It was this or NSFW. Damn fanart.

As Pontifus already told you, we’re diving hip-deep into the twelve moments of anime project for 2008.  However, I will warn you in advance, I’ll be “cheating” a little and doing some video game moments as well — I don’t think that’s too much of a problem, as Super Fanicom is about gaming as well.  Moving on!

As you might have gathered, my first entry into Superfanicom’s ultimate, giant Christmas extravaganza is Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu.  The trick here — the one that explains the questions you’re hurling at your screen right now — is that it isn’t the show that I’m entering here.  It’s the phenomenon.

I know things turned sour, yes.  I know the show went awry.  I know I haven’t even finished watching it, despite my maddened oath to blog every episode (I believe what I said was, “By God I’ll finish this show if it breaks me“).  But can you cast your mind back to that moment when the first episode had just come out of your local fansubber’s hot little queue?  Your cursor rested lovingly on the file icon and you prepared yourself for. . .  something.  I’m sure my following statement includes people who didn’t even watch, but it seemed as though we were all excited.  And for a few episodes it paid off.  The Akihabara episode was actually pretty great.  This is a show, we felt, about us, about the sometimes-crippling sense of alienation that we have, to greater or lesser extents, put up with.  Some of us maybe for all our lives.

Perhaps the part that hurts nerds (of all stripes) the most is that gnawing anxiety that underlies every reminder that we’re different from those around us — we chose this.  It may not actually be true, by the way.  Some people think biology determines our personalities.  If that’s true, then I have generations of other people to blame for the way I swoon when Luke turns off his targeting computer.  But unlike people discriminated against for their gender, race, or sexual preferences, most would agree that nerds, in some way, chose to be nerds.  That is, at some point I was (metaphorically) presented with a football and a lightsaber toy.

So Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu seemed promising to a lot of us.  Some otaku are still self-conscious about being nerds.  I’m not, but that’s because of my circumstances in a grad. program.  So for someone so demonstratably-popular among the “normies” to be an otaku did a lot of things.  It let the still-self-conscious feel better, because even the popular kids like moe.  All of us can identify with the social estrangement Haruka fears, and so the show, in some ways, functioned as a microcosm of our lives.

Bloggers, fans, and anime-watchers all came together to talk about this show, to wonder what was going to happen, and to be fascinated by someone’s attempt to chart the really painful moments of an otaku’s life.  Sure, we had Genshiken and Lucky Star already, but those are after the fact — sure, some people still make fun of the Genshiken, and even Konata’s friends think she’s a bit odd, but the nerds in both shows were basically in safe zones, where they could do whatever they wanted and only their actions, not their predilictions, would be judged.  Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu put its characters in the worst pit of arbitrary judgment and bias imaginable:  high school.

So that seems to me to be a great moment for this year.  Personally, at least, and this is meant to be my twelve moments.  My reasoning stands this way:  I rarely know anything about the state of the otaku-rhombus, but I was made aware of it by this show and the giddy discussions about it.  We seem to have risen up as one and said we need some kind of figure to rally behind.  And getting that many nerds to agree on anything is nothing short of a Christmas miracle.

Misogyny might be — nay, probably is — too strong a word for certain events of Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu’s tenth episode. It’s just that the “m” alliterates. You understand the importance of titular alliteration, I’m sure.

In particular, I’m referring to the Miss Hakujou Academy competition, in which Haruka participates as the returning champion during episode ten. Regarding its place among the goings-on of the episode, and of the series proper, it’s a minor event, functioning as little more than a testament to Haruka’s conventional perfection — while love rival Shiina enters as well, she never seems too put out by her loss, and she isn’t a very proactive love rival anyway. Yuuto’s friends explain the Miss Con, as they call it: though it’s never clear who decides the winner from among the final eight, said eight are chosen by vote. And who’s eligible to vote? The male students.

The male students specifically. But not the female students.

My first inclination was to call foul on the Hakujou Academy administration. Really, a competition for girls laid exclusively in the hands of high school guys, at least in its early stages? Is that wise? I’m not saying all high school guys are bastards, and it’s true that a few of them, at least, seemed impressed with the full gamut of Haruka’s many qualifications back in episode one, but, thanks to a volatile combination of physical development and social influences, high school guys on the whole have certain collective priorities. I suspect that any girl in a contest whose contestants are siphoned by a group of fifteen to eighteen year old males isn’t there because she can play the piano.

But who knows? It’s been a while since I’ve even been inside a high school. Maybe piano has recently replaced physical appearance as the leading attractor of young male interest. And there’s also the matter of Japan not being the country with which I have personal high school experience. My instincts tell me, though, that teenage guys are teenage guys, no matter where you go.

As I said, “misogyny” may be too strong a verdict here, especially where Hakujou’s male students are concerned. But if we look at it practically, the Hakujou administration has effectively silenced the female fraction of the student body on the matter of determining a girl’s worth — and, in doing so, has possibly encouraged the male students to follow suit. Consider the above picture, in which Yuuto’s friends interrupt his conversation with Shiina, relegating the Miss Con competitor to the background as they detail the competition in her stead. Shiina’s mild expression of “what the fuck, guys” is particularly poignant. Are we to take this as a warning of what can happen when authority-wielding institutions make bad decisions? I don’t know enough about the present state of Japanese high schools (and I’m not versed nearly enough in feminist criticism) to put it in a more specific context, so if you do, please enlighten me.

It’s entirely possible that I’m making something out of nothing here. Upon scouring the aniblogosphere for opinions offered by my contemporaries on the matter, I found that the Miss Hakujou Academy competition’s patriarchy didn’t stand out to the community proper, or at least not enough to garner words from the eight or so blogs I consulted. Have I fallen prey to a mistranslation, perhaps? My knowledge of Japanese being shoddy, at best, I’m a slave to subtitles and the subtitlers who write them. I’ve consulted two subbed versions of the episode on the matter, the second differing very little in its translation of the Miss Con explanation from the one pictured above, but the Brock-looking fellow on the left doesn’t exactly enunciate, and it’s possible that I’ve been led astray twice.

Perhaps it simply doesn’t matter that the Miss Con is a paragon of patriarchy. Or maybe it’s a good thing, a way of bringing the sexes together. Consider that Haruka has as many female worshipers as male, at least apparently so; clearly the girls have a vested interest in the picking of favorites. Resting the choice of Miss Con finalists in the hands of the guys may be a way of instilling a valuable lesson about cooperation between the sexes. They’ll have to coexist with their female classmates until graduation; imagine the hell a young man’s life would become if a group of high school girls decided to exact vengeance upon him in answer to his valuing the physical appearance of his Miss Con choices over their other qualities. Such an explanation might make light of the Hakujou administration’s phallocentrism, true, but nobody seems too perturbed by it anyway.