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.”
Love Hina can be metafictional, too.
I found Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals at the university library — seven or so months ago. And, what do you know, it’s due back. Overdue, probably. So I suppose I should annotate this thing at long last, for your benefit and mine.
It’s a short book, but I won’t be entirely exhaustive here. I’ll omit basic overviews of things many of us would find intuitive anyway, and some of the more extreme postmodern/poststructural business, in the assumption that you’ll read the book yourself if you’re looking for that sort of thing. It must be said, though, that, while Azuma got his start as a Derrida scholar, Otaku is very readable even if you aren’t so familiar with Baudrillard, Lacan, and their ilk — and, that being the case, I suppose I ought to make this post more or less readable, too.
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.
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.