Oh Lord, you’re probably thinking. This again.
Moment the Ninth: Sorry, kid
By Pontifus on 17 December 2009 | Manga | 7 Comments[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]
Who wants to live forever?
Alright, this is the last of my Moments Twelve about death giving meaning to life, or allowing life to mean, or what have you. I’ve just been into that as a theme lately, I guess. And you may know that I can’t put said theme to rest without bringing Bokurano into it.
Moment the Eleventh: By her own fists
By Pontifus on 15 December 2009 | Manga | 5 Comments[Read the previous moment here]
Hell, this is almost as weird as FLCL.
Talk about an underdog. I mean, let me lay this out for you: Hoshi no Samidare (otherwise The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer — yeah, I know) is about a giant hammer poised to smash the world at the whim of “the Mage,” Animus, and the dysfunctional crew assembled seemingly at total random to deal with this threat.
12 Days 1: Rideback
By Cuchlann on 15 December 2009 | Anime | 2 Comments
Sorry I am late with my first 12 Days post. I had to spend yesterday studying for my final exam, which I took this morning. So here I am, hat in hand, to do two posts in one day — as Pontifus and I are alternating, the even days I’ll be posting here and Pontifus at his site, then the odd days I’ll be at my site and Pontifus here.
So anyway. Rideback.
Multimedia adaptation and the act of consumption: an outline
By Pontifus on 24 November 2009 | Art and Culture, Literature | 5 Comments
Live action Tanyuu is...live action?
Like Cuchlann, I find myself mired in schoolwork and related things. It’s Thanksgiving break, yes, but it’s still difficult to blog when I know I should be writing an essay about Darwinian rhetoric in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or researching transversal poetics and presentism. But fortunately, my research interests being what they are, schoolwork and blog-work overlap from time to time. More often than not, maybe.
What follows is the list of notes (and a few visuals) I used to give a presentation on adaptation and all it entails — or, rather, as much of what it entails as I could fit in twenty minutes or so. My research has centered on the novel-to-film variety, but most of it seems more broadly relevant. These being personal notes more than anything, I make no guarantees as to their cohesiveness, but they should at least be legible — and, with any luck, somewhat interesting.
Here are knockers indeed! [post 1 of the Cuchlann fanservice series]
By Cuchlann on 15 November 2009 | Anime | 10 CommentsIf a man were porter of Hell Gate…
Fanservice! We all know it, we all, ah, have a strong opinion about it. Is it good, is it bad? Is it neutral? Can we even say that about something so polarizing?
[note: I wrote this back in July. My semester continues terrible, and I should really be reading theory, Dickinson, and James Hogg right now. But I've decided to post this, which is really unfinished. I wanted to make this a post of three sections, examining a show in each. As it is, it works as the beginning of a mini-series, and hopefully once the break arrives I can write parts two and three.]
Five rules of funny molestation
By Pontifus on 10 August 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture, Literature, Manga | 15 Comments
In real life, molestation isn’t funny, so don’t think I’m condoning your trip to Japan whereupon you will hit the subways, so to speak. But in anime and manga, sexual molestation is used in service of humor as often as it’s an agent of personal horror, and there seems to exist an unspoken code governing the line between the two.
Don’t think this is all about cultural implications, either. Such narrative machinations as humor can be deliciously structural. Not that the examples I look at here are off the social hook, per se, but we’ll look at that on a case-by-case basis.
(Edit 9/8 — Let this comment serve as a brief addendum in answer to those parts of this post that weren’t thought through as well as perhaps they should’ve been.)
Super Fanitheme 3, presented for your consideration
By Pontifus on 8 August 2009 | SFCentral | 27 CommentsUpdate 8/9: I’m going live with the new theme now, after making some changes based on the feedback I got here. You’re welcome to keep commenting with suggestions (and bear in mind that I have yet to decide what else to do with the header, so there may be a place for more color up there).
Lest you thought my Twitter comment about revamping the site was an act of impulse, mere offhand rambling, I present to you the basically-finished prototype of Super Fanitheme 3.0, a simplified, cleaned-up affair compared to what we have now. All I need now are thoughts on how it might be made better.
The front page, with image caption formatting
More sections offered for your perusal after the break.
Geographies
By Cuchlann on 6 August 2009 | Anime | 9 Comments
The Tick protects. . . The City.
Where does Bakemonogatari take place? In a city, that’s in Japan, which is a country in a world that has gods and ghosts. But the city is strange. Not on its own behalf — it’s not a warped place, like Sunnydale or something. It’s stranged for the inhabitants by the events that take place within it. Or really, perhaps it is stranged by the people themselves, making their own surroundings into mystery.