When I write about these things, I’d very much prefer to focus on what I like about them. And I fully expect to like them overall. Enough people like them. In fact, quite a lot of people whose opinions I hold in high regard (mostly because they tend to like the same general sorts of things I do) like these things.

Cowboy Bebop, though, requires some qualification. It might help you to know a few things about my art preferences and foreknowledge before we begin (and, once we’ve begun, I’ll have other things to talk about). After all, the show enjoys a strange sort of cultural cache here in the west. It’s one of the very, very few Japanese cartoons that non-fan Americans are allowed to watch; it’s the absolute favorite of many a film-snob-type fan.

Not super-long ago, tight compadre OGT related himself to the problem thus:

… I manage to evade the extremes of opinions about Cowboy Bebop: I neither worship it as the feather of truth that the hearts of other anime must be weighed against, nor do I revile it as some kind of impure anime too tainted by Western influences to qualify as “true anime”.

“Cowboy Bebop THE REWATCHENING”

The problem being that, very generally speaking, we are kind of expected to feel one way or the other about it. Or maybe it’s that one extreme begets the other, at which point they become symbiotes, devouring or at least overshadowing the moderate stance.

I don’t imagine I’ll takes sides here and I’d rather not. But if you know me, you could make certain reasonable assumptions about how I’m likely to feel about the show, however much I end up enjoying it. I’m a bit of an apologist for the anime mainstream — I maintain that, while sometimes problematic, this or that formula can be very effective when it isn’t simply regurgitated wholesale for its own sake. Cowboy Bebop eschews the anime formulae we know so well in favor of western film conventions — conventions in which I’ve never been especially interested, to be perfectly honest.

See, I’m probably not among this show’s ideal audience. I’m not much of a film fan; young Pontifus discovered anime via video games and Saturday morning cartoons. And, though I’m reluctant to call myself a hipster, per se, I’ve always been attracted to idiosyncrasy. Those anime conventions I defend so ardently may be conventional for a given population, but I’m not exactly a member of that population. I could name ten chiptune/FM synth musicians or ten indie/post rock bands faster than I could name ten famous jazz musicians.

If Cowboy Bebop is “for” anyone, it may well be for people steeped in mainstream western culture. My own culture, ostensibly. I like jazz well enough and I respect the innovations of early filmmakers, but I’m afraid I never had much use for a mainstream that largely excluded the things I liked.

And yet I feel an affinity with Cowboy Bebop’s “author.”

Being a TV production, there’s no one person responsible for how it turned out. We could sort out the group effort, if we really wanted to. Director Shinichiro Watanabe is known for his cultural mashups. Writer Dai Sato is an outspoken opponent of the moe movement. And so on, I’m sure, but Cowboy Bebop conflates and contorts the contributions of these individuals into a single product. When I say that I can relate to the show’s “author,” I’m not talking about any one member of the production crew; I’m talking about the author-concept suggested by the show itself. Something like the Barthesian implied author.

Let’s call him/her/it Author-san.

Cowboy Bebop seems tailor-made for us, by whom I mean westerners, and western SF fans in particular. It’s easy for us to enjoy it. From our point of view, it seems well in line with the sorts of things it’s socially acceptable to call “good” or “well-wrought” or “classic,” and it’s no wonder that we aren’t hassled too much by our peers if we profess to like it. It’s like enjoying a Miyazaki film (which, while sometimes more thoroughly “Japanese,” usually has the Disney stamp of approval).

Consider, though, the Japanese otaku culture that gave Author-san authority in the first place, the culture out of and into which s/he made Cowboy Bebop.

Hiroki Azuma points out that this is a reactionary bunch. They distance themselves from their fellow citizens, who appropriate and enjoy western culture, by positing themselves as especially Japanese. Azuma problematizes this (“Between the otaku and Japan,” he writes, “lies the United States”), but it doesn’t matter much with regard to Author-san whether it’s problematic or not. Author-san happens to like jazz and film noir. S/he also happens to like cartoons — happens to like them so much that s/he has made a career in the industry that produces them. But, just as some friends of mine would laugh at me for extolling Aria as a grand human achievement, some of Author-san’s friends simply cannot understand why western imports speak to him/her as they do.

“Why?” Author-san asks. “I’ll show you why!”

Thence Cowboy Bebop.

Clearly this is fictional — it’s a series of assumptions based on a show I haven’t even seen yet (apart from bits and pieces on TV, anyway). The point is that I’m disinclined to bemoan Cowboy Bebop for courting the western mainstream. As far as I can tell, it does and it doesn’t — and what interests me more than either proposition is the tension between them. It’s a tension that I hope to find in the show itself, albeit not one that I feel much like lingering upon or arguing about. I’m more concerned with simply enjoying the show, and I’m reasonably confident in my ability to find something to like about it, even if I do suffer from the occasional hipster tendency.

Who lives here?

Every once in a while Cuchlann mentions that he wants to write more about video games. And he has — over here. (Did you know he set up a new solo blog? Rather than talking about nerd stuff how he’d talk about classic literature, he talks about classic literature how he’d talk about nerd stuff. If even there’s a difference. Which is kind of the point.) But resurrected dinosaur Super Fanicom needs more video game content, I say!

So, Proteus. Is it a game? The IGF seems to think so.

Developer Ed Key isn’t so sure you’ll agree. He mentions his early trepidation in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

I wasn’t sure how it’d be recieved without any traditional goals or rewards but many people loved it enough to make me remove any remaining hints of goals. I’m happy and a little suprised that it seems to be so refreshing to so many people. There are a bunch of philosophical things I was trying to do, but I’ll spare you the exposition.

Alec Meer (interviewer), “IGF Factor 2012: Proteus”

True, you have no predefined goals in Proteus (granting that only a basic demo is currently available, but Key doesn’t seem eager to change this). It’s like pre-Beta Minecraft in that way. Minus even a character progression system to motivate you, you wander around a random landscape doing whatever you feel like doing.

In other words, you see/hear things. You have almost no real means of interacting with your environment. You can control Proteus with only the mouse, if you want to. Sometimes the environment reacts to you, but there are no puzzles to solve, no resources to gather, certainly no monsters to kill. There are only weird teleporter obelisk things and creatures/objects whose proximity makes the (really, really fantastic) music change.

Proteus is by no means the first entertainment product that sets you down in a strange place and lets you wonder at it for a while. This is a key component of adventure games, and pretty much has been since Zork. It’s a relatively common tactic in fantasy and SF of all kinds. Mundane literature puts it to use with some regularity; Proteus might remind you of the third chapter of Ulysses, which shares its name. And we anime/manga types with our Aria and Mushishi and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou should be quite used to it by now — we’ve even imported a vocabulary for describing this kind of experience: iyashikei, mono no aware.

But to what degree is it a game? How much interaction does a thing need before it’s a game? How much in the way of goals? I don’t know. I never know how to answer that question. I could quote a definition from game theory or something, but I doubt it’d be applicable, as indie games seem to be shredding every solid definition at our disposal (for which I love them, of course). Is a visual novel a game? Is Dwarf Fortress a game when you generate a world just to read its history? I do have a cop-out answer — it depends on how you use it — but, frankly, I don’t care; I enjoy these things, and that’s all I need to know.

I can tell you what the maybe-game does, or what it might do to you.

Let’s assume for the sake of convenience that you’re exactly like me. You’re dropped into Proteus’s colorful, musical, pixelly world, and immediately you set out to find something to do. Because that’s what you do in video games. If there is no goal, you at least need to determine what you’re capable of here, so you can then proceed to do it.

This doesn’t take long. You can’t punch trees until they drop wood. Sometimes you’ll run into packs of little sound-creatures, but you can’t do anything about them. You can make the day/night cycle speed up, you can change the season, but this requires no more effort than walking into the appropriate area.

Here you’ll think about quitting. You won’t. You’ll keep walking around, necessarily covering the same ground. It isn’t a massive world.

You’ll start to notice things. Why’s the ground a different color here? Why’s that tree different from all surrounding?

Well, why not?

What does this or that difference signify?

It must have some significance. Things in video games have significance. Your surroundings aren’t accidental; they constitute a playing field. Even when the field results from random numbers fed into an algorithm, someone had to write that algorithm.

The more you tromp about, the less your preconceptions nag.

Here’s a nice-looking area. It’s nice because, who cares? It’s nice. And, look, a house! Who decided to build a house there?

Maybe you’ll want to share this place with someone. Like showing off a strange Minecraft seed on a multiplayer server, or simply sharing the seed among friends. Only you can’t; Proteus lacks the means by which to do those things. It’s just you and trees and mountains and water and a house. You’re hiking through the woods alone and you stop to rest in a calm and peaceful clearing. You contemplate a nearby obelisk. How do you communicate this feeling? And why, after all, do you feel such a need to? It wouldn’t even be a significant sort of feeling (how many virtual landscapes have you experienced, after all?) if not for its transience — you know that when you quit the game, as inevitably you’ll have to do, you’ll never stroll through this particular landscape again. Proteus doesn’t save its worlds. It’s, well, protean.

It’s not that this sense of benign melancholy is unique to Proteus. But it’s one of the few games I can think of that elevates the act of being there to the status of primary objective.

As someone who, in my World of Warcraft days, would hold up dungeon runs so I could read the books of lore scattered throughout, I can appreciate that.

Which, incidentally, is a good thing.

Here are some things to expect, to know, and to cherish:

• Lots of broken links at the moment. I think some of this will go away when the old domain is properly mapped, but I’ll be on the lookout for stragglers. Sorry for the bother in the meantime.
• Damn near every Super Fanicom tract of yore and quite a few pontif.us screeds can be found here, with a few notable exceptions. Such as all the audio content. And, most unfortunately, the Strike Witches posts — that’ll be a long-term project (had I tried to include them today, I’d be far from done). I actually do still have the raw materials of the eight(?) we never did finish, though…
• Wonder of wonders, we have post ideas! Or I should say that I have one post “idea” (which…well, you’ll see), and otherwise Cuchlann and I have a few post aspirations. Maybe some video sorts of things. Since the last time we tried audio I’ve procured a better headset and a hard drive that doesn’t lurch violently every three seconds.
• If your name isn’t on the authors list to the right, rest assured that I’ve credited you for your posts in-text, and probably tried to get you signed up here properly; just shoot me an email with your WordPress.com username if you want that straightened out, and watch for the subsequent invite.

Tired. More anon.

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.

Thekittymeister took this.

Oh yes, for three years ago the beard was born!

(Three years and one day, actually).

In the time since our last gathering together to celebrate, it has been whispered in certain English departments that this beard contains within it the souls of all people alive on this planet — verily, that shaving even one hair would slay a person; one inch, dozens; a goatee would doubtless depopulate a continent.

Neither do I know where its groping, hirsute rampage will end. But those faithful few of us will know it forever beneficent.

I rarely harbor feelings of hate when I play video games. But when I do, I do it with audacity and intensity. So when the concept of incorporating Cash Points in modern gaming came into existence, I was furious. Why, you ask? Because the existence of Cash Points is the most horrific thing to happen in the video game industry.

To know why it’s bad, one must know how it works. Basically, you purchase the points using real world cash, which you can use to unlock rare and powerful items in the game, hence the term. Feeling underpowered with the cheap Longbow you mugged from some random monster? Become a god of archery with this Cash Point-only Super Bow. Fifty inventory slots not enough for you? Purchase fifty more slots using Cash Points. Want to stand out from your guildmates? Get the limited edition Gold Ring.

Now that you know how it works, back to why it’s bad. And it’s bad on a number of reasons:

Cash Points Break the Game

Items that are available in Cash Points throw a lot of game semantics out of the window. Now that you have the Super Bow, grinding would always be a breeze. You can have all the items you can get your hands on because you have a hundred inventory slots. And nobody will mistake you for another player now that you wear the Gold Ring. In exchange for convenience and uniqueness, players would simply buy these items. This in turn defeats the purpose of working to get the common but trusty items.

Use of Cash Points is Intensely Exclusive

Rarely will you see a game that will let you sell Cash Point items for ingame currency. Why is that? Simple: If anyone can purchase said Cash Point item using ingame currency, then it defeats the purpose of the item being exclusive to Cash Points. Therefore, to make sure that they can earn a lot of money from players purchasing Cash Points, they make sure that the item stays exclusive. They “lock” or “bind” the items to those who purchased them, you can’t trade them to other players, you can’t sell them, you can’t drop them so other players can pick them up, etc.

Cash Point Items have Time Limits

To keep you purchasing Cash Points, they time the items you purchase. The Super Bow will only last in your inventory slot for a week. After that, you’ll have to purchase it again for another week to be able to use it again. The extra fifty inventory slots you purchased using Cash Points will only last for a month, after which the items in those extra slots will be unusable until you purchase the extra inventory slots for another month. And while some players think of it as one of the ways game designers implement ingame balance (putting you back in the same level as common players), the majority thinks of it as one of the ways game developers make you waste a lot of money (making you purchase more Cash Points to stay on top of the game). I can’t agree on the latter any better.

Constant Obsolescence on Cash Point Items

A lot of online games are constantly updated. The same goes for the plethora of items that you can acquire in the game. Of course, that only means one thing for Cash Point items: What can break the game now won’t break the game later. This is specially painful for those who spend their ten dollar weekly allowance on Cash Points. You should’ve saved the ten dollars you used to purchase the Gold Ring last month. Now you can’t purchase the Platinum Ring that came out this month because it’s worth twenty dollars. Oh, woe.

Cash Point Gambling

This is a recurring trend to a lot of Japanese MMOGs, and is probably the most evil of the marketing strategies they employ. They put the Cash Point items in a lottery box, and you use Cash Points to roll the box. The more rare the prize item is, the lesser the chance you get it. Alas, the frustration can only escalate to uncontrollable heights as players with the capacity to buy Cash Points rage at the fact that they are wasting a lot of money on something they can only get by chance, while those who can’t buy Cash Points gripe and whine at the fact that people who get the items would literally break the game into inconceivable pieces. And oh, did I mention that the game developers can rig the lottery box?

Now we’re on to why I hate it. As an oldschool gamer (I’m from the cartridge/chiptune/8-bit era, and thank heavens most of the guys here are the same as me), I’ve always believed that a gamer’s toil in the game must be well rewarded. I’ve always believed that in order to be overpowered and badass, you need to slave yourself grinding all night like a sleepless insomniac just to get the high levels and cool items the game has to offer. I’ve always believed that a friend or two can make even the most powerful enemy fall. Modern gaming changed all that. Today, rewards are bought by Cash Points, so the need to toil is virtually nonexistent. High levels and cool items can easily be achievable through Cash Points, so you don’t need to go through sleepless nights and grinding marathons. You can’t share Cash Point items to your friends, because Cash Point items can’t be traded or sold. And considering the gullible concept of needs-versus-wants (in this case, real life necessities versus the Cash Point items), it’s a constant battle for your money. Take note that we’re haven’t even talked about promotions and ingame freebies that tempt you into purchasing a great deal of Cash Points. Yet.

Now, I don’t mean to sound like a pretentious idiot, or someone who whines a lot on something that can be merely dismissed as an unimportant feature of any game. If I were to find a purpose as to why I wrote this post, it w0uld be to raise a questionable point in the current era of gaming: Why would game developers make virtual money, and why would they incorporate it to the point that it drastically changes the role and behavior of a player? There are number of reasons that answer to this, like easy access to game consumers and the implementation of content that is relevant to gamers’ interests, but one thing is for sure: They want your money, and they want more. It doesn’t matter if you bought the game since without Cash Points, it’s considered incomplete, obsolete even.

What of the non-Cash Point players, then? What of those who still stick to the tried and tested methods in enjoying the game? They get the common, underpowered items. They aren’t as powerful as those who buy Cash Point items. And yet they can still play and enjoy the game nonetheless. At the most, they possess the most powerful sentiment: They will never have any regrets on playing the game, for they have never spent a single nickel on it. And if the game dies due to bad game developers and management? They’ll wear a smile that goes from ear to ear, tap a Cash Point player and say “Problem, mate?”

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.

Below the cut you may gaze upon its splendor, as well as the photo from one year ago illustrating its vigor then, and its increased power into the present day.

My current state

Lo, it is true that my beard is fearful, but anger it not, and it will withhold its smiting follicles.

My state one year ago.

Celebrate! For its power is devoted to you! The beard nurtures and protects SF.c.

If you would like, you may post pictures of your own facial states, as homage to the beard, either in comments or your own shrines (twitter, blogs). Link here and remember the #bycuchlannsbeard hashtag.

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.