I offer you a quote from Ghostlightning, whose ongoing effort to engage with Cowboy Bebop’s love-remembering elements is one of the most meticulous and goddamn heroic blog activities I’ve ever seen:

We won’t find anything in Cowboy Bebop that has a reference that figures so significantly in the narrative so as to be the primary source of meaning and value. Cowboy Bebop can be fully enjoyed not knowing a single reference or allusion the show is making.

“A Masterpiece of Remembering Love: Cowboy Bebop; Episode 01 ‘Asteroid Blues’”

I’m certain that’s true. I’m enjoying Cowboy Bebop quite a lot despite being lazy about music and film (as mentioned before). I might be intimidated by the prospect of doing a series like this at the same time as Ghostlightning — walking in the shadows of giants and all, though he of all bloggers wouldn’t want anyone to feel that way — if not for my being reasonably confident that I won’t cover too much of the same ground. This is my first viewing of the show, for one thing. And, where GL’s Bebop posts are love songs to the act of remembering love, I like to write about and fangasm over structural points of interest and masterful acts of manipulation moments of emotional resonance.

Good thing, too. For someone like me, Cowboy Bebop is downright meaty.

As I began, I remembered a time when cartoons from Japan were exciting and alluring and new. A very specific time, I mean. I was in the fourth grade — this was before Cowboy Bebop existed, incidentally — and somehow or another I’d managed to acquire the first few episodes of the Record of Lodoss War OVA from the local video rental place. What I remember most from that viewing isn’t Lodoss War itself (which I had to rewatch to recall in any detail), but the trailers preceding it, complete with cheesy narrator (“This isn’t animation…it’s JAPANAMATION!”). I can’t remember what specifically was previewed. Things like Bubblegum Crisis and Project A-Ko, I guess. But I remember that these trailers must have sampled the most stylish, violent and/or sexy scenes from their respective shows or movies. I was nine or ten years old and infinitely impressed. I interpreted the trailers as a promise.

Then, some years later, I finally did get into anime, and my tastes leaned well away from the realities of the kinds of shows previewed on the Lodoss War VHS tapes. But there was still that promise. Cowboy Bebop seems to have remembered it. In many ways it’s the un-show I constructed to illustrate “anime” in my mental dictionary.

The second thing I noticed was the pacing.

The pacing is weird, which is to say that it’s a little atypical of anime. Often you’re lulled into believing that you’re watching a movie, and you’re surprised when the ending theme kicks in after 22 minutes. Speaking purely practically, it’s a damn effective way of getting people to keep watching.

But it can be disorienting if you come in with expectations. You aren’t always watching people talk or fight or otherwise interact. Sometimes there are no people onscreen, and during many of these scenes the characters don’t bother interjecting via voice-over. There may not even be any music.

The first episode especially shows us a lot of space.

I found myself wondering about the point of it all. It reminded me of the first Star Trek movie — you know, the one in which there’s about ten minutes of plot and 300 hours of pretty lights and spaceships moving really slowly.

That might be an unfair comparison, but I don’t mean it as a criticism. The spaceships-moving-slowly thing works so much better in Bebop. It doesn’t take up that much time, in the grand 26-episode scheme. And it occurs to me that, when I said that Bebop shows us space, I probably should’ve said that it shows us spaces.

Environment (visual, aural) is important in this show in a way that it wasn’t in the Star Trek movie. A comparison with the original Star Trek TV run would be more apt (though not perfect; I’ll get to that when I talk about the cast). Place is a force or “character” here, though not in the same way as in, say, Kino’s Journey. Here it’s less immediately, directly powerful and far more talkative.

If, like me, you pay more attention to the scenes and their transitions than to the dialogue (resulting in many a rewind, let me tell you), you might get the impression that Cowboy Bebop is a show in constant conversation with itself. I don’t mean that it’s “meta” (that it talks to relevant things outside itself), which certainly it is (and does). I mean that its consistency reminds me of an active thought process or an internal monologue. It’s a little like catechism, in other words, albeit considerably cooler.

In the first seven episodes, I notice at least two distinct models for scenes in conversation. There seem to be others, but the following are the most sustained and least personal, and I can make the strongest cases for them.

Q. Does [x] have value? A. Yes.

Ghostlightning again:

I hesitate to use the term “middlebrow” because it is generally used negatively or even derisively, for people or works who “put on highbrow airs” while remaining populist and accessible. Put in a clumsier way, it’s a kind of pretentiousness. But I will use it here for Cowboy Bebop, not only because it has excellent episodes “to balance” lowbrow content as one would classify “Heavy Metal Queen” [episode seven] of being, but rather because the execution of this episode is on a high level.

“Raising the Brow: B-Movie Goodness in Cowboy Bebop 07 ‘Heavy Metal Queen’”

I sympathize quite a lot with the use of “middlebrow” as a nonjudgmental descriptor, but maybe Cowboy Bebop resists such classifications altogether. It almost has no choice but to do so. Some of the creators seem to be the sorts of people who set out to make “art,” but they’re working in a medium that gets panned in the evening news as a gathering of pornographers (and, remember, Bebop aired in 1998). Several avenues of argument are available to people in that position. They could try to topple the canon, at which point all art is low; they could try to expand the canon, at which point more art is high. They could redefine the canon, even. But the real problem is that people talk and think about art in these terms to begin with — that people are inclined to distrust any medium that isn’t 400 years old, and, when such a medium finally earns some “legitimacy,” that its practitioners insist upon rewarding themselves by setting up new divisions of their devising and under their control. The child abused by its parent responds by abusing smaller children.

Cowboy Bebop looks into the eyes of those with brows lowered and those with brows raised high. I don’t think it seeks a compromise so much as it shaves its own brows clean away.

Nowhere early in the show is this more explicit than in the fifth episode, which juxtaposes, in subsequent scenes, an opera house and a convenience store, (religious) opera and porno.

There’s much to be gleaned from the contrast here, but what interests me most is that, by the time all’s said and done at each of these locations, the lines between them have been blurred. The opera house becomes a stage for smut, location of rather messy murder and fanservice vehicle Faye Valentine (who is more than that, yes, but she is a fanservice vehicle). The convenience store with its racks of porn hosts a meeting of old friends the likes of which you might find in a Hemingway story, a brand of narrative with the cultural seal of approval. In any given story there is pondering and pandering. Cowboy Bebop doesn’t try to obscure that by arranging its brows in a particular way; it throws its trenchcoat open and invites you to look.

Oh, also: that fight in the Chartres Cathedral facsimile.

Among other things, Chartres Cathedral is an enduring example of French Gothic architecture, a demonstration of the power of symbols cited by Joseph Campbell, and a launchpad for philosophizing about art, art-making, and authority for Orson Welles and other filmmakers.

Spike Spiegel blows it up with a hand grenade.

Q. Does [x] belong to [y]? A. You’d be surprised.

Cowboy Bebop is really quite American, in the United States sense (apologies in advance if you object to the U.S. appropriation of a word that means two continents; for my purposes, it’s just convenient). You’ve got things like long-distance trucking and hitchhiking, staples of American literature and film thanks to the breadth of the country and the highway system.

You’ve got a Mexican/Tijuanan cantina, “American” by virtue of its being little more than a site of activity for people who aren’t necessarily Mexican (i.e. Asimov Solensen), as in film westerns. (Incidentally, “El Rey” is the name of a fictional town inhabited by American expatriates.)

And you’ve got the music — jazz, blues, occasionally metal. The first in particular represents a mashup of cultural traditions from throughout the world, but it’s generally thought to be distinctly American because the U.S. is where the synthesis happened.

Jet Black is a fan of jazz and blues. We can understand this. He’s (kind of) a cool guy, for one thing. He’s an adult, and he doesn’t seem to be young anymore at that. Lacking the left arm with which he was born, he’s clearly seen and done some things. We’re not surprised that this is the character who dreams about Charlie Parker quoting Goethe.

He makes a comment about singing the blues in the womb or something. But in seven eleven episodes we don’t see him act upon that. He’s lived the blues, sure, but he never gets around to playing them.

In Cowboy Bebop, this is the face of the blues:

Yep, a little white kid. He’s in the news and everything. This image is made jarring by its providing a source for the soundtrack of Spike’s weird episode-opening daydreaming, and then for Jet’s deferring to the kid’s harmonica mastery.

We learn as the sixth episode carries on that this isn’t technically a kid. He “suffers” from a peculiar kind of illness. But despite the episode’s being called “Sympathy for the Devil,” we’re never really shown how hard it is to live as he does, apart from one scene in which his parents/guardians die. Mostly he just makes life difficult for people around him — in a literal way, he is the blues, or he brings them. Being the episode’s titular devil, he might interface with the devil stuff in blues mythology, but I don’t know much about that.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, though I may be inventing a correlation between screencaps here, the whole sixth episode has to do with expectations defied. I’m not going forward without prompting.

Now, how to untangle this?

I suppose it’s partly cautionary. In other words, be careful when making assumptions about the art that a particular person might find enjoyable, applicable, or otherwise useful. Maybe the corollary is that paying attention to the art that a person actually, actively finds useful can tell you something about them, but I’m not so sure about that. Taste is slippery.

I tend to think of it as a nod toward Cowboy Bebop’s appropriating as much as it does from the U.S. and elsewhere. Art may have cultural boundaries in terms of the knowledge it requires of you, but it has no physical boundaries, especially in a setting including both the internet and FTL travel. Jazz doesn’t belong to the United States (or to cool people, or whomever), nor do trucking or hitchhiking as tropes (or as activities, really). The jazz song is an object that transcends physicality and ownership, whatever the IP barons would like you to believe. You hear it and it’s yours. It doesn’t matter if you’re Charlie Parker or a little white kid or a Japanese anime director.

Much like a Haruki Murakami novel, Cowboy Bebop exemplifies or performs this idea even when the scenes aren’t riffing off of each other to that effect. This is almost inevitably what happens as you watch; unless you’re familiar with every culture and every nuance thrown into the mix, you’re appropriating things or being asked to — and I always did appreciate stories that ask you to learn something.

You may wonder how I ended up with a sample group of seven episodes here. Post length, partly. And also because these won’t exactly be “episodic” posts — the episode progression won’t entirely determine the order in which I do things. I’ll have points to make. There will be overlap.

Next up: episodes 1-7 again, plus 8-11, and characters. I may do something about Gibsonian hackermancy, too. We’ll see.

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.

A year after I wrote the first entry, I’m finally getting around to the second. Hurrah! Unsurprisingly, I want to take on the fanservice in High School of the Dead, the new zombie anime that’s taking the world of awesome by storm.

There are a lot of different things I can say about the fanservice of the show, even from the two episodes I’ve seen at this point. In fact, most of them I thought of during episode one, and two simply didn’t change my mind. Many of them are obvious, some of them are easy, but a few might be particularly fascinating.

Freud, high school, and zombies

This is one of the obvious ones. Any time service is juxtaposed with teenagers we could take the Freud angle — and with the undead and violence involved? Ha!

High school is a boiling pool of hormones. We all know this. It’s why even someone like me, who doesn’t spend too much time reliving high school, still likes high school anime — it makes for great drama. Everyone’s angry all the time, shit’s going on in the body no one understands — and that reminds me: NO ONE UNDERSTANDS, MAN! It’s also representative of the traditional time we all went through our awakening sexual drives.

It can be easily argued in any show or comic following a high schooler that any fanservice serves to outline the thought processes of the character. Biological urges take focus away from other applications when you’re seventeen and full of testosterone. The old biological saw is that males are at their sexual peak at seventeen. So even if it doesn’t seem to make sense for the show, fanservice can be viewed as a way of easing the reader into the place the main character inhabits, and part of that place is a maddening inability to stop focusing on sex.

HotD runs full force with this, coupling it with a Freudian angle. Freud generally comes up whenever sex and horror go together (and they usually do go together). I could do a bunch of different things with this combination now. There’s Freud’s dichotomy between the Pleasure principle and the Death principle, abandon and control, generation and destruction, and how the two are constantly interacting.

Indeed, much of the zombie craze (of which I’m a part — love zombies) can be attributed to our desire for control. Monsters with carefully crafted kill points give us ways of using knowledge to exert control. A professor of mine once brought up in class why Van Helsing spends so much time on how to kill Dracula, given that they never do any of those things to him. It’s the same as the zombie survival guide and the rules in Zombieland; follow the rules, keep your head, and you survive, proving your strength and your worth. You trample down the Death principle in all of us; you exert control over your strange desire for death, you keep away from the voice telling you to jump, wondering what it’ll be like to shamble. Poe called it the “imp of the perverse” decades before Freud wrote. Fortify yourself, the zombie tale says, and you will prevail over this thing inside you. Compelling stuff in a story set in a high school, where one’s insides are sometimes one’s own worst enemy.

Then there’s Freud’s id/ego/supergo complex. Literal translations from the German would be it/I/over-I. the id is the hungry one, the bad angel on the shoulder of Marlowe’s Faust, the one that wants. The ego is you, you as you conceive yourself, the open, conscous part that sees things thinks about stuff. The superego is the instilled, subconscious internalizations of external, societal and familial things. Your “conscience” that happens to coincide with what your parents taught you, imported from outside and placed within.

These things fight inside us, so fiction dealing with them would externalize them so we can watch. Zombies feed, zombies want and desire and take and eat and never sleep and never think and never look or watch or second-guess. They’re the id, the “it,” the terrible Other within us. They’re consumers (not just in Romero’s sense); they eat. Let me stop being so general.

The love triangle of HotD is between the normal, slightly nervous kid, the average pretty girl, and the controlled, talented overachiever. Said controlled kid is the one who becomes a zombie. His id, we could say, is let loose and he becomes something that feeds. We all have to eat. It’s Cartesian dualism — we don’t like to be reminded that our bodies are machines. Disgust with eating or crapping is often disgust with the mechanical parts of ourselves. Suddenly the controlled kid is trying to assault and consume the beautiful woman, and she is an object of consumption — her breasts bounce, her panties show. The controlled kid is suddenly not so controlled, and in his undeath he seeks what he was repressing in life.

Phenomenological squick-out

Of course, the zombies aren’t the only ones seeing the panties and the boobs. We are, too. Those of us who feel any degree of arousal are perking up, and those of us who aren’t see the sexual nature of the teens, and then zombies are eating them, consuming them like objects of lust or food. Sensuality escapes in one form or another — except that suddenly our consumption of the characters becomes a grinding of their sinews and bones between zombie teeth. I was freaked out, at first, by the immediate pairing, all through the first episode, of service and gore. Violence and sex may be somehow cross-coded in our brains — or our entertainment — but whoa. Of course, we’re the targets of horror. We sympathize with the characters under assault, enjoy their breakaways — why else the fine tradition, here upheld, of improvised weapons in zombie lore? Power drill? Nail gun with a plywood stock? Fuck yes!

Dude, have you seen Dead/Alive? Watch this shit, I’ll wait:

Awesome. Not only do we experience the horror through the sufferings of the characters; we suffer too. Characters we like die; horrible things happen to innocent teenagers just trying to live their lives; best friends turn on each other like rabid dogs; blood gouts; eyes flatten and the soul leaves the body.

Where’s the fanservice here? Doesn’t it freak you out, to see someone’s panties as they’re screaming and zombies are ripping them apart? It freaks me out. That is entirely the wrong time to be looking at a lady’s underpants. But then, anything we look at during this violence is inappropriate. Isn’t it? What do you look at, when someone’s being mutilated? Their face? Their feet?

Blazoning and vulnerability: a touch of feminism

Blazoning is the traditional poetic technique of breaking the subject of a love poem into parts and, each in turn, talking about how wonderful each part is. Shakespeare plays with two variations of this Petrarchan theme: in Romeo and Juliet, act two scene two — the balcony scene, silly — Juliet blazons Romeo. This isn’t how it works, not in a patriarchal poetic tradition. Blazoning is the poetic version of objectifying a woman. T&A, yes? Rather than M.A.? The woman is there for the parts we can look at, rather than the person. Blazoning compares teeth to pearls, lips to rubies, but never really talks about the person, either wholly or personality-wise.  You should be able to guess Shakespeare’s other attempt to mess with blazoning: c’mon, say it with me. “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun.”

Traditional sexist views of women, including fanservice, focus on the parts of the woman. There’s the genital area, covered by panties. There’s the outline of a breast, or a bra revealed under a rain-soaked shirt.

Do you see where we’re going yet? Blazoning and fanservice — focusing on the parts of a woman. Taking her apart. Feminist criticism has called blazoning a poetic “dismemberment” of the female form. HotD, then, is doing the same thing over and over: dismemberment. It dismembers the female form by taking it apart shot by shot: boob, panty flash, boob, thigh. Then it takes the form apart literally, with teeth and fingernails. Ghastly spurting blood. A literalization of the figurative theme underlying fanservice, that we, as consumers of the product, revel in the dismemberment of the subjects before us.

This isn’t just along gender lines, of course, though that’s the easiest thing to see (and the one that follows the fanservice). The boys are taken apart as well, right? The protagonist is, to us, a bundle of parts: he’s the typical lead, nervous, eventually vocal after too much radio silence. Suddenly he switched, broken by a situation into a badass, a different creature altogether marked by different behaviors. He’s the same person, but we view him differently.

This happens fully in-scene with the delicious tensai and her bumbling gun-fanatic companion. Not only does his facial set and expressions change when he gets a “gun” in his hands, she sees him differently, as we do. Transformations happen through focusing on different aspects of personality, rather than the personality as a whole. Through the database, rebirth.

Except, as of yet, no one’s been reborn into anything. The director of Shaun of the Dead, in a commentary, described the scene where Shaun and Ed kill two zombies and bash them so hard blood spatters up from off-screen all over them as a “baptism of blood.” The cast of HotD may be in for a similar baptism, but this early on they’re vulnerable, and the fanservice highlights this as well. In normal circumstances a public, accidental flash of someone’s underwear would be about as vulnerable as they could get… unless they get ripped apart by a mob of mindless eaters.

We are viewing these characters as building blocks, like a blazon or a pile of body parts. HotD portrays the turmoil of sexuality and the accompanying objectification as a violent dismemberment of those objectified, both male and female. The fanservice not only highlights this, it is it. By bringing to our attention, in a traditional method found in anime, of the parts of the characters through character traits and the fanservice, the show puts on display the act of dismemberment by the audience itself. Those who watch are those who consume, those who break apart. The audience is the hungering horde.

And given the love of the zombie, that’s OK.

Martin never claims that his way of valuing art applies or should apply to anyone other than himself (in a way, he actively disclaims as much). I am to blame for the degree to which this post makes such an assumption. And it may be a mistaken assumption, but it’s probably necessary if I hope to examine certain of Martin’s claims as such.

Let’s start by sketching out some of the values Martin’s post seems to imply.

As difficult as it is, I have to admit that I’m enjoying K-On. Not because it’s intelligent, thought-provoking, original or a work of art. I’m enjoying it despite it not really being any of these things, mainly because something that’s so intentionally dumb is undemanding and therefore the perfect thing for unwinding with at the end of a long day.

Yes, it’s shallow, commercialised and derivative but truthfully as long as it makes you smile, who the heck cares? I’ve done at least three drafts of this post before wiping the whole lot off the screen and starting over; this is by its very nature a show that’s difficult to write about because there’s not much to it beyond the obvious observation that it’s cute, undemanding fun.

Thus, good anime might be:

• Intelligent (caveat: “intentionally dumb” is not strictly bad)
• Thought-provoking (caveat: “undemanding” is not strictly bad)
• Original
• Art
• Cute
• Fun

Whereas bad anime might be:

• Shallow
• Commercialized
• Derivative

I’ll leave the arguments about how shows of its ilk are having a negative effect on the quality of the anime industry’s output as a whole for those who know more about it – there’s still enough stuff made that appeals to me and I don’t know enough about the Industry and its issues to speculate on that. But I am a music fan so I can’t help but (over-)think about how it fares as a show about music.

An anime about a rock band is doubly Relevant To My Interests really. …

Of significance here are Martin’s finding stories about music particularly relevant to himself, and his (wise, in my estimation) refusal to engage in doomsaying about the state of the industry as a result of moe et cetera. Again, it’s evident that Martin isn’t trying to push his art-consuming apparatus on anyone. He’s simply explicating — which is in all likelihood what makes his post so useful to me.

I’m interested in several of the modes of valuation listed above (particularly the notion that K-ON! is not especially a “work of art,” given my definition of “art” as a way in which an object is used rather than something an object is). But I’d like to focus on one of these modes in particular: originality is good; derivation is bad.

In this case, at least, I’m positive that such an approach is not unique to Martin. Here’s part of a comment by Kaioshin:

…I simply cannot relate to this school of thought that I’ve noticed cropping up…one that seems apologetic (something I agree should be unnecessary as ghostlightning points out [here]) of shows that are just mindless fluff because they are “relaxing”. I typically don’t find these school slice of life shows especially relaxing simply for the fact that I can’t stop noticing ways in which they are derivative of their predecessors in episode to episode plot lines. Derivative almost as rule.

…I also happen to agree that it won’t be around or remembered once the next school slice of life with moe girls show comes around unless it pushes the boundaries of the genre to define itself in a way that isn’t so easily emulatable. Part of the frustration I think a lot of people (myself included) feel with K-On is that it has a way in which it could be breaking from the pack in it’s music club plot-line, but rarely uses it and almost seems to want to avoid using it. Why?

Anyway I think it’s possible for a show to be relaxing without having to be derivative and commercialized…

Kaioshin is, by his own admission, literally distracted by the derivative nature of the K-ON! sort of moe show. This is not something for which he should be “blamed,” so to speak, as it isn’t something he can help. In the English-speaking world, at least, we’re riding in the wake of several literary movements which brought originality in vogue; the Romantics and high modernism come to mind. Even postmodern works, with their pastiches of cut-and-pasted elements, are expected to arrange these elements in refreshing ways. Compare Shakespeare, who (to simplify a little) ripped off as many old stories and lives of English royalty as he could manage, and appealed to his audiences by way of the familiarity of these stories and the fanservice and meta-references he inserted. Why don’t we hound Shakespeare for being derivative? Because he was influential, and he became influential by mastering the dramatic trends (i.e. market demands) of his time. Could an animation studio make waves in the industry without giving the people what they want?

Or are studios simply giving the wrong people what they want? Because, of course, producers aren’t producing moe shows to piss off a certain kind of fan. They’re catering to another kind of fan, a kind of fan regarding which Hiroki Azuma has much to say — and this fandom is as precedented by historical development as Kaioshin’s brand of fandom. Judging by recent trends, these moe fans seem to be the ones with the money, or at least the ones most willing to spend it. I’m hesitant to make any absolute claims here. But at the very least moe fandom provides an answer to Kaioshin’s question. Why does K-ON! almost insist upon not “breaking from the pack?” Because the pack is the point. The pack — the moe database, as it were — is as much an object of aesthetic appreciation as K-ON! itself. Perhaps it even eclipses the individual show. From a certain standpoint, K-ON’s derivative nature, its level of engagement with the database, is not a fault; it’s an accomplishment.

Perhaps unfortunately, then, I won’t end with some sensationalist appeal to one side over another. All sides are “right,” insofar as they can be — or at least all sides are justified in their preferences by the particularities of their life experience. You may consider this point of view symptomatic of that crippling passivity which, like so much else, happens to be the cancer that’s killing anime — and that’s fine, because you, too, are shaped by your experience, and how can I hold that against you?

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.

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…

…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.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Bakuman — I’ve read all that’s currently available, actually. It is, in a word, good, and it stands out in its self-referentiality in terms of art itself more than fandom. I could talk about that, but I won’t, as it’s plain enough to any reader, and you really should read it. I will, however, talk about the following segment.

Which brings us to our titular question: who is an otaku?

Takagi vehemently rejects the label. But he is self-admittedly and demonstrably a fan of manga. He writes manga, with the goal of having some work of his animated at some point. It’d be difficult to call him an especially casual manga-reader.

And yet he doesn’t self-identify as an otaku. If anyone around him thinks of him as such, we don’t see it. Do his creative inclinations free him from otaku status? As I understand it, an otaku in the Japanese sense is one who does something obsessively; perhaps Takagi’s manga addiction is permissible insofar as it results in an output. Instead of holing himself up in his room and reading manga at the expense of all else, he produces, and thus his hobby is not entirely self-centered or without broader utility.

Or perhaps Takagi isn’t an otaku because of his success as a manga writer. Money serves as powerful justification. You don’t hear anyone call Stephen King a nerd because of his interest in speculative fiction. Financial success is perhaps yet more evidence of productivity, but it’s evidence that most people can’t ignore.

For what it’s worth, Moritaka seems to have little or no interest in what the general public thinks of him. Perhaps it’s a matter of public denial on Takagi’s part. But neither Takagi nor Moritaka spend much of their time doing the usual things that show up in manga as representative of anime/manga otakudom. It might not have been surprising to see them hone their skills through doujin work, but at no point do they consider that option.

The line between manga-ka and manga otaku seems thin, but at least we can draw it — provisionally — using productivity as our guide. Still, I have to wonder about a case more relevant to my interests. What of an academic? Or a blogger? Is someone who uses anime and manga as catalysts for critical and philosophical inquiry while receiving (and expecting) little or no tangible, measurable reward an otaku?

We could talk about the intellectual rewards of critical thought and writing, but it’s difficult. How would we measure that? If it’s primarily we who benefit from our work — ourselves and our small communities — are we forced to concede that our output is low in social terms? This may not be a concern for blogs with wider appeal, but my perspective is that of one who writes for a very narrow audience. I certainly don’t consider myself a teacher, handing out bits of knowledge for you to do with as you will. I just try to ask questions and contribute to the discourse of the sphere, as the discourse of the sphere entertains me (and I hope it entertains you as well, if you’re immersed in it).

I’m not one to trivialize entertainment; I think entertainment and critical thought are very closely related. We can make readers reflect by entertaining them, and that is, I think, a tangible output — it’s the very output with which Takagi and Moritaka are concerned, in fact. But they’re dealing with a much broader audience. As Wikipedia has it, Jump’s circulation stands at around 2.7 million readers. I doubt I need to clarify that especially analytic anime blogs attract a much smaller crowd, and, in my experience, it’s a crowd consisting mainly of bloggers. And as far as I’m aware, we have no good method for bolstering our ranks. A passion for deep and specific analysis is something one must come to on one’s own terms. We (and I don’t mean anyone specifically, so include or exclude yourself to whatever degree you deem appropriate) are essentially writers writing for an audience of writers, who enjoy a certain kind of rhetoric, and who needn’t worry about the relative unpopularity of that rhetoric in the company of one another.

I suppose I’ve digressed. My question was whether or not we academic-types are otaku in the way Takagi fears. Do we do what we do too exclusively? Most of us try to be as accessible as possible, I think, but there’s only so much we can do beyond varying the specificity of our analyses — and you may know that I tend to be very specific, and thus more exclusive at times than even I might prefer, but I have to write the sort of thing I like to read.

What, then, are the benefits of reading posts that pick through arcane literary devices and rhetoric with a set of precision instruments? If we can figure out what the reader gains, we may be able to establish a level of productivity. Personally I think there’s much to learn of narrative art, and of how and why people appreciate it, from beginning with the minute and moving outward, and from following the records of those who do so. We could at least call it an intellectual exercise. It’s more beneficial than idleness, I’m sure. And each of these utilities suggests criticism as a form of entertainment, at least given my preferences. It almost has to be.

But if we’re entertaining only our little club, if our productive energy isn’t escaping our circle despite our efforts to the contrary…no, there’s a misconception there. It’s not inaccurate to say that we’re entertaining our club. It is, I believe, inaccurate to assume that a blogger like Danny Choo isn’t entertaining his club, too. His happens to be larger, but it’s still a club.

I think I’ve painted too bleak a portrait of our situation. There exist a number of bloggers who pair fairly deep analysis with readable language, those who don’t undertake passionate love affairs with jargon as I do (it’s not because I’m a douchebag, it’s because technical language is useful). I won’t provide a list for fear of excluding anyone, but many of you will know who I mean. And our loosely-defined legion does expand, if slowly. After all, I ended up in it.

I’m really reaching for a point here, believe it or not, that being that we can’t really define an otakudom as a community that doesn’t produce. Every community produces within itself. I’d say something about discourse, but I’m too rusty on Foucault. At any rate it’s not Takagi’s productivity that allows him to deny otaku status; it’s his belonging to a community of considerable size. Manga isn’t an unpopular pursuit, and one who reads (and writes) manga isn’t necessarily involved with all the more obscure accoutrements. In the end it’s about popularity, and though that conclusion may seem too obvious to warrant over a thousand words en route, it never hurts to explore possibilities and make connections, to really know a term or a narrative element.

And anyway, this sort of thing is just what I do. This is my obscure accoutrement. I’m a structural and rhetorical criticism otaku.

(It may be worth mentioning that grad school and eventually work will probably prompt me to write more here and less over yonder. These posts are so much easier.)

Reading the structure is a wasted…hey, what the hell, Shirou?

To be fair, if we’re going the magic = art route, I don’t think he’s wrong, per se. Structural criticism may deal with absolute terms on the surface level, but all we can say for certain of those terms (provided we study them sociologically) is that they effect x% of y population one way, z% of y population another, and so on — where the artistic energy is most easily transmitted, as it were. But then, I like that about structural criticism; if you go far enough with it, it ultimately has to move beyond textual minutiae into the realm of readers. Also, Shirou ends up getting quite a lot of use out of his talent for structure. But at any rate I’m not opposed to taking this as a warning against dwelling on the surface of things exclusively.

I had forgotten that a Hindu/Buddhist reincarnation mechanic was in play here. Humans and animals I understand — but machines? That’s an interesting twist. This cycle of death and rebirth seems to rely on public opinion, or devotion, or “worship,” so what happens when a kind and generous human being known to very few dies? Should we simply measure kindness and generosity in terms of the number of people who benefit from it?

Who else wants to see a Mother Teresa servant? She’d make a hell of a Berserker.

Ooh! See, this is why I like Kotomine (besides the mullet). He’s a real bastard, but he says what needs to be said. Really, this is true; the desire to protect something does imply a desire to protect something from something else, which must obviously be an active threat, or else what’s the point? Some people get on to Shirou for being misogynistic in this route, but I think that particular quirk of his is sufficiently dismantled by the end.

It’s a matter of point of view, isn’t it? I’m sure the Cyclopes didn’t think Odysseus was a hero. This explains handily why many of the servants designated “good” seem so ruthless — we’re on the receiving end.

This becomes a theme late in “Fate,” and it strikes a personal chord with me. Bad experiences with the kind of people who spend half their time wishing things had happened differently for them have led me to believe that they’re cowards, in a way (not that I, you know, do that myself or anything). Granted, Saber’s in a position to make an eternal sacrifice here, so she’s a bit of a special case.

This following a date. I love how F/sn has handled romance so far. It’s so awkward, so…mundane that it’s easy to forget those involved are superhuman. Even the first sex scene in this route is a little awkward. The second…well. Awkward to watch, maybe.

Turning the dissemination and evolution of stories into a literal source of power…this is some serious Pontifus-pandering right here. I especially like the Caliburn vs. Gram/Balmung bit. Still, the way it works seems a little contradictory, given what we’ve learned already about the relative power of servants, namely that it’s derived from how well-known they are when they’re summoned. If Excalibur is more well-known than Ea at the time of this particular Holy Grail War — and it no doubt is, as Ea doesn’t even have a “true” name — why does Ea overwhelm it so reliably? Perhaps the rule applies to servants but not noble phantasms individually, which function as extensions of the servants, and if Gilgamesh draws power from those who revere heroes derived from his epic…well, that explains a lot.

More Pontiservice. I like the theme of balance, and of all things belonging to systems which in turn belong to larger systems and so on. It makes sense (to me) if we’re talking about magic, or magic symbolizing art and the consumption thereof.

And it is the case that many heroes die in pursuit of their final objective. Gilgamesh even jokes about it one point, referencing his own failed quest for immortality. This is one of the many little answers F/sn throws at the question of what a hero is, exactly. Joseph Campbell would’ve been all over this shit.

Dear Cuchlann: PLAY THIS GAME.

Kotomineeeeee~ m(_ _)m

So many questions to deal with here! Is art’s having been created what renders it entertaining? Probably, given how it’s used. Kotomine circumvents the issue of art necessarily being a distilled depiction of reality by toying with people directly, but Kotomine’s just a tad crazy, and art’s distilled nature isn’t an unequivocally bad thing; it may let us see ourselves more clearly within it than we can in reality. Perhaps Kotomine’s rejection of art played a role in rendering him as emotionless as he is here; if nothing else, it contributes to my sense of his inhumanity.

Here’s another answer to that ubiquitous question: heroes are exemplars of humanity, encompassing all the good and bad traits thereof. Heroes of myth often do things that aren’t especially admirable — Gilgamesh here would know, he having been a womanizing lout of a leader before he and Enkidu became an ambiguously gay duo. Interesting, as we (and by we I mean me, and by me I mean His Majesty Northrop Frye) often think of mythic heroes as exceeding humans in means and surroundings, and romantic heroes as humans of supernatural or at least exceptional means and surroundings, and yet these very heroes manage to be everypeople, in a way. Perhaps being an everyman itself constitutes exceptional means; after all, which one regular human can speak for all regular humans?

More posts to come on “Fate,” as soon as I hit the aniblogocalypse for thoughts thereupon.

Is our pithy protagonist making a daring fashion statement here, in wearing pants that closely match those of his younger sister? Are man capris popular enough in Japan that the artists responsible for the above would’ve included them in Kyon’s wardrobe without giving it much thought? Or is this just visual evidence of Kyon’s slowly losing his edge?

Not that I want to get into the intricacies of adaptation right now, but I’ll note that Kyon’s intriguing legwear is a KyoAni addition. In the short story, Kyon introduces his visual situation like this:

At the time, I was sitting in my own living room, tuning in and out of the middle school baseball games, which I had little interest in.

And not, you’ll note, like this:

At the time, I was sitting in my own living room, wearing my favorite pair of man capris, tuning in and out of the middle school baseball games, which I had little interest in.

See for yourself, if you like. The point is that…seriously, look at those pants! What the hell, man?¹

Let’s try that again. The point is that surely our hero’s ankle-bearing khakis must mean something, and surely my saying so has nothing to do with any sort of tendency of mine to read into things too much, a tendency which I may or may not exhibit on rare occasions.

Of course, it’s possible that my particular reaction to Kyon’s fashion sense marks me as an outlier (but really, what’re the odds of that?). Perhaps we should begin with a brief investigation of the place of man capris in contemporary postmodern society, an investigation the likes of which the internet makes rather easy. Consider this exchange on Yelp, a site where people can…have conversations about things? I’m not entirely sure, but those who engaged in the aforementioned man capris (or “manpris”) discussion mostly agreed that the effeminate pants aren’t exactly the height of male fashion, provided you aren’t European. Some of my favorite anti-manpris positions are as follows, quoted anonymously to protect those involved from roving bands of vengeful metrosexuals.

Oh lord, I had no idea this was even an issue! How disturbing.

Anything that “K-Fed” wears would be a definite don’t. So big no on the manpris.

When the weather is a bit more temperate…I say it takes a very “special” man to pull off this look…

man-pris + garden shoes are the stuff nightmares are made of. who started this trend? mario batali?

Man capris? If those start becoming the norm, I’m busting out my fannypack- that’s right my fannypack. I’ll just say I’m German.

I just got back from a summer vaca in Italy and not only are all the men over there wearing man capris but they all have MULLETS!!!! Good God please tell me that is one fashion trend that will never make it back over to Boston.

I think there’s some graph that explains this issue. The x axis would be the length of the short, and the y axis would measure the range of sexual ambiguity…

capri pants for men, only if you’re ghey.

Well, Kyon isn’t what I’d call “ghey,” given that we’re in his head and we see some of his healthy male inclinations (i.e. he likes boobies). He isn’t Italian or German, and he has little in common with Kevin Federline and Mario Batali. Perhaps his donning of the man capris is a show of solidarity with these aforementioned individuals and groups; perhaps Kyon means to make it clear that he favors a diverse world. After all, he spends most of his time with an ambiguously gay ESPer, the worst candidate to be a time traveler ever, a cybrid, and an ignorant deity. If one in his position chooses to embrace human differences, said one might find the world a colorful place indeed.

In case there was any doubt, this isn’t really a serious post. Or, I may say something remotely useful to you before the end, but I’m fairly sure I haven’t so far. I’m working on some serious posts (three, in fact, including one for a blog that isn’t mine), but those are hard, and making fun of Kyon’s man capris…no, making fun of man capris in general is easy².

That’s not to say I’m writing this for no reason at all. For one thing, I’m excited as all hell about the new Haruhi episodes. I watched Melancholy as I made my balls-to-the-wall return to anime fandom after years of denial, and I’ll always remember it fondly for being one of the shows that convinced me I was making the right decision, that I really would miss out if I let superficial concerns keep me from an entire narrative medium. More specifically, though, I think the second new episode shows the first signs of the weak mortar in Kyon’s wall of sarcasm, something which, if I remember correctly, plays a notable role in the fourth novel, the plot of which will by all reports be included somewhere among these new episodes. It’s early-stage character development, basically. The (potentially, if you want to look at it this way) emasculating man capris are just a humorous prelude.

It occurred to me that Kyon’s biting commentary (new word: kyommentary) seems weak throughout this particular arc (which, if it follows the story “Endless Eight” closely, hasn’t ended with just the one episode, though KyoAni seems to have omitted all the real plot development so far). He slips his usual criticism of all things Haruhi among the events of summer’s end, but his criticism is often visually punctuated by scenes in which he appears to be enjoying himself.

And that’s not to mention that some of his quips here are pretty dull to begin with.

It’s as if he criticizes because he has to, because being down-to-earth and wry is just his role among his friends. In the short story, he even acknowledges that his objections aren’t much in the face of Haruhi’s enthusiasm; “Sulk as much as I may,” he relates early on, “I still meekly headed toward my closet and removed the items [Haruhi] requested.” Even if they are his objections, they aren’t enough to keep him from going along with Haruhi’s plans, and so they begin to feel like a formality — which, don’t get me wrong, doesn’t mean Kyon is becoming less potent; rather, it means he’s acting in a way that’s consistent with real life friend dynamics. Friends fall into behavioral patterns relative to one another, and those patterns can be difficult to break.

I suppose we might ask whether, in a moment of duress, Kyon would continue to fill his role, or if he would shed all pretense and stand by Haruhi. Of course, so far he’s been bound by his mission; he’s led to believe that, in his absence, Haruhi would inadvertently do strange things to the world, and that’s fair motivation for not abandoning her outright even if he does consider her an annoyance. But what if that suddenly wasn’t an issue, or if Kyon had a way out? I’m looking forward to seeing KyoAni’s take on that question.

Endnotes

¹I offer my sincerest apologies to any of you who may enjoy the occasional jaunt in a comfortable pair of man capris. Your lifestyle is your business. Seriously, it’s cool with me; I support your rights.

²To be fair, Kyon’s petite pantaloons aren’t the only fashion emergency present in the episode. Setting aside the frog suit, which is too obvious, there’s this:

Clearly, Haruhi is a classy lady.