Posts Tagged ‘irony’

Five rules of funny molestation

By Pontifus on 10 August 2009 | Anime, Art and Culture, Literature, Manga | 15 Comments

Alright, that's sort of awesome.

In real life, molestation isn’t funny, so don’t think I’m condoning your trip to Japan whereupon you will hit the subways, so to speak. But in anime and manga, sexual molestation is used in service of humor as often as it’s an agent of personal horror, and there seems to exist an unspoken code governing the line between the two.

Don’t think this is all about cultural implications, either. Such narrative machinations as humor can be deliciously structural. Not that the examples I look at here are off the social hook, per se, but we’ll look at that on a case-by-case basis.

(Edit 9/8 — Let this comment serve as a brief addendum in answer to those parts of this post that weren’t thought through as well as perhaps they should’ve been.)

Sidelines

By Pontifus on 21 July 2009 | Manga | 4 Comments

Ako considers the problem.

I wrote my first Negima! post (here on Ghostlightning’s joint) about Nodoka and Yue, as I was bound to do so by favoritism and other darker things in the crevices between human comprehension. It was almost physically painful to have to pick two characters out of that cast of worthies…and as I was mulling that over, it occurred to me that blog-space isn’t exactly about to run out, so here we are.

Of Diebuster, structure, and the parents of gods

By Pontifus on 4 June 2009 | Anime, Literature | 14 Comments

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.