Breaking into the super robot genre has proven difficult for me, so I asked the wise OGT to point me toward a few shows that might help. Among other things, he recommended Gunbuster (aka Top wo Nerae!) — you may already know this, given all the fanboying I did over the show and its sequel. Gunbuster was probably just the sort of thing I needed, tempered as it is by enough drama and pain to sustain my interest through the genuinely awesome moments, which I can in fact enjoy on the level of genuine awesome if I stay interested long enough.

Diebuster, though.

You want to put it into words. You really try. But the last episode explodes your mind, and you’re left with assorted pieces, slightly charred, floating through space. You could leave it at that, but these pieces practically beg to be reassembled, and I’m nothing if not tenacious when it comes to weaving my webs.

So this is a post about Diebuster, ostensibly. But where to begin? “At the beginning,” some would no doubt suggest, but that’s part of the problem: the story’s structure resists that sensible impulse. It’s vexing now that I’m trying to put my thoughts in order, but it’s not something a first-time viewer would notice early on — the beginning seems just fine, and it is, in more ways than are evident from the beginning.

If that makes little sense, you can blame Diebuster’s unusual structure. Things we see in the beginning are parts of larger things that aren’t evident until later; crucially relevant information is withheld. Open an image in your favorite image editor, zoom in as far as you can, and then zoom out slowly, and you’ll get the idea. We could call it “revelation,” but it’s more ubiquitous than a series of run-of-the-mill reveals — plot, characters, setting, et al. (or, specifically, our perception of them, which is what matters anyway) are affected across the board, enmeshed as they are in a structure that’s heavily reliant on strategic obscurity and the unexpected.

It’s atypical, perhaps, but not unique, or even especially new; eighty or so years earlier, the same technique saw use by (you guessed it) James Joyce, particularly in Ulysses¹. Joyce scholar Fritz Senn calls it “circumdation:”

In [Ulysses's] first chapter we will figure out, not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting on top of a historical tower, somewhere near Dublin, at a certain time. The last two chapters, “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” above all put much of what we had taken for granted into a different light. Adjustment takes patience and circumspection, many retracings in an Odyssean progression of trial and error… As often as not we may still be waiting for the final, redeeming “circumdet” that makes everything fall into line.²

It must be said that Diebuster is more comprehensible the first time through than Ulysses. Still, if you compared the point-by-point, beginning-to-end analyses of a first-time viewer and a second-time viewer, you may not find much middle ground. I’ve watched bits and pieces of earlier episodes after finishing the show, and the experience was quite different the second time around, relatively speaking; given how much we learn about Nono, the Topless, the space monsters, and the universe itself along the way, and how much of that information is the sort that’s probably evident to the characters all along even if we aren’t aware of it, the second viewing produces constructs of meaning vastly different from the first. Many stories (maybe all stories) have this quality to some degree, but Diebuster has it in spades — again, it shapes the story’s very momentum.

Since I’ve ended up on the topic of second viewing anyway, consider the first episode on rewatch. We know of Nono’s identity; much of what she does makes a new sort of sense, or assumes altered significance. We know that Lal’c, with all of her baggage (of which we also know), is responsible for the brief voice-over during the opening moments, and we’ve heard the complementary voice-over in episode 6. We know the basis of Tycho’s attitude toward Lal’c. We know more about the antagonists, about the setting, about practically everything. It seems, to me at least, a more profound change in experience than that brought about by simply knowing what will happen in future episodes.

With that said, circumdation isn’t specifically a process that takes place between viewings; it happens all along, and forces us to question our assumptions even during the first viewing. We’re kept on our toes, made to disassemble initial conclusions, insert new information, and reconstruct them as best we can, all while processing plot developments which, in six episodes, don’t have time to pause and give us a breather. It results in a very active, almost hectic reading process — I enjoy it, usually, though I wonder if this would be a basis of complaint for some viewers.

The effect is most evident in later episodes, when revelatory events invoke broad re-imaginings — episode four in particular comes to mind, and the sixth episode affirms that Diebuster’s circumdative nature can reach even Gunbuster, if we let it. Being a matter of basic structure, however, it’s present all along. In the first episode, for example, we aren’t even certain of the setting (that is, Mars) until the latter third or so, when it’s announced outright. Consider the screencaps above, both from the beginning; the predominance of blue, the snow, and the rustic nature of the houses are all deceptive. As the episode progresses, yellow and red come to dominate the palette, technology becomes more evident, and we might, if we’re perceptive, “figure out” (as Senn says) “not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting.” Appropriately enough, the reveal itself takes the form of a literal zoom-out.

Now, I do enjoy examining structure, probably more than I enjoy examining socio-culturo-historico-things in the usual way. But structural nuances, I must admit after a thousand-odd words about them, are not much of a starting point, which is to say that my thoughts on a story don’t begin with the specifics of its twists and turns. Customarily, I’ll try to attach broad identifiers to a thing, but Diebuster even makes that difficult — about which I am thrilled, as any excuse to combine Northrop Frye and mad speculation is a good one.

Diebuster is a mecha show, certainly. It might be postmodern, though I suspect it takes that half-step beyond that hints at postmodernism’s relevance having begun its slow death. Terms like “mecha” and “postmodern,” however, are narrower than the identifiers I have in mind — namely, Frye’s modes and mythoi. It’s possible that these terms are too restrictively Aristotelian; it’s also possible that, when these terms no longer serve our needs as-is (which isn’t necessarily the case, mind you), it’s time to play around with them, and you should know by now that nothing is sacred when I wield my Unlimited Interpretation Works.

We can say one thing with some certainty: Diebuster has irony. I don’t claim that it falls within the range of Frye’s ironic mode (I would’ve said it is ironic); it may, but I’m not yet certain of that. I simply mean that Diebuster is bursting with ironic elements, things that aren’t what they seem they normally would or should be and situations that play out in unexpected ways. Given circumdation, the very structure itself is ironic; one might say irony is its gimmick. And the characters — really, if you’ve seen Diebuster, I doubt I need to explain how the Topless are atypical super robot pilots. Consider Casio, who, despite his hanging around and offering words of wisdom where needed, essentially quit the mecha business out of fear, or Nicola, who, lacking any direction of his own, just rolls with whatever life throws at him. Tycho and Lal’c aren’t what you’d call paragons of awesome, either, until Nono teaches them how to be. And if you figured out what Nono is before the reveal in episode four, you’re probably superhuman, as it’s really just ridiculous (in a good way).

It’s possible, if we’re going with a descriptor that consists of mode and mythos (and we are, because I like to), that Diebuster is “ironic irony,” that it meets the conditions of the ironic mode (the work deals with characters presented as “below” the reader in situation or surroundings) and the ironic branch of the Mythos of Winter (the work applies myth conventions and storytelling methods new and old to realistic, recognizable situations). The latter is likely accurate; despite their capabilities and their surroundings, the Topless are all too human in their mannerisms and conflicts (perhaps it’s the effect of realism on familiar tropes that gives irony its unpredictable nature to begin with). But are they ironic characters in the modal sense? They do, after all, still have those capabilities, and they still inhabit those surroundings; the basic conditions under which their humanity takes place are unfamiliar to us. Consider the climax, during which, for a brief period, the laws of the physical universe don’t apply to Nono at all. Mode-wise, it’s almost mythological.

That in itself isn’t mind-blowing. I’ll borrow Cuchlann’s lovingly hand-crafted illustration:

It’s reasonable to imagine the modes as a cycle, and even Frye speculated in the Anatomy of Criticism that the literature of his time showed signs of moving away from irony and toward myth and romance, citing science fiction specifically. We could stick Diebuster somewhere between irony and myth, and label it transitional, and I’d be okay with that. But something deep in the untamed wilds of my mind insists that there must be more to it than that, that I shouldn’t be so quick to concede to Frye’s cycle as is. It almost feels as though we’re missing something.

Consider the relationship between contemporary “myth” and what we usually think of as myth, stories of gods and heroes and such. Both are basically myth, in Fryean terms, as both involve characters who surpass human beings in kind; whether we’re talking about Zeus or Buster Machine No. 7, we’re dealing with characters whose means fall beyond the comprehension of the humans below them. Those humans may possess the fantastical powers of the romantic mode, but they’re still human, literally speaking, and their abilities, however potent, cannot match those of the myth-figures present.

There is, however, one key difference between mythic paragons old and new. The former are made by older deities, generally, elsewise they simply are. In the beginning, there was Oceanus and Tethys, or Chronos, or Chaos, or Muspell and its guardian Surt, or God who created the heavens and the earth; these deities oversee the creation of other deities (when they allow other deities to exist), the processes of which don’t involve human beings much at all. But consider our alleged contemporary mythology. Nono is a war machine built by humans, one imbued with human-like intelligence and emotion. The Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is raw human potential made manifest. In Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos, those we see gain power over time and space are either human or human-made. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith leverages Martian wisdom with his humanity to reach his state of godliness. The difference, then: we, humans, make the gods — sometimes we are the gods. I don’t believe that’s something we can ignore.

We might call this strategic use of the unexpected, irony in the vein of this ironic age. Or we might not; I’m not sure that it’s expected or unexpected, if that makes any sense. It’s simply a fictional truth that continues to appear in the fiction (especially the science fiction) I consume. It’s not even especially surprising; irony has primed me and others to accept that God is dead, disinterested, or irrelevant, that there is no concrete meaning of life, and that, subsequently, we’re free to fill the meaning-void with whatever meaning we choose, as soon as we stop moping about there being no meaning in the first place (did I mention I usually don’t like postmodernism?). We are creators, in that sense; Heinlein’s aforementioned Stranger in a Strange Land presents that idea with little distillation. It’s as if we’ve been getting it wrong all along — rather than products of gods, we are fledgling gods ourselves. Thou art God, as it were. Please continue being a Messiah.

I’m not claiming that’s a fact of the natural universe, or even that the idea’s increasing presence in narrative art is evidence of some deep awareness of the idea on our collective part (realistically I might suggest the latter, but that’d make this post much longer than it is already, and I don’t want that). I am claiming that what Frye had in mind when he outlined the mythic mode…

If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories.³

…may not describe satisfyingly or with suitable accuracy our new mythology, which, given that, may not be mythology at all. It is at the very least a mythology informed by our having written our way through the entirety of Frye’s cycle and emerged from irony intact, one which acknowledges that, even when gods grow beyond our ability to control, they wouldn’t exist at all if not for us — even from works in which gods exist literally, such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, and (since this is basically an anime blog, after all) Kannagi, we often get the sense that a god’s power depends in whole or large part on the devotion of its followers. Either we are gods, or we inflict them upon the universe — the two may be basically the same thing. Perhaps, if we’re going to keep the cycle of modes, we should accommodate expansion, turn it into a spiral whose size reflects the experience we accumulate as we travel the modes.

Or perhaps we must acknowledge that the cycle is a result of our oversimplification of an amalgam of modes with no clear demarcations between them. “Fictions,” says Frye, “may be classified…by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same⁴” — but what if, in fiction, our power of action knows no bounds, or if an apparently mythic hero’s power of action is no more or less than what we “mere” humans decide it is? Perhaps we haven’t come full circle, so to speak, but have integrated all modes known thus far into our understanding, in a linear progression — and if that’s the case, what undiscovered modes lie ahead? What happens when self-aware gods write stories about themselves?

Endnotes

¹Not that Joyce invented it singlehandedly, but, to my knowledge, he refined it into something like what we experience in Diebuster. Even very old literature relies on the withholding of information from the audience, but, in this case (and in the case of Ulysses), it’s synonymous with the narrative structure itself, which offers understanding slowly as a series of junctures which broaden setting and characters in steps.

²Senn, Fritz. “Anagnostic Probes.” Joyce, Modernity, and Its Mediation. Ed. Christine van Boheemen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989: 40, 44.

³Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000: 33.

⁴Ibid.

I’ve recently been badgering nearly everyone I know with this quandary I’ve landed myself in:  how does science fiction work, and what does that mean for my study of anime?  (go all the way to the end, it has a happy conclusion)

An actual attempt to describe what SF is or how it works would keep us here forever, and I would be the only one to get anything useful from it (I am automatically suspicious of any attempt to identify where SF comes from or what it is).  However, I can examine here one part of that process, in context.  For me, SF is an essentially textual process.  I’m reading a lot of literary methodology, as you might have already noticed.  One of those books is Starboard Wine, by Samuel R. Delany.  I’ve already talked about Delany, too.  Delany’s SF methodology, in short, is wicked-cool.  In several essays, through two books, he goes through the compiling process a reader of SF must go through to make sense of the text, and claims (fairly well) that SF is actually different from mundane fiction.

That’s great and all, but it left me with a problem.  How, then, accepting this methodology as I do, can I deal with SF in visual media — movies and anime, in particular?

I’ve been banging my head against this intermittently for the past few weeks, now.  I kept trying to think of SF movies and anime that would work for me in the same way as my favorite SF books and short stories.  Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Real Drive, Rideback, Mazinger, I thought of an awful lot, and none of them sparked for me in the same way as even a mediocre SF novel might.

For instance, I love cyberpunk, and will devour novels in the genre in a few days.  Despite enjoying it almost as much, it took me years to finish Stand Alone Complex, and I still haven’t finished Real Drive.  They don’t appeal as strongly as Neuromancer or Snow Crash (or even the not-nearly-as-good Eastern Standard Tribe, which I still read in two and a half days).   Why shouldn’t cyberpunk in one medium affect me as much as another?  Even when some of them have delicious amalgams of concepts that placate me in outstanding ways?  It seems to come back to precisely what Delany was describing, except in a negative:  they function on a visual level, not a textual level, and thus do not offer to me the same satisfactions I derive from the SF genre generally.

Pontifus had an interesting development when I talked to him about it:  what does appeal about them, then?  I couldn’t answer him then, but usually visual SF seems to appeal to action-movie aesthetics.  Why, for instance, did they add in the silly CGI monsters to I Am Legend when the whole point is that they’re people, but turned to vampires (great book, by the way)?  Because probably the transference wouldn’t happen.

Now, here’s the happy ending I promised:  I have indeed finally come up with some examples of SF, most of them anime, that satisfy me, or might.

• Gundam
• Galaxy Express (and all related bits and pieces)
• Crest of the Stars (and, again, all the other odds and ends)
• Haruhi Suzumiya
• Farscape
• Firefly

Yes, I used a bullet-point list.  I felt like it.

What do all those shows have in common?  They don’t tell us everything about the setting.  They use particular hints and elisions to imply a great deal of information about how the settings are not zero world, but they don’t spend time showing us all the different places like a set of vacation slides (this could, perhaps, explain some of why the prequel Star Wars trilogy falls flat as well).  Text works by building an experience between the audience and the text; it’s impossible to deliver everything (and stuff that tries, like the fantasy-setting of The Wheel of Time, just comes across as tedious), so it uses flourishes and conceits to show us things are different without telling us exactly how.

Eventually, of course, a lot of information will get across to us anyway.  John does get to Earth in Farscape, but not for long.  But these examples all use an economy of setting details to do, in a visual form, what a book does with words:  tell us things by leaving things out.  Heinlein was deservedly famous for this.  The best-known example is from Beyond this Horizon when, in the middle of perfectly normal descriptions, the third-person narrator calmly says “the door dilated.”  No more detail is given, but it completely restructures the reader’s thought processes about the setting. And the fact that the description is so non-chalant tells us even more, that dilating doors, the thing that just blew our minds and our views of the setting, aren’t even all that important.  Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, claims it “consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written.  And it is precisely this second part which is the important one” (qtd. in Margolis, Selves and Other Texts, xi).

Let me kill the two figurative birds with one stone, because it’s possible you’d like to see an explanation that actually uses an anime as an example; also, it will allow me to explain the choice that might be puzzling you — Haruhi.

Haruhi was actually the first example of an anime SF I thought of that satisfied my desires for SF and not just for anime.  It is, like all the other examples, a world that is not our own, and through that allows us to examine both the subject (the typical focus of mundane fiction, like the high-school-drama/comedy Haruhi masquerades as) and the object (one of the foci of SF).  It deals with both the impact of a differed world on people and people’s impact on a differed world.  And it does it all, to use the cinema/television term, behind the scenes.  If the show were to, for instance, show us Haruhi going home after talking to Kyon, getting angry, and, with a split-screen, showing one of the giants getting bigger and angrier, it would lose its place on this list.

The point of SF, then (at least for me, though I’m paraphrasing Delany again here), is to provide a frission between our different audience experiences, for things to appear both familiar and strange at the same time.  Haruhi, like all the anime on my little bullet-point list, does that.   It may be easier to accomplish that in writing, given the fill-in-the-blank nature of prose itself, but it turns out it’s not impossible for TV to do it after all.

It may also finally explain my ambivalent (that is, both like and dislike, that’s what that word means) reaction to Blade Runner.  It’s delicious in its visuals and acting, but spends too much time explaining the Replicants.