll look for evidence of these three models operating simultaneously, as they don’t seem mutually exclusive.
• I’m also interested in how various media happen — how they’re read or consumed. So far I’ve only looked at novels and film [during this bout of research, anyway; otherwise I've had some ideas].
  • I’ve come across a few possibilities: that film and novels are both essentially visual media (which I don’t buy); that film and novels share the medium of the human consciousness, and differences in physical mechanics are of little importance (which discounts the importance of form relative to content too much, as far as I’m concerned); that, despite the apparent relative immediacy of film, the film and the novel both take place in the “present tense” during consumption (I more or less agree)
  • Any similarities in the reading process between two or more media may help me determine how one text affects another
• Ultimately, the only way to get a clear sense of how adaptations function within a franchise is to consult the responses of consumers — both academic consumers and the “lay” audience.
  • The case of Ulysses(1967)
    • Before its release, it achieved publicity as a rallying point for the cause of free speech (likening it to the novel); director Joseph Strick maintained publicly that he would not pollute Joyce’s vision with his own (possibly as an appeal to viewers who valued fidelity)
    • Film reviewers expressed concern as to whether an audience with no experience with the novel could appreciate the film (the film was, perhaps, less an autonomous adaptation than a directorial “reading” [implying a spectrum with reading at one end and adaptation at the other?])
    • Critics who valued fidelity considered the film a failure [but it's rated 6.4 on IMDb, which could certainly be worse]
• It’s probable that the relative function of related adaptations in the reading of a given consumer — that is, how great an impact each previously-experienced adaptation has on further reading in the franchise — is related closely to how the consumer assigns value to individual texts. By consulting individual consumers, we might be able to draw conclusions about the social factors associated with various ways of reading, and, with any luck, patterns indicating the underlying interaction of adaptations will make themselves evident.

References

Elliott, Kamilla. “Literary Film Adaptation and the Form/Content Dilemma.” Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004: 220-243.

Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008.

Griffith, James. “Introduction.” Adaptations as Imitations: Films from Novels. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997: 15-75.

Zumthor, Paul. Toward a Medieval Poetics. Trans. Philip Bennett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Images

First edition Ulysses — http://www.theworldsgreatbooks.com/ulysses_wraps.htm

Ulysses (1967) film — http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Barbara-Jefford/dp/B00004W1A9/

With regards to its title, “Fate”, I found it to be apt in the way in which it worked to illustrate, by means of the larger picture, how going against it can sometimes be overrated. For want of better citations, I’ve noticed that this is where the East has traditionally broken off from the West when it comes to fiction–to the former, fate is not something to be resisted, merely something to be endured. Yes, you can row, row, and fight the power, but at the end of the day you’re going to be a hobo cracking open coconuts for a kid on the sidewalk, no exceptions. [Owen, "Fate/stay night, Fate Route"]

Even if my point of view is decidedly western, I’ve seen that trend as well. Allow me to whip out The Wind-up Bird Chronicle:

“… The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.” [Vintage/Jay Rubin translation p. 51]

As much as I like it, it can be a difficult novel to deal with, as it lacks the immediacy of conflict that I’m used to. For hundreds of pages, we simply watch the narrator come to terms with the idea of doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done in accordance with the “flow” of things. He undertakes a kind of quest, but his real victory is learning to take things as they come without, say, losing it and beating a dude with a baseball bat. It’s not about overcoming odds, or forging one’s own destiny; it’s about living with such things, which play out as they do just because.

Perhaps the core of this difference between east and west lies in my side of the dividing line’s conception of fate as a simple thing, or as a single thing.

For the record, Fate/stay night as a title is nothing more than the offspring of a brain fart and bastardised English, for the only thing I can think of that explains it coherently is this. Unlike Tsukihime (月姫, Moon Princess) or Kara no Kyoukai (空の境界, Boundary of Emptiness) which make for straightforward translations, F/sn as a title is written in English, as is the route from which it presumably lends its namesake.

Maybe it’s Nasu’s frustration at Japanese having a ridiculous number of alternatives for the word itself, each of them subtly differentiated by means of context–there’s the ubiquitous 運命 (unmei), the more formal 定め (sadame), the Known To Be Translated Erroneously As ‘Fate’ Due To The Limitations Of English 必然 (hitsuzen)–and that’s just the more common terms that I’m listing down here. Don’t take my word for it though, look it up in WWWJDIC to see what I mean.

Compare this to English, where fate becomes less of a question of “Which one are you talking about?” and more of a concept that anyone with a decent vocabulary can easily grasp. The general understanding behind it is that of something so steeped in unavoidable inevitability that nothing can change it, an irreversible force of nature that only superhuman feats or deeds can overcome. [Owen, "Developer's Diaries: Fate/Meta Narrative"]

See here. Of course, none of these means exactly “fate” as we understand it in English; these words mean what they mean, and I wouldn’t claim to have a good feel for any of them unless I’d lived in Japan for a while. With that in mind, to which “kind” of fate should we say the title refers? The English kind? One of the synonymous (or partly so) Japanese concepts? I’m sure we could discuss the “Fate” route using several of these terms; perhaps we should view the title as a synthesis of all varieties of fate that might come to mind.

Even in English, where synonyms for and variations upon the idea of fate are somewhat more limited, it’s a rather abstract concept, the sort of thing a good postmodernist might deny has any real meaning at all. Of course, having no “real” meaning allows it to encompass any honest interpretation. That’s the essence of deconstruction, after all, that everything-and-nothing simultaneity. We might conclude that フエイト/feito, an English word written in a Japanese way, a kind of canal between one linguistic pool and another, represents just such a recognition of the nature of fate: it’s whatever we say it is, whether it be God or nature or bullshit.

…‘fate’ as a metanarrative allows us to examine the concept of free will within a universe whose boundaries have been so clearly delineated but with such blurry precision at the same time. What is free will, anyway? Is it the freedom to have a choice? Or is it the freedom to react to the consequences of your choice, assuming that you can’t pick your choices? What if it’s an entirely different thing altogether? [Owen, "Developer's Diaries: Fate/Meta Narrative"]

This is what I’m saying, basically. “Deconstruction” as a term is used pretty loosely now, but F/sn does what I’d call “complete” deconstruction with the idea of fate; it doesn’t rob it of its meaning, it calls its meaning into question by presenting numerous possible meanings, any of which could be true given the right circumstances and perspective. I’m not referring to dictionary-definition meaning, of course, which is easy enough to figure out (once we settle on which “fate” in which language to look up, anyway); I’m talking about the peripheral concerns, the qualifiers and caveats. Who or what imposes fate? Can it be overcome? Is it, as Murakami’s character suggests, a necessity, a river to be navigated but not dammed?

Like the game itself, I’ll leave it for you to decide. I need to talk about structure before this post gets out of hand.

I’ve noticed this before with other visual novels, but here – possibly because the text is ‘in front’ of the images rather than segregated from them – it’s more prominent: the sentence is king. At any given moment there’s never enough text on the screen to build up a really meaty paragraph, which means there’s little opportunity for the constructive, building-block hypotaxis I expect from modern prose. I wonder if it’s fair to call this prose at all – but whatever we’re going to name it, this form of writing relies on the well-tempered sentence. [Emphasis mine] [IKnight, "Fate/stay notes"]

Now there’s an interesting question. I certainly think a visual novel is more written fiction than video game, assuming the rudimentary choices it offers its players/readers aren’t enough to render the experience very game-like in terms of interactivity and setting. It may be more akin to a light novel than to film, as its images are largely static. It’s a hybrid of all those things, really. I’d be inclined to say that we can’t deal with it as we deal with traditional, printed prose fiction, as we’d be overlooking too many of its qualities, but that prose fiction is certainly a part of the experience — granting that the presentation of said prose is somewhat unique. The one-line-at-a-time presentation must impact the way we read somehow.

With only sounds, a limited array of visual effects and dramatic-yet-positionless sweeps of coloured light to rely on, I find myself gripped. The frustrated desire to know what’s going on, and what particularly gruesome kind of wound Shirou will sustain this time, drives me through the text. [IKnight, "Fate/stay notes"]

I’d say the game’s handing us narrative a few sentences at a time adds to that sense of lack of information. When in the middle of a novel, we know there’s more to come; we can see it, skip ahead, guess at outcomes based on the length of description remaining and the presentation of words on the page. Fate/stay night doesn’t offer that minor luxury. We’re essentially plowing ahead blind, and, if my experience is any indication, our sense of suspense is heightened considerably for it.

As the title indicates, this is an addendum of sorts to my last post, which you can find over here: ["A Terrible Darkness"]. At Ghostlightning‘s (sort-of) request, I’m revisiting Shin Mazinger and the Gothic in light of the thirteenth episode, “First Love?  The Beautiful Lorelei!”

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

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

[Later]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

Really defining “the Gothic” is kind of a rough job.  It started in 1764 when Horace Walpole published a novel called Castle of Otranto. The entire novel supposedly came from a dream Walpole had, in which he saw a giant, armored hand thrusting into a room.  That and more appear in the novel itself.   Since then the genre has become / sucked in a lot of different things.  The essentially realistic romances of Ann Radcliffe are also Gothic (in which nothing supernatural ever occurs, though characters think ghosts are appearing, until the ending proves otherwise — think an O. Henry story, but not as well done).  Others, like The Monk, reveled in violence, rape, incest, and all sorts of mean and nasty things.  The Gothic is often associated with architecture (literature originally borrowed the term from the study of Gothic churches), but even the classic ruined castle isn’t necessary:  Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others, consciously practiced the Gothic without castles.  A whole lot of the Gothic, no matter what else they did, was concerned with family lines, lineage, inheritances, and the like.  So what the hell is it?

Let me wield the power of quotation at you for a minute:

The more a work frightens, the more it edifies.  The more it humiliates, the more it uplifts.  The more it hides, the more it gives the illusion of revealing.  It is the fear one needs:  the price one pays for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on irrationality and menace.  Who says it is escapist? (Franco Moretti, qtd in Clery, 9)

According to Moretti, the Gothic deals with a threatening world by expanding the threats, making them worse.  This argument is very common, and we’ll use it in a minute.

The Gothic novel draws its plots, its motifs, its ghostly effects from various sources :  the supernatural realm of the ballad, and all that was mysterious and eerie in epic and the drama.  The traditional lore of old, heathen Europe, the richness and splendour of its mythology and superstitions, its usages, rites, and songs, in short everything wild and extravagant, was rediscovered by scholars about he middle of the eighteenth century and was immediately recognized as  source of powerful material by contemporary writers. (Varma 24-5)

The Gothic is a kind of amalgam literature.  Again, useful in a minute.

Now comes the part you’re probably waiting for:  how does this apply to Mazinger?  There are the obvious connections:  it’s science fiction, and in some sense SF is always related to the Gothic (more or less).  Brian Aldiss makes the connection when he claims, “Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould” (8).  Historically speaking, Aldiss and others tie SF’s origins to Frankenstein, a Gothic novel by Mary Shelley where a scientist toys with strange, possibly forbidden, sciences.

Does this sound familiar?

That’s the other painfully obvious connection:  Mazinger is partially about a mad scientist, one of the prime tropes that connects the Gothic with SF.  However, connections like that wouldn’t lead me to want to devote this much time to the subject — I do love mad scientists, but that’s another post.

There are other elements, possibly more important elements, to consider.  Mazinger Z itself is a pretty good place to start.  Juuzo calls Mazinger “castle of black iron,” which he leaves to Kouji to repay him for his parents’ deaths.  So it’s a kind of inheritance, and even figuratively described as a black castle, the traditional Gothic inheritance.

Mazinger as a castle is odd, at first glance — it walks around.  Wouldn’t it be a suit of armor, or a weapon, at least?  So long as Grandpa was being poetic, he could have called it a “black sword.”  But calling Mazinger a castle is very pointed.  In both Gothic and typical medieval traditions (including the Japanese medieval era), the castle is obviously a symbol of military might and power, but also a symbol of any sort of power.  If you own a castle, you own land, and land is the power to do what you want in a medieval society.  The castle becomes a symbol of medieval power.  Shin Mazinger Z juxtaposes a very old symbol with a very new one:  the super robot.  Super robots (and various other power suits) are typically symbols of newness, of a kind of ultra-male power to conquer, like the rocket ship.  But the castle is all about the past tense.  If you have a castle, you already got that power, it’s available.  The symbolism of Mazinger as an iron castle transforms it from a weapon that can be used to gain power into a place from which already garnered power can be drawn.  Kouji has inherited power from his family, he doesn’t need to go out and get it.

There’s a lot of Gothic in the “back up singers” too.  Most of the villains fit the bill rather well.

Ashura is one of the most obvious, but all of Dr. Hell’s henchmen appear to suffer from some form of bodily abnormality.  A frightening shift in the body itself is yet another common Gothic trope, though it’s viewed as a 19th century evolution of the form.

In place of a human body stable and integral [. . .], the fin-de-siècle Gothic offers the spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated; in place of the possibility of human transcendence, the prospect of an existence circumscribed within the realities of gross corporeality; in place of a unitary and securely bounded human subjectivity, one that is both fragmented and permeable.  Within this genre one may witness the relentless destruction of ‘the human’ and the unfolding in its stead of what I will call [. . .] the ‘abhuman.’  The abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other.

This…  Yeah, this seems pertinent.  Not only Baron Ashura, but Blocken and Dr. Hell suffer from this kind of abhumanity.  Ashura is simply the best example.  Rotting in their grave, two lovers were revived by the terrible scientific knowledge of Dr. Hell, but halved and pieced together, a constant reminder of the “gross corporeality” and the fragmentation mentioned above.  Blocken’s head is off his body.  I have no real idea what is wrong with Dr. Hell yet; he’s blue.  Not only does this constant visibility of physicality underline the Gothic tendencies of Mazinger, it also highlights the primary theme of the show:  choice.

As I said, Kouji isn’t trying to find power.  He has it.  Boy, does he have it.  He does seem to be striving for a kind of socialization.  His home life was relatively happy, in the short glimpses we got of it, but he did lose his parents, apparently due to something his grandfather did, and then his grandfather was killed as well.  Kouji’s primary motive, at this early point, is simple revenge.  The choice is, of course, posed lucidly by Juuzo:  Kouji can become a god or a devil.  Both are evident in the show.  Mazinger resembles Zeus, one of the other super robots is based on Aphrodite; meanwhile, the Mechanical Beasts are terrible monsters and demons.  They are the poles of this field that Kouji’s caught in.  Juuzo didn’t care.  He had a responsibility to his family, and he fulfilled it; whatever Kouji does with his birthright is up to him (shades of the supposed objectivity of the scientist?).

Kouji is the Gothic protagonist in its fully realized form:  the Byronic hero.  A synthesis of the traditional heroes and villains, the Byronic hero has all the qualities of the villains and enough from the heroes to help us sympathize with them.  Good and evil?  What are they to the superman, the figure above humanity?  Byron’s Manfred sees the capitulation of this figure, when the eponymous character seeks to lose painful memories, and in his quest he will petition God, spirits, demons, death, and finally Satan himself, but unkneeling and proud all the while.  The Byronic hero could go either way — but usually went to the bad (or, dare I say, BAD END).  The Gothic themes surrounding Kouji help us to understand the position he’s in:  he has no real debt to society.  His castle may not be in the depths of the Apennines, but it is removed from the world all the same.  He gets his power from it and needs no other.  He is circled by the bodily world:  ruined but powerful bodies on the one hand, abhuman and devilish, and on the other hand the regular folks who are familiar, human, but powerless — even their super robots are useless against the kikaiju.  The dark undercurrents the Gothic tropes lend to the show not only help us see what’s happening, they also put into some thematic doubt the outcome.  In Kouji’s position, why bother being good?  What would come of it?  Perhaps we can assume he will come out “good” in the end (of course, if you’ve read/seen a previous iteration, maybe you wouldn’t be assuming), but the ambiguity, the question, is the place where the emotional action of the show takes place.

Further Reading:

I dealt more with Lewis’ The Monk here: [->]

E. J. Clery’s The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762 – 1800: [-> google book link]

Varma, Devendra.  The Gothic Flame. [->]

Brian W. Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree: [->]

Hurley, Kelly.  The Gothic Body:  Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle: [->]

I also wrote about the Gothic villain (in relation to Crest of the Stars‘ Baron Febdash) here: [->]

Ghostlightning on Baron Ashura: [->]

Ghostlightning on some of the generic markers of “super robot” (in contrasting it with “real robot”): [->]