we remember love and martian successor nadesico
me: how can i convey to [----] that the true power of anime blogging is being able to say "fukuyaman perspective" and "moe pantyshot" in the same paragraph?
Aja: NONE OF THIS COULD EXIST WITHOUT THE INTERNET.
me: how can i convey that the true beauty of a successful anime blog is getting enough social status so you can apply a 1950s sociological term to ~moe~ and make such statements as: "What we are seeing here is much more than simple economics- it is an example of cultural hegemony, or spontaneous allegiance to dominant cultural trends and ideologies."
with the same seriousness as this statement: "In other words it’s basically one more way of pronouncing “HNNNNNNGGGGHHHH-” when your waifu does something especially adorable on screen right?"
Aja: dfjsdjfkasdkfjdflsjdl why do you need social status in order to apply sociological terms to moe
me: oh aja, if you only knew
10 reasons to love the anime blogging community.
Often I make statements to people (read: Aja) that read something like, "I hate the anime blogging community" or "I would join the anime blogging community more often if it wasn't sexist/ ridiculous/ time-consumingly idiotic/ enraging/ etc" or "The anime blogging community is awkward and insular." So I thought I'd make this post to make up for it. This is just a small sampling of the things that keep me coming back, because I love these people so much. Warning: most of these posts are maybe only interesting if you're already a huge anime nut and enjoy reading other anime nuts engage in anime nuttiness.
01. E Minor, "Just when I thought I was out..." That is brilliant. It is absolutely stunning in its inability to tell me anything. It’s just a string of sentences.
02. Celeste, "A Tatami Galaxy kind of year" As viewers, it’s not that we hope Watashi will find his way through his ‘maze’. Instinctively we know he will, because it follows the patterns of narrative that we’re used to. The reason why Watashi is so interesting to watch, as he cubes up in nervousness in front of Akashi, or gloats to himself at his literary prowess, is because, just as we know he’ll make it, we also know exactly what he needs to do to escape: he has to take a chance. Watashi needs to jump back into the river and be swept away. This is contrary to Watashi’s - and really, all of our - views on life, love, and our careers. We’d much rather feel in control of things, but control is contrary to progress. As if to underscore this point, Higuchi and Watashi, at the turning point of the anime in episode nine, have a conversation by the Kamo Ohashi, on the Kamo River - a place the characters find themselves at repeatedly throughout the course of the Tatami Galaxy.
03. JP Meyer, "What I was not forced to watch this week: Martian Successor Nadesico" The most important fantasies that Ienaga takes aim at are the idea that surely not everyone could have been like this, and that there had to have been people that disagreed and did not participate. It’s both a pretty common fantasy since it seems reasonable, and it’s an extremely important fantasy because it shows how threatening the subtext in some ostensibly safe fantasies (like super robots!) can be. There was a time, not too long ago, when people did take that subtext and those fantasies seriously, and look at the catastrophic results. With that in mind, one shouldn’t be so glib as to just easily be able to dismiss problematic fantasies and subtexts.
Hmm, that word. Problematic. Where do I keep seeing that? Ah yes! In analyses of subtexts. The next big source for getting me to think more about fantasies and subtexts was when Sady Doyle started having the same kinds of thoughts that the characters in Nadesico were having, in her case with feminism. Sure, it’s easy enough to take something (really, anything) and apply one’s theoretical lens(es) of choice to it and come up with the subtext that we want to see. It can be either a good or bad subtext, depending on what we want to prove. But usually, what we want to prove is something that works easily for us. It’s a pretty frequent mindset, both on the left (I’m resisting hegemonic capitalist forces by reading Harry Potter slash about Snape raping Draco!-Matt Hills actually took Henry Jenkins to task on this tendency when he interviewed him in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers) or on the right (Precious is a conservative movie because it shows those welfare queens to be as lazy and stupid and fat and slovenly and undeserving of the fruits of my Randian labor as they really are!) I will note that the left is usually more intellectually honest about this.
But what we rarely see are the cases like Sady’s (or the Nadesico’s) where one realizes that the subtext in things regarding themselves may not live up to their theoretical ideals, and have to figure out what that means for themselves. Instead, it’s far easier to deny the dissonance, or tweak the theory, or joke it away, than it is to genuinely wrestle with the implication that it might have for oneself or one’s society.
04. IT'S A SOMY. Also, Ogiue Maniax, "My Favorite Anime Studio is Rolex"
05. Jason Miao, "5 stages of love, as told through anime" Stage 4, My Drill Will Pierce The Heavens
The best part of any relationship. You’re feeling each other out. You like discovering new things about her, from her Kirby tattoo to how she enjoys farting in the shower. You irrationally like all the music she sends you, even if it’s The Bravery or (shudder) Miley Cyrus. This phase can last anywhere between a few hours (drunken hook up with the crazy, but hot, chix0r) to a few decades (that soulmate who always has a trick up her sleeves).
Rarely does anime do this. Maybe for Kare Kano‘s Arima and Yuki, whose honeymoon lasted exactly one day. Or Amagami‘s Ayatsuji and Junichi, which probably lasted until a Johnny got sliced off.
In general anime, this time is when the characters discover that extra gear, like how Simon fucked up the space-time continuum to save Nia, how Van turned from a hot-blooded and wild pilot to an efficient killing machine for Hitomi, how Keitaro finally passed his Toudai exams thanks to Naru, how Kira and Athrun became even more powerful together than apart, how Sagara tamed the Lamdba Driver with Chidori, how Sugata tamed The King’s Pillar thanks to his feelings for Takuto, how Shizuru became even more powerful after seducing Natsuki, and how Shichika became the ultimate blade thanks to Togame.
This is where most anime end. In a few spots, either because of plot points or franchise milking, the move onto either Stage 5A or Stage 5B.
06. 21st Century Digital Boy, "Shinji and I" Neon Genesis Evangelion didn’t change my life, like some of the other shows I will talk about did. It didn’t even really get me back into anime - that responsibility would be taken up by The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya about six months later, which would pretty much have a similar effect on me to Evangelion, but manage to introduce me to the anime community. NGE didn’t end my depression. That would happen in March of 2007 when I moved into a new house that I loved, started watching anime seriously, and made my first good friends in a long time, namely Zerodyme.
What Neon Genesis Evangelion did was affirm my existence. It told me that it was okay, if not expected, for me to be pathetic. It told me that someone understood me, and that my way of life could properly be explained through simple psychology and philosophy. It taught me that I could find salvation through spirituality, and that my spiritual beliefs really did make sense (and, sure enough, spirituality would come to greatly aid me much later on.) It gave me something that I could point to and say - ‘this is the kind of thing that I am into.’ A piece of art that truly defined my life, my interest, and my beliefs. A true blue ‘favorite anime.’ The sheer impact it had on me and my memory of that impact would keep it in my top five until long after I’d forgotten any of the details about the show.
07. GAR GAR Stegosaurus, "Revolutionizing a World" ...one of RGU’s messages was that you can’t truly save another person; they have to save themselves. You can certainly enable them to take that step forward to save themselves, but you can’t do it for them.
08. 2DT, "HitagiWorld: Thoughts on the Senjougahara Fascination Movement" But this dynamic is arguably the essence of moe, and really of any character love. After all, even the most vocal detractor of the Senjougahara Fascination Movement is the writer of a blog called “Mikotoism.” The love of anime characters is an interface: a continual process of negotiating between the reality of the screen and the fantasy of our desires, which we create and reinforce ourselves.
09. JP Meyer (again), "Breaking Down the Awfulness of Haruhi's Movie"
10. Aaaaaaand last but not least, the post that inspired this: mt-i, "How to write your own blog post on the moe decadence" Now is the time to recall what the I in IA stands for. As a proud IA, you need to uphold your intellectual pretensions by giving your post a scholarly twist. I mean, everyone can make up cool-sounding phrases and turn something like moe into a far-reaching social phenomenon. It's even the standard mode of discourse about Japan, where Dentsu will happily shock upstanding citizens with NEETs, hikikomori and soushoku danshi.
The IA is expected to do better than that, namely put his assertions of social change on a credible academic foothold. It's a lot like Dentsu, except that the keyword du jour that you will put forward as an explanation needs to be traced back to some philosophical or sociological authority. It's completely fine for the concept behind that keyword, or at least your understanding and description of that concept, to be somewhat shallow, provided that you can put a respected person's name on it. For example, don't just write about “the downfall of political and religious grand narratives after the Cold War”; make it “the Lyotardian theory of incredulity towards metanarratives”. If you mention “the end of history”, put it in a “Fukuyaman perspective”. On nihonjinron, reference Watanabe Shouichi and his Western critics. And so on.
Be sure not to miss the various reaction posts. The last link-- read the comments.
(as a note, animeblogging wank is a whole 'nother animal from anime wank, to the point where I can hardly explain what it's like being an outsider and reading it without simply flapping my hands in frustration. It's passive-aggressive, hyper-sensitive, and yet oddly indulgent. It's a lot of purposefully, community-recognized trolling that sometimes falls flat and ends up coming off just plain rude. It's incomprehensibly opaque statements referring to other anime series that people may or may not have seen, made in ~lol irony~ or with such SRSBZNS overtones that you're unsure whether or not the ~lol irony~ is pulling one over on you. It's endless collaborations, de-collaborations, group blogs, tournaments, judging, judging, and love. A lot of love. Hidden under more judging.)
Aja: NONE OF THIS COULD EXIST WITHOUT THE INTERNET.
me: how can i convey that the true beauty of a successful anime blog is getting enough social status so you can apply a 1950s sociological term to ~moe~ and make such statements as: "What we are seeing here is much more than simple economics- it is an example of cultural hegemony, or spontaneous allegiance to dominant cultural trends and ideologies."
with the same seriousness as this statement: "In other words it’s basically one more way of pronouncing “HNNNNNNGGGGHHHH-” when your waifu does something especially adorable on screen right?"
Aja: dfjsdjfkasdkfjdflsjdl why do you need social status in order to apply sociological terms to moe
me: oh aja, if you only knew
10 reasons to love the anime blogging community.
Often I make statements to people (read: Aja) that read something like, "I hate the anime blogging community" or "I would join the anime blogging community more often if it wasn't sexist/ ridiculous/ time-consumingly idiotic/ enraging/ etc" or "The anime blogging community is awkward and insular." So I thought I'd make this post to make up for it. This is just a small sampling of the things that keep me coming back, because I love these people so much. Warning: most of these posts are maybe only interesting if you're already a huge anime nut and enjoy reading other anime nuts engage in anime nuttiness.
01. E Minor, "Just when I thought I was out..." That is brilliant. It is absolutely stunning in its inability to tell me anything. It’s just a string of sentences.
02. Celeste, "A Tatami Galaxy kind of year" As viewers, it’s not that we hope Watashi will find his way through his ‘maze’. Instinctively we know he will, because it follows the patterns of narrative that we’re used to. The reason why Watashi is so interesting to watch, as he cubes up in nervousness in front of Akashi, or gloats to himself at his literary prowess, is because, just as we know he’ll make it, we also know exactly what he needs to do to escape: he has to take a chance. Watashi needs to jump back into the river and be swept away. This is contrary to Watashi’s - and really, all of our - views on life, love, and our careers. We’d much rather feel in control of things, but control is contrary to progress. As if to underscore this point, Higuchi and Watashi, at the turning point of the anime in episode nine, have a conversation by the Kamo Ohashi, on the Kamo River - a place the characters find themselves at repeatedly throughout the course of the Tatami Galaxy.
03. JP Meyer, "What I was not forced to watch this week: Martian Successor Nadesico" The most important fantasies that Ienaga takes aim at are the idea that surely not everyone could have been like this, and that there had to have been people that disagreed and did not participate. It’s both a pretty common fantasy since it seems reasonable, and it’s an extremely important fantasy because it shows how threatening the subtext in some ostensibly safe fantasies (like super robots!) can be. There was a time, not too long ago, when people did take that subtext and those fantasies seriously, and look at the catastrophic results. With that in mind, one shouldn’t be so glib as to just easily be able to dismiss problematic fantasies and subtexts.
Hmm, that word. Problematic. Where do I keep seeing that? Ah yes! In analyses of subtexts. The next big source for getting me to think more about fantasies and subtexts was when Sady Doyle started having the same kinds of thoughts that the characters in Nadesico were having, in her case with feminism. Sure, it’s easy enough to take something (really, anything) and apply one’s theoretical lens(es) of choice to it and come up with the subtext that we want to see. It can be either a good or bad subtext, depending on what we want to prove. But usually, what we want to prove is something that works easily for us. It’s a pretty frequent mindset, both on the left (I’m resisting hegemonic capitalist forces by reading Harry Potter slash about Snape raping Draco!-Matt Hills actually took Henry Jenkins to task on this tendency when he interviewed him in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers) or on the right (Precious is a conservative movie because it shows those welfare queens to be as lazy and stupid and fat and slovenly and undeserving of the fruits of my Randian labor as they really are!) I will note that the left is usually more intellectually honest about this.
But what we rarely see are the cases like Sady’s (or the Nadesico’s) where one realizes that the subtext in things regarding themselves may not live up to their theoretical ideals, and have to figure out what that means for themselves. Instead, it’s far easier to deny the dissonance, or tweak the theory, or joke it away, than it is to genuinely wrestle with the implication that it might have for oneself or one’s society.
04. IT'S A SOMY. Also, Ogiue Maniax, "My Favorite Anime Studio is Rolex"
05. Jason Miao, "5 stages of love, as told through anime" Stage 4, My Drill Will Pierce The Heavens
The best part of any relationship. You’re feeling each other out. You like discovering new things about her, from her Kirby tattoo to how she enjoys farting in the shower. You irrationally like all the music she sends you, even if it’s The Bravery or (shudder) Miley Cyrus. This phase can last anywhere between a few hours (drunken hook up with the crazy, but hot, chix0r) to a few decades (that soulmate who always has a trick up her sleeves).
Rarely does anime do this. Maybe for Kare Kano‘s Arima and Yuki, whose honeymoon lasted exactly one day. Or Amagami‘s Ayatsuji and Junichi, which probably lasted until a Johnny got sliced off.
In general anime, this time is when the characters discover that extra gear, like how Simon fucked up the space-time continuum to save Nia, how Van turned from a hot-blooded and wild pilot to an efficient killing machine for Hitomi, how Keitaro finally passed his Toudai exams thanks to Naru, how Kira and Athrun became even more powerful together than apart, how Sagara tamed the Lamdba Driver with Chidori, how Sugata tamed The King’s Pillar thanks to his feelings for Takuto, how Shizuru became even more powerful after seducing Natsuki, and how Shichika became the ultimate blade thanks to Togame.
This is where most anime end. In a few spots, either because of plot points or franchise milking, the move onto either Stage 5A or Stage 5B.
06. 21st Century Digital Boy, "Shinji and I" Neon Genesis Evangelion didn’t change my life, like some of the other shows I will talk about did. It didn’t even really get me back into anime - that responsibility would be taken up by The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya about six months later, which would pretty much have a similar effect on me to Evangelion, but manage to introduce me to the anime community. NGE didn’t end my depression. That would happen in March of 2007 when I moved into a new house that I loved, started watching anime seriously, and made my first good friends in a long time, namely Zerodyme.
What Neon Genesis Evangelion did was affirm my existence. It told me that it was okay, if not expected, for me to be pathetic. It told me that someone understood me, and that my way of life could properly be explained through simple psychology and philosophy. It taught me that I could find salvation through spirituality, and that my spiritual beliefs really did make sense (and, sure enough, spirituality would come to greatly aid me much later on.) It gave me something that I could point to and say - ‘this is the kind of thing that I am into.’ A piece of art that truly defined my life, my interest, and my beliefs. A true blue ‘favorite anime.’ The sheer impact it had on me and my memory of that impact would keep it in my top five until long after I’d forgotten any of the details about the show.
07. GAR GAR Stegosaurus, "Revolutionizing a World" ...one of RGU’s messages was that you can’t truly save another person; they have to save themselves. You can certainly enable them to take that step forward to save themselves, but you can’t do it for them.
08. 2DT, "HitagiWorld: Thoughts on the Senjougahara Fascination Movement" But this dynamic is arguably the essence of moe, and really of any character love. After all, even the most vocal detractor of the Senjougahara Fascination Movement is the writer of a blog called “Mikotoism.” The love of anime characters is an interface: a continual process of negotiating between the reality of the screen and the fantasy of our desires, which we create and reinforce ourselves.
09. JP Meyer (again), "Breaking Down the Awfulness of Haruhi's Movie"
10. Aaaaaaand last but not least, the post that inspired this: mt-i, "How to write your own blog post on the moe decadence" Now is the time to recall what the I in IA stands for. As a proud IA, you need to uphold your intellectual pretensions by giving your post a scholarly twist. I mean, everyone can make up cool-sounding phrases and turn something like moe into a far-reaching social phenomenon. It's even the standard mode of discourse about Japan, where Dentsu will happily shock upstanding citizens with NEETs, hikikomori and soushoku danshi.
The IA is expected to do better than that, namely put his assertions of social change on a credible academic foothold. It's a lot like Dentsu, except that the keyword du jour that you will put forward as an explanation needs to be traced back to some philosophical or sociological authority. It's completely fine for the concept behind that keyword, or at least your understanding and description of that concept, to be somewhat shallow, provided that you can put a respected person's name on it. For example, don't just write about “the downfall of political and religious grand narratives after the Cold War”; make it “the Lyotardian theory of incredulity towards metanarratives”. If you mention “the end of history”, put it in a “Fukuyaman perspective”. On nihonjinron, reference Watanabe Shouichi and his Western critics. And so on.
Be sure not to miss the various reaction posts. The last link-- read the comments.
(as a note, animeblogging wank is a whole 'nother animal from anime wank, to the point where I can hardly explain what it's like being an outsider and reading it without simply flapping my hands in frustration. It's passive-aggressive, hyper-sensitive, and yet oddly indulgent. It's a lot of purposefully, community-recognized trolling that sometimes falls flat and ends up coming off just plain rude. It's incomprehensibly opaque statements referring to other anime series that people may or may not have seen, made in ~lol irony~ or with such SRSBZNS overtones that you're unsure whether or not the ~lol irony~ is pulling one over on you. It's endless collaborations, de-collaborations, group blogs, tournaments, judging, judging, and love. A lot of love. Hidden under more judging.)