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.”
Here I shall finish what I began — namely, the listing of things that might’ve made my cadre of moments, but did not, for whatever reason. And then I shall rest, satisfied in my yearly contribution to the grand ambitions of Master CCY (or is it Master Canon these days?).
[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]
Chia Pet scroll: do want.
If asked to identify the most enjoyable character I read about in the past year, I may not settle on Ginko, but he’d at least put up a hell of a fight.
[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]
Says the girl in the bunny suit.
I haven’t exactly neglected to mention Negima! in the past year. I’ve written about Nodoka and Yue, my favorite members of Negi’s unwieldy harem, and Ako, who starts out as a bit player, but comes into her own, and with a vengeance. What’s left to write about?
“What’s left to write about?” Ha!
I thought of continuing what I began with my Ako post, which just scrapes the surface of her character and then promptly ends. But let’s save that for later. Instead, because you asked for it, let’s talk a little about Chisame. And I do mean a little; we’re talking about a manga that’s currently over 270 chapters long here, and Chisame plays into quite a bit of it. But we can at least try to get a handle on what she’s about — which, I think, is probably the tallest hurdle a blogger writing about Chisame would need to jump.
[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]
Who wants to live forever?
Alright, this is the last of my Moments Twelve about death giving meaning to life, or allowing life to mean, or what have you. I’ve just been into that as a theme lately, I guess. And you may know that I can’t put said theme to rest without bringing Bokurano into it.
[Read the previous moment here]
Hell, this is almost as weird as FLCL.
Talk about an underdog. I mean, let me lay this out for you: Hoshi no Samidare (otherwise The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer — yeah, I know) is about a giant hammer poised to smash the world at the whim of “the Mage,” Animus, and the dysfunctional crew assembled seemingly at total random to deal with this threat.
In real life, molestation isn’t funny, so don’t think I’m condoning your trip to Japan whereupon you will hit the subways, so to speak. But in anime and manga, sexual molestation is used in service of humor as often as it’s an agent of personal horror, and there seems to exist an unspoken code governing the line between the two.
Don’t think this is all about cultural implications, either. Such narrative machinations as humor can be deliciously structural. Not that the examples I look at here are off the social hook, per se, but we’ll look at that on a case-by-case basis.
(Edit 9/8 — Let this comment serve as a brief addendum in answer to those parts of this post that weren’t thought through as well as perhaps they should’ve been.)
I wrote my first Negima! post (here on Ghostlightning’s joint) about Nodoka and Yue, as I was bound to do so by favoritism and other darker things in the crevices between human comprehension. It was almost physically painful to have to pick two characters out of that cast of worthies…and as I was mulling that over, it occurred to me that blog-space isn’t exactly about to run out, so here we are.
We’re nearing the last leg of Northrop Frye’s first essay in Anatomy of Criticism; this time we’re tackling the section called “Thematic Modes.”
Now that I’ve challenged the heterosexuality of your pure, innocent gondoliers, let’s explore the gritty underbelly of the planet they gondolier upon. Not that the underbelly is really very gritty; normally it’s just pleasantly soft and susceptible to the application of stimuli, like that of a cat. It isn’t perfect, no, but it’d be boring if it was.