Before we start, I’ll be frank and swift about this: Please take note that we are not trying to define or conclude anything concrete here. The analysis simply investigates and branches out a fan’s, to coin Pontifus’ term, “interpretative strategies”, in order to come up with a proper result. And because interpretations are never always the same, the majority of the basis and processes of this analysis is not concrete, which means results would still remain as an opinionated guess until tested (and, on a more daring note, proven) based on personal (in this case, your) interpretations. Or we could just do a survey and see how it works. I’m not going to go out of my way to say that this is overanalysis. We’re database animals, so feel free to question yourself about it instead. And no, I’m not really mad. Just handing out disclaimers, in case you need to say something about the writing.

Shance: Since I can’t seem to get you on Twitter ot Gtalk, I just made a Gdoc so I can ask your opinion on this Cartesian Plane I made:

Where X = The degree of openness of the fandom to outside stimuli
And Y = The affinity of the fandom in question

Pontifus: Haha, I guess I’d be open/positive, albeit not quite a mindless, rabid fan, but then the extremes are, after all, extreme.

I tend to think of elitists as equally positive and negative, as they’re as confident in the wrongness of your taste as in the rightness of their own, and generally will tell you as much. But then I don’t know what the closed/positive extreme would be. How positive can a closed-minded person be? Closed/positive seems like a weird quadrant.

Same with open/negative, actually. Unless those are people who watch things they know they won’t like. But then, there’s a certain kind of person who enjoys bad things for their being bad…maybe the most relevant part of the graph is the line from the closed/negative corner to the open/positive corner. That seems to be roughly where most people would fall.

Shance: I think I haven’t fully defined what “affinity” in the plane really represents, because affinity in fandom represents a lot of things, like liking bad stuff like porn or fetishes like guro or futanari, or being destructive in a sense like trolling other fans, bashing shows or genres, etc. That’s why I put the elitists in the positive/close quadrant, since they are not willing enough to listen to others’ opinion unless it coincides to their own, or it proves something wrong in the ideals they believe in. The trolls on closed/negative quadrant on the other hand simply just do anything negative like bash shows and disregard opinion just for the hell of it.

But yeah, we could just disregard those two and form the line. Question is, who represents what? Any ideas on that?

Pontifus: Well, I was thinking of something like this:

I mean, I do think that closed/positive people exist. These would probably be the hardcore nostalgiafags –people who really, really like what they like, and aren’t really interested in telling you that what you like is dumb, but what they like is 20 years old and they aren’t really open to anything more recent than that. They aren’t really elitists because they aren’t interested in invalidating what they don’t like; it just isn’t for them. On the other hand, the elitist fans (or film snob fans, as I tend to call them) see themselves as arbiters of good taste, and that job requires equal parts elevating things they think are great and tearing down things they think aren’t so great. These would probably fall toward the center of the y-axis.

The open/negative quadrant still eludes me, though. Are these maybe those people who get great enjoyment out of watching “bad” things while still thinking they’re bad?

Speaking of good/bad, I think this graph has to function independent of any value judgment paradigm. Or, that is, it needs to take into account how fans themselves judge things, without relying upon concrete assumptions about quality. I’ve been assuming that that’s what the y-axis is for; a positive fan likes what they like more than they dislike what they dislike (as suggested by their contribution to fandom discussion/rhetoric), and vice versa for negative fans.

Shance: If we are to go by your definition of elitist fans, doesn’t that make every genre-specific fan fall under this category? Based on observation, mecha fans in particular do this a lot, and so do the moeblob lovers. However some genre-specific fans do have some preferences that are outside the main interest, like fetishes for example. How would you interpret this?

As for the open/negative quadrant, yes, those kinds of people are included. They would love illegal and unethical things like rape, harem, incest, and loliconism, but I think we can disregard if they even think of it as good or bad in any way.

Lastly, do you have a better interpretation for the judgement paradigms? Do we need to include only the important ones, or should we remove everything completely?

Pontifus: Genre-specific fans would be another example of positive/closed people who I wouldn’t call “elitists” — at least, as long as they’re more concerned with liking what they like than disliking what they don’t like (hence positive). To me, an elitist is someone as likely to deprecate things as to appreciate them. I don’t think they’re remarkably positive.

What I’m saying about value judgment is that I don’t think that we should, for the purposes of making the graph, think of anything in terms of legality or ethics. For our purposes, lolicon or rape or whatever is just a thing someone might like or dislike, or be open or closed to. Legality and ethics should have no bearing on the graph; they’re simply too variable. “Negativity” to me would refer to spending more time with one’s dislikes than with one’s likes — say, writing more negative, defamatory blog posts than positive, celebratory posts, regardless of what those posts actually celebrate or defame. It’s all very specific to the individual. The actual, particular objects of fandom shouldn’t matter, at least if we want the graph to be broadly applicable. I’m not saying that we should throw up our hands and approve of people who like toddlercon or whatever; I’m just saying that the graph should function as independently of our opinions as is possible. We open a can of worms when we start passing judgment on what people are into, and I don’t think that’d help anything here.

Shance: I guess the graph needs a major revision:

If we are to denote a certain population for the open/negative quadrant, do you think it’s for people who consume content because they think it’s bad while looking for a reason to like it or call it good? Considering our current outlook on the past seasons and years, this seems to be the case.

And since I don’t have any credible reason as to why the hell I put Trolls on this Cartesian Plane in the first place, I’m taking it out. We’ll have to find a demographic for the closed/negative quadrant, though.

Pontifus: I actually think “trolls” is a pretty good descriptor for the extreme members of that quadrant. I don’t even think they’re all bad, those trolls. Some of them are just mean, I guess, but otherwise they’re the tricksters of the Internet, and tricksters have their uses.

I agree that open/negative people are those who purposefully and systematically consume what they’d call “bad” media, but I’d think that someone who puts effort into trying to like something is more positive than negative. The open/negative person watches Mars of Destruction or Garzey’s Wing because they’re hilariously awful; they find value in those things precisely because they’re “bad.”

For example, the Terribad group of SSCSAV is an entirely open/negative undertaking. They make the “bad” judgment, hence negative, but they still watch a lot of things, hence open.

Shance: Well, for one those guys aren’t really trying to do anything else from those shows, so I guess that’s acceptable.

Time to get a little touchy, then. Since we dodged porn for a bit, I’m going to go back into discussing its part in the plane. If we are to include the perverts and all the tag-frenzied hentai-loving communities in the graph, where would you put it? I initially think they’re negative/positive, but after our discussions I now think they fit in the positive/neutral category (we can’t really say quadrant on this one, can we?). They like their porn, hence positive, but they can be open or closed about it, preference-wise. Of course, preference meaning fetishes and all of the similar sort.

Speaking of which, have you ever thought of a demographic that can actually fit in the center of the graph, i.e. neutral in both affinity and judgment?

Pontifus: Totally agree with you re: porn consumers. That’d be a good characterization of the average viewer who uses porn as porn, anyway.

I don’t know if there’s a distinct demographic I’d peg as perfectly centrist or moderate. Those people probably exist in all the groups we’ve talked about — they’re just less extreme than the really vocal members.

Shance: I guess if we can’t peg a demographic in it we might as well settle with the majority line.

Interestingly, I thought of another demographic during our talk about the open/negative quadrant: Redeemers. They’re people who initially think a show is bad, then watches it to find any factor that would make people think it’s good or passable, hence “redeeming” the show that was watched. I think I’ll add it in here, too.

Anyways, this probably means the graph is good. For now. We’ll just have to wait for further changes. I just hope we’re still around when it happens.

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.

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

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

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

Whoa, One Manga capitulates… damn (Kabitzin)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider me and Aria, for example.

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

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

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

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

These are, at any rate, the major divisions I make when I read Genshiken. The Madarame/Kasukabe subplot is significant enough to drive the story on some occasions, and sustained enough to warrant mentioning; the Comiket/doujin arc is a leveling-up moment for both the Genshiken and Sasahara (both of whom, lo and behold, actually do something, and continue to do things thereafter); and, for me, the most significant shift occurs when Ogiue brings her quirks to the clubroom table.

In a way, Ogiue is the most “character-like” of all the characters; she’s easily identifiable as both tsundere and a potential love interest with a tragic past. Of course, her co-characters peg her character traits, too, and her “tragic past” involves a yaoi doujin, so the spirit of Genshiken remains intact throughout. But the way things play out for Ogiue isn’t unheard-of — she softens up to the other club members over time (she’s one of those classic-type tsundere characters, I guess), and she learns to live with her past with the help of friends and a love interest.

Here’s something I find interesting, though: why doesn’t Madarame go for Ogiue?

He has every reason to, doesn’t he? Given his lolicon tendencies and his preference for tsundere, Ogiue is precisely the kind of manga character he likes (literally!). When she’s finally talked into cosplay, she even dresses as Madarame’s favorite Kujibiki Unbalance character, who, in terms of broad traits, isn’t all that unlike her.

Wouldn’t Ogiue provide Madarame with a distraction from the girl he loves but can’t have? She might even be able to relate — she liked a guy, once, and suddenly found that he was beyond her reach. The circumstances were different, I know, but that doesn’t mean the two situations don’t contain some seed of commonality that might serve to bring Madarame and Ogiue together. One has to wonder — but, in the end, I can think of a few reasons why things don’t play out like that.

Firstly, maybe Madarame’s just that into Kasukabe. Maybe he’s holding out hope not because he particularly wants to, but because he can’t help it. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? And, anyway, Madarame’s the type to let his circumstances carry him where they will; I suppose this is why the fujoshi girls have him pegged as a sou-uke, a “total receiver” of…well, you know. For anything to develop, the girl in question would probably have to make the first move, and Ogiue certainly wouldn’t go that far.

Secondly, maybe this is a simple case of 2D preferences not making the leap to the 3D world. I, like Madarame, have a thing for flat-chested (albeit not underage) tsundere characters (plus glasses, plus nekomimi, plus forehead…goddammit Shimoku-sensei, get out of my head!), but I don’t require those qualities in my real-life love interests. Hell, it’s not as if “tsundere” is something that applies well to reality; people are, after all, a little too crazy for neat classification, as the social sciences continue to discover. I seriously doubt that Madarame evaluates Ogiue (not to mention Kasukabe) based on his 2D preferences, their actually being manga characters notwithstanding.

And, thirdly, the possibility of an Ogiue/Madarame end may be precluded rather early in Ogiue’s tenure as Genshiken member, as she may fall for Sasahara earlier than is readily obvious. This time through Genshiken, I noticed myself picking up on more of Shimoku’s brilliantly-situated hints, and while I might’ve initially wondered about the abruptness of the Ogiue/Sasahara setup, I have no such complaint now. It’s possible that Ogiue has developed a healthy thing for Sasahara as early as the explosive doujin production crisis control meeting, which occurs only a few chapters after her appearance…

…and it seems likely that her feelings begin to take shape before the end of the doujin arc, given her reaction to Sasahara when she sneaks into the following winter Comiket (or Comic Fest, or whatever they call it).

It’s the resultant carelessness (with a little help from Ouno’s accoutrements) that gives her away, in the end. And I especially love this scene. I mean, check out Ogiue’s expression here; you have to wonder if this is the moment at which she realizes her feelings. It’s panels like that one that completely and utterly justify all the sacrifices made on the altar of fandom.

But I digress. While it may seem somewhat logical that Madarame should at least develop a passing crush on Ogiue, even if he isn’t prepared to date her properly, logic often doesn’t factor into the decisions we make regarding the people around us. The gut acts first, you may recall. And Genshiken is nothing if not authentic — so authentic, in fact, that it can be as difficult to read as it is enjoyable. But, lest I spiral off into another, more personal digression, I’ll end here.

(Because I failed to namedrop him anywhere else: SDS is, of course, the undisputed king of Ogi fandom in the English-speaking world. He has written about her at length on his blog, aptly titled Ogiue Maniax. But of course you know about SDS already if you even know about someone like me.)

I picked up Genshiken for the first time back when I had only just gotten back into anime, manga, and all related accoutrements after a few years of Japanese pop-cultural drought. And it left quite an impression on me, to be sure, but my experience this time around is a bit different. Consider, for example, that, in terms of sheer hours watched, I’ve seen about twice as much anime now as I had when I finished Genshiken the first time — not to mention that the amount of manga I’ve consumed by now renders the amount I’d read at that point positively pitiful, and, in the greater scheme of things, I still haven’t read nearly as much as quite a lot of people.

While the character I admire most, for various reasons, is probably Madarame, I’m undoubtedly most like Sasahara. He’s the professional That Guy of the group, and I share his talent for leaving no impression at all on anyone without putting forth sustained effort. But, more than that, I, like Sasahara, have always been something of a multiclass nerd, with some experience in a variety of frowned-upon pursuits.

Presently my level distribution probably looks something like this:

• Level 3 gamer (favored enemies: CRPG, puzzle, strategy)
• Level 1 role-player
• Level 2 computer nerd
• Level 4 otaku (subclass: weeaboo)
• Level 6 litterateur (schools: speculomancy, canonism)

This would’ve looked different the first time I read Genshiken. I was still figuring out what it really meant to be an anime fan, and while I had been to conventions at that point (two Otakons, even), and I’d stumbled haphazardly into blogging, I was still firmly rooted in the American fandom of the mid to late 90s. I had yet to really puzzle through moe, I hadn’t seen Gundam or Macross, and things like Touhou and Vocaloid made no sense to me at all.

So I think it’s safe to say that certain of Genshiken’s self-referential moments were simply beyond me. And I rated it 10/10 on MAL (MML?) anyway. You can imagine how much fun I’m having with it this time through.

For one thing, those between-chapter bits, which usually amount to in-universe fanboying about Kujibiki Unbalance, ring truer to me now. Consider this one, from the second volume:

… Shinobu’s glasses symbolize her attempt to cut herself off from the outside world. And when she removes them her personality changes. Similarly, when Maori-san takes out her braids, it symbolizes the release of a repressed part of her personality. … [Del-Rey trans.]

Madarame laments the descent of the innocent choosing of favorite characters into “an examination of the most minute and meaningless details.” And maybe I would’ve agreed with him in early 2008 — but come on! This is important stuff, I say; we need to tease out these little details. But that opinion is probably part of why I’m still a relatively obscure blogger despite having been at it for two years, so I suppose it’s debatable.

I’m also getting more out of those chapters which are especially heavy on the fan culture. The thirteenth chapter, in which the club builds Gunpla models, is a good example. I always understood what was going on there, on some level — I mean, if you’ve been an anime fan for longer than three minutes, you don’t have to have seen Gundam to recognize the RX-78 and the Zaku II. But this time I went about it a little differently; I saw this panel…

…and thought, “Hey, it’s a GM, and a Za — no, wait, this is no Zaku, boy!” and figured that, yeah, now I’m probably much better equipped to enjoy this thing than I was before. But it isn’t just the meta-references; now I can more or less understand why the Genshiken devotes so much time to the assembly of cheap little pieces of plastic.

Consider Smithy’s adventures with his Dollfie Yoko. Upon glancing through those pictures, two things occurred to me at once:

• This is a piece of plastic lying in the grass.
• This is something more than a piece of plastic lying in the grass.

Of course the latter is more relevant. I’m still not really into figures, but they make sense to me now as means by which fans can interface with both the art they appreciate and the fandom itself. I suppose this is how I use DVD box sets; I buy them not for the “hard copy” of the show in question so much as for the physical object, the proof of my support for the artistic work the DVDs represent. Box sets can be displayed, discussed, and lent to friends; they’re foci of fan activity. And while a figure and a DVD are fundamentally different sorts of thing — there’s a case to be made for figures and models as sculpture, I’m guessing — I don’t think the analogy is wholly misguided.

At any rate, I get why Ouno reacts as she does when Kasukabe breaks the leg off of her poor high-grade Gouf, the result of a week’s worth of effort, each second of which brought her closer to other Gundam fans, and to Gundam, and to Ramba Ral — and who doesn’t want to be closer to Ramba Ral? Monetary value is one thing; value accrued through time and effort spent or through aesthetic and social use is quite another.

If put to the knife or something, I suppose I’d conclude that I appreciate Genshiken most for the sheer depth of its relevance to the lives of anime fans, something I understand now more than ever. But let’s not forget that the intertextual stuff is also pretty great.

But what might that be?

This panel is a good place to start. It’s not as if public communication is entirely prudish; our media give us stories about sex, we have to put up with shady periodicals whose writers devote their lives to unearthing the sex lives of celebrities, and so on. This is usually glamorous, idealized sex. But what we don’t want to know is what it’s like when the married couple next door gets it on, or what our friends did with their significant others last night. This isn’t glamorous. This is real people screwing, and it isn’t interesting so much as embarrassing and awkward insofar as it’s private. I’m assuming that most of us live in a place where it isn’t generally acceptable to go around explaining how you did x to y last night.

This is what Octave does. It gives us characters who are remarkable in their mundanity, who aren’t even especially likable in and of themselves, and makes us watch them fuck. And “make love,” too, but we see the fucking first.

It feels like picking someone at random from a crowd, following them home, and watching from the closet while they (re-)consummate the relationship of their choice. It feels like voyeurism; it feels like you, the reader, really shouldn’t be present through all this. Hell, it feels that way when the characters aren’t screwing, when they’re just fretting over the problem of how to carve a niche for oneself in a society that doesn’t care much about You the Individual. These are the kinds of things we deliberately don’t tell people about.

Octave is about a former teen idol struggling to make a living in Tokyo who, by chance, meets a freelance composer in a laundromat. Freelance composer uses former teen idol for sex. Relationship ensues. And of course this is an atypical love story in that this is the kind of thing that actually happens, in many cases.

The delivery is all over the place, too, throughout the first few chapters. Disorientation seems to be the dominant narrative philosophy. It doesn’t feel good, no, but it’s actually executed rather well, I think; as the manga progresses, things pan out, begin to flow and cohere and make more sense. It may be the nearest thing to literary stream of consciousness I’ve seen in manga (whether by design or creative accident matters little to me).

What we’re given, then, amounts to a series of private moments in the life of a rather neurotic protagonist. It’s really terrible to watch; it’s the kind of thing we’re likely to read manga to escape. But there’s something about it…something that keeps me reading, anyway.

It certainly isn’t any particular affection on my part for the characters; while I don’t hate any of them, I wouldn’t exactly want to befriend most of them, either. I’m probably fascinated by the narrative technique, to a degree; you may know how easily I’m won over by that sort of thing. But it must be said that, uncomfortable as it is, I do consider the story genuinely good. Happy moments occur throughout, and these are made all the more satisfying by what the characters (and the reader!) have to endure to reach them — and for all of Yukino’s infuriating qualities, I find it difficult not to care about her many, varied problems. If Octave makes you squirm (and, who knows, it may not), at least it makes an effort at rewarding your perseverance.

And, anyway, if we find ourselves trapped among the sexual artifices of the mass media, and unable to discuss sex in the most real terms — well, maybe that’s where fiction comes in.

One of my high school English teachers once said that good literature doesn’t make things easy for you; good literature disorients, confuses, and otherwise makes the reader uncomfortable. And, while I’ve always been skeptical of statements that take the form “good literature does [x/not x]” (even if I, er, make such claims), somehow that notion has stuck with me. So I suppose that, at the end of the day, I have to respect Octave for troubling the waters a little.

If you caught the Aoi Hana anime a few seasons back, you may remember that sense of separation between characters and backgrounds, which lent the whole thing a stage-like feel. This character/background contrast isn’t really present in the manga; quite often Shimura draws panels without much in the way of backgrounds at all. In fact, while the anime gave the impression of a transparent, stage-like fourth wall, the manga opaques our view into the world of its characters. Characters’ thoughts are often presented in otherwise empty panels; without visual context, it can be difficult to determine which thoughts belong to whom. The end result isn’t so much disorienting (oh, we’ll talk about Octave later) as…simply frustrating, maybe, but not in a bad way. Our thwarted attempts to figure the characters out lend a sense of suspense to the thing. And if we have trouble orienting ourselves relative to Aoi Hana’s setting, so do the characters.

The plays-and-books-within-an-anime/manga remain intact — or, I should say that they survived the transition from manga to anime — but they’re probably a bit more prevalent throughout the manga, if only because there’s more plot in the manga than would fit in eleven animated episodes. On one occasion, even Fumi attempts the drama thing — while in the anime that simply would have seemed appropriate, as Fumi’s attempt to seize agency as the main character in the play of her own life, in the manga it comes across as an attempt (incidental or otherwise) to find a background to inhabit in the first place, a potential means of escape from solid white and black panels. But, as you can see above, even stage backdrops are often omitted. Readers and characters are left adrift in uncertainty — or perhaps they’re meant to face the stark, utter certainty of convention, the pervasive foe of alternative sexuality.

The chapter titles, too, are rather literary, often evoking lesbian novelists and poets. There seems to be something of a tradition of those in Japan. And that strikes me as odd not because it’s odd in itself, but because attempts to (re)construct a gay literary tradition in English literature seem to be arduous and uncertain affairs. Most of us know about the gay modernists — Wilde, Woolf, and so on — and about certain isolated “deviants” such as Whitman, and that’s about it, at least prior to the era during which overt homosexuality would no longer result in prompt banning of the offending literature. We talk about potentially gay historical authors in hushed, bemused tones, as if we were their contemporaries trying to incubate a scandal. I’m sure there’s something to be said for the tradition that produces yuri manga versus western traditions of GLBT narratives, but, whatever it is, I don’t suppose I’m properly equipped to say it.

I seem to have digressed a bit (as I’m wont to do). But that’s alright; I’m running out of things to say anyhow. You’ll probably hear more from me on Aoi Hana when I get to Hourou Musuko, which isn’t yuri, exactly, but should fit into the present project quite well regardless.

I have this proposition, though. I don’t claim that it’s true; I don’t even claim it’s plausible, or that it has any foundation in logic or data; all I claim is that it’s something I’ve been thinking about, and it may seem relevant to you or it may not. Accept, reject, or modify it at your discretion.

I propose that:

1. The “sufficiently advanced” anime/manga fan, immersed in a culture whose underground art scene holds nothing back when it comes to exploring nonstandard sexuality, has both a practical sexual self-identity (i.e. who s/he sleeps with in “real life,” which gender roles s/he enacts, etc.) and an interior sexual self-identity.
2. The interior self-identity is amorphous; it can adapt to accommodate a variety of situations.
3. Both self-identities influence the enjoyment of art, but do not necessarily or even commonly influence one another.

Now that I’ve given you more context than you asked for, here’s the real point of this post: I’ve decided to become a yuri fan. Which is not to say I haven’t always had a healthy respect for fictional antics involving two biologically female homo sapiens. I’ve simply decided to make a conscious effort to read more yuri/shoujo-ai manga than I have thus far (and to watch more yuri anime, I guess, though my anime consumption has dwindled lately; Marimite is on the agenda, at least).

No, it isn’t because I have a sudden craving for girl-on-girl action. In fact, I haven’t even been especially impressed with shoujo-ai franchises, traditionally. I tend to rate them in the 6-7 range on the MAL, which isn’t fabulous, but at least I usually finish them; the only exception I can think of right now is Strawberry Panic, whose characters I loathed almost unequivocally.

Then why delve into a genre whose products I largely deem high-mediocre/low-good? Honestly, because, while it may not regularly excite my critical tendencies or my eye for structural complexity, shoujo-ai makes me feel good — and that’s the important thing.

But why does it make me feel good? Sans that question, there isn’t much point in blogging, is there?

Today’s manga exemplar is Girl Friends, the discovery of which I blame on Smithy’s post. True to form, I find it enjoyable albeit not so impressive, which renders it somewhat generalizable as an example.

What do I like? Well, let’s see:

• Women are allowed (by society, manga artists, or what have you) to express emotion more overtly than men. When this applies to both parties, I find the romantic situation more satisfying.
• While the social deviance of the lesbian relationship is not usually ignored, the relationship creates a sub-space in which gender is relatively homogeneous — i.e. no pointless misunderstandings or awkwardness as a result of man vs. woman. Complications within this sub-space result from more neutral (and thus more universally relatable) character traits.
• Quite simply, I find women more aesthetically appealing than men.

You may infer from this that I fall under a certain purview:

It is not inaccurate to state that an otaku would both like to become one of the characters in these shows as well as bone one of them, or be boned by one of them. I would make the case that with Strike Witches, it is true that many male otaku want to be a young girl, but still like girls. It appeals to a man’s desire to be more pure, open, and emotional. A lot of guys feel that they cannot be that way as a man, but are totally comfortable with their heterosexuality – hence the desire to become a lesbian woman. [Digitalboy, "Strike Witches and Sengoku Basara - the Nudity of Concept - Don't F This Up (2)"]

Digiboy brings up the notion that it’s possible to respond to a (female, gay) character in terms of both sexual arousal and identification, and I’d agree. But I contend that I don’t want to be a gay woman, that I don’t need to want to be a gay woman, that the amorphous internal self-identity I mentioned earlier takes on the gay woman persona when it needs to.

Of course I don’t “become” a gay woman in any practically meaningful way, which would entail the acquisition of life experience I do not and cannot have. But, given sufficient textual prompting, I can relate to the yuri relationship on the level of yuri relationship. While my identification with the characters in a shoujo-ai scenario is probably of the usual kind — I relate to characters because that’s just what people do when they read — my identification with the scenario itself is mediated by a pseudo-me, a feminine, homosexual, usually younger construct (perhaps a byproduct of my relating to the characters in the first place).

Ergo: I can get a raging stiffy at things in fiction that probably wouldn’t, for various logistical reasons, faze me in reality. No, I won’t make you a list.

I foresee at least three objections:

1. I’ve overcomplicated what might be a fairly simple mechanism of reading, i.e. the ability to relate to characters and situations.
2. I’ve been dishonest: either I’m lying about my disinterest in real-life teenage lesbians, or I’m trying to cover my ass by demonstrating that I can enjoy all sorts of strange things (my model would apply to things much stranger than yuri, which really isn’t that strange) with my normative sexuality intact.
3. I’ve simply misjudged myself, and I really am in it for whatever appeal physical girl-on-girl action has for a straight man.

Well, fine; I also have doubts. But allow me to rebut:

1. Fair enough, but all I’m really doing is proposing a mechanism for something plenty of people have observed already: a fan’s porn consumption doesn’t necessarily influence his sexual practices. In other words, someone aroused by loli porn isn’t destined to become a pedophile, and so on.
2. At the very least, I’m not knowingly dishonest here, though I suppose it’d be difficult for me to know all my subconscious motives.
3. If I’ve made a mistake, it’s probably my confounding common straight male inclinations with some magical process by which people relate to alternate scenarios. But I submit that both can operate at the same time.

(In retrospect, this post may include a few too many lists.)

This isn’t the last you’ll hear of me on the topic of yuri; I managed to avoid talking about Girl Friends, for the most part, and there are certainly a few things to be said about Aoi Hana. Think of this post as a glimpse at my early assumptions — rough, untested assumptions that will inevitably change.

3.31.2010 2:53:46 “I’ll read one or two chapters of a Kozue Amano manga before bed” = STUPID PONTIFUS, STUPID

Actually I’ve had a strange relationship with Amano’s manga so far. I love it for being the basis of what is probably my favorite anime series in terms of raw enjoyability (which series that would be should be pretty obvious by now) — but, at the same time, I find the Aria anime generally more enjoyable than its manga precursor. So I suppose I have, semi-consciously and based on inadequate evidence, made Amano into a pretty good writer whose writing might benefit from a little editorial intervention (but whose fantastic art, unfortunately, has not been reproduced in the transition to animation).

Being so new, Amanchu! can’t suffer by comparison to an adaptation. But I can and do compare it to the Aria manga, as well as to things like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou and IO, though the comparison with Aria (and Aqua) is probably more relevant, and not only because of the common authorship.

It barely needs to be mentioned that the art here is similar to Aria’s. But it’s not just a matter of having been drawn by Amano’s hand. Despite being more overtly Japanese, the setting — a seaside town full of enough pretty things to serve as a conduit to the enjoyment of everything — isn’t wholly unlike Neo-Venezia, nor is the focus on a protagonist who serves as a “tour guide” relative to said pretty things much different from Aria’s setup. Which is fine, because, as I said, I always thought Amano’s art was just fine as it was.

One of my problems with the Aria anime (problems? With Aria!?) — and it’s probably not something that could’ve been helped — is the loss of the dynamism that makes Amano’s character art as enjoyable as it is. There’s always a sense of movement about these characters, even when they do nothing more than stand around and talk, which, for me, adds a level of engagement to the reading experience that not many artists achieve (though Bakuman comes to mind here). I suppose I do, in the end, think Amano’s characters look more kinetic on the page than in their moving picture iterations — which may sound strange, but I take it as a testament to Amano’s mastery of her craft.

I suppose it’s possible that, for some readers, Amanchu! will be a little too evocative of Aria. I mean, those school uniforms look the slightest bit familiar. And what’s that Mars cat doing here? But the differences between the two series are notable. Amanchu! is altogether more suburban, for one thing — which I like, as suburbia is something that often comes up in things I read (not to mention things I write). It’s probably a bit less girl-centric than Aria in terms of character demographics; the core band of tight compadres — the “girl band” as it were — includes one guy, as of the fifteenth chapter. And the characters here are generally less benign than Aria’s. For example:

Yeah, I’m pretty much sold on this character. Aria needed someone like this — like Akira, just a little more unhinged. Or maybe it didn’t, but I don’t care. Ai knows what it means to be a badass elder sibling (Otouto-kun might disagree, but he would, wouldn’t he?).

All in all, I think I’m enjoying the early chapters of Amanchu! more than I enjoyed the beginning of Aria/Aqua, which I suppose is a good thing. But the difference in “enjoyment level” between the two isn’t phenomenal — say, one point on a ten-point scale — and I like both quite a bit. At this point I’m curious to see whether Amano will take Amanchu! in a more “serious” direction, which would certainly be possible, or whether we’ll get what amounts basically to Aria in a contemporary setting, though I don’t suppose that would be altogether a bad thing.

(P.S. I have been posting here frequently. If for whatever reason this excites you, I’ll warn you not to get your hopes up. Semester two of grad school is just beginning…)

(P.P.S. Though I guess it would be nice if I could pull out 500 words or so at least once a week. We’ll see.)

IO’s tricky when it comes to the harem bit. It’s rather more than harem, but the transition between harem and everything else is remarkably smooth, if indeed the manga transitions from harem; at no point does the harem become invisible, so to speak. Better to say that IO begins predominantly harem-genred, and stacks on a new genre every half-dozen chapters or so, until we end up with a Frankenstein monster composed of slice of life, supernatural mystery, political thriller, family drama, psychological horror, and diving equipment instruction manual, among other things.

The result is that IO is about many things. Ostensibly, though, it’s about this dude.

He being Taiyo Nakahara (or Nakabaru, or something, nobody seems to know for sure), that lecherous high school guy whose exploits form the core of any respectable harem romance. But only at first glance.

He isn’t that lecherous, for one thing. He just has a healthy respect for certain attributes of the sex in which he’s interested. Yeah, he has much to say on the topic of picking up women, but he never really harasses anyone. And, yeah, he’s a fan of porno. But so were you, in high school. Don’t lie to me. At any rate Taiyo isn’t anything like that obnoxious Urusei Yatsura guy, and that makes him alright, as far as I’m concerned.

Even his accidental lechery is remarkably rare — one or two (in)convenient falls, and one or two unintended gropes, as far as I remember. Give or take, anyway; suffice to say that he isn’t as clumsy as, say, Keitaro Urashima. And he’s generally more respectable than Keitaro in that his successes, those incidents of his being a decent human being, tend to be neither accidental nor incidental. He succeeds because he really, genuinely cares about people with a fiery passion. So fiery, in fact, that he’s practically hot-blooded. His great-great-great-grandchildren will be super robot pilots, probably.

Taiyo makes mistakes, of course, usually by being bullheaded or imperceptive; he isn’t likable 100% of the time, and that’s the way it should be. He only truly and profoundly screws up once — but it is one hell of a screwup, it must be said, one with lingering effects, one he can never really make right. But it’s the sort of event that might be interpreted differently by each reader, morally speaking, and, for my part, it didn’t make me hate the guy; it just made him seem all the more human. More than that, it’s a mistake caused in large part by Taiyo’s hotbloodedness and willingness to give so much of himself to those in need. His virtues become flaws — or, rather, they’re revealed as simply traits, personality attributes with positive and negative repercussions.

In short, Taiyo is remarkable because he shows a bit of character. He’s sympathetic well beyond the level of reader-surrogate, even when we don’t necessarily agree with him. I’m not trying to condemn harem protagonists generally here, though perhaps that’s what I’ve done; I’ll try to pull away from that by saying that Taiyo’s development from apparent stereotype into complex entity struck me as notable in any of the contexts IO provides.

(If you do indeed decide to seek out and read IO, you may wish to do so with Baka-Raptor’s harem simultaneity requirement in mind. I didn’t consider it at the time, and I wish I had.)

Consider Aria. Food is a popular gift in Neo-Venezia and a significant element of at least a few of the celebrations we see. Old friends gather and catch up around the table; characters separated by physical distance send one another food, or include food in their rare instances of personal interaction (Grandma being the prime example of this). Hell, in the fifth episode of Aria the Natural, food serves a supernatural purpose. But there isn’t exactly a designated Potluck Dinner Day each year, a day when everyone is expected to give and receive. The giving of food is more incidental, more spontaneous, more pointed — and perhaps more meaningful. In the first half of Aria the Natural 19, for example, Akari and Alice bring Aika pudding not because they’re obligated to, but because they know Aika well enough to know it’ll make her feel better (and in Aqua, at least — I can’t remember if it’s true of the show — it’s a doubly good call on Akari and Alice’s part, as Aika wanted pudding anyway, but failed to secure it previously).

We do see the Neo-Venezian Festa del Bòcolo, when women receive roses from their admirers — but, insofar as the nature of the gift is determined by the tradition of the celebration, it’s more akin to Valentine’s Day (or White Day, as it were).

Haibane Renmei has that festival with the colored nuts — I don’t recall any other festival in Haibane Renmei, but it’s been quite a while since I saw it, so I could be wrong. Again, custom determines the nature of the gift, even if it allows for some degree of personalization. Though the nut festival certainly lends something to the show’s ending, other instances of giving — instances not tied to a particular celebration — stand out more clearly in my memory — the wing-warmer things, for example, or the wing ointment (Rakka’s wings get a lot of attention, come to think of it). Wasn’t there an umbrella in there somewhere, too? And some pea soup?

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou more or less eschews the festival thing entirely. Well, that’s not true; there are little local celebrations, but they’re more spontaneous and less organized than the festival days of Neo-Venezia and Glie. Certainly none of them revolve around buying and giving; material things have a particular significance in YKK insofar as they’re often hard to come by, and, though the setting does seem to include money, to some extent, bartering seems a viable alternative. Things given have tangible and metaphoric weight. Alpha hands out quite a bit of coffee over the course of the manga, but we know just what she has to go through to secure coffee beans and fresh water, a process perhaps reflective of her interpersonal efforts. And when she decides to take a lengthy journey, Alpha leaves her scooter — her means of exploring her place, her home, even her means of transmuting “place” into “home” — to Takahiro, who is quickly growing old enough to inherit place/home from his forebears. Each act of giving — save perhaps the act of giving alcohol to Alpha for the lulz — exists independent of mandatory, customary celebration days, and stands on its own as a uniquely weighty event.

It seems, then, that I’m working toward the idea that a Christmas-like celebration would cheapen the giving in the aforementioned stories, but that’s not really what I mean to say — that is, I didn’t mean to say it when I started this little post. At any rate, if you can think of any counter-examples, examples of speculative slice of life franchises with holidays resembling Christmas in the United States (or any other country where it’s somewhat commercial, for that matter), I’d certainly like to know. Mine are shaping up to be a bit one-sided.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou

YKK is, in a manner of speaking, Aria at the end of the world. It isn’t some grand and glorious apocalypse — there are simply less people than there used to be, and though humanity lingers on, who knows how much longer it’ll be around? Otou-san explains:

What’s pervasive in your mind throughout YKK is an almost-overwhelming sense of melancholy, of sad nostalgia. The earth itself seems to long for the glory days of humanity, even as it’s in the last phase of reclaiming itself from them. As 2DT mentions [here], it seems very Japanese to quietly accept the end of the world like this; after all, we don’t see what anyone’s doing elsewhere on earth, but something in YKK does give the impression that this is… just how it is. After all, what can you do? Nothing. It’s over. This is the twilight of humanity, and I only hope that we go with such grace and poise. [Otou-san, "Twelve Thingies: A whimper, not a bang"]

In one sense, humanity is charged with dying well. But in another, it needn’t concern itself too much with death, as it has produced successors — humanoid robots, one of whom is the story’s central character. Are they effectively successors, or are they a plot convenience, allowing us to witness longer periods of time in more consistent settings than might have been practical with a human narrator? I’m not sure it matters, as YKK makes the end of the world — or, because the world will certainly carry on without us, the end of the reign of humanity — seem like an okay thing at any rate. We have to wonder if we’d be better off if there were fewer of us.

I can’t really specify a single moment of note here, as YKK is too…fluid, maybe. It feels more than anything like a coherent and consistent whole. And that is by no means a bad thing.

Clannad ~After Story~

I stand by my final verdict on Clannad’s second season (mostly). Your mileage may vary, obviously, but I found the ending downright annoying — it made the whole thing feel disjointed. But still, I have to give it some credit for a few great moments.

I liked the entire Sunohara arc, but the ending was especially good. I mean specifically the part where Tomoya and Sunohara lay everything out on the table while punching the hell out of each other, then laugh about it the next day. This kind of resolution — total honesty, total retribution, total forgiveness — strikes me as very brotherly. And that’s how I wanted to see the two, ultimately. I couldn’t help feeling a little let down when Sunohara barely showed up again after the graduation.

And how about that Kyou Chapter OVA? This and the Tomoyo OVA were both executed brilliantly, I think, especially considering the constraints of a 22-minute episode. And anyway, a focus on Kyou is pretty much an instant win.

Haruhi 2009

I really enjoyed Endless Eight. Yes, honestly.

Is it because so many people didn’t? Maybe, insofar as E8 gave us all something to talk about, and I can’t fault it for that. Or maybe it’s because E8 was a pretentious move on KyoAni’s part. I can’t deny my admiration for the size, shape, and luster of the balls of whomever greenlighted the thing, and I certainly enjoy it as an experiment in episodic story structure. I’ll admit that I, too, felt the tedium during those uneventful eight weeks, but I suspect it’s the sort of thing that’s best enjoyed in retrospect. I realize that’s arguably more a fault than a virtue, but what can I say? One of my favorite novels is Ulysses.

And you have to admit that the ending is pretty satisfying.

At that, I can now call it a year. Don’t hesitate to check out other bloggers who have paid homage to the highest and lowest points of 2009 — including Otou-san, Schneider, doctordazza, Gargron, Scamp, zaon47, kevo, rabbitpoets, drmchsr0, ghostlightning, 53RG10, Vii, Seinime, Eternal, FuyuMaiden, Eater-of-All, Shinmaru, calaggie, yumeka, Nazarielle, Cuchlann, Jinx, Janette, stringedsonata, animewriter, prototype27, and probably others.