Happy early Lunar New Year. Also Harvest Moon meta. WTF.
Tomorrow's New Year's Eve but not sure I will be around. SO HAPPY BUNNY YEAR >:B
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Watched Only Yesterday for the first time. One scene made me cry (not the ending, though the ending was perfect). The rest of it, I was like... oh man, I have to show this to my mom. XD (She comes from a very similar background as depicted in the movie.)
I wonder if there's any academic meta out there about the influence of 50s/60s nostalgia on the older Ghibli directors. Pretty sure I remember seeing something of the sort somewhere. I touched on this a bit with my pissy Totoro post in December... And there's also something stewing in my head about the pastoral idealization that runs as a theme through their work and how that ties into the Harvest Moon franchise (which, in the earlier games, I suspect capitalizes on the same sense of nostalgia and idealization). And how Japanese pastoral fiction is a very different creature from American pastoral fiction.... the general sense of it strikes me as being closer to Tolkien and his hobbits than to the American conception of the rural lifestyle or of the frontier, but even then it's a bit different from that "English village" feel.... but I'm not sure I have enough background for any proper discussion of this.
But yeah, seriously, something clicked while I was watching the movie. I picked up on some of this last year when I was writing the stupid fic, but English-speaking Harvest Moon fandom definitely has an overall "small town America" take on the games, which, though a natural interpretation given the audience, struck me as really off. At the time I thought it was just me, but more and more I'm convinced that the early games, at least, are inseparable from the cultural context (despite bits of Westernized elements like the horses, the church, and the Western names, and Caucasian-looking characters -- though I should note that some characters are implicitly "Asian" as well, and overall the characterization is much more "rural Japan" than it is "rural America"). There are some aspects of the games that are just impossible to localize (some of the festivals, for instance). It's kind of an odd mashup. Early on it's a very very Shinto series imo, and in fact even the more recent games retain some of that feel, despite updating to more modern sensibilities/starting to focus more on the dating sim aspect. (based on what I've read, the spinoffs like Rune Factory and the fishing games do not have that Shinto feel. And I would argue that the later HM games attempt to cater to a more international fanbase.)
Dear lord, of all the things to meta about, WHY HARVEST MOON.
(More seriously, I think it scratches a particular itch I have -- despite being in a totally wrong generation, Totoro/Only Yesterday style nostalgia resonates really strongly with me.)
/random ramble
- - -
Watched Only Yesterday for the first time. One scene made me cry (not the ending, though the ending was perfect). The rest of it, I was like... oh man, I have to show this to my mom. XD (She comes from a very similar background as depicted in the movie.)
I wonder if there's any academic meta out there about the influence of 50s/60s nostalgia on the older Ghibli directors. Pretty sure I remember seeing something of the sort somewhere. I touched on this a bit with my pissy Totoro post in December... And there's also something stewing in my head about the pastoral idealization that runs as a theme through their work and how that ties into the Harvest Moon franchise (which, in the earlier games, I suspect capitalizes on the same sense of nostalgia and idealization). And how Japanese pastoral fiction is a very different creature from American pastoral fiction.... the general sense of it strikes me as being closer to Tolkien and his hobbits than to the American conception of the rural lifestyle or of the frontier, but even then it's a bit different from that "English village" feel.... but I'm not sure I have enough background for any proper discussion of this.
But yeah, seriously, something clicked while I was watching the movie. I picked up on some of this last year when I was writing the stupid fic, but English-speaking Harvest Moon fandom definitely has an overall "small town America" take on the games, which, though a natural interpretation given the audience, struck me as really off. At the time I thought it was just me, but more and more I'm convinced that the early games, at least, are inseparable from the cultural context (despite bits of Westernized elements like the horses, the church, and the Western names, and Caucasian-looking characters -- though I should note that some characters are implicitly "Asian" as well, and overall the characterization is much more "rural Japan" than it is "rural America"). There are some aspects of the games that are just impossible to localize (some of the festivals, for instance). It's kind of an odd mashup. Early on it's a very very Shinto series imo, and in fact even the more recent games retain some of that feel, despite updating to more modern sensibilities/starting to focus more on the dating sim aspect. (based on what I've read, the spinoffs like Rune Factory and the fishing games do not have that Shinto feel. And I would argue that the later HM games attempt to cater to a more international fanbase.)
Dear lord, of all the things to meta about, WHY HARVEST MOON.
(More seriously, I think it scratches a particular itch I have -- despite being in a totally wrong generation, Totoro/Only Yesterday style nostalgia resonates really strongly with me.)
/random ramble