Well, here's the thing: it's a Japanese medium, and ergo everything you get is going to be filtered through their cultural tropes, and how they see our culture, if it's one of our cultural things they're riffing on. Sometimes this looks...very odd...to someone who grew up in a Western culture. Someone who had some reason to know (being of Asian extraction and having grown up partially overseas, in Japan) explained it to me like this once: our cultural "things" are as exotic to them as theirs are to us. So they like to use them in their media, but it doesn't...translate...exactly like you'd expect. Because sometimes what they think is important isn't important to us or because they're comparing it to something in their own culture that doesn't exist in ours. I've heard that from a few other people, too, but at least one who I expect has some real personal basis for saying it (which I don't: I lived overseas, but not in Asia).
Some people do this better than others. Hiromu Arakawa, the writer/artist who did Fullmetal Alchemist, does a VERY SOLID European quasi-magical industrial society (I'm a big fan and I'm picky about my European Magical Industrial Societies, as you know.) And I've, you know, not only grown up in a western society, I lived in Europe. I spent formative years in the sorts of places she was modeling her society on, and it looked fine to me. She did her homework (...mostly. Her occasional failure to get how Western audiences would react to her tossing Buddhist nonviolence into weird places in a VERY violent storyline shows nobody's perfect.)
Then you could watch, say Yana Toboso's Black Butler, which is a very good example of what it is--namely someone who clearly likes the visual style and some mythological things about a Western setting but doesn't actually manage to pull it off in a way that anyone who's actually familiar with the setting will buy as genuine. I made it through two episodes of the anime: I laughed myself sick. My husband thought I'd gone crazy. It's on Netflix: flick it on for about ten minutes and I think you'll see what I mean.
I have friends who EAT THAT STUFF UP WITH A SPOON. And they'd LOVE this book. So I recommended it to them.
I can't really define what it is without giving it more thought that it probably merits at the moment, but there's certain things that anime and its related mediums (manga, Japanese and other Asian country produced video games) tend to do Western religion, and they all do it more or less the same, and I see it in this book. I listed some of the things they tend to do (EVIL CONSPIRACY CHURCH! EVIL POPE/BISHOP THING! HEAVY STYLE POINTS FOR THE DRESS CODE! NO ACTUAL, Y'KNOW, RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL CHURCH MYTHOLOGY OR DOCTRINE EXCEPT IN A VERY VAGUE VISUAL SENSE! PRETTY PRETTY WOMANLY MEN!) I could probably make a very, very long list, and someone else has probably already done it better.
It's one of those things, I think, you either like or you don't. I don't really care for it but I can overlook it if there's something else going on that I find interesting. I didn't see anything like that here to get me past it.
Some people do this better than others. Hiromu Arakawa, the writer/artist who did Fullmetal Alchemist, does a VERY SOLID European quasi-magical industrial society (I'm a big fan and I'm picky about my European Magical Industrial Societies, as you know.) And I've, you know, not only grown up in a western society, I lived in Europe. I spent formative years in the sorts of places she was modeling her society on, and it looked fine to me. She did her homework (...mostly. Her occasional failure to get how Western audiences would react to her tossing Buddhist nonviolence into weird places in a VERY violent storyline shows nobody's perfect.)
Then you could watch, say Yana Toboso's Black Butler, which is a very good example of what it is--namely someone who clearly likes the visual style and some mythological things about a Western setting but doesn't actually manage to pull it off in a way that anyone who's actually familiar with the setting will buy as genuine. I made it through two episodes of the anime: I laughed myself sick. My husband thought I'd gone crazy. It's on Netflix: flick it on for about ten minutes and I think you'll see what I mean.
I have friends who EAT THAT STUFF UP WITH A SPOON. And they'd LOVE this book. So I recommended it to them.
I can't really define what it is without giving it more thought that it probably merits at the moment, but there's certain things that anime and its related mediums (manga, Japanese and other Asian country produced video games) tend to do Western religion, and they all do it more or less the same, and I see it in this book. I listed some of the things they tend to do (EVIL CONSPIRACY CHURCH! EVIL POPE/BISHOP THING! HEAVY STYLE POINTS FOR THE DRESS CODE! NO ACTUAL, Y'KNOW, RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL CHURCH MYTHOLOGY OR DOCTRINE EXCEPT IN A VERY VAGUE VISUAL SENSE! PRETTY PRETTY WOMANLY MEN!) I could probably make a very, very long list, and someone else has probably already done it better.
It's one of those things, I think, you either like or you don't. I don't really care for it but I can overlook it if there's something else going on that I find interesting. I didn't see anything like that here to get me past it.
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