People compare Scalzi to Heinlein, and for good reason. The basic gist of his SF universe is thus: the galaxy is full of habitable planets, but it’s also full of intelligent races, most of whom prefer mutilating one another over any sort of diplomacy (this includes our own humble race). In some cases, this is unavoidable; when two species simply cannot comprehend one another, and they’ve both decided they want a particular plot of land, what’s to be done? Even a fairly recognizable race of bipedal mammalians might prove culturally impenetrable. This lends Scalzi’s setting moral complexity, and that’s good; shades of gray are interesting.

For me, however, moral grayness becomes problematic when it’s little more than a lesson in moral grayness. Old Man’s War seems to suggest that anyone who starts wondering whether it might be a good idea to come up with a moral code that doesn’t involve razing all the diverse cultures of the universe is either suffering a temporary lapse, deluded, or an asshole. I can think of one exception, and it isn’t the protagonist.

Look: this isn’t the era of Milton. This isn’t Victorian England. This is postmodernism — and, in fact, it has been for quite some time. I really don’t need to be told outright that morality can’t be reduced to a binary, or that “killing is bad” is an oversimplification. You may as well write a novel about how people can’t escape their circumstances, or about how the American Dream is dead, or about one day in the life of an “ordinary” but remarkably self-aware protagonist.

It’s not that I actively disliked Old Man’s War, and I’ll grant that, in just over 300 pages, Scalzi didn’t have time to do much besides set up his universe. The included excerpt from the followup book suggests that we might get a broader overview of subjective morality if we continue on. I’m just a little dissatisfied that Old Man’s War dwelt for so long upon the notion that we may want to stop and think before we hold soldiers responsible for returning fire when fired upon.

My point here is that moral complexity has been done to death, and while I’m highly skeptical of the notion that originality is automatically good, I do think that stories benefit from not repeating the same old lessons to the point of banality.

My preferred solutions to the “stark gray” morality problem are just that — my preferred solutions. But, with that glaringly obvious disclaimer out of the way, my position is thus: while the character who simply becomes accustomed to a morally gray universe feels like old hat, the character who rejects the notion of moral grayness through force of will or personal failure, who operates beyond morality, or who undertakes a nuanced journey through an established moral system has the potential to fascinate me endlessly.

I’ve only just begun Otsuichi’s Zoo, but the protagonist of the first and eponymous story in the collection is something like a moral adventurer — or, if he isn’t quite lucid enough to explore morality himself, he serves as a vehicle for our own moral self-exploration. He’s like a good Poe protagonist in that regard; crazy as he seems, we have to wonder whether we can really hold his objectionable actions against him, and, if so, to what degree. For much of the story he engages in a kind of act, filling a social role that allows him to maintain a certain degree of self-righteousness while avoiding whatever moral judgments he has made about himself, and this bizarre interplay puts the reader in a strange position. But I won’t go on for fear of revealing too much, as the story is well worth reading.

What I will do is talk a little about an especially fabulous Gundam villain who has recently earned a place in my heart: Paptimus Scirocco.

I wonder what it is about these complete bastards that so appeals to me. You may have noticed that I’m not one of those people who takes pride in being a dick. I usually try to avoid conflict altogether; when I take a stand on an issue, I often attempt to do so in a way that appeases all involved. Hell, I don’t even like to see conflict. Being so peaceable (yeah, let’s go with that), I shouldn’t be predisposed to enjoy characters of Scirocco’s ilk, but I am. With a vengeance.

Now, Scirocco isn’t quite the sort of villain I lovingly deem a “real fucker.” But he isn’t exactly an upstanding dude, either. Most notably, he has a talent for seducing every woman in a ten-mile radius, and he abuses this superpower to build himself a loyal harem of skilled mobile suit pilots. And he isn’t much concerned about who he has to kill to accomplish his goals — goals which, in the end, make him an interesting character, as he seems to want the same thing everyone else in Zeta Gundam wants, namely a more peaceful and generally better universe. Granted, his approach to the problem renders him almost Nazi-esque, but it goes to show that Scirocco isn’t operating in spite of a moral code; he’s doing things in accordance with a moral code of his own.

We don’t have to agree with Scirocco, to be sure, but it’s easy to see that, from one standpoint, he’s one of the good guys. The same could be said of everyone in Zeta Gundam, really. It’s not as if any of them simply wants to go around in an ugly transforming robot and cause some shit (well, maybe Yazan, but…). Morality only becomes “gray” when we let numerous individual moral judgments blur into an abstract bigger picture, and while a bigger picture is fine, I guess, I really prefer a more nuanced treatment of morality, one where each “pixel” in the gray slate is enlarged to allow for scrutiny. Someone like Scirocco — a character whose moral code differs vastly from that of the protagonists, but who is allowed to live for more than five minutes anyway — aids in the zooming process, demonstrating that the personal moral frameworks that contribute to the gray mass are not simply and uniformly gray.

To put it in D&D terms (because, you know, I do that), maybe I’m saying that I don’t really believe much in “true” neutrality, and that everyone probably acts according to whatever they consider “good,” whether that be societal improvement, personal gain, or something else entirely. Old Man’s War’s doing-what-needs-to-be-done justifications make sense, I guess; I just wasn’t satisfied that the novel didn’t give much of a voice to those characters who didn’t quite agree on what needed to be done. Only now do I realize that I may be complaining about the novel’s kind-of-anthropocentrism and resultant lack of moral complexity; a single shade of gray can only be so interesting by itself.

Really defining “the Gothic” is kind of a rough job.  It started in 1764 when Horace Walpole published a novel called Castle of Otranto. The entire novel supposedly came from a dream Walpole had, in which he saw a giant, armored hand thrusting into a room.  That and more appear in the novel itself.   Since then the genre has become / sucked in a lot of different things.  The essentially realistic romances of Ann Radcliffe are also Gothic (in which nothing supernatural ever occurs, though characters think ghosts are appearing, until the ending proves otherwise — think an O. Henry story, but not as well done).  Others, like The Monk, reveled in violence, rape, incest, and all sorts of mean and nasty things.  The Gothic is often associated with architecture (literature originally borrowed the term from the study of Gothic churches), but even the classic ruined castle isn’t necessary:  Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others, consciously practiced the Gothic without castles.  A whole lot of the Gothic, no matter what else they did, was concerned with family lines, lineage, inheritances, and the like.  So what the hell is it?

Let me wield the power of quotation at you for a minute:

The more a work frightens, the more it edifies.  The more it humiliates, the more it uplifts.  The more it hides, the more it gives the illusion of revealing.  It is the fear one needs:  the price one pays for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on irrationality and menace.  Who says it is escapist? (Franco Moretti, qtd in Clery, 9)

According to Moretti, the Gothic deals with a threatening world by expanding the threats, making them worse.  This argument is very common, and we’ll use it in a minute.

The Gothic novel draws its plots, its motifs, its ghostly effects from various sources :  the supernatural realm of the ballad, and all that was mysterious and eerie in epic and the drama.  The traditional lore of old, heathen Europe, the richness and splendour of its mythology and superstitions, its usages, rites, and songs, in short everything wild and extravagant, was rediscovered by scholars about he middle of the eighteenth century and was immediately recognized as  source of powerful material by contemporary writers. (Varma 24-5)

The Gothic is a kind of amalgam literature.  Again, useful in a minute.

Now comes the part you’re probably waiting for:  how does this apply to Mazinger?  There are the obvious connections:  it’s science fiction, and in some sense SF is always related to the Gothic (more or less).  Brian Aldiss makes the connection when he claims, “Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould” (8).  Historically speaking, Aldiss and others tie SF’s origins to Frankenstein, a Gothic novel by Mary Shelley where a scientist toys with strange, possibly forbidden, sciences.

Does this sound familiar?

That’s the other painfully obvious connection:  Mazinger is partially about a mad scientist, one of the prime tropes that connects the Gothic with SF.  However, connections like that wouldn’t lead me to want to devote this much time to the subject — I do love mad scientists, but that’s another post.

There are other elements, possibly more important elements, to consider.  Mazinger Z itself is a pretty good place to start.  Juuzo calls Mazinger “castle of black iron,” which he leaves to Kouji to repay him for his parents’ deaths.  So it’s a kind of inheritance, and even figuratively described as a black castle, the traditional Gothic inheritance.

Mazinger as a castle is odd, at first glance — it walks around.  Wouldn’t it be a suit of armor, or a weapon, at least?  So long as Grandpa was being poetic, he could have called it a “black sword.”  But calling Mazinger a castle is very pointed.  In both Gothic and typical medieval traditions (including the Japanese medieval era), the castle is obviously a symbol of military might and power, but also a symbol of any sort of power.  If you own a castle, you own land, and land is the power to do what you want in a medieval society.  The castle becomes a symbol of medieval power.  Shin Mazinger Z juxtaposes a very old symbol with a very new one:  the super robot.  Super robots (and various other power suits) are typically symbols of newness, of a kind of ultra-male power to conquer, like the rocket ship.  But the castle is all about the past tense.  If you have a castle, you already got that power, it’s available.  The symbolism of Mazinger as an iron castle transforms it from a weapon that can be used to gain power into a place from which already garnered power can be drawn.  Kouji has inherited power from his family, he doesn’t need to go out and get it.

There’s a lot of Gothic in the “back up singers” too.  Most of the villains fit the bill rather well.

Ashura is one of the most obvious, but all of Dr. Hell’s henchmen appear to suffer from some form of bodily abnormality.  A frightening shift in the body itself is yet another common Gothic trope, though it’s viewed as a 19th century evolution of the form.

In place of a human body stable and integral [. . .], the fin-de-siècle Gothic offers the spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated; in place of the possibility of human transcendence, the prospect of an existence circumscribed within the realities of gross corporeality; in place of a unitary and securely bounded human subjectivity, one that is both fragmented and permeable.  Within this genre one may witness the relentless destruction of ‘the human’ and the unfolding in its stead of what I will call [. . .] the ‘abhuman.’  The abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other.

This…  Yeah, this seems pertinent.  Not only Baron Ashura, but Blocken and Dr. Hell suffer from this kind of abhumanity.  Ashura is simply the best example.  Rotting in their grave, two lovers were revived by the terrible scientific knowledge of Dr. Hell, but halved and pieced together, a constant reminder of the “gross corporeality” and the fragmentation mentioned above.  Blocken’s head is off his body.  I have no real idea what is wrong with Dr. Hell yet; he’s blue.  Not only does this constant visibility of physicality underline the Gothic tendencies of Mazinger, it also highlights the primary theme of the show:  choice.

As I said, Kouji isn’t trying to find power.  He has it.  Boy, does he have it.  He does seem to be striving for a kind of socialization.  His home life was relatively happy, in the short glimpses we got of it, but he did lose his parents, apparently due to something his grandfather did, and then his grandfather was killed as well.  Kouji’s primary motive, at this early point, is simple revenge.  The choice is, of course, posed lucidly by Juuzo:  Kouji can become a god or a devil.  Both are evident in the show.  Mazinger resembles Zeus, one of the other super robots is based on Aphrodite; meanwhile, the Mechanical Beasts are terrible monsters and demons.  They are the poles of this field that Kouji’s caught in.  Juuzo didn’t care.  He had a responsibility to his family, and he fulfilled it; whatever Kouji does with his birthright is up to him (shades of the supposed objectivity of the scientist?).

Kouji is the Gothic protagonist in its fully realized form:  the Byronic hero.  A synthesis of the traditional heroes and villains, the Byronic hero has all the qualities of the villains and enough from the heroes to help us sympathize with them.  Good and evil?  What are they to the superman, the figure above humanity?  Byron’s Manfred sees the capitulation of this figure, when the eponymous character seeks to lose painful memories, and in his quest he will petition God, spirits, demons, death, and finally Satan himself, but unkneeling and proud all the while.  The Byronic hero could go either way — but usually went to the bad (or, dare I say, BAD END).  The Gothic themes surrounding Kouji help us to understand the position he’s in:  he has no real debt to society.  His castle may not be in the depths of the Apennines, but it is removed from the world all the same.  He gets his power from it and needs no other.  He is circled by the bodily world:  ruined but powerful bodies on the one hand, abhuman and devilish, and on the other hand the regular folks who are familiar, human, but powerless — even their super robots are useless against the kikaiju.  The dark undercurrents the Gothic tropes lend to the show not only help us see what’s happening, they also put into some thematic doubt the outcome.  In Kouji’s position, why bother being good?  What would come of it?  Perhaps we can assume he will come out “good” in the end (of course, if you’ve read/seen a previous iteration, maybe you wouldn’t be assuming), but the ambiguity, the question, is the place where the emotional action of the show takes place.

Further Reading:

I dealt more with Lewis’ The Monk here: [->]

E. J. Clery’s The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762 – 1800: [-> google book link]

Varma, Devendra.  The Gothic Flame. [->]

Brian W. Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree: [->]

Hurley, Kelly.  The Gothic Body:  Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle: [->]

I also wrote about the Gothic villain (in relation to Crest of the Stars‘ Baron Febdash) here: [->]

Ghostlightning on Baron Ashura: [->]

Ghostlightning on some of the generic markers of “super robot” (in contrasting it with “real robot”): [->]

Actually, it’s the seventh, but I figure now’s as good a time as any to stop numbering them and just admit they’re a (semi-)regular feature.  Woo!

Anyhow, this time I’m doing an essay called “Coming to Terms” by Gary K. Wolfe.  It’s short, so hopefully I can get this entry done before the scourging weather wipes my house out of the valley in which it nestles.

I think this essay is especially pertinent here because the anime fandom is nearly always in a roil, the past few years, concerning what to call things.   At the beginning of the essay, Wolfe quotes Everett Bleiler:  ”Our terms have been muddled, imprecise, and heretical in the derivational sense of the word” (13).  This sounds awfully familiar.  Of course, Wolfe is talking about science fiction and fantasy, but both situations essentially stem from the same place:  a kind of ghetto status, either real or imagined, in terms of acceptance within the tradition from which most literary terms come from.

If you haven’t worked it out by now from general observation, SF and fantasy are sort of “my thing.”  SF and fantasy are what originally drew me to anime, even with the success of shows like Supernatural or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, American tv doesn’t have nearly as many SF or fantasy shows as Japanese anime tv does.  There’s a lot to choose from.  Now, obviously my interest doesn’t end there, but I’m always going to be interested in those genres.  Hence the use of an SF text here.

Anyway.  Much of Wolfe’s essay is in the format of a dictionary.  I don’t mean to quote his definitions entirely, but I thought I would the first one, as it too has special significance to the anime community:

Academic:  Used both as an adjective and a noun to describe the involvement of professional scholars and teachers in the criticism, history, theory, and teaching of science fiction.  Such a meaning might seem obvious, but the term has gained a great many overtones, usually either disparaging or defensive, and has come rather imprecisely to be contrasted both with ‘fan’ or amateur scholarship in the field, and with the various ‘internal’ works of history and criticism generated by science fiction and fantasy writers themselves.  In this usage, the ‘academic’ is ofted regarded as an outsider trained in traditional humanistic methodologies wich are sometimes felt to be inadequate for science fiction; interestingly, the term is seldom applied to university scientists or even social scientists, suggesting that it refers not necessarily to the academic world per se, but specifically to inhabitants of English or history departments in universities.  (13-4)

Yeah, I’m not going to bother explicating that one further.

Wolfe deals with “cognitive estrangement,” lifted from the writings of Darko Suvin and defined, here, as “estranged from the naturalistic world but cognitively connected to it” (15).  Now, what I wonder about this, in relation to anime, is how liberally this could be applied.  It seems as though the traditional use of strange hair colors might even qualify otherwise “realistic” anime as “estranged.”  Nothing’s wildly different, we don’t have trouble living within parts of the world, but there are notes within it that are not realistic, but are not considered strange.  It’s become so familiar that shows such as Bleach use it as an entryway — it is odd that Ichigo’s hair is orange, and this almost acts as a gateway to dealing with the estrangement in the spiritual world intruding on the material.  At least, the speculation on what that interference would mean comes across to me as better and more “realistic” than the same situation in, say, Yu Yu Hakusho.

He also cites Gene Wolfe’s term “posthistory” for far future stories so far in advance of our own that the characters aren’t connected to us any longer (19).  Think of Canticle for Leibowitz — then jump further into the future.  No, further.  Go ahead, go farther still.  Once all emotional or factual connection is gone, that’s posthistory.  It appears to be made in contrast to pre-history, and both terms indicate a time actively separated from our own by distances so great as to make nearly new worlds of the timeframes involved.  I’m wondering if any anime SF could qualify as posthistory; I can’t think of any right now.  Any ideas out there?  If there aren’t that many, I have to wonder if there’s a significance there, regarding perhaps differing views of the functioning of historical recall (or some such).

Oh, Wolfe (Gary, not Gene) mentions “sci-fi” as a neologism made up by journalists and others “outside” the genre who don’t understand it, and its widest non-pejorative acceptance within the genre is to indicate things that aren’t as complex as usually expected — Star Wars is the example cited from Elizabeth Anne Hull 20-1).  Am I the only one who has never encountered this?  ”Sci-fi” was just a short version of “science fiction” for me, growing up; I’ve never experienced it as pejorative at all.

Okay, this one strikes me as odd:

Wonder: Frequently invoked in definitions of fantasy but seldom defined, as in C. N. Manlove’s phrase ‘a fiction evoking wonder.’ The term is equally common in discussions of science fiction with its ‘sense of wonder,’ but it is quite possible the meaning there is somewhat different, relating to philosopohical notions of the sublime in the face of vastness. In fantasy, the term need not imply awe and terror in the face of the natural world, but rather suggests the desire and longing arising out of the promise of other worlds or states of being. (22)

Uh… I call bullshit. How does fantasy not enter into the “awe and terror in the face of the natural world?”  My impression is that fantasy is much more involved in portrayals of the “natural world” than SF is. I think Wolfe means to refer back to the supposed love and idealization of physics and other “natural” descriptors within SF, but the emphasis on technology and human aspiration is generally antithetical to sublime pursuits. On the other hand, fantasy derives directly from the Gothic, in which the sublime is absolutely essential. Radcliffe wrote one of the pre-eminent essays on terror, entirely relating it to the Gothic.

That’s about it.

Work Cited:

Wolfe, Gary K. “Coming to Terms.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, eds. Scarecrow Press, Inc.: Lanham, MD. 2005.

If you’re following at home, you’ll already know that I started Aria: the Animation.  And I just finished it.  I know there’s a bunch more of it, but I dunno when I’ll finish it — if I learned one thing (and I’d like to think I learned several, but still), it’s that I can’t really shotgun Aria.  You ever eat so much candy that, while still hungry, the thought of sugar makes you ill?  It doesn’t mean the candy is any worse, you just really need a steak.  That’s sorta what happened to me, though luckily each day found me ready for more.  Sleeping off the sugar crash works, it turns out.  Anyway, this post might ramble all around a bunch of different topics, but if you’re okay with that, let’s get started.

I suppose I should explain my subject line before we move on.  I first ran into a reference to undines in a Blue Oyster Cult song, “Workshop of the Telescopes.”  Check it out here, it’s great. I’ll wait.

Now, the song’s actually from Blue Oyster Cult’s first, self-titled album, but the track is from a collection I have — this specific track is the one I listened to in high school.

Okay.  So, inevitably I had to look up what these things were in the song.  A salamander is a lizard of fire, supposedly born in conflagrations — rather, one kind of salamander is that (there were others, according to Greek natural philosophers that were so cold they could extinguish fire, but the former is the best known version).  Drakes are typically small, dragon-like creatures.  I think I knew those two already by the time I listened to the song.  An undine, on the other hand,  is a water spirit from Germanic folklore.  Well, one spirit — it was originally a name.

This stuff should sound familiar.  Both salamanders and undines feature into Aqua’s landscape, along with gnomes and sylphs.  While not entirely removed from their mythic roles, Aria‘s versions are, ah, different from the originals.

The gnomes are pretty much out of Norse legend, and were generally mean, tricksy, and brilliant craftsmen.  Loki tricked them into building the wall surrounding Asgard, and the gods purchased from them the chains that hold Fenrir.  The gnomes on Aqua still work with fire, but are, in other wise, fairly more benevolent.

I’m not going to go through each reference.  If you’re really interested, you can dig them up yourself.  My point is that, in just about every case, the referenced creature’s enmity or capriciousness has been softened into the same work-for-the-greater-good-of-everyone atmosphere.  While it makes me grit my teeth a little bit, it’s not quite a bowdlerization; it serves to highlight the nature of the planet itself.  Constructed almost wholly by human hands, Aqua is a place where things are remade.

Ghostlightning, commenting on my previous post, mentioned (in response to my gibbering) the theme of the terraforming itself.  I think he wanted me to talk about it, as he meant to and — I was about to make a joke about Ghostlightning being lazy, but the irony can’t overcome the sheer GAR of his self-mandated work schedule.  Moving on.

The terraforming of Mars into Aqua is covered more than I thought it would be, from my second-hand blog-post reading.  It’s interesting, though entirely on the side of the spectators.  That’s not wrong — I appreciate the “bug’s eye view” it gives us (think of it like Cloverfield, which is a “person on the ground” view of a Godzilla movie).  I am a fan of the terraforming trope, though, and have the good luck (bad luck) to have stumbled upon one of the best examples of it:  the Mars trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson.  It’s hard SF with an actual sense of how words are used to carry a story.  I recommend it.  I have only read the first book myself (yes, gasp, I know).  I took the second book to Memphis with me, only to find that, no, I had taken the third book.  So I had hoped to slip it in during the summer, but, uh, we’ll see about that.

So basically, I’d just like to see a little more of the terraforming just because I like that sort of thing.  Aria takes a novel approach, in showing us the world already completely remade, and seeding bits of its making in throughout the story.  It makes the assumption that water could be found under the surface of Mars — which isn’t all that far-fetched, though even if true I don’t think those amounts would be under there.  But hell, the latest rover found water ice on the surface, so that’s cool.  The only thing about the “science” that I would even qualify as “wrong” is that Aria is fond of dramatic sunset shots, but the sun is the same size as it is on Earth.  Mars is half an AU farther from the sun as Earth is — not as dramatic a distance as the next planet out, Jupiter, but still significant enough.

If you start to think about the social climate of Aqua, though, it’s a bit disconcerting on its own.  Literally everything appears to depend on the salamanders and the gnomes.  If I grasp the line of terraforming of the Mars trilogy correctly, the idea there is to eventually make the friendly-to-human circumstances of the terraforming self-sustaining — that is, if you do enough to change the planet, it would just be that planet.  You wouldn’t have to do much to regulate it (there is, by the way, one autoplastic group in the Mars trilogy, who change themselves to suit Mars — nothing like this seems to have happened on Aqua).

But really, Aqua is a utopia that is one crashed hard disk away from killing millions of people who have no concept that things could go wrong — Akari’s view of what the salamanders do is to make it “comfortable” for the people on Aqua.

Of course, maybe later in the series it turns out they have altered the planet significantly enough, and their job is just to nudge things into comfortable directions.  No telling.

Now let’s turn to that idea of a utopia.  If I had to identify anything disturbing about the show itself, this would be it.  My instinct, and all the reading I’ve done recently on the topic, tells me that even in literature a utopia never really happens, at least not like this.  Andrew Gordon, in an essay I dug up for my paper on Delany’s Nova, claims that, “a story in the ‘open-system model’ must somehow deal with and transcend the fears about destructive technology [. . .] Far from being uniformly positive visions, the ‘open-system’ stories create a dialectical tension between our hopes and our fears about machinery” (193).

What he means by “open-system model” is a shorthand for a previous critic’s idea — Patricia Warrick claims that utopias use an open-system model in that they posit technology allowing a free movement back and forth through every level of society.  In contrast, a dystopia is a “closed-system model” that forces everything into a mechanistic stasis.  Aria is certainly open system, but Gordon convincingly claims that a functional open-system story holds, inside it, a closed-system story that has been circumvented — or the plot of the story itself could be the circumventing.

Aria doesn’t usually hint at a circumvented dystopia, so often it can feel a little false, more fantasy than SF — why is Aqua so happy?  Because it is.  Now, given that ghosts (or cats, or something) show up with magical requests and time travel, viewing Aqua as a fantasy — or a science-fantasy — may not be so far off the mark as all that.  I would argue for that, in fact.  Of course, things back on “Man-Home” don’t sound so great, but it’s so forcedly distant — as of now — I can’t really see it.  And anyway, Aqua hasn’t served to fix anything about Man-Home; it’s simply a tourist attraction to help people forget their apparently terrible lives back on the home planet.

My only other problem with the series is deeply personal, and not really a fault of the show’s at all.  It is full of happy people being happy; even the sarcastic character isn’t very sarcastic  I am what one might call a mean person.  I’m not cruel, but I make very mean jokes, and so do most of the people I spend a lot of time with.   People so blindly cheerful actively agitate me — it doesn’t help that, in my region, they’re usually blind religious zealots who have achieved their total, blank happiness by giving up all control of their lives.

Actually, I just wrote myself into a realization.  Thekittymeister and Ghostlightning frequently talk about Sartre and Kierkegaard, or at least, their concepts of self-destiny, control over one’s own life.  That’s one of the secrets to why I love TTGL so much, and it rattles me to watch a show so much about just shrugging and moving on.  In the traditional, colonialist breakdown, it’s enormously western of me.

The episodes of Aria, however, where the characters actively strive to better themselves, well, that works for me pretty well.  And holding the shape of the entire show in my head, I see it all as a tendency toward this.  The driving force of the undine’s job, it turns out, is to enjoy it.  A lot.  They are, after all, supposed to make people happy, and doing that when you’re not happy about it is a terrible struggle that doesn’t really work.  Pretty much ever.  So loving, or learning to love, every little thing about their job is what our undines-in-training are working at doing.  The show is essentially a bildungs-roman (that is, traditionally, the education of a young man — you might see how old the trope is from the gendered phrasing).  Except, they all know how to row, how to sing, so on (maybe they’re not great at these things, but still).  They haven’t yet connected what they’re doing to being strictly happy on their own terms.  Hence the advice “Grandma” gave to them about how Alicia enjoys everything about being an undine.

I did something with this show I rarely do:  I looked (a little, admittedly, not a lot) into the cultural background of the production of the show itself.  I’ll just go ahead and link you to the Wikipedia page I’m using.  The manga of Aria was specifically praised as a great thing for “elementary school girls.”  It’s not as though slippage in anime fanbases is new, but at one point in an episode I watched, a notice came up that the next week, the episode would air at 2:00 a.m.  This is not exactly the time elementary schoolgirls would be watching anime.

So the anime shifted audience focus; the original slippage probably came with the manga.  I suspect cultural insecurity is part of the reason for its spread of popularity.  Like much of the early American SF that preceded it, Aria assumes the nationality of the writer/readers will fill the stars.  One of the questions leveled at defensive SF authors is, if your future is so egalitarian, why are all the characters white/American/what-have-you.  Aria does fairly similar things — Athena looks Indian (I’m basing this off the depiction of other Indian characters in anime, not any relation to actual Indian people),  and I guess many of the Himeya group may be Chinese (based on the dresses they sometimes wear when off-duty), but everyone lives in a culture which is a romanticized mish-mash of Italian and Japanese culture.  There is, inexplicably, an onsen on Mars, which one would think couldn’t spare the geothermal energy for such a thing.  The mailman drinks genmacha to combat the cold, and guests are naturally seated on cushions on the floor, with nary a joke about how seiza hurts after a while (hurts?  Oof, I can barely get up at all after about five minutes or so, though it’s great for the back).

This cultural appropriation does something very important for its audience:  it’s enormously reassuring.  In the face of what appears to be a looming threat of cultural hybridization, Aria provides a vision of a world that goes into the stars, but is still essentially Japanese.  There is a delight, then, within this insecurity, when watching characters poling gondolas through space-Venice get off work and eat watermelon on the beach in the traditional manner.

This isn’t a criticism — if it were, I would necessarily implicate decades of SF writing in America and elsewhere.  And while perhaps they are guilty of some colonial simplification, it was mostly naivety.  That, I suspect, would be the most Aria is guilty of, and I’m not too worried about even that minor issue.

If you’ve been waiting for a judgment, or need one because I’ve led you to believe I hate this show, let me set you straight:  I enjoyed it.  It’s not my favorite thing ever, in the history of ever, but then, what is?  I haven’t talked much about the obvious care and attention the show received in production, but others have probably done that better than I could.  It was certainly very educational for me — I wouldn’t normally watch a show like this.  Hmm…  I would have sworn someone did a post recently about how blogging has changed the contours of their watching habits, but I can’t find it.  If that’s you, or you know it, link it up in the comments.

It’s certainly true of me:  I’m very glad I watched the first thirteen episodes of Aria.  The next set of twenty-six await me, though I may catch up on Mazinger first.  And, uh, finish my paper, and this terrible book I’m reading for class.  You know, the stuff I’ve been putting off.

Work Cited:

Gordon, Andrew. “Human, More or Less: Man-Machine Communion in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova and Other Science Fiction Stories.” The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction. Thomas P. Dunn, Richard D. Erlich, and Brian W. Aldiss, eds. Greenwood: Westport, CT. 1982. 193-202.

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.

Maka says, Read a book! Or she'll take your soul.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything worthwhile.  I suppose it’s possible that will continue after today, but whatever.  This is a little different from most of the AiC entries, as I’m going to post a piece I wrote for my SF literature class.  It is much in the vein of the AiC posts, sort-of; that is, when he gave us grad. students the assignment (we’re crashing an undergrad. course), he said it was a completely arbitrary assignment that would never be published anywhere.  We’re meant simply to respond to two critical essays he gave us.  I riffed on them in the way I will, sometimes, and have no idea if it’s what he wants to see.  I’m turning it in tomorrow, so we’ll see.  But I just wrote the last paragraph and I’d talked to Pontifus about posting it when it was finished.  It is.  So, uh, woo.  The essays are “On the Origins of Genre” by Paul Kincaid and “Science Fiction and Literature — or, the Conscience of the King” by Samuel Delany.  (Kincaid’s most recent book is up for a non-fiction Hugo this year, by the way.)

In “On the Origins of Genre” Paul Kincaid tracks the movement of science-fiction across its evolution, ultimately coming to the conclusion that the genre has no beginning or end of any significance, and because of that, “science fiction is what we point to when we say ‘science fiction’” (52). We have no single way to identify the genre; there is no fingerprint or DNA matching, only a kind of familial resemblance one might expect from an essay titled after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Kincaid begins the essay by providing a good overview of attempts to define “science fiction,” with entries from critic Darko Suvin to The Oxford Companion to English Literature. He comes to the conclusion that science fiction is too broad and diverse to admit of a definition that would both cover everything readily acknowledged as science fiction and be limiting enough to be of use as a definition. Kincaid ultimately says the act of creating a hard definition will not work.

Similarly John Frow, in his book Genre, suggests that genres provide readers with a “horizon of expectations;” genres use a system of commonly-understood tropes to provide readers with ideas about the work drawn from a kind of pool that already exists (69-70). A work may violate the expectations without becoming another genre. “Genres,” he claims, “are neither self-identical nor self-contained” (71). This process is quite different from using a hard and fast definition (or even one that is not so fast). Frow’s conception of genre is fluid, which in turn allows the text to remain fluid and still use the genre markers it needs to make its meaning. Kincaid and Frow seem to agree on the generic system which draws from a source larger than any one text. I have to wonder if the tradition of attempting to define science fiction is, at least in part, a way to legitimize a genre that still meets occasional resistance from more staid academic circles.

Kincaid also soundly repudiates another habit I have seen in commentators on science fiction: the attempt to find an original science fiction text. On the idea of an “urtext” he says “there is no such thing” (51), unequivocally stating that it is impossible to find a single textual source for the origin of science fiction. I feel this is true of more genres than science fiction. The Gothic genre is often traced directly back to Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. It’s certainly not wrong to do so, just as it is not wrong for Brian Aldiss to trace science fiction back to Frankenstein, but the Gothic was created both before and after Walpole’s novel. Before in the sense that he willfully drew from medieval romances for many of his elements; after in the sense that the Gothic could not be a genre until enough texts existed to group together and form the pool I alluded to above, the one from which readers draw their expectations for a new work participating in the genre. A genre is always made up of more elements than any single work; attempts to get every genre identifier into a work leads to “kitchen sink” stories that almost never read well. Given the inability of any one text to participate in every identifier of a genre (Castle of Otranto can’t even do it, and it is the first Gothic text for all practical purposes), it seems as though the search for an urtext is essentially futile. Kincaid deals with the problem in a relativistic way by claiming, that tracing the “family resemblances” of science fiction elements “does lead, rather, to a series of urtexts” (51). He goes on to claim that individual threads (tropes) could be traced back in this way, and those may originate in individual texts (52), such as the mad scientist, which can be drawn back to Frankenstein, even though Frankenstein cannot serve as an “urtext” for the genre as a whole. Examining elements rather than either the whole genre or the whole text is more useful, as it provides methods for critics and readers to, in turn, examine the themes and issues within the genre and the texts, which strikes me as much more important.

Samuel Delany’s “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’ – or, The Conscience of the King,” in contrast, attempts to grapple with what people do in that process; it is how people of different sorts make meaning when reading. He primarily focuses on the differences between science fiction and what he terms “literature,” or academically-accepted mainstream fiction. The essay suffers an ambivalence that makes it difficult for a reader to understand, at first, who Delany is criticizing. He refers to not knowing important information about the SF field as “certain academic blind spots” right after summing up an episode wherein a well-respected SF editor he knew had no idea what the Hugo awards were (100-101). He also provides examples of academics failing to know important information about SF, but I am left wondering why he believes it is specifically an academic problem when, by his own admission, it is no such thing.

His greater point, concerning the need for readers of all sorts to pay attention to the field, and not just their perception of it, finally comes clear. He claims that “the assumption of most academic critics [. . .] is that somehow the history of science fiction began precisely at the moment they began to read it” (99). while SF readers “deny all existence to the interpretive space around the SF text” and “assume a conscientiously philistine approach” to set them apart from readers of “literary” fiction (114). Both these views reduce the field of SF writing to what the reader wants. These readers do not admit of anything counter to their desires and will alter or misinterpret whatever they need to in order to maintain their views.

These “ruptures” (the term Delany uses throughout to describe these problems) are clearly bad for the interplay of intelligent discourse around SF, but I am forced to worry whether or not Delany alienates more people from his ideas than he gathers to them in this work. His attitude towards academics, those already in place to do what he asks of readers in a significant and influential way, is dismissive at best. He claims “reading literature as if it were ‘literature’ is [. . .] pretty much a waste of time” (117). This statement, while driving home his point about the proper method of reading, insults anyone who has engaged in traditional reading of literature, even if it is not meant to. Meanwhile, Delany, in summing up the views of the “philistine” SF fans, insults them in almost as bald a fashion. It doesn’t seem to me as though it’s a very helpful strategy.

Delany’s views of reading, as stated in this essay, are enormously compelling and probably the most useful portions of it, though his move to call it “reading as though a text is science fiction” perhaps, again, hobbles the effort. Delany outlines the systems mainstream and SF writing use to make meaning: both use words, but in a science fiction novel any metaphorical phrase, such as “her world exploded” could also be literal, and the reader must strive to make sense of the phrase, always keeping in mind that both the literal and the figurative are both lending meaning to the work at the same time (103-104). I agree with this entirely; his study on the ways in which we organize information in this way and the effects of it are effective and interesting.

Delany’s second major idea, that science fiction reading should overtake “literary” reading (as I referenced it before), is interesting as well, but slightly misled. Delany tells the story of a 19^th century literature scholar who began to consume more SF than mainstream fiction; upon going back to one of his favorite novels, Pride and Prejudice, he found himself enjoying it more, and using the book as a way to wonder about what sort of world it created – whereas, beforehand, he read it as an account of the world as it was when Austen wrote (116). Delany commends this method of reading, claiming it is particular to science fiction. And while I agree SF can make a reader more likely to engage in this reading, it is not that field’s particular birthright. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien describes an alternative to Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” He claims that something unbelievable, such as a fantasy, creates a “secondary world” of the fiction, and within that world all the unbelievable events are just as natural as any other. There is no question of belief, as the world contains them (57-68). This idea can be expanded to all literature, not just fantasy (of which Delany’s SF is a kind). Anything read in a book is not reality, which is obvious; however, when a book is realistic most readers don’t notice. A realistic book is experienced in the same way as a fantastic one: it is read, not heard or seen or felt or smelled. The events of a realistic novel, such as Pride and Prejudice, occur in a secondary world as removed from the real world, by virtue of the way in which is is experienced, as any science fiction novel. Delany has described something very valuable, but in claiming it for SF readers he widens a gap that needs to be closed.

Works Cited

Delany, Samuel R. “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’ – or, The Conscience of the King.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press, Inc. Maryland: 2005. 95-117.

Frow, John. Genre. Routledge. New York: 2006.

Kincaid, Paul. “On the Origins of Genre.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press, Inc. Maryland: 2005. 41-53.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. 33-99.

Let’s examine a few choice morsels from the aforelinked article.

“What we love about this is we hopefully get the best of both worlds,” Mr. Howe said. “We’ll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we’ll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand.”

“Human-friendly?” Surely Mr. Howe doesn’t mean to imply that geeks/nerds/what have you are in some way subhuman; surely he simply means that a re-branding campaign would help bring more humans into the viewership. But I wonder how many current viewers it will alienate. Apparently they’ve deemed it worth the risk; it worked for the video game industry, after all. Now, I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice if the companies responsible for our entertainment had more money to work with thanks to an increase in consumers, but is it conceivable that a reimagined company might, in time, rid itself of the things that made us like it in the first place because they’re less profitable than what the shiny new fan base wants? I’d think so.

The bottom line is, an entertainment company is only interested in pleasing its current fan base as long as said fan base is satisfyingly profitable. Low-level employees need to eat, after all, and upper managers in any proper capitalist society require regular bonuses as catalysts for the eldritch spells that keep them from going poor like the rest of us right now.

Sci Fi is coming off the best year in its history. In primetime it ranked 13th in total viewers among ad-supported cable networks in 2008. It’s a top-10 network in both adults 18 to 49 (up 4%) and adults 25 to 54 (up 6%).

During its fourth-quarter earnings call, parent General Electric said Sci Fi racked up a double-digit increase in operating earnings despite the beginnings of the recession.

Given that, and the fact that science fiction and fantasy are probably acceptable to a larger audience now than they ever have been since the birth of TV thanks to such illustrious personages as Harry Potter and Batman, what’s the point?

“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.

I’ll refer Mr. Brooks to the previous blockquote. They’ve done alright so far, haven’t they? Also, I know a metric fuckton of “female audience” members who are at least okay with sci-fi and fantasy. This is, after all, the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Nine.

Yes, these people are professionals and I’m not, they’d know better than I would, etc. etc., but still.

And, goddammit, if he didn’t think the name worked, why didn’t he do something about it when he helped launch the channel?

In terms of television, the new brand better reflects that the channel has programs that are not about the typical sci-fi themes of space, aliens and the future.

Like Battlestar Galactica and Stargate? Oh, wait.

I know that the channel has its share of low-quality horror, too, but I was under the impression that its epic space operas were quite profitable; why risk a system that’s been proven to work? Here’s an idea: why don’t these people devote their market-savvy ways to convincing consumers of something many have already begun to figure out, namely that speculative fiction isn’t the dark side of the artistic force?

Honestly, I think the channel’s image problem (if there even is a problem, given that “during its fourth-quarter [of 2008]…Sci Fi racked up a double-digit increase in operating earnings despite the beginnings of the recession”) isn’t related to its being known as a haven of nerds so much as its reputation for airing absolute shit most of the time. How about improving the quality of the programming, and then worry about brand names and such? But now I’ve started to air my negative opinions, so let’s move on.

“When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it,” Mr. Howe said. “It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.”

There’s nothing insightful in this quote; I just think it’s funny when the rhetoric of the uncool (“techno-savvy,” “hip”) is used to describe coolness. Or maybe I’m wrong, and that language is hip among the techno-savvy these days.

For the record, yes, I indulge in what could easily be called the rhetoric of the uncool, but I don’t do so while presuming to be cool or claiming to represent an organization rife with coolness.

The network will begin briefing cable operators about the transition this week and plans a trade ad campaign in April as part of the upfront. The new campaign will use the slogan “Imagine Greater,” which Mr. Howe thinks will resonate with both consumers and media buyers.

“It’s a call to action,” he said. “Look at the everyday and how you can turn it to the extraordinary. It’s an aspirational, optimistic message about enhancing people’s lives.”

Yeah, people already do that. It’s called sci-fi. Seriously, what an asshole.

Ahem.

Forgive my unreasonableness here. I know well enough by now how companies operate. I simply have a tendency to don my armor, draw my bastard sword, and offer an oath to the gods of righteous vengeance when I feel that I or my comrades in arms are at immediate risk of being sold out and written off. That risk must exist, it seems, for the companies that produce the things we like to survive, but I reserve the right to be disgruntled about it.