Second, I have this project in mind, and I need you (yes, you) to let me know how viable it is.

I’m envisioning a series of free ebooks of essays on various topics in fandom. The goal would be to produce something more “professional-looking” than blog work — that is, the things would be copy edited proper-like, and made to conform with some style manual or another, to a degree. But I’d want the “kinds” of essays present in each collection to vary quite a bit. That is, a theoretical analysis paper on franchise x might be followed by a personal account of franchise x’s impact on the writer’s viewing habits — the point being that, as we’re free of the constraints of what approaches are in vogue in the popular press and academia and so on, we should take advantage of the opportunity to present a tremendous variety of angles on the things we enjoy in one mighty document.

What I need to know is, would anyone — bloggers, commenters, readers, or otherwise — be interested in contributing articles/essays/papers (I’m thinking 2000 words and up) to such a thing? As it’d be offered for free, there’d be no monetary compensation involved, of course. But I think the effort at letting ourselves run with a topic and compiling the results in a nice-looking package could prove worthwhile.

I first came across Cardcaptor Sakura by watching the dubbed version on TV.  I didn’t catch every episode that aired (& as particularly is my curse, I missed a number of the beginning episodes).  Over last summer, I finally decided to see if any of the episodes or movies were available on the Netflix, & lo! they were there.  But what I found perplexing was that some of the reviews utterly reviled the edited English dub as presenting Sakura & the other female characters as vapid, weak, & submissive.

Of course, it practically goes without saying that there are quite a few differences between the two versions.  The English dub was drastically edited from the original.  As I watched the sub version, I was amazed by the differences repeatedly.

The awkwardness of this scene makes way more sense now!

But the Sakuras don’t seem terribly different.  In the sub version, she’s still squeeing over Yukito (which seems to happen more often & more severely than in the dub), having fun baking cakes, worrying about being late for school, & in general, being a ditz.  In her defense, she is still a kid.  And in some ways, she is more capable than some kids are—she’s often home by herself & (despite her brother Toya’s teasing) can cook & bake fairly complex dishes from scratch for her family.

At the same time, though, Sakura is ‘inheriting’ strong magic & power from the Clow Cards that she collects.  She has the responsibility on more than one occasion to save the lives of her friends & family (& often of strangers as well).  Those occasions often involve Sakura risking her life (let’s face it:  dealing with the Sword Card, for example, was srs bsns).  But what does Sakura think in a crunch?

At this point, I literally had to pause the episode (& pause in my knitting) as a realization came crashing down on my head:  #@$%#! I might be more of a feminist than I thought.

This is when she’s after the last Clow Card!  This is while the city is being destroyed!  This is in the midst of this fight!  Is this supposed to be a strong character who’s a good example for kids?  Kero has to tell her to think!

*heaves a sigh* OK, admittedly, I am rather biased—critical thinking (hell, even just thinking) is one of the skills I hold in highest regard. So maybe I’m being a little unfair.

CCS does often subvert gender construction, which is perhaps most glaringly obvious in the play that Sakura’s class puts on—Li plays Sleeping Beauty & Sakura plays the Prince who will awaken him/her.  But oddly, it’s here, blatantly playing a male, that Sakura manages entirely on her own to figure out how to capture the Clow Cards responsible for the mischief at the end of the play.  However, once the characters are out of the confines of the play & a couple of episodes down the road, we’re at the point of Sakura not being able to think on her own (see above diatribe).

Not much better.  Let’s try this again, this time with a little help from some friends.

First, let’s do some groundwork by borrowing the concept of “in-between.”  This handy concept essentially dismantles the idea of (or at least blurs the line between) binary constructs in deconstructionist methodology; Mary Poovey uses this in an attempt to reconcile deconstructionism with feminism.  Thus, as Poovey sets forth, the “in-between”
expose[s] the fact that the opposition between the “sexes,” like the definitions of “women” and “men,” is a social construction, not a reflection or articulation of biological fact.  In so doing, deconstruction sets up the possibility that the supposedly fixed opposition of masculine/feminine might lose its social prominence because we could begin to recognize that there is no necessary connection between anatomical sexuality and gender stereotypes or roles. (*)
Why is this necessary?  For one, it allows us to view Sakura as a liminal character, balancing between both the “male” & the “female.”  This liminality is a requisite for recovering & using the Clow Cards.  For another, the binary system potentially accounts for Li’s initial (but long-lasting) treatment of Sakura.  What winds up happening, though, is that Sakura must eventually integrate herself into a binary system of gender in order to convert the cards into Sakura Cards.  Or, more accurately, she must first subvert the binary system & then create her own discourse within it.

We still need one more thing:  “The Laugh of the Medusa” by Hélène Cixous.  In it, Cixous describes écriture féminine, or “gendered feminine writing.”  I’ll be referencing this a couple times as we go, but a brief summary seems like a good idea.  In a nutshell, Cixous’ idea is this:  the dominant form of writing & language is masculine.  To break out of this (Cixous regards masculine writing as stagnant), one must engage in écriture féminine, which Cixous sets in opposition to phallogocentric writing.

Note:  this blurring of binaries even happens at the most general level:  CCS is shōjo.  The blurring of binaries is inherent in a shōjo character, as such characters are essentially their own gender, not male or female.  Although we’re likely already aware of what shōjo means (or, if we’re not, Wikipedia can sometimes be your friend), CCS seems to try to be both shōjo & not shōjo (just in case we weren’t subverting enough binary systems…).  Sakura begins the series as the “not-quite-female female,” but this changes along the way.  I’m not really going to get into the sexual nature/experience/alignment of the shōjo character, as I don’t really have those goggles in my collection.  I’ll leave that to…someone else or another time.  In addition, while the primary addressee of “The Laugh of the Medusa” is “Woman,” the practice of feminine writing does not seem to be relegated to only to the female sex.  In fact, Cixous suggests that écriture féminine is best engaged in through bisexuality, through androgyny, having both features of the male & female (sound a little familiar?).  Thus we are viewing another in-between, as écriture féminine seems to exist to subvert the (masculine) status quo.

To connect Cixous to CCS, we need to take one final small step on our own.  That step is to think of Sakura’s use of the cards as an equivalent of writing.  It’s not much of a stretch.  We can think of the staff Sakura uses as her writing instrument, & the activation & actions of the cards (as well as the use of the magic power she has) as the writing itself.  We can essentially use the terms “magical power” & “text” interchangeably.

Let’s start on a small scale—the power of writing one’s name.  Whenever Sakura captures a card, she must write her name on it.  If she fails to do so after finding it, as she does in one episode, the card will not recognize Sakura as the new master, & thus, since Clow Reed is gone, it will run amok until Sakura turns it back into a card & writes her name across the bottom.  She is unable to harness the card’s power if it doesn’t have her name on it.  The same also applies to Li, as he must also inscribe his name on the cards that he captures.  Each of them can only use the cards s/he caught—Sakura never uses Li’s cards, or vice versa.  Thus, by writing her name on the cards she captures, Sakura is essentially excluding Li from using them.  Presumably, however, their names could be erased & overwritten.  But while the writing of their names is what gives them power over the cards, the cards don’t seem to function solely on their magical powers.

Now to start on the bigger picture.  Sakura has magic power of her own, or else, as Kero states, she wouldn’t have been able to open the seal on the cards.  As she starts her adventure of collecting the cards, Sakura’s magical powers aren’t particularly strong, & they seem focused more on detecting other magical presences (like the Clow Cards).  But as her knowledge of the Clow Cards increases, so does her magical power.  However, when Sakura uses a Clow Card, she is effectively creating (or using, perhaps) her text (magic) within Clow Reed’s text (magic).  Because she is just starting, she has to function within the power that Clow Reed left behind; she isn’t strong enough yet to support the kind of power the cards require—the show later implies that this is in part due to the fact that she is just a child.  Thus she is still learning, & she needs (& the cards need) the magic that Clow Reed left behind.  As Cixous states, “There’s no room for her if she’s not a he.”  Sakura cannot use the Clow Cards solely as a female—she has to balance the female (herself, her magic, her text) with the male (Clow Reed’s magic, his text).  She must balance herself in the liminal space between, as a shōjo.

However, Sakura’s magical power & use of the Clow Cards comes as an affront to Li, whose family can trace their lineage & magical power to Clow Reed.  Li’s text operates within the traditional, ancestral, masculine text of Clow Reed; as a result, Li often views Sakura’s text functioning within Clow Reed’s as an aberration, as subversive.

When Li’s character is introduced in the 8th episode, most of his first appearances involve berating Sakura for knowing so little about the Clow Cards.  When he bullies her & demands she give him the Clow Cards she’s recovered, she resists, saying that she promised Kero she would find all the cards, but she still has to be saved by her brother Toya.  Later Li calls her “idiot” & “moron.”  Instead of trying to stand up for herself this time, she proceeds to cower behind him while he figures out how to capture the Thunder Card.  For someone who made a promise to collect the cards, she certainly isn’t being active about it here.  Though passivity can be a mark of the shōjo, Sakura has been fairly active about capturing the cards.  While a number of her previous encounters with the cards involved some running from them, Sakura isn’t running; however, she’s depending on Li, a boy who continues to insult & harass her, to take care of the situation.

Because it's cool to be mean, right?

Li continues to treat Sakura in much the same manner for quite some time, though their competition for the cards eventually turns into friendly rivalry & then cooperative.  It seems as though as Sakura’s magical knowledge increases, Li is able to respect her more.

Sakura remains in the liminal space of the shōjo as long as she is capturing Clow Cards.  However, once all of the cards are collected, she must face the Final Judgment & defeat Yue.  However, because Yue draws & controls the power from the magic Clow Reed left behind, he can’t be defeated by just using Clow Reed’s magic or the Clow Cards.  The old text, then, is insufficient, even for Sakura, simply because she is still operating within that text.

To succeed, Sakura has to create a new staff & remake the Clow Cards into Sakura Cards.  I am again reminded of Cixous:  “If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man…it is time for her to dislocate this “within,” to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of.”  & that is precisely what happens.  By using her own power, by creating her own text, by remaking the card, Sakura is able to win, & Yue must serve her.  Even the new staff she has created requires a new chant & a new magical circle, things that Sakura must make up on her own.

Finally, the staff’s change is worthy of a little further scrutiny.  Let’s take a look.

We have Li’s sword, Sakura’s first staff, & the one that she creates during the Final Judgment.  The point of Li’s sword is what he uses when using one of the Clow Cards; he only uses the flat of it for his own elemental magic.  Sakura only ever uses the beak of the staff for using the cards.  The sword & beak are naturally phallic symbols (reminiscent of Gilbert & Gubar’s concept of the phallic pen), a marker of Clow Reed’s power that the cards require.  The end of Sakura’s second staff, a circle enclosing a star with wings on either side, seems to imply a uterus or vagina.

However, the staff change leaves us in a tiny bit of a lurch in terms of shōjo.  We have our not-quite-female female breaking out of androgyny, creating her own feminine text with a feminine pen.  Even in the next play Sakura’s class puts on, Sakura plays the princess rather than the prince.

It seems to be a subversion of subversion.  But then, that seems to be what CCS likes to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou

Somehow I can't call YKK out on its anthropocentrism.

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 very, 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.

All conflict should be resolved like this.

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.

Don't hesitate too long, Tomoya; you only have 22 minutes.

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

Kyon-kun, denwa~

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work Cited:

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

Before you can remember love, you have to feel it for the first time. Such was my motivation when, early in the year, I decided to watch as much of Macross as I could manage — which, in the end, meant pretty much all of it.

You may wonder, given my preferences, why I didn’t give Aria the number one spot again. After all, last year I had seen only the first season; this year I watched the latter two and read half the manga (that is, two volumes of Aqua and five of Aria). Surely I’m much better equipped now to praise the hell out of the thing. But, after the first season, Aria’s effect on my preferences, or on me as a fan, had already run its course. I was guaranteed to like the rest of it.

On the other hand, I did watch something this year with as profound an effect on my fan-hood as Aria had in 2008 — Macross. It’s hard to pin down precisely what it did for me, though. It probably did several things: it demonstrated the power of the franchise as both an artistic and marketing apparatus; it added to my foundation of Important Anime or Anime One Must See; it served as a gateway into older and longer shows; it was just pretty damn cool all around, equal parts humorous and serious, with its commingled themes of love, war, coming of age, and music. I can never claim to be one of those people who have been fans of Macross (perhaps by way of Robotech) practically forever, but I think I get what they’re on about, to some extent, when they profess their love of the franchise from on high. I rated none of the individual installments in the series higher than 9 on MAL, but if I could rate the whole thing cumulatively, it’d easily earn a 10. It’s about the combined experience, I think.

The SDF Macross opening isn’t my chosen moment, but it seemed an appropriate opener to this post insofar as it encapsulates all the things that make the series great. It’s got music as great as it is ridiculous, it’s got transforming plane-mecha and spacefaring capital ships, it’s got bridge bunnies and staid captains and even a hint of tenuous romance. It’s easily one of my favorite openings — how much better could it be? (Well, alright, a little, but not much.)

To choose one moment from all of Macross would be to slight its component parts, in a way. What I’ll do here, then, is choose a moment from each major installment in the franchise. Well, each installment except Macross Zero, which wasn’t bad, but left me vaguely dissatisfied. Maybe someday I’ll be able to remember love for that one, too.

SDF Macross: Pinpoint barrier + Daedalus = ?

I was tempted to write about the show’s ending here, but if I did it’d mostly be out of spite for Minmay, and she isn’t that bad — she’s a teenager, and much of what she does can be attributed to youth. So instead, I’ll write about the most awesome thing that has ever happened.

Just to clarify, the Macross itself is pretty much the most awesome thing that has ever happened. It’s a capital ship (check) that can transform into vaguely humanoid form (check) with smaller capital ships for arms (check). Of course, if you happen to find yourself vastly outnumbered by aliens you’ve accidentally pissed off and whose motivations you aren’t entirely sure of, there’s only one thing to do with all this. Executive officer (or something) Misa Hayase knows what that one thing is.

If that doesn’t simultaneously melt your face, blow your mind, and cream your jeans, I can’t imagine what would.

Macross Plus: Reversal

One of my complaints about Macross Zero is that it doesn’t feel much like Macross, and I suppose one could field the same complaint about Macross Plus. For my part, I think it’s great; it darkens and distorts the conventions of Macross without rendering them unrecognizable. Everything — the love triangle, the music (Yoko Kanno!), the pilots, everything — is more sinister somehow. Even the SDF-1 itself.

The powers that be tend to thwart our (anti-)heroes as often as they provide aid, if not more often, and the protagonists find themselves facing monumental odds with few allies. This becomes most chillingly clear when the Macross, damaged as it is by the events of the first show and some thirty years of weather, is commandeered and turned against Isamu Dyson, who, in the end, stands alone between it and Macross City (though the real conflict is much more local, you may know).

Under other circumstances, such a “resurrection” would’ve been fist-pumpingly epic. Here, it’s horrifying. Or, no, it’s probably both. That tendency to throw your emotions into disarray is what makes Macross Plus my favorite individual stretch of the franchise.

Macross 7: And still Basara sings

Macross 7 was first described to me as a show in which people fight space vampires with the power of their rock, and by God that’s what it is. If you happen to enjoy the “tangible power of rock” theme as it appears in, say, metal mythology or anything by Tenacious D, you’ll probably like Macross 7. It’s ridiculous, yeah, but it has a lot going for it — Nekki Basara is easily my favorite of Macross’s dense but skilled pilot protagonists, and Mylene Jenius is probably my favorite Minmay.

My moment of choice comes from the 27th episode, and, in a way, it marks the upturn of the show — not that it starts out terrible, but it is somewhat repetitive until about halfway through. In the previous episode, Basara launched a giant speaker into the enemy bridge…

…and rocked the commander so hard that his space-vampirism went wild and stole Basara’s voice. And yes, this is exactly as cool as it sounds, and by the time you’ve seen 26 episodes of Macross 7 it’ll seem perfectly reasonable.

The villainous Protodeviln strike again in episode 27, and the Macross 7 fleet’s most effective defense, Basara’s voice, remains out of commission. Now, in accordance with Macross 7 logic, there’s only one solution to a problem like this — namely, rock at it until it gets better. And that’s exactly what happens.

What’s the first thing Basara says when he gets his voice back? Nothing — he rock-screams a beam of song energy.

This is crazy and ridiculous and everything that makes Macross 7 great. And it is by no means the only scene of its kind; it’s simply the one I most remember.

Macross Frontier: Sheryl/Ranka

My kneejerk reaction to Macross Frontier is that it introduced into the franchise two things that Macross really could’ve done without — Alto Saotome and Ranka Lee. Now, let me qualify that — I don’t hate either character by any means. Ranka is fine, and Alto is…tolerable, anyway. In fact, I think Frontier does a fairly good job of making its characters feel like people. It’s more about what these characters represent. It’s strange seeing 21st-century moe in Macross (as opposed to late 20th-century moe, admittedly), and I’ve never liked the brooding emo kid protagonist mold into which Alto fits quite nicely. But again, this is just a kneejerk reaction, and I can’t fault Macross for changing with the times.

Now that I’m done being a curmudgeon, I’ll say that Frontier does have its high points. For one thing, the interaction between the show’s two pop idols is always enjoyable. And I’m fascinated by Sheryl Nome, or by how the show handled her — I was ready to hate her the moment I saw her, and before the end she had captured my heart in that way she’s so famous for. Generally fiction isn’t able to do that for me, and I keep on disliking those characters I peg as unsavory in the beginning, and so I have to give Frontier credit on that account.

The concerts are good (especially when they coincide with battles), and the many little interactions between Sheryl and Ranka are good, but my favorite scene with the two is this one — the pop-off. And for this, it’ll have to be video.

(Yes, the conversion process did something terrible to the subtitles — sorry about that.)

Check Alto out. He looks terrified — as if he doesn’t know what’s going on here! But then the Macross protagonist usually doesn’t, does he?

Oh, and for the record, Sheryl is great, but I still think Ranka is better for Alto. Or that Alto is better for Ranka. Either way, Alto/Ranka.

So! We’ve done My Neighbor Totoro, Hoshi no Samidare, Casshern Sins, Bokurano, Onani Master Kurosawa, Mahou Sensei Negima!, Yotsuba&!, Mushishi, Gunbuster and Diebuster, Toradora!, Aria –and here, at the pinnacle of my twelve moments of 2009, the venerable Macross. From where I’m sitting, it’s been a good year for anime and manga; I hope it’s been the same for you.

Charming, really.

By the time you read this, I’ll be on a plane to Texas. I’ll be out of town until the 30th, and mostly absent from the internet, so if I fail to address your comments in a timely fashion, that would be why. But keep an eye on this blog and pontif.us; I’ll have posts scheduled through the end of December.

With that said, today’s title references one of Schneider’s moments, which, if you’ve read it, may act as a kind of complement to this post. Though, as a Minori fan, he may not be too thrilled that I’m pointing to his moment as complementary to this one.

I always liked Minori, actually. I was prepared to like her from the beginning. Yui Horie had something to do with it, granted, but Minori was generally just a fun character. And that thirteenth episode — I mean damn. I watched it last Christmas, in the late morning or early afternoon, and I remember thinking that Japan and its media-producing machinery had given me a fine gift, and being annoyed that I hadn’t seen it early enough to include it among my twelve moments of 2008.

But this post isn’t about that episode. This post is about Ami.

You may recall the cadre of bloggers who threw their support behind Ami nearly as soon as the show introduced her. I was not among them. Toradora! seemed to posit her as a wrench in everyone’s gears, a generally not-very-nice person, and I bought it wholesale. But as the show progressed, something happened. Ami changed — either the “real” Ami began to emerge from behind her stalwart shield of bitchery, or her two personalities, the public and the private, began to merge into a more “complete” Ami. Possibly I changed, too. I finally began to get a sense of her depth. I realized at some point that her criticisms of her friends’ romantic foibles were my criticisms. She was my voice personified as a high school girl.

And when, during the eventful twenty-first episode, she just couldn’t stand for Minori’s bullshit anymore…

Goddamn this scene is uncomfortable.

Someone should make a Toradora fighting game.

…her fist was my fist.

But by the same token, Minori’s face was my face, her chest was my chest. I didn’t realize this until it occurred to me how much this scene hurt.

Minori’s tactic for dealing with Ryuuji’s feelings is simple: “If I ignore it, maybe it’ll go away.” It’s rough, being on the receiving end of that. I get how Ami feels; I tend to be a little upset, too, when I see my friends being jerked around by people they have feelings for. Ami’s way of dealing with her frustration here is not exceedingly mature, no. But to her credit, Minori hit her first. And it’s not as if she hasn’t been embroiled in this tangled and sometimes melodramatic web of teenage romance all along — she just succumbs to a moment of exceptional weakness here.

But I get how Minori feels, too. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve employed her tactic. Oh, have I employed it — my talent for avoiding telling people how I really feel about them has become legendary. I’m not proud of myself, but it is what it is, and so I think I understand Minori’s reasoning. As long as she’s able to ignore it, things don’t have to change; everyone can remain friends, and everything can carry on as it always has. What’s more, she doesn’t want to cause problems for Ryuuji and Taiga, regardless of what form their relationship takes in the end. Minori certainly isn’t acting out of ill will; if anything, it’s the opposite. I’d guess that she simply doesn’t know what else she should do.

You can see how problematic this scene is for me when I relate to both characters involved. Ami, my more jaded, self-aware, reasonable side, attacks Minori, my well-intentioned but cowardly side. Who do I side with? Well, neither, ultimately, because I’m both. It was a little shocking to see one of my internal conflicts represented in animation like this. And it’s still difficult to watch; I never know whether I should laugh or cry.

[Read the next moment here]

Awwww yeaaahh!

I’m actually squeezing two things in together here [joke cut], but you’re grown-up, you’ll deal with the inevitable heartbreak.

The first thing that made my heart well up in all sorts of happy glee, in this show, was the awesomeness.  I think it actually contains some two metric tons more awesome than Mazinger Z, but then I was always a sucker for awesome-physical fighting — and Sengoku Basara doesn’t space out the awesome with twenty episodes of grunting, like some shows I could name.  It helps that Production I.G. animated this show; they’re not fucking around when it comes to animation, those guys.  It helps the show achieve a kind of fighting aesthetic only a few things can call a personal thing — Cowboy Bebop, again with its animation, alongside the music, had its own fighting aesthetic, that managed to cross through martial arts, gunfights, and space combat.  Bruce Lee’s oddly formalized, frozen-to-hot-handed-combat style is also a kind of personal aesthetic.  You can think of others, I’m sure, but my point is not everything manages to do this.  This show manages it, and it’s filled with so much GAR and awesome and ass-kicking that it’s simply a joy to watch, even when someone’s not actually fighting.

The second “moment” is more specific.  It’s that melange of scenes, once Date gets his people back from the crazy old man guy.  Everything in that episode and the two following can be described as “loyalty-porn.”  Lots of shows, movies, and books all throw around loyalty, and if it’s not entirely cliched we feel a little warm and satisfied inside.  But Sengoku Basara does it so damn well I’m tempted to say I’ve never seen anything do it better.  The show makes you feel that these people know they need each other, but would do their damnedest to keep their honor cleared anyway.  It’s a network of obligation that doesn’t really use guilt — one could argue any kind of obligation implies a kind of guilt, but what the show does is remove what may be true from the equation.  For these people an obligation is something you’re almost glad to have.  It’s a kind of sign showing they’re who they say they are.  It’s one of the primary sins of their enemies, Nobunaga and his people:  they entirely ignore their obligations, to one another and to everyone else.

As almost everything else on the list so far, I haven’t finished this show.  I hope to once I finish Mazinger Z.  Sigh.

12 Days 9 (of twelve):  awesome people and the love of honor that binds them!

Chia Pet scroll: do want.

If asked to identify the most enjoyable character I read about in the past year, I may not settle on Ginko, but he’d at least put up a hell of a fight.

Let’s talk about the D&D alignment system for a minute — not the oversimplified gradient of fourth edition (what the hell is “unaligned,” anyway?), but the 3×3 grid that came into being with AD&D. Or, because a lot of you are aware of the D&D alignment system already, let’s talk about my relationship with it. As a teenager I fancied myself a rebel — this was no more true of me than it is of any suburban American teenager, but that’s what I wanted to be, and so I liked to think I was chaotic good, champion of the people in spite of the law. But as I grew older, I grew more moderate, or at least I realized I was more lawful than I had admitted to myself. Chaos was overrated anyway. Thenceforth I was neutral good, an opponent of villainy above all else. Neutral good seemed a reasonable place to be, for a while.

I’ve changed quite a bit in the past few years, however, and though I still tend to get neutral good on the alignment test, I’ve developed a healthy respect for true neutrality. Perhaps this is my way of acknowledging that the world wouldn’t be what it is without good things and bad, that balance is paramount, or perhaps it indicates my awareness that such a thing as an alignment “system” could never adequately describe human inclinations (though I like to think I knew as much all along). Whatever the case may be, I’ve come to enjoy characters who are equal parts order and chaos, good and evil, characters who seek to understand things as they are. Kino of Kino’s Journey is one such character. Mushishi’s Ginko is another.

Yes, I know Ginko makes his living as a traveling healer, of sorts. I don’t think he’s unconcerned with the lives of people; that isn’t really what true neutrality is all about. But he values equally the lives of Mushi, it seems, or he simply doesn’t judge life in terms of worth at all.

When I think of Ginko’s approach to things, I think firstly of the manga’s tenth chapter, Ginko’s encounter with the Watahaki. What we have here is a bad situation all around: a woman who desperately wants a child is infected by a mushi that gestates in her womb, emerges, secrets itself away under the house, and produces “limbs,” of sorts, which take the form of the child the woman would have borne. (Again, I have to scan my own manga here, so the quality won’t be great.)

Maybe it'll grow up to be a perfectly handsome gelatinous cube.

Kill it with fire?

Ginko is called in when the false children begin to die. They have short lifespans, he explains, and, upon death, they will disseminate countless Watahaki seeds; it’s best to do away with them before that happens, or else more families could suffer the same fate. But Aki has come to identify the things as her children.

First rule of Mushishi: always listen to Ginko.

At the behest of Aki and her husband, Ginko leaves the situation alone for the time being, urging the couple not to neglect to kill the children before they release their seeds. But before that becomes necessary, things take a strange turn, one Ginko could not have predicted — the Watahaki becomes self-aware, or it learns enough language to demonstrate that it has been self-aware all along. It’s clearly too dangerous to leave alive. But Ginko holds no malice against it; he does away with it because that’s the only thing he can do.

Makes sense.

The mushi want to live; humanity wants to live; when the two end up at odds with one another, one side will live and the other will die. That’s nature.

But, again, Ginko doesn’t especially want to kill the Watahaki, and in the end he allows it to live as long as it can in a diminished form.

That thing is still pretty creepy.

I suppose I respect Ginko for his ability to do what needs to be done. And I have to give him credit for not reveling in it, even if his victory is a victory for the human race. He’s about as impartial and logical as he can be while upholding his responsibility to his species and his general respect for life of all kinds. I doubt I could ever manage such a balance; perhaps that’s why I’m fascinated by Ginko’s having done so.

[Read the next moment here]

Says the girl in the bunny suit.

I haven’t exactly neglected to mention Negima! in the past year. I’ve written about Nodoka and Yue, my favorite members of Negi’s unwieldy harem, and Ako, who starts out as a bit player, but comes into her own, and with a vengeance. What’s left to write about?

“What’s left to write about?” Ha!

I thought of continuing what I began with my Ako post, which just scrapes the surface of her character and then promptly ends. But let’s save that for later. Instead, because you asked for it, let’s talk a little about Chisame. And I do mean a little; we’re talking about a manga that’s currently over 270 chapters long here, and Chisame plays into quite a bit of it. But we can at least try to get a handle on what she’s about — which, I think, is probably the tallest hurdle a blogger writing about Chisame would need to jump.

(And yeah, I know this isn’t a “moment,” per se. If I were to choose one moment, it’d be something from my Nodoka/Yue post, but I don’t want to repeat myself. Still, I have to give Negima! credit for being generally momentous somehow.)

Negima! handles most things rather metafictionally. Characters are established within archetypal (or perhaps stereotypical) frames only so that they might comment upon or subvert these frames as they develop. Ako is the generic minor character; Nodoka is the timid one; Yue is the quiet and strange one; Asuna is the tsundere and the magic-canceling swordsperson, the dense fighter — the list goes on. Here we run into our first problem. What type or trope is Chisame supposed to represent?

When we’re first made privy to her thoughts (in chapter twelve), we might assume she’s another kind of tsundere — that quality has been bestowed upon Asuna already, but it’s hardly homogeneous.

They, uh, need the exercise?

Tsundere is old enough and prevalent enough that it takes a number of forms. There’s romance-tsundere and friend-tsundere; there’s oldschool tsundere (the character warms up over time, with relative permanence) and new-school tsundere (the character switches from cold to warm and back throughout); there’s local tsundere (which applies mostly to the character’s relationship with one other character) and global tsundere (applying more generally to the character’s interactions with others). And of course there are all sorts of things in between, since absolute extremes are rare in any case. Asuna’s tsundere is more local, while Chisame’s is more global; Asuna is more representative of the new school and Chisame the old; Asuna’s tsundere is more about romance (I’d say, though I guess that’s debatable) while Chisame’s is not so specific. The difference here is that Chisame’s tsundere is mostly played straight (so far), and that sets her apart, in a way, from the heavily self-referential cast. For comparison, Asuna’s is undercut by the fact that the object of her conflicted feelings is ten years old, and it’s complicated to some degree by her relationship with Takahata. The former might be true of Chisame, but not until quite late in the story.

So I suppose Chisame might provide for tsundere fans who aren’t buying what Asuna is selling. But she’s hardly the tsundere character of the cast insofar as she doesn’t really act as a nexus of commentary thereupon. But then what is she?

srs bsns is srs

She usually has her serious face on, at least in public. She’s not one for nonsense, and this renders her contrary, most of the time, to most of the class; her potential allies in this regard (Evangeline?) are themselves loners, for whatever reason. And she’s an impressive skeptic with impressive powers of deduction — well, no, her deductive abilities may not be that impressive, but she’s allowed by the narrative to figure things out on her own when most characters aren’t, as the festival arc demonstrates.

Seriously, she can't be the only one able to work this out.

Negima! isn’t hesitant to poke fun at itself for its conceits. Chisame may be one of the ways it does so; while most are willing to attribute the veritable miracles of the school festival’s tournament to “special effects,” Chisame essentially uses them as evidence to figure Negi out. Perhaps this is less impressive, so to speak, than the fact that nobody else can do so — but then, if I remember correctly, Chisame becomes instrumental in ensuring that the secrets of the magi aren’t revealed to the world. The point is that she’s no idiot. She may be a little genre-savvy, even, albeit not as much so as Haruna — or perhaps not about the same things.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Returning to chapter twelve, we find that Chisame also values normalcy.

If you want 'normal,' you may want to try another manga.

This may be a natural extension of her seriousness, granted, but it probably deserves mention on its own. Hers is an impressive shell. I mean, this is the class that got Ako to relax and open up a little, the class in which even Nodoka feels relatively comfortable. And here Chisame keeps herself separate, condemning the lot of her classmates for ruining her “normal school life.”

Also, she’s a net idol.

Er...surprise?

Well that comes out of left field — but does it really? For one thing, there’s been a connection between computers and the supernatural in the Akamatsuverse (if such a thing can be said to exist) since A.I. Love You/Ai ga Tomaranai. It isn’t so surprising that the internet would feature into Negima!, a comic ostensibly about magic, as long as Akamatsu-sensei’s at the helm. And, really, if she can’t express herself in “real life,” or if she doesn’t feel that she can, why wouldn’t Chisame turn to the internet? It’s served as a haven for many who are too disillusioned or too reticent for human interaction in their “normal” lives.

But that she’s skilled with computers and knows a few things about costumes brings us back to her genre savvy. Or perhaps, given her otaku inclinations, we should call it audience awareness. She knows something of moe…

Moe is, after all, part of the basic repertoire of the manga female.

…and is evidently no stranger to cosplay.

Chisame, president of Genshiken, Mahora Branch.

Ah, but she’s no straightforward, brazen otaku.

It's maybe a little late to worry about that.

True colors?

I think I’m finally starting to get a handle on what makes Chisame tick. She’s Negima’s commentary on its audience — and, as commentary, I suspect she hits rather close to home for some of us. Perhaps branding her “tsundere” does her a disservice. She’s simply insecure. She doesn’t know what people will think of her if her hobbies become common knowledge, and she doesn’t want to know; her fear that the “real” Chisame isn’t good enough keeps her from forming meaningful relationships. In all likelihood her insecurity isn’t even tied inexorably to her hobbies. That she’s into things that aren’t “normal” just gives her a convenient focal point for her worries, worries that are in fact more fundamental.

I understand her position (perhaps all too well). And I think I understand why, to Chisame, internet stardom is “what being loved is all about.”

Quite a transformation sequence, this.

But I don’t agree.

Here’s what Ghostlightning has to say about love in Macross and its fandom.

… All these Macross fans who supposedly ‘love’ the Misas and the Sheryls of the franchise talking about ‘loving’ a character who ‘deserves’ it. I like these characters a great deal. But love? PFFFT. That ain’t love. That’s too easy. It’s easy to appreciate excellent qualities such as maturity and strength, decision-making and competence under pressure. Loving a character for those qualities is safe and conservative.

If it fits in the pocket of one’s preferences. That’s not love at all! That’s like saying I love anime and only mentioning Ghibli films, and maybe Legend of the Galactic Heroes. That’s not love! Appreciating such excellence is what you’re supposed to do. [Ghostlightning, "Discovered Deculture: My Fair Minmay ~ Dreaming Prelude"]

And in a reply to my comment on that post, he added:

Rather than overlook, I’d rather choose ‘forgive’ as the operative recourse [regarding the flaws of the object of love]. I’m not into the ‘blind’ kind of love that overlooking may lead us to adopt, not that some amount of overlooking will inevitably occur.

Chisame seeks “love” in a place she knows she’ll find it, and at any rate what she gets from her fans isn’t any kind of love. These people don’t know her. They haven’t accepted her quirks and her flaws for what they are. They’ve never seen a picture of her that hasn’t been doctored in Photoshop, and they don’t know her real name. What Chisame presents isn’t Chisame, but Chiu; the fans love, or think they love, Chiu. Perhaps this love is indeed “real,” but the object of love is not. Chisame remains a spectator, living vicariously through her creation.

Genuine love is not so easy — I don’t doubt that Chisame realizes this on some level. Perhaps this realization is itself the source of her insecurity; perhaps she knows, or thinks she knows, that the greatest threat to her “normal school life” is herself. Or perhaps she has erected her shell to keep in the illusion, or the delusion, that such a thing as normal school life exists at all.

[Read the next moment here]