This shit is pretty unambiguously pretentious and I don’t like it. But I don’t really hold it against the show. It isn’t just the creators jerking off. Opinionated metafiction is one convention in a set of conventions that Bebop calls upon, then shows us through the eyes of a cast that doesn’t hail from the same set of conventions — this technique is a large part of why I like the way Bebop does references so much.

The aforementioned set of conventions is, despite the year in which Bebop came into being, modernism, and it’s easy to understand why the show feels so modernist. Many of Bebop’s references and remembrances hail from the early 20th century, modernism’s heyday. I don’t intend to do a lecture on modernism here — probably we’ve done that already, and you’re sure to find it in the archives. I mean to talk about one general trend within modernism that, though it’s been present in Bebop since the beginning, began to stand out to me at about the midway point.

It’s funny, actually, to find this trend in a show like Bebop. A good deal of science fiction is, as William Gibson put it once, agnostic with regard to technology. The fictional future isn’t unambiguously good or bad — in fact, because it has people in it, it remains entirely ambiguous. Not so much in Cowboy Bebop, whose characters are indeed complex, but whose future is pretty grim. We’ve got a ruined Earth and a sequence of colonies afflicted by relative squalor. If I remember correctly, the only characters we’ve seen wearing expensive clothes have been criminals and warp gate CEOs.

The modernists, too, were nostalgic. Eventually the postmodernists would come along and dispel that, would claim that the past was never any fuller or richer than the present and we only pretended it was, but sometimes Bebop doesn’t acknowledge this. It’s funny because Bebop is nostalgic for a better past that hasn’t happened yet, but it evokes the mood of modernist works so well that it almost has to be.

tl;dr: Bebop’s present sucks and its past was better. I’ll review how each episode from 12 to 19 either reinforces or riffs upon this. Some episodes do both.

Sessions 12-13 (“Jupiter Jazz”)

Setting: a grungy city in which there are only men. These episodes are fairly straightforward, as there’s a lot of Spike angsting over his lost girlfriend and confronting his friend-turned-nemesis. Whenever Spike gets an opportunity to chase after his past, he takes it, consequences be damned.

Interestingly, it’s here that Cowboy Bebop (in all its Americana) chooses to nod toward war fiction.

When war fiction’s nostalgic, it tends to pine for the time before the war in question became inevitable, the time before the world went mad. For obvious reasons, I suppose.

Not so, in this case. Instead we get a character who seems not to mind having been shot at, as it meant he could participate in the camaraderie he holds in such high regard. He thinks of the past as better, though his is a past that might have killed him. It’s not the same, certainly, but it’s a little reminiscent of war propaganda, quite a lot of which coincided with the modernist days (because, you know, imperialism and World Wars). We don’t really see the opposition, nor do we get any political background; we see one group of soldiers shooting at nothing, dodging explosions with relative ease, and kicking back in camp. It’s creepy, and, while Gren does maintain the nostalgia thing in an odd way, he’s creepy as a consequence.

Session 14 (“Bohemian Rhapsody”)

This episode does and doesn’t invert the trend. On one hand, Hex was at the top of his game in his youth. He was a genius programmer and a chess prodigy, and now he’s a senile old man. On the other hand, the entire episode relates the much-delayed resolution of Hex’s striking back at the sorts of things he had to worry about when at the forefront of space innovation. He may well be happier in his senility. His biggest concern now is losing at chess. And death, maybe, though he doesn’t seem the sort to ruminate upon his own mortality. His happiness may be of an empty or involuntary variety, but that doesn’t seem to bother him any.

Session 15 (“My Funny Valentine”)

A strange episode for the purposes of this post, as Faye has no past, in a way. She remembers only the grim universe of the present, in which twenty-year-old amnesiac women are played for all they’re worth, even when they don’t own the clothes on their backs. And yet she retains a certain affection toward Whitney. Con man though he may be, he was briefly a part of her life, and she feels she owes him something for that.

Or we could think of it this way: Whitney was always lying to Faye, but she experienced a brief period of happiness, and that was his doing. This doesn’t let him off the hook, by any means; he’s still an asshole. But she was happy. But…this is complicated.

Session 16 (“Black Dog Serenade”)

This episode is more postmodern (maybe the last was, too). Yes, Jet was happier in the past, and now he’s something of a lonely old man. We learn here that some of his fond memories depend upon fabrications, that in fact his partner was responsible for the loss of his arm. Like Faye, any nostalgia he might express for a past happiness dependent upon his limited point of view or his lack of information would feel somewhat inauthentic. This sort of story cuts to the heart of nostalgia, and I appreciate that Bebop takes the time to do this even while weaving about itself a distinctly modernist vibe.

Session 17 (“Mushroom Samba”)

I can’t decide whether this episode isn’t terribly relevant to my present purposes, or whether it’s so relevant that I experienced an initial sensory overload that led me to conclude that it isn’t terribly relevant.

It continues an occasional, distinctly un-nostalgic theme, a general disdain for the drug culture of the 60s and 70s. Users of traditionally illegal drugs in Bebop aren’t terrible people, necessarily, but they’re depicted as pretty ridiculous. We saw this back in episode 14, too. It’s a stronger indictment if you choose to include all the Red Eye stuff as part of this.

It nods toward colonialism. See the screencap above; “Western World Development” makes me think of nothing so much as Manifest Destiny.

Giant flying blonde white woman bringing the light of pastoralism to the brown-skinned peoples of the frontier! Except instead of a giant flying blonde white woman it was a bunch of white dudes with guns and smallpox, and instead of bringing the “light” of pastoralism they just killed a lot of people. It’d be hard to sympathize with anyone who felt particularly nostalgic about this.

In “Mushroom Samba,” though, space-Kansas is where two or three blaxploitation movies collide. I thought there’d be something to say about this (sub)genre having been removed from its usual urban setting — nostalgia for the city, in other words — but, as it turns out, there’s a western (sub-)subgenre within. Suffice to say that the space-frontier isn’t wholly dominated by white people.

I guess this episode is an inversion, if it’s anything.

Session 18 (“Speak Like a Child”)

If not for the crazy space shuttle business of the following episode, I would’ve ended this post here, as, after a whole handful of variations, it brings the earnest nostalgia back. For all intents and purposes, our heroes spend the entire episode (hilariously) chasing after the means of unlocking Faye’s past, the time when she was happy. Because, remember, her present troubles began only a short while after she awoke from suspended animation. Arguably they began immediately after she awoke, or a little earlier, as she was the victim of a scam all along. And, again, that’s all she knows. She’s lost the good times completely and irrevocably.

We also get a 20th-century-tech otaku. Nice.

Session 19 (“Wild Horses”)

Easy. The space shuttle, one of the earliest reusable spacecraft, saves the day! And with an old man at the helm, no less.

Coda

Nothing in Bebop is simple — clearly, as it took me over a thousand words to justify the statement “Cowboy Bebop is nostalgic,” and to try to finesse my way through those instances in which it doesn’t entirely apply. The variations are the point, though. I’m happy to have discovered that the sense of nostalgia about the show doesn’t come across as an accident or a reference to a bygone movement simply for the sake of reference. What we get instead is a kind of dialogue between the time in which the show was made and the period that it nods toward so often — another example of Bebop’s catechismal quality, its talking to itself.

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.

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.

For the sake of getting the “proper” citation out of the way (and thereby making myself feel better), it is thus:

• Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Azuma’s thesis here is “that the essence of our era (postmodernity) is extremely well disclosed in the structure of otaku culture” (6). He put this thesis forth during a talk in 2001, the essay-ified version of which he makes available for free on his website; you may want to check that out if you want a more extensive overview of Azuma’s position from the man himself.

…[O]taku, 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. … In other words, some people refuse to even recognize otaku, while others believe only a designated group possesses the right to speak about them. It has been extremely difficult to take a position that does not adhere to either of these stances. (5)

Tell me about it, Azuma! I’m not at all surprised that this phenomenon isn’t limited to our English-language sphere of anime blogs, where many of us have encountered it in one form or another. Azuma calls it a “dysfunctionality,” and claims that his work here amounts in part to an effort to circumvent (if not remedy) the factionalism of fans and non-fans (5). The degree to which the book succeeds at this will probably vary somewhat widely from reader to reader, but I didn’t feel at any time that Azuma stacked things entirely in favor of either cultural theory or fandom — he is in turns accepting and critical of both.

The history of otaku culture is one of adaptation — of how to “domesticate” American culture. This process also perfectly epitomizes the ideology of Japan during the period of high economic growth. Therefore, if at this time we perceive a Japanese aesthetic in the composition of anime and special effects, it is also necessary to recall that neither anime nor special effects existed in Japan prior to a few decades ago and that their process of becoming “Japanese” is rather convoluted. Otaku may well be heirs to Edo culture, but the two are by no means connected by a continuous line. Between the otaku and Japan lies the United States. (11)

Japanese history, etc. That otaku artifacts are, on some level, dependent on both technology originally imported from America and “the complex yearning to produce a pseudo-Japan…after the destruction of the ‘good old Japan’ through the defeat in World War II” makes me wonder about the position of the American fan relative to this complex interplay of traditions (13). That is, I don’t think American fans are so interested in the construction of a pseudo-Japan — or, if they are, I doubt it’s out of a desire to “overturn the overwhelmingly inferior status of postwar Japan with respect to the United States,” and more out of an interest in fictitious pseudo-Japan as an object of entertainment (13). It’s likely that postmodern Americans are as likely as postmodern Japanese to turn to narrative fandoms in an effort to make sense of the present world — Azuma notes at several points that his broader theories are not meant to be exclusive to Japanese otaku culture — but certainly the westerner’s relation to the east/west convolution that is anime is distinct, not least because we’re re-importing products dependent to some degree on our cultural exports.

At what point do the cultural distinctions inherent to anime break down? At what point does anime become something akin to what Timothy S. Murphy identifies as a “literature of globalization?”¹ Azuma seems to suggest that the otaku arts aren’t quite there yet, but, insofar as “the impact of otaku culture now reaches far beyond Japan” — a fact of day-to-day life for me and, if you’re reading this, probably you, too — the germination of a truly global genre within anime and manga seems at least remotely possible.

We also have to wonder what will happen when American creators claim significant stake in anime projects, as in the case of Heroman and the other Marvel collaborations. If anime is to some extent and in some cases a reaction to the American cultural elements it appropriates, who is appropriating and reacting to whom in Heroman? Is this an example of the smoothing-over of cultural boundaries, or — in the most extreme case — evidence of American capitalistic imperialism?

At any rate, the notion that acts of adaptation mark the beginning of otaku culture seems significant, given the multimedia adaptation processes at work in the anime/manga industry. Azuma attributes the proliferation of adaptations and derivative works to the postmodern fall of the metanarrative and the death of definitive authority, but if the birth of anime was, in a sense, an act of adaptation to begin with, perhaps a culture of derivation was simply a likely technical and logistical outcome.

[The] prominence of derivative works is considered a postmodern characteristic because the high value otaku place on such products is extremely close to the future of the culture industry as envisioned by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard predicts that in postmodern society the distinction between original products and commodities and their copies weakens, while an interim form called the simulacrum, which is neither original nor copy, becomes dominant. The discernment of value by otaku, who consume the original and the parody with equal vigor, certainly seems to move at the level of simulacra where there are no originals and no copies. (26)

In other words, Vocaloid and Touhou. Azuma’s prime example of this is Di Gi Charat, that franchise born of a store mascot when “the stories and settings that form its world were created collectively and anonymously as a response to the market, after the character design of Digiko alone gained support” (40). And I suppose it’s very revealing of my “brand” of fandom that I can’t really get into those sprawling franchises (I mistyped that “fanchises,” and maybe I shouldn’t have corrected it) without much in the way of authorial frames of reference. I’m not hostile toward or dismissive of fan work at all, nor do I dislike Touhou and Vocaloid; I suppose I have thus far simply failed to understand those fandoms, having cut my fanboy chops on western literature and film.

In otaku culture ruled by narrative consumption, products have no independent value; they are judged by the quality of the database in the background. …

…[O]taku consumers, who are extremely sensitive to the double-layer structure of postmodernity, clearly distinguish between the surface outer layer within which dwell simulacra, i.e., the works, and the deep inner layer within which dwells the database, i.e., settings. (33)

Azuma posits the “database” of story elements — character attributes, fragments of plot, and so on — as a replacement for the “deep inner layer” that presumably guided the reading of modern (i.e. pre-postmodern) literature (32). I’m not sure to what degree I buy that; part of me asks whether we haven’t simply done away with deep layers to begin with, given how poststructuralism rendered the semiotic signified inert, absent, or simply another signifier in disguise. But it is the case that fans of anime and manga concern themselves with very specific traits disconnected from any one character or story, and that creators both professional and amateur draw from an array of these traits — we can probably agree that the database exists, whether or not we grant its status as “grand nonnarrative” or replacement metanarrative (38).

Compared with the 1980s otaku, those of the 1990s generally adhered to the data and facts of the fictional worlds and were altogether unconcerned with a meaning and message that might have been communicated. Independently and without relation to an original narrative, consumers in the 1990s consumed only such fragmentary illustrations or settings; and this different type of consumption appeared when the individual consumer empathy toward these fragments strengthened. The otaku themselves called this new consumer behavior “chara-moe” — the feeling of moe toward characters and their alluring characteristics. (36)

Here, Azuma posits the birth of moe as we know it — that’s some srs bsns, isn’t it? While “moe” as a term evidently came about in the 1980s, Azuma locates the turn away from “fictitious grand narrative” such as that constructed by UC Gundam and toward stories that served as vehicles for the data that were the true foci of fandom in the mid-90s (37). And what franchise do you suppose he suggests is the crux of this shift? That’s right, it’s Evangelion — the very show that, in the U.S., convinced a generation of casual viewers of Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon (myself included) that they were actually fans of a storytelling method capable of conveying deep, meaningful, and consistent narrative experiences. And while we were trying to explain Christian symbolism in the context of Shinji’s journey, Japanese fans were dissecting Rei Ayanami into component parts to be recomposed later (by enterprising, market-conscious creators) into Ruri Hoshino and others (42, 49). Funny how that worked out.

It’s easy to see how contemporary “cute girls doing cute things cutely” shows came to be. People may accuse K-ON! of being “empty” — but, at the end of the day, emptiness is kind of the point. K-ON! represents a distillation of narrative into a pure vehicle for characters, who are themselves constructs of tried-and-true moe elements (moe-golems, if you will), which is what new-school fans sign on for in the first place, or so Azuma claims. The author of the linked Japanator article suggests that perhaps “emptiness” is an invitation to bring one’s personal experience to the viewing (which is inevitable anyway, she says, and I agree), but, if Azuma is to be believed, emptiness as such is practically irrelevant to the target Japanese demographic, whose members aren’t really interested in metaphoricity, cultural relevance, and so on, and whose primary concerns are the core components of cuteness, the manifestations of the database they know and love, which might be disassembled and reconstructed ad infinitum.

Which is not to say that a moe show is doomed to what we might identify as shallowness. Azuma is all about Saber Marionette J as an allegory for the late-90s otaku condition (20). And I can’t help wondering what he’d think of Strike Witches, whose regard for World War II history may be more than superficial. As long as moe shows encourage creativity by making their moe elements readily available to viewers, they can’t be all bad, I figure.

All that considered, can we really hold Chinka (which I guess is for real now?) against Danny Choo? Well, maybe — but if we do, we’re probably delving into the realm of broader issues with moe itself. Should we go after Choo’s studio for being manipulative, or should we take it up with those fans who want to be fed pure, unadulterated moe elements? And if we do, are we really doing nothing more than revealing our cultural bias?

The modern Japanese novel is said to reflect reality vividly (shasei); the otaku novel reflects fiction vividly. The characters and stories that [Ryuusui Seiryouin] depict are never realistic, but they are possible in the world of comics and anime already published, and therefore the reader accepts them as real. (56)

Even the novel is subject to database modes of consumption and production, evidently because otaku readers seek consistency with previous fiction (by way of the database) rather than with reality; “the moe-elements extracted from the subculture database seem far more real than the imitation of the real world for the emergent group of consumers in the 1990s” (78). To some degree I suspect that this has always been the case for all readers; however, Azuma speaks of an extreme, a situation in which “[o]taku print culture as a whole is beginning to obey a different kind of logic, one oriented toward characters rather than individual works” (57). The otaku novel is “[n]either literature nor entertainment,” to the extent to which such a thing is possible; it concerns itself, like anime, with serving as a vehicle for database elements (58). I couldn’t tell you how staunchly I’d stand by this notion, but I can tell you that, as a fiction writer influenced by the storytelling methods of otaku media, I find myself highly conscious of character traits as elements that might anchor readers based on previous fiction consumption.

Games produced by Key are designed not to give erotic satisfaction to consumers but to provide an ideal vehicle for otaku to efficiently cry and feel moe, by a thorough combination of the moe-elements popular among otaku. For example, in Air, pornographic illustrations of all sorts are concentrated in the first half, as if to reject the premise that the goal of girl games is erotic satisfaction. The latter half of the ten-plus hours of playing time does not even contain substantial choices; the player only follows the texts as a melodrama unfolds about a heroine. Even this melodrama is rather typical and abstract, created out of a combination of moe-elements such as “incurable disease,” “fate from previous lives,” and “a lonely girl without a friend.” …

…[T]his kind of game…masterfully grasps all of the fundamentals of moe, from the types of narrative to the details of design. …

Therefore, in most cases when they say “it’s deep” or they “can cry,” the otaku are merely making a judgment on the excellence in the combination of moe-elements. In this sense, the rising interest in drama that occurred in the 1990s is not essentially different from the rising interest in cat ears and maid costumes. What is sought here is not the narrative dynamism of old, but a formula, without a worldview or a message, that effectively manipulates emotion. (78-79)

What we have here is a loaded block of text, and I’d like to tackle it from the bottom up.

You’ll notice, toward the end, that Azuma reveals his priorities as a reader here — or he finishes the revelation that began with his early consideration of Nadesico and Saber Marionette J. Azuma and his otaku subjects evidently disagree on what is “deep;” to the otaku, depth means extensive engagement with the database, while to Azuma, depth seems to amount to engagement with some set of cultural or historical conditions — which makes sense, given that Azuma is a cultural critic by trade. Perhaps Azuma is claiming that, in the database-driven world, such a thing as “depth” no longer exists, but this notion relies on a particular definition of “depth,” and depth of experience is, practically speaking, something that varies from consumer to consumer, from product to product, and from individual consumptive act to consumptive act. What I’m trying to say is that I’m a little wary about how Azuma has framed this section — but, alright, I’ll grant that what he’s ultimately saying (i.e. otaku tend to read for emotion-invoking structural elements rather than metanarrative-based meaning) makes sense.

Essentially, Azuma takes very seriously the conception of Key games as “emotion porn.” And, yeah, I doubt there’s much room for debate over whether Key takes advantage of story elements proven effective at making consumers cry. Of interest here is Azuma’s identification of such elements as components of the database, and the implication that otaku use the database to achieve emotional states or to invoke emotive effects. What “is felt as most real” to the otaku consumer is neither “reality” nor “earlier fiction,” but “the database of moe-elements” — Azuma always seems to liken the movement toward otaku culture to a search for authentic feeling (58). Perhaps needless to say, the database consists of elements that make consumers feel certain ways. As such, database-derivative art focuses not on intellectualizing and explicating metanarratives, but on bringing about emotion in its consumers.

The idea that Air discounts sex as a satisfactory or worthwhile goal may even give us some insight into the tangled mess that is otaku sexuality. But we’ll get into that a bit more momentarily.

…[C]onsumers of novel games can be characterized as having two completely different inclinations toward the surface outer layer (the drama) and toward the deep inner layer (the system) of a work. In the former they look for an effective emotional satisfaction through combinations of moe-elements. In contrast, in the latter they want to dissolve the very unit of the work that gives them such satisfaction, reduce it to a database, and create new simulacra. In other words, in otaku the desire for small narratives and the desire for database coexist separately from each other.

…[P]ostmodern individuals let the two levels, small narratives and a grand nonnarrative, coexist separately without necessarily connecting them. To put it more clearly, they learn the technique of living without connecting the deeply emotional experience of a work (a small narrative) to a worldview (a grand narrative). Borrowing from psychoanalysis, I call this schism dissociative. (84)

I’m not sure I follow Azuma here. That is, I get that consumers have moved beyond the need to connect small narratives (individual works) with some underlying metanarrative. But, again, I don’t know how much I buy that the database occupies the space left empty when metanarrative went away. Wouldn’t small narratives inevitably be connected to the database? Its elements “prove” themselves in small narratives; small narratives are picked apart, and their effective elements are entered into the database. Wouldn’t enjoyment of small narratives and enjoyment of the database have everything to do with one another? Or is Azuma just reinforcing his point that “narrative” as such isn’t really important?

Specifically, Azuma’s talking about the disconnect between the enjoyment of a visual novel for the narrative experience it provides, and the enjoyment of a VN as a collection of images, sounds, and divergent, sometimes contradictory narrative bits. The former is what allows us to enjoy Fate’s three routes as discrete stories, and to compare them in those terms, while the latter is what compels us to play through all three arcs and achieve every possible ending systematically. Azuma gives the hypothetical example of the game that allows the player to choose to pursue a relationship with multiple women, but frames each possible relationship, in its turn, as destined: “although the protagonist is depicted as someone who experiences pure love at each juncture and encounters his ‘woman of destiny,’ actually each of the different encounters that results from the player’s choices is called ‘destiny’” (84-85). Perhaps “there is a vast discrepancy between the drama required by the characteristics of the system and the drama prepared in each scene,” but the discrepancy doesn’t result in a jarring, disjointed experience for the otaku player (85). In this sense I suppose I get where Azuma is going.

Psychiatrist Saitou Tamaki raises the following question in several occasions: Why are there very few actual perverts amongst otaku, even though the icons of otaku culture are filled with all sorts of sexual perversions? … (88)

Just as animal needs and human desires differ, so do genital needs and subjective “sexuality” differ. Many of the otaku today who consume adult comics and “girl games” probably separate these two; and their genitals simply and animalistically grew accustomed to being stimulated by perverted images. Since they were teenagers, they had been exposed to innumerable otaku sexual expressions: at some point, they were trained to be sexually stimulated by looking at illustrations of girls, cat ears, and maid outfits. However, anyone can grasp that kind of stimulation if they are similarly trained, since it is essentially a matter of nerves. In contrast, it takes an entirely different motive and opportunity to undertake pedophilia, homosexuality, or a fetish for particular attire as one’s own sexuality. … (89)

Thus, according to Azuma, getting off to hentai is something one learns. That may seem counter to the more intuitive Madaramean Principle at first, but it’s probably true, to some extent. We know at this point that gender is learned, that it is by no means wholly related to biological sex. And I don’t suppose a hentai picture would trigger sexual arousal in someone whose mind took longer to do with it what the otaku mind is trained to do in mere moments. Obviously I’m way out of my league here (and I get the impression that Azuma is, too) — have there been any psychological studies on this sort of thing?

And regarding Azuma’s pointing out the disconnect between enjoying hentai and being a pedophile — well, what can I say? I just wish people would pay more attention to professional cultural critics and less to fear-mongering news outlets (CNN, I am disappoint) and conservative commentators.

In postmodernity, the deep inner layer of the world is represented as the database, and the signs on the surface outer layer are all grasped as an interpretation (combination) of it. (103)

No, no, wait a minute. You can’t overthrow the Platonic cave only to replace it with the Platonic cave. Just saying.

…[I]n the world of simulacra, a parallel relationship (in which A, B, C, and D are all grasped as a “reading” from the same information) is preferred over a tree-like, hierarchical relationship (in which A defines B, B, defines C, and C defines D, etc.)

…For example, in otaku culture…the reality is that information belonging to different layers exists side by side, such as the individual units of work like an anime or a novel, and behind those the settings and characters in their background, and in turn behind them the moe-elements. All such information is consumed in parallel, as equivalents, as if to open different “windows.” So today’s Graphical User Interface…is a marvelous apparatus in which the world image of our time is encapsulated. (103-104)

Azuma calls this parallel mode of consumption “hyperflatness” (102). And it’s a concept that resonates with me personally — I delve into a franchise expecting to be entertained by blog posts, Twitter reactions, and things like TV Tropes as well as by the franchise’s individual works. A work consists of structural elements (in its text iterations) and readings (socially), and I like being privy to all that at the same time. Maybe that’s why I do this blogging thing in the first place.

Still, I have to wonder about how the parallel small narratives interact. Azuma describes a process of “slipping sideways” that occurs when a consumer, seeking final authority or agency (the “invisible”), brings potential candidates for this agency into view, thereby rendering them “visible” — and, in becoming visible, they become yet more small narratives lacking in authority (105-106). But that’s not really what I mean; what I’m curious about is how consumers organize small narratives. To use Azuma’s earlier example of Rei Ayanami and her many derivatives, do consumers create a “group” or “category” for quiet girls endowed with mysterious power? Does Rei hold relative authority in this group because she provided the database with those elements in a substantial way?

With words such as “postmodernity” or “otaku culture” many readers might imagine the play of simulacra cut off from social reality and self-contained in fiction, but this kind of engaged work [Yu-No] also exists. This book was written to create a moment in which great works such as this can be freely analyzed and critiqued, without distinctions such as high culture versus subculture, academism versus otaku, for adults versus for children, and art versus entertainment. (116)

Does the book succeed? Well, I don’t know; I’m not the best person to ask. I already analyze porn games and canonical literature on the same plane, using the techniques of both theory and fandom; in my case, Azuma is preaching to the converted. But I do consider the book a success insofar as it might prove useful to readers on each side of the binaries he mentions — and if the common experience of Otaku allows inter-faction discussion (something I’m hopeful but not unrealistic about), I suspect that’d be just as planned.

Endnotes

¹Murphy, Timothy S. “To Have Done with Postmodernism: A Plea (or Provocation) for Globalization Studies.” Symploke 12.1-2 (2004): 20-34. Project MUSE. Web. 30 November 2009.

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.

First mentioned to me by Owen (here), Ako didn’t quite make the cut when it came time for me to choose a subject (or subjects) for my “Showing a Bit of Character” post. That Negima! gave me more time to fanboy over Nodoka had a lot to do with it, but there’s also the matter of Ako’s being a little too meta for the kind of post I wanted to write. One could write a post about Ako and encompass within it examinations of any number of minor characters, Nodoka and Yue included — in which case they might have been eclipsed in the post’s structure, and I didn’t want that.

That’s not to say Ako is a better minor character, necessarily. But, in terms of Negima! deconstructing the universe, she is the minor character: she comes to stand for the concept itself, and she’s at least a little genre-savvy about it.

When Ako enters the school festival arc in earnest, she’s…

Playing the bass! Shit yeah! (It’s in her head at that point, but she does play for real later on.)

Enthusiasm aside, the bass guitar seems to have a reputation in anime as an instrument for side characters¹. If I remember correctly, Mio plays bass in K-ON! because she figures it won’t make her stand out, and she isn’t really wrong in terms of anime tropes. But, as both characters more or less demonstrate, it’s not as if the bass isn’t important in its own right. Where would a string ensemble be without its double bass? Where would the Red Hot Chili Peppers be without Flea? I’d say this is a common sort of revelation for token side characters.

Ako’s insight, however, is not quite so simple. Through her role in the story, she brings into scrutiny the very idea of the “side” or “minor” character. She’s of little immediate importance to the central plot — she says so herself — but the plot of Negima! is rarely straightforward; most often, major plot arcs resolve when a handful of minor plots converge into a volatile skein. What would happen if one of these component sequences of events played out differently? At no point does Negima! presume that minor characters aren’t important (how could it, when it has so many of them?).

Normally I’d be inclined to say that the question of major/minor depends on point of view. If we accept Negi as the main character insofar as we most often see things from his general perspective, then Ako would be fairly minor, given that we’d probably use Asuna as our example of a major secondary character simply because she’s the most obvious. It’s difficult to establish that as a standard, however, as point of view in Negima! tends to be unreliable. The designated POV character switches more often than is convenient to count — and if the major/minor character paradigm is tied to point of view, it rearranges itself entirely with each of these shifts. And anyway, we can’t write off examples of similar media in which the point-of-view character is very pointedly not the “main” character as such (Haibane Renmei comes to mind), which at the very least complicate how character relationships affect the model.

It’d probably be easier to illustrate where I’m going with this if we walk through a few Ako segments. We may as well start with the school festival, when Ako, who has developed a crush on Nagi (presumably Negi’s cousin; actually Negi after age-progression magic), runs into the man-child himself, and brings her various insecurities with her.

Because you really should read the rest of it yourself if you haven’t already, let’s jump right into the end of chapter 122.

You know the drill — Ako, being more or less underconfident, flees in horror from the dressing room (she, uh, puts a shirt on first). Cue self-conscious teenage girl mode!

I have two things in mind right now that are almost too obvious to mention, but I’ll mention them anyway. The first, from the two-page spread above, is when Ako asks no one in particular for help, and Negi appears, which is ironic and yet somehow not. It depends on how much anime and manga we’ve consumed, and how we define irony, maybe, but it isn’t especially unexpected. Were it a real-life situation, we might’ve laughed at the odds of Negi showing up at just that conveniently inopportune moment, but in terms of the genres of fiction to which Negima! belongs, it’s one of the more natural things that could’ve happened. If we read it as postmodern metafiction, postmodern irony is subverted or avoided.

Annoyingly, though, postmodernism devouring itself ouroboros-style is very postmodern. And it may simply be ironic in the first place that we wouldn’t find irony in the situation at first glance. I’ll get you next time, postmodernism! Next time!

The second item of note is Ako’s scar, which, while itself visually prominent, could stand for any number of defects both external and internal that relegate characters to minor-dom. That’s misleading, actually, insofar as some of them aren’t what we’d call “defects” at all. For example, there was a time when Jews could aspire to no greater status than minor character in Western literature. Jewish women (and, I think, dark-colored women in general) were under no circumstances considered for One True Pairing — and as if that wasn’t enough, they tended to be written as promiscuous, “ruined” rape victims, or both (I don’t hate you, Ivanhoe, but…). I doubt a whole slew of contemporary readers would call Judaism a flaw, but that’s the point; what is a flaw? Isn’t it a matter of perspective, a character trait we personally don’t like? And if the core characters of a given story are flawless for all practical purposes, wouldn’t that simply render them lacking in character²? Of course, low mimetic and ironic heroes make realistic fiction what it is, so it’s a passe question if you’re at all familiar with that genre (and I’d be skeptical if you said you weren’t), but contemporary speculative fiction seems to be where Mary Sue fled when the mainstream voted her out, and she has quite a foothold in shounen manga and its derivatives.

I’m sure there’s something to be said here for the expression of social constructs — Ako notes that men especially would value her lower for her potentially unsightly physical feature — but I’m really not the one to ask about that. Besides, Negi (and Kotaro, too) isn’t especially concerned with it; the society of magi, like the society of the Host Club, is perhaps more silent role model than outspoken commentator (or the former renders it the latter). At any rate Negi swoops in and, in what he assumes to be a teacherly gesture, ferries Ako several hours into the past to ensure that she doesn’t miss her concert. He also takes her on a date.

Oh, Negi…if only you knew what we know.

The context here is that they’ve entered…I guess it’s a beauty pageant, technically. A couples beauty pageant. Perhaps Negi’s oblivious to Ako’s insecurity (which isn’t unlikely), or perhaps he’s acting deliberately, but he doesn’t validate her underconfidence by acknowledging it directly. That’s one way of addressing the issue, anyway. I wonder if another character (Madoka? Haruna?) might’ve gone the route of saying her feelings aren’t invalid insofar as feelings are validated by being felt, or host no validity variable.

Well, alright — Negi does acknowledge Ako’s physical insecurity during the swimsuit round. It’s possible that the pair’s conservative dress costs them first place. Maybe the point here is that Ako’s worries are valid from a certain perspective — there surely exist men who would find her scar off-putting — but she’s surrounded by people around whom she needn’t worry, and who won’t turn away from her because she worries.

And, what’s more, she isn’t bound to accept a point of view that doesn’t accept her. After all…

To be all Sartre about it, she’s condemned to freedom. Freedom from constructs like “supporting role” is a part of it — of course she isn’t really free insofar as she’s a fictional character, but Akamatsu does have a way of treating several members of his support cast as “main” when their turns come up. The idea is that Ako, being herself, doesn’t have the luxury of falling back on an excuse like “supporting role,” as only she can be her main character. Every character could be a main character; it just so happens that, in a given story, most of them aren’t. There’s no good way of avoiding that, but at least Akamatsu tries a few maneuvers. Negima! gives the impression of concerted effort aimed at making as many characters as possible as interesting and relevant as possible. One-dimensional stock characters don’t really have a place here; in true Akamatsu fashion, the recurring characters left undeveloped are at least quite weird³.

Basically, the problem with Ako is that she won’t accept her human agency, and the problem with minor characters in the genres upon which Negima! comments is that they’re often not enabled to do so. Negi isn’t the kind of hero who boldly, phallocentrically shoulders the worries of frail damsels in distress; he’s an existential enabler. He brought the same sort of passive aid to bear with Nodoka and Yue, you may recall, but Ako’s seizing of her own destiny is more of a sweeping gesture due to her self-reference.

(I’m sure there’s more to be gleaned from Ako’s role in the magic world arc, but I think of that as a separate phase of her character, if that makes sense. Another post, perhaps!)

Endnotes

¹I’m led to believe these artists and writers aren’t familiar with people like Les Claypool and Victor Wooten, but then those two are among a handful of anomalies.

Also, I can think of maybe one exception to that rule, but Haruko never really plays the thing.

²Which isn’t to say that characters (even main ones) who lack human traits don’t have their uses in fiction, but that’s one digression I’ll avoid for now. Consider also that lack of flaws may be a flaw, depending on how you look at it.

³I’d call the villains a little flat, but most of them seem to embody some hentai fetish or another. I mean, goo girls? Seriously?

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.