HAPPY TWELVE DAYS OF ANIME! I think I’m a day late o_O

Ok, I apologize if this post is less than well thought out/incoherent. I have a paper and a final exam due tomorrow that I’m procrastinating, so part 2 will be much cleaner, but I promised Josh I’d get something up so here goes…

Josh is going to give you a review of this show in his own terms, those being very dry and academic, but as you know I will give you my lovely opinions in more uh…pedestrian language haha. This will probably shock those of you who know anything about me, but I actually liked this show! *Cue snowstorm in Hell* Oh wait I’m in Boston. XD Couldn’t resist. Anyway, but yes I liked this show, which is more surprising to me than anyone else. See, I like to play this game with Josh where when he nags me to do something I actively go out of my way to sit on my hands and refuse to do it. The “it” in this case being to finish up the Sailor Moon reboot so I could write a post about that. But yea, the more he nagged, the less inclined I was to work on that so since he was watching Penguindrum for his class I decided to be a total toolbag (see douchecanoe) and start watching it without telling him. Because I’m nice like that. Anyway, but yes I shall forthwith give you my musings on this very strange show and let you know what I thought!

On to the commentary!

Summary: All twins Kanba and Shoma know is that when their terminally ill sister Himari collapses at the aquarium, her death is somehow temporarily reversed by the penguin hat that she had asked for. It’s a provisional resurrection, however, and it comes at a price: to keep Himari alive they need to find the mysterious Penguin Drum. In order to do that, they must first find the links to a complex interlocking chain of riddles that has wrapped around their entire existence, and unravel the knots that tie them to mystifying diary and a baffling string of strangers and semi-acquaintances who all have their own secrets, agendas and “survival strategies.” And in order for Himari to live, someone else’s chosen destiny will have to change. It’s a story of love, fate, life, death… and Penguins!

Penguins being the most important part. Clearly.

See the problem with this show is that it’s difficult to discuss without getting academic and talking about symbolism. I don’t really want to rain on Josh’s parade so consider this a tl;dr for his upcoming post. I could go on and gush about the character development, which no lie was one of the best I’ve seen in a while. Or the fact that I want one of those penguins as a pet, but Josh won’t let me. The best way to discuss this show is with a little more of an intelligent approach. There was so much freaking symbolism. The show had it bleeding out of the ears and I did find it to be overwhelming at times. Plus it would be beating around the bush to say that it’s not weird. It’s so weird that Wikipedia can barely come up with a good synopsis for it haha.

The best way I can describe this show is a combination of a fairytale and some weird Gabriel Garcia Marquez-esque magical realism. Any other AP Spanish Lit-ers out there? We follow Himari–a clear Snow White/Sleeping Beauty figure. Both the fairytale and the show hit hard with the resurrection theme. There is a lot of rebirth, Himari dies and is reborn several times throughout the show. This keeps in line with the central theme of trying to rewrite destiny. If one rewrites destiny then is everyone in the new path of fate reborn into different roles? Different decisions? I’d like to think so. Maybe it’s a bit too profound, but I think it’s an important idea.

First, a little bit of mythological/folklore background: I’m not going to go into the whole Judeo-Christian lore because Josh wanted to tackle that so I’ll get to a bit more of the obscurities. In Celtic/British folklore the apple symbolizes fertility, new life, and rebirth. Also, in Norse mythology the goddess Idunn kept a tree full of golden apples that were supposed to keep the gods young and beautiful. If anyone wants some more apple symbolism information they can go here–I don’t feel like cataloguing every single symbol.

Himari is first resurrected from the child broiler when Shoma offers her an apple and ties his destiny to hers–thus saving her from whatever fate might otherwise await her. A bit earlier on, Himari also refuses an apple from Shoma citing that she doesn’t take food from strangers. At that point she has refused her resurrection, she is not ready to accept that she needs to be reborn. Only once she’s in the weird freakyass child broiler does she think, “well I’d better get the hell out of here”.

This is a mirror of the scene where Momoka saves Tabuki from the child broiler. The difference being that Shoma is not immediately injured trying to save Himari, unlike Momoka. However, Momoka doesn’t offer Tabuki an apple, but later an apple will offer herself to him hehehe. Ok that was a terrible joke. This is what happens when I try to be serious for too long.

Tabuki’s apple…XD

I think each central character goes through their own and I will try to outline each. Himari’s brothers, Shoma and Kanba, always seem to come in charging as Prince Charmings. But they don’t get stuck in the typical older brother cliche. They have more than enough depth. Ok, I’m trying to think about how to describe this, but there’s a surreal scene with Shoma and Kanba as small children both in cages and both of them are pretty convinced they’re dead until out of nowhere an apple appears in Kanba’s cage. The boys share the apple and are, in effect, brought back from the dead. As to why they are keeping small children in cages and practically starving them to death I have zero idea. But hey they also have a ‘child broiler’ so who the hell knows what’s actually going on in this universe.

Momoka is the agent of resurrection for a significant portion of the characters until her untimely death? disappearance? Whatever you want to call it. She saves Yuri from her crazy artist father. Seriously though someone needs to call CPS on this show. So much weird child abuse, borderline or otherwise. Yuri and Tabuki are both resurrected by Momoka, but once she is gone there needs to be a new agent of salvation.

Enter the apple. Not Ringo, Ringo is in the words of my 15 year old sister, ‘cray cray’. I’m talking about the metaphorical apple that seems to be constantly floating around in the world. The apple symbolism is everywhere…TO BE CONTINUED/FLESHED OUT TOMORROW

So as some of you know, Josh and I have been dating for almost exactly two years now….

Last night, Josh asked me to marry him. This was my response:

Only kidding. I said yes! Ok that’s the announcement, and the reason why I never actually got to throw anything up on the blog last night. Somehow I think you’ll forgive me. Stay tuned. The plan is to post something real tonight!

I want a penguin. Not a real penguin, but one from the magical world of Penguindrum that will behave in my image and be super cute and cuddly and adorable. I will now write a manifesto about why I deserve a penguin and why you should help me convince Josh that I deserve one.

Reason 1: I deserve a penguin because…I don’t need a reason.

I think they’d look really good in my underwear.

Reason 2: If you get me a penguin I will spend less time harassing you while you’re trying to watch anime or play video games.

I’ll also stop asking you to kill bugs for me. Because he’s the boy and that’s his job.

Reason 3: Getting me a penguin will give me an incentive to write a real post instead of nonsense filler posts because I’m lazy.

He could also get me a pet octopus while he’s at it. I like it ‘cuz it’s purple.

Reason 4: I’ll stop writing stupid reasons if you just get me a goddamned penguin.

She could help me with my baking and then he’ll have more sugar to eat and rot his teeth out.

Reason 5: It’s probably a bad idea to get me a penguin since I have yet to keep a single pet alive for any reasonable amount of time.

We won’t have to eat ramen anymore when I’m too lazy to cook.

Reason 6: Penguin.

I’ll never have to ask him to help me clean out the refrigerator.

If anyone is currently taking requests, I also want the crab from League of Legends, but Josh knows that already ;).

I know this version of Sailor Moon is supposed to be more adherent to the manga, but seeing as I haven’t read the manga and cut my anime teeth on the original series I have a serious bias against the way the reboot has been executed.  I haven’t finished watching all the new episodes yet, but I thought I would give some first impressions on the Sailor Moon Crystal. My opinion of the reboot in a word: meh.

I’ll try to keep my complaints succinct, but my problems with the show ranged from the character interactions to the general artistic character design of the reboot. I’m going to keep this post short, but here goes. 

So let’s talk about the character design. Compare the above picture to a picture of the original sailor scouts.

Now which of these girls actually look the right age. (The sailor scouts are supposed to be about 14.) The new rendition of the sailor scouts look  way more mature and bordering on adulthood, which takes away a large part of the show’s charm. Sure you can dress them in cute school girl uniforms and say that they’re about 14, but if you look at the artwork I’m not necessarily buying it. This probably sounds weird, but Usagi is way too pretty–it makes her awkward clumsiness less awkward and clumsy, which ruins the character to a certain extent. She’s supposed to be an awkward pubescent girl who’s falls and general bumblings aren’t tempered by beauty or other qualities. This is a change in all the sailor scouts to this very pristine and almost unnatural beauty that makes me somewhat uncomfortable. They lose some of their humanness in this way. Because of their mature appearances and somewhat perfect bodies, you miss out on some of the more charming and hilarious scenes in the iconic ‘weight loss episode’ where Usagi decides to temporarily give up on her life of eating sweets all the time and get in shape.

And you know all that beautiful ’90s fashion haha.

I think the original show was a lot more creative in some of the attempts to get energy from humans to give to Queen Beryl. Of course there were a lot more episodes in the original, which gave a lot more freedom for these different arcs, but the new show feels like it’s trying to rush through everything instead of giving the characters and the story enough time to develop. I feel like they also tried to tone down everyone’s personality, which is what made the original so great. Usagi is a little bit less whiny and more composed and the other sailor scouts really aren’t that interesting, at least from what I’ve seen so far in the show.

Then there’s the missing antagonistic relationship between Usagi and Rei. As well as the lack of love rivalry for Mamoru/Tuxedo Mask. Rei was a great character in the original series because she always said exactly what the audience was thinking–even if she could be a bit harsh at times–about Usagi and her ridiculous antics.

 I seriously miss this! It added an extra dimension to the sailor scouts instead of having them all be super supportive and loving of each other all the time. A little drama now and again isn’t the worst thing in the world (as long as it doesn’t reach Toradora heights XD).

Then of course there’s the issue of the romance. Damn this went fast. Part of the charm of the original romance was the fact that it took so long for Usagi and Mamoru to finally acknowledge their feelings for each other and their relationship. Sure I like some nice romance as much as the next smushy girl (read my post on shoujo if you want more on that), but this moved a lot faster than I would have liked. If this were a book I was reading I probably would have put it down and been like “nope”. Sometimes wham bam thank you ma’am romance is nice, but I liked the relationship much better when it had more of a history. Then there’s also the arc where Mamoru and Rei have a short thing going on–essentially there are some love rivals, it isn’t just starry-eyed Usagi and Mamoru falling for each other after a few encounters. Plus Mamoru used to wear the most wonderfully hideous outfits ever–made my day every time XD.

Isn’t it beautiful? Can’t you feel the sweet, sweet burning of your eyeballs?

Anyway, am I going to continue watching the reboot? Yes, I probably will since I’ll be bored out of my mind over break. Am I going to like it? Eh. Not sure. Let me know what you guys think! Have you watched it? How do you think it compares?

New Mamoru seriously needs to up his fashion game.

Hey guys! Josh and I have been busy with traveling and holiday plans so our posts have gotten a bit bogged down (it’s largely Josh’s fault for playing videogames instead of working on his posts :p). Anyway, I’ve started re-watching Hell Girl- no particular reason it just kind of caught my fancy- and decided I’d write up my thoughts on what I’ve re-watched/remember about the show. This was supposed to go up around Christmas, but we were in the sticks so internet was being kind of finicky and I couldn’t get my pictures up.

I’m only going to talk about the show in context of season one (Jigoku Shoujo) since I’d rather not get into the complicated details that happen in the subsequent seasons.

Here’s a brief synopsis for those of you who haven’t seen it:

Somewhere in the vast sea of the Internet, there’s a website that can only be accessed at the stroke of midnight. Known as the Jigoku Tsushin (Hell Link), rumor has it that if you post a grudge there, the Jigoku Shoujo will appear and drag whoever torments you into the inferno. Very little is known about the girl—all we know for sure is that she lives with her equally enigmatic grandmother, that three magical straw dolls accompany and serve her, and that whenever a posting on the Jigoku Tsushin moves her, she becomes the Jigoku Shoujo.

I had forgotten how damn dark this show was. I mean you’re probably like, “come on Rebecca it’s a show about sending people to Hell–it’s obviously going to be dark” but I seriously did forget just how twisted some of the characters are. When I started rewatching I worried that I wouldn’t like it nearly as much as I did the first time I watched it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’m just as hooked on the show as I was the first time. I was kind of going through an emo phase (yep I was one of those) back in high school when I first watched this show so I think it’s a very different perspective watching it now. That and the fact that I’m much older.

One of the things that struck me the most about the show is how negatively it portrays humanity. In the episodes so far, not a single person has failed to pull the string on the straw doll given to them by Hell Girl. Some of the things they want to kill people for are incredibly petty as well. Then again, the show is clever at showing this. Some of the grievances are legitimate e.g. one episode where a girl has a creepy stalker who tries to kill her father and his work associate in order to get to her. Ok great. I’d probably send that guy to hell too. But then there are the more ambiguous cases, the ones where someone does something shitty, but it was also the fault of the other person that it turned out as badly as it did. For example, there is an episode where two sisters open a bakery and it gets shut out of business after a bigger bakery steals their idea. My problem with this episode is that the reason the dessert was stolen is because one of the sisters was an idiot and shared the idea with the other bakery owner.

Sure it’s a shitty thing to do, but is it worth my eternal soul to get revenge? Probably not.

Right so it’s kind of her fault. Or do you think I’m being too harsh? I guess my problem with this show is a similar problem to the one that I had with Death Note. Where do you draw the line about who deserves to die/go to hell? The difference here is that while I can understand L’s puritanical moral code to a certain extent, Ai Enma doesn’t seem to have much of one. She seems to allow almost anyone with a grudge to put in a request and doesn’t do too much analyzing of the situation before she steps in. This becomes problematic when she gives a doll to someone, but that person turns out to be a real asshole and gets taken out by someone else before they can do anything. It technically turns into a situation where if two people hate each other enough and have legitimate enough grievances it turns into a game of who pulls the string first, which completely undermines the process anyway. Or one episode turns into a hell bound suicide pact, which to be honest was really perverse.

Better you than me…

The show tried not to be too black and white in terms of portraying people, in that it often tried to give a positive bent to some of its antagonists, but in doing this it ended up doing exactly what it didn’t intend to do. No one screams and cries and confesses to their crimes at the end when Ai gives them a chance to repent their sins. I mean really? Unless every single person she sends to Hell is a sociopath (maybe they are?) they’ve got to be capable of feeling some sort of remorse or guilt. I don’t know about you, but I’d be groveling on the ground and swearing things on my firstborn child or donating all my wealth to starving children in third-world countries or something. They could all just be sociopaths though. These people instead blatantly deny that they did anything wrong, some go so far as to feign ignorance as to what Ai is even talking about in the first place. I’d say this is pretty black and white if you ask me.

On the other hand, I don’t know if I’m the kind of person who would ever get to the point that I could hate someone so much that I would want them to go to Hell if it meant my soul was on the line as well. Sure it would be nice if those jerks who used me for target practice in high school gym class got some retribution, but would I want them to go to hell? Nah. It provokes an interesting question though: what kind of person does it take to want another person to legitimately go to hell? Do you think that the average person is capable of that level of hate? I’m really not sure. What do you guys think? Do you think you could ever get to a place that you’d hate someone so much that you’d want to send them to hell if it meant you’d end up there too? I’m going to say no, personally, but that’s because I’m a chickenshit and don’t think Satan and I would get along very well.

Also, just for shits and giggles:

For those of you who’ve also seen Black Butler…XD

It’s been quite a while since the last time I posted on here.

It’s quite a weird feeling to completely fall off the face of the Earth (i.e. anime community) for the better part of 6 months. Or maybe it’s 9 months. But in the tradition of this blog, that means wrapping up ongoing projects way past their initial due date. And rambling about stuff for a bit.

Clearly what you’ve all been thinking. PRAISE ME MORE STRAWMAN IMAGINARY AUDIENCE.

This blog is no stranger to unfinished projects. I never finished up one of my very first series comparing weeabo culture (i.e. fandom over Japan) between the Meiji and modern eras, which was one of my first forays into publishing academic content on this blog. I never wrote up that final review of Diabolik Lovers I promised I’d get around to. Or get around to watching Junjou Romantica (which has been sitting on my shelf for ~6 months now). Or even finish writing up my notes on Anime Expo 2014. Or continue my annual Year in Review posts. Goes to show that my academic “mouth” is bigger than my academic “stomach”.

Although that’s not to say that I just drop these things for good. I actually do spend a lot of time mulling these issues over and talking to Rebecca about them. It just happens that once I’m happy with where I’ve ended up, I never sit down to write out my thoughts into a good blog post. :(

“But Josh”, my imaginary audience might ask, “why the extended hiatus from blogging? Are you telling me you never sat down once since your last post to write something new?” Sadly, the answer to that question is yes — not once did I have enough motivation to write out even a single blog post. Or even read blog posts — my current “unread” email updates from blogs I follow is now almost 1.8k!

Old man Joseph know where it’s at.

This apathy towards blogging by itself is nothing new – unlike most anime blogs I’ve seen that publish content pretty regularly, I’m much more sporadic, and tend to blog in big “bursts” so that during certain weeks/months I’ll write a whole slew of posts, and others I’ll barely write up anything. But this particular cycle was exacerbated by a couple changes in my life that led me to essentially stop watching anime.

If I was making excuses, I’d say it was something about “work-life balance” and a “shifting of priorities” or some other similar bullshit. “I was entering senior year and starting to think about career prospects (including applications for graduate school) as well as getting more serious about my research in astronomy.” etc. etc. While that was obviously part of it, to be honest the real explanation is much less glamorous: I got back into video games (much to Rebecca’s chagrin).

Since high school, I’ve mostly been a casual gamer — I played some League of Legends with friends back home (and later with Rebecca), Call of Duty et al. sometimes at parties, and a couple random video games over the course of the year (I remember pulling an all-nighter playing Mass Effect 3 my freshman year right before taking one of my exams lol). However, last summer I had no internet access at the dorms while I was working on my research project. And since I still stream(ed) most of my anime (ikr?) and didn’t want to bring my laptop to work all that often, I ended up looking for standalone activities to do to pass the time.

A visual approximation of how I spent most of my time.

The first thing I did to compensate was working a lot. And I mean a lot. Over the course of the summer, I’d worked ~60-80 hours a week, including weekends. The only break I had was when Rebecca visited for a few weeks, although even then I was still working more than 50.

The next thing I did was look into my game history to see if there was anything I was interested in buying or re-playing. Next thing I knew, I’d extensively (re-)played through the first two Dragon Age games and the first five Assassin’s Creed games. At this point, I was experiencing my big video game “revival” since I hadn’t really revisited most of these titles in years. I was having all these cool thoughts about video game storytelling and non-linear structures (especially around branch points and the interaction between realism and in-game mechanics), relationships to Western media (think comic books, movie franchises), interactions with the fandom (“real life” historical precedence, meta-awareness, surrounding pop culture), and a bunch of related topics. I was particularly interested in thinking about how Assassin’s Creed navigates these dichotomies in its fake historical realism.

Anyways, I was kinda caught up in the “newness” of it all (the academic honeymoon phase), and really got hooked on video games. After starting school, I ended up playing through a bunch more RPGs, which pretty much ate up my entire free time for the semester that I had previously dedicated to anime and blogging, and even started cutting into my research productivity. The only show I ended up watching was Penguindrum, which in retrospect was a pretty awesome show to pick if you’re only going to watch a single anime over a 3 month period.

This is exactly how I drink my milk too!

It’s kind of funny, but it’s only when I had completely dropped anime that I discovered how much effort/time I’d been putting into watching it. And how much it really meant to me. I mean, when you spend a lot of time doing something, whether as a hobby or something else, there’s always some sense in which it becomes some portion of your identity. I’d been known for almost 6 years (since the middle of high school!) as a combination of “that anime guy” and “that astronomy guy”, and it was very weird to completely pull away from the anime in one fell swoop and still sorta inhabit that role (at least within other people’s minds).

So…that’s that, really. I now spend much more time playing League and Hearthstone than watching anime, although that’s starting to change now that I’m getting back into it. I managed to get through the new Ghost in the Shell: Arise series the other day, and about a month ago ended up rewatching some of my favorite series Rosario + Vampire and Sora no Otoshimono (Heaven’s Lost Property), which are just as good as I remember (although in slightly different ways). And as I get back to blogging and slowly start trying to integrate back into the community, hopefully I’ll find even more reasons to get back out there and start watching some of the newer shows that have come out since last summer.

I mean, this is just such QUALITY. What’s not to like???

Also, to everyone who’s been waiting on those posts I said I’d write up, this is an official declaration that I’m now actually working on them and will have them out at some point in the not-too-distant future ;). I never thought I’d get any more than a handful of followers for a blog as weird as this one (although Rebecca’s posts have probably helped out quite a bit!), so it’s been really fantastic to have so much support and be part of such a great community. And special thanks to Froggy-kun and Appropriant for their recent Twitter exchanges that finally got the ball rolling for me. Sometimes the smallest of things can make a big difference.

It’s good to be back! I’ve been gone for quite a while, so feel free to comment about any cool updates in your lives (both on the anisphere or in RL) or ask questions in the comments!

EDIT: Rebecca also says hi. :)

Hey guys, it’s Rebecca, just saying that I’m alive. I also have a super important question for you guys. Ok it’s not actually that important, but it’s been driving me crazy. So as we did last year, Josh and I are heading to Anime Boston (hit us up if you’re there too!). Last year we did an FMA cosplay with one of Josh’s friends (Risa, Roy, and Armstrong). I think you can guess who was who haha. I’ll give you a hint: I’m a girl and Josh has no muscles.

Anyway so my problem is I can’t make a decision for shit and if we don’t decide soon we’re just going to end up going as Risa and Roy again, which wouldn’t be the end of the world, but I thought I’d do some crowdsourcing first.

So here’s the question readers: What awesome/obnoxiously cute couple’s cosplay should Josh and I try for this year since it’ll just be the two of us and not his friend as well? Let us know in the comments! If I hate all your ideas I’ll let you know and we’ll just stick to FMA again XD.

*On a side note, neither of us are very artistic so try to stick to something that isn’t going to require a crazy amount of sewing or arts and crafts skills or money (we’re poor college students).

As many of you guys are probably aware, I have a long-running love-hate relationship with the idea of meta-ness. And, as you probably can guess, it’s time to revisit that relationship yet again so I can dump some more of my thoughts onto this blog.

Kaiki 3meta5me.

Becoming meta-aware of your own actions and the context in which they take place is not really a bad thing. In fact, it’s one of the most useful perspectives you can frequently take towards an issue since it forces you to try and adopt one (if not multiple) outside perspectives through which to scrutinize your own actions. It allows you to think on a once-removed level from your current context, make connections, and avoid being a hypocrite. While the frequently used “privilege” psuedo-arguments I hear on campus can be irritating (for reasons I’ll hopefully get to in a future post where I expand on my foray into melodrama logic!), they ultimately stem from these well-meaning ideas about understanding our contexts.

Note that this idea of individual meta-awareness is different from empathy, which I would argue is probably the more important of the two skills. To be empathetic, you want to see the world through someone else’s perspective so you can gain insight into both how they think as well as how they feel. This helps you better understand other people. When being meta-aware, on the other hand, the focus is on you – the whole project is to try and disassociate yourself from your own actions to understand them in a broader context. One is how someone else see’s the world; the other is how someone else sees you.

Just imagine penguins are watching your every move.

This type of thinking interests me in a purely academic sense because of the way it not only builds on itself (being meta about being meta, etc.), but of the type of insularity it generates. For each level of meta-ness a person tries to achieve, he ends up reaching a more and more exclusive subgroup of people due to the increasing amount of knowledge inherent in drawing the relevant connections and understanding the evolving lexicon. In anime, this type of environment creates an incredibly incestuous community that continually builds upon itself. So for all that some creators might rail on the community, I think it’s actually a fantastically interesting place that really emblematizes the types of concepts underlying things like Stand Alone Complexes.

However, the type of meta-ness that evolves in these types of communities has one intrinsic problems:

• What purpose does it actually serve?

In the general meta-aware case I outlined in the first paragraph, meta-ness serves a useful function: it allows you to understand the context in which your actions take place so you can improve on the ways in which you interact and see with the world. This is a bit of a tall order, but…*shrug*

Tall enough to break through the 4th wall, perhaps?!?!?!

But what about in anime/media more generally? What purpose does making all these references to other (somewhat related) works really serve? Or pointing out the fact that the story is aware it’s a story read/watched by viewers? Or that its part of a larger media environment within a specific fandom? Or that it has a particular historical lineage? Or showcasing how it is constructed/broadcast?

There really seems to be no point to any of these actions for most of the things I’ve watched. It’s almost like being meta is a compulsive act, something that shows (and viewers!) just do just for the sake of doing it. As a result, “pop culture” ends up being this perpetual machine where everyone feels this desire to consume everything because everyone uses them to make references and needs to understand what’s going on without any real “reason” behind it. Anime of course ends up being no exception. The meaning behind being meta ends up being completely overlooked in the quest simply to be meta.

(This logic ends up being similar to that used in descriptions of “late capitalism“, but I don’t want to get into all that shit. Cool stuff though.)

Clearly the symbol of everything that’s wrong with modern society.

However, being meta is an action, and like every other action/element/symbol/thing, we can attempt to infuse some sort of meaning into it. Drawing attention to the constructed nature of media, for instance, can be important in allowing people to broaden interpretations and engage with stories in different, directed ways. It can allow people to better understand what goes into the stuff they watch, both externally (how anime gets made), internally (what preconceptions they hold), and the fuzzy place in-between (where tropes and similar concepts live). Most importantly, meta-aware media can help train us to be more critical in general of the type of things we consume, which can allow us to think more critically about the themes (meaning of courage; conceptions of family), frameworks (technology vs. nature; man vs. robot), and “tropes” (fanservice; body language) they propagate.

(In retrospect, this is what one of my original meta posts was probably trying to get at…)

The Monogatari series tends to be the flagship for this type of thing.

But there is a big difference between being “aware” of something and actually doing something about it. In fact, being aware about something can often make you less inclined to actually do something about it, whether that be some form of external (protesting, boycotting, raging on forums) or internal (re-framing thinking, changing context) action. And this difference is what I’m getting at when I use the term “Offensive” and “Defensive” in the title.

Broadly speaking, offensive meta-ness is meta-ness that’s meant to make the consumer feel uncomfortable and unsettled, with the explicit or implicit goal of inspiring some type of action in the viewer. By contrast, defensive meta-ness is meant to be reassuring – you already know what’s up, so you point it out, hint at how clever and progressive you are for noting it, then pat yourself on the back for being aware of the issue. And finally, neutral meta-ness is the type of thing described above, where it’s this compulsive act that seems to have no strings attached.

As you might have noticed, the definitions above are fundamentally subjective: I’ve assigned not only intent to these terms, but also directionality, so that there’s no way to actually distinguish between whether any singular meta moment is meant to be offensive, defensive, or neutral. And it’s this ambiguity which I believe draws the largest debates within the fanbase as to the merits/demerits of any particular show, and in particular whether a show is just a “recycled piece of harem garbage”, “a clever genre deconstruction”, or just plain crap.

I mean, such QUALITY right here.

For examples of this phenomenon, we can look towards discussions on Haganai, Nisekoi, OreImo, or No Game No Life (casually using older examples since I’m still out of touch with anything that’s aired in the past few months). While people often lambast the “deconstruction” viewpoint (frequently since it comes with the oh-so-great buzzword “postmodern”), the reason why some fans arrive at these interpretations can often be traced to how they’ve chosen to interpret the meta-aware content: while a “normal” show likely illustrates or even defends the status quo, a “deconstructionist” one is meant to shed light on the genre in a useful (and often positive) way. It may be that I’m overly optimistic and/or give shows (much) more credit than they’re due, but on this blog I tend to favor interpretations leaning towards offensive meta-ness. And most of the disagreements I get in the comments tend to come from people who’ve taken this exact opposing viewpoint on what function such meta-ness serves.

(That said, I generally try and showcase the logic behind my arguments quite thoroughly. While it’s trivially true that consumers can “poach” any particular meaning from a given piece of media, I still believe that some interpretations tend to be more valid/natural than others.)

Anyway, while we can argue over the type of meta-ness present in individual shows, I actually find the concept of defensive irony to be particularly scary given how easily it can work its way into both our own mindsets and the public consciousness. It’s a mode of thought, inherent to the viewer but influenced by the media in question, that subverts the whole positive impact meta-awareness can have, driving a wedge between awareness and action that allows us to congratulate ourselves for things we never really resolve simply because we’re clever enough to notice their presence and influence on our lives. This remains especially true within heavily Internet-centric fan communities such as anime fans where these meta-aware attitudes (“I’m glad I can see the meta-ness in this anime yo!”) and impulses (“This partially obscure anime reference I just made is so clever yo!”) are really prevalent.

Clearly how I would feel if I ever engaged in such a practice.

So…yea — these are the latest iteration of my thoughts on all things meta. They’re a bit rough (although I’m inordinately pleased at how DEEP AND META I think the images I chose are), so I’d love to hear what you think (that I think that you think that I think that you think that…) in the comments!

In the words of my previous “We’re alive!” post,

It’s been quite a while since the last time I posted on here.

And with that, I now get to usher in the second resurrection of this blog. Except this time IT’S FOR REAL.

Welp.

Now, you might be wondering,

“But Josh, you sounded so ready to get back to blogging last time! What happened?! And why can we trust you this time around?”

CALM DOWN IMAGINARY AUDIENCE — ONE SET OF COMPLETELY SCRIPTED QUESTIONS AT A TIME. PLUS ONLY IF THEY’RE BOLDED AND PUT IN A HEADER FORMAT TO DEMARCATE SECTIONS. SAVE THE REAL QUESTIONS FOR THE COMMENTS. SHEESH.

Why the second hiatus?

I mean, it really comes down to one simple fact: college theses tend to be all-consuming affairs. It’s ironic, really — everyone always tells you stories about how their thesis consumed their life, regardless whether they’re talking about their bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate degrees. In fact, I don’t think I’ve talked to a single person who hasn’t told me that working on a thesis at some point becomes an all-consuming affair.

As you might imagine, being a research nut (but seriously – I’ve pretty much done astronomy research continuously since the end of high school) and an academic, I was pretty excited to do a senior research thesis. And, up until around March or so, it had been a fun experience that involved a lot of work but still left me time to do other things. But soon after I talked about getting back into blogging, work on my thesis ratcheted up, and I spent pretty much the entirety of March and April working on nothing but my thesis. While I never wrapped everything up I wanted to get done, I did finish a thesis, so if anyone’s interested in seeing more of that kind of stuff, you can grab a copy here.

Sometimes I feel giant railguns are the closest anime gets to astronomy.

“But that only explains two months! What happened to blogging and getting back into anime when you were done?”

JEEZ YOU GUYS ARE SO DEMANDING PLZ STAHP GIVING ME AN OPPORTUNITY TO TALK ABOUT MY BORING PERSONAL LIFE TO MAKE ME FEEL LIKE I’M VALUED BY SOME NEBULOUS SEMI-ANONYMOUS COMMUNITY.

The rest of the story is pretty simple. I spent the latter part of April and early May dealing with fallout from my thesis — catching up with all the work I had dropped in my other classes, last-minute college stuff, etc. Then I got really sick for about a week (like almost bedridden level of sick), played ~100 hours of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, graduated from college, moved out, moved into a new apartment with Rebecca for the summer, and began my new job working as a researcher!

There goes my amazingly melodramatic college experiences!

And that pretty much brings us to today.

“Wow, do you always make excuses that are this long-winded? Everybody who’s serious about something knows that you make time for the things you love.”

FINE YOU WIN IT’S TRUE IT’S ALL TRUE I WAS BUSY BUT DURING MY SCATTERED FREE TIME I DIDN’T WATCH ANIME READ ANY BLOG POSTS OR TRY AND WRITE ANYTHING AND INSTEAD PLAYED COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF VIDEO GAMES OR DID MORE RESEARCH I’M A HORRIBLE PERSON DON’T JUDGE ME I’M NOT BEHOLDEN TO YOU OR ANY OTHER AUDIENCE EVEN THOUGH I PUT UP THIS BLOG AS PUBLIC CONTENT AND FEEL AN OBLIGATION TO MY READERS AND ENJOY WRITING STUFF AND HAVE IDEAS I WANT TO SHARE BECAUSE I’M EGOTISTICAL AND A WORKAHOLIC BUT I’M TRYING TO GET BETTER BECAUSE MY DAD WORKED ALL THE TIME AND MY GREATEST FEAR IN LIFE IS THAT I BECOME HIM AND REBECCA’S BEEN NICE ABOUT IT BUT I’M TRYING TO GET BETTER GOD I SOUND LIKE AN ALCOHOLIC BUT NOW THAT I’M OUT OF SCHOOL AND AM NOT SUBJECTED TO DOING RESEARCH ON A REALLY SHORT CLOCK I FEEL LESS PRESSURE ABOUT TAKING TIME TO DO THIS AND ACHIEVING BETTER WORK-LIFE BALANCE BUZZWORD SO THAT’S THE REAL REASON WHY NOT THEN BUT NOW OKAY?!?!?!

Why should we trust that you’ll actually be blogging for real this time?

Well, as my half-crazed, likely disconcertingly emotionally vulnerable all caps answer above indicates, I’m getting pretty serious about blogging, especially now that I’m out of school. It’s starting to become that time of my life to decide where my priorities are, and when it came down to it, I really feel like anime — and participating in the anime community — were important to me and something I wanted to continue doing for the foreseeable future.

That said, there’s also another reason:

REBECCA AND I ARE GOING TO BE LIVING IN JAPAN NEXT YEAR!

THE WEEB IS STRONG WITH THIS ONE

Yes! It’s true! I’ll finally join the likes of Artemis and journey to the birthplace of anime! It should be a lot of fun — I’ll be doing (you probably guess it) astronomy research at the same institute I was at during my summer in Japan 2 years ago before returning to the US for grad school, while Rebecca will be teaching English full-time. She’s never been to Asia before, so it hopefully it’ll be a pretty exciting experience for her too.

Anyways, it’d be remiss if I didn’t blog about anime and such while I’m partying it up in Japan (maybe I’ll even participate in some anime pilgrimages!), so consider that good insurance that I’ll be around for a while.

Why the strange title?

“But Josh, I never asked about the title since you always pick ones that you think are DEEP AND MEANINGFUL but usually just sound stupid.”

HOW COULD YOU SAY SUCH A THING TO ME IMAGINARY AUDIENCE — I TRUSTED YOU AND NOW YOU’VE BETRAYED OUR VERY DEEP CONNECTION SO WHY DON’T YOU JUST GO PULL AN AKU NO HANA OR SOMETHING

I know — what a comeback.

Leading questions aside, the title actually does mean something. I intend to take this opportunity to officially drop all of my unfinished projects and start fresh on the blog.

Now this doesn’t mean I will necessarily ignore everything I’ve either explicitly promised or hinted that I would like to write about — many of the topics I’m interested in are related, so there’s a high chance I’ll return to them at some point in the future. But for now at least I’m dropping all of them so I can focus on putting out some new stuff I’ve been working over for quite a while and am pretty excited about.

I have quite the collection of unfinished posts, so as a small consolation to you guys (BUT MOSTLY MYSELF SINCE MY IDEAS ARE SO IMPORTANT AND YOU GUYS ARE UNBELIEVABLY PRIVILEGED TO HEAR THEM) I’m just going to summarize their general gist below:

• Fandom of Japan through the Ages: Driving Forces and the Elite (Anime)
  • Never got around to writing this the second part of this post up, so I’m just going to link the original essay (not amazing, but my first attempt at more academic analysis), which should be enough to stimulate some thinking (if not really convince anyone).
• Pure Love: Hyouka, Sakurasou, and Anime that Changed My Life
  • I could never really do these justice in a post, so after several failed attempts I’ll just say that I love both of these shows to death AND NO ONE CAN TELL ME OTHERWISE.
• Otaku: Fandom Demographics
  • I wanted to actually try and partner up with MyAnimeList (or, alternately, scrape data from the site) to get metadata on a host of anime fans and apply a number of quantitative data analysis methods common in computer science and informatics to see how fans actually look like. This was inspired by a post on The Cart Driver a long while back, but I never ended up taking up this (very ambitious) project.
• Anime and Introversion
  • I wanted to talk about this article which showed that the use of anime and emojis was highly correlated with introversion (not super common though), and discuss what that might mean for the fandom in lieu of some of the discussions on escapist tendencies going on at the time.
• History of Otaku-dom in America
  • Turns out it’s already been done by many other people much more qualified than me. This is the best source I’ve found, although I’m sure others exist.
• Postmodernism
  • I’ve wanted to do this post for forever, but couldn’t really find a good way to go about it in a way that left me satisfied. In brief, I wanted to go about it in a “postmodern” way by setting up several different narratives that gave similar end-goals:
  • 1) The dichotomy during the enlightenment/romantic periods with the focus on the absolute vs. subjective, how led to an obsession with irony (you are always unsure; both subjective and objective), the similar situation we are in now in the modern/postmodern eras with our focus on authenticity (or lack thereof), and how these will probably naturally lead to an escape with performativity (ephemeral) and meta-ness (the authentic from the inauthentic).
  • 2) As a deconstruction of society caused by increased consumption and reproduction (a la Jameson), or by a deconstruction of the “aura” of personhood caused by modern life (a la Benjamin).
  • 3) A reflexive, deconstructionist impulse (a la critical theory) to emancipate us from the structures that bind and surround us spurred by profound disillusionment in political and social projects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
  • 4) The changing symbols of the eras: the scope and ship (enlightenment), the play and philosopher (romantic), the institution and government (modern), and the machine and computer (postmodern). Each of these symbols is associated with concepts and propagates certain types of structures.
  • 5) The evolution of characters in literature from characters (fixed entities; “The Great Gatsby“) to “kyara” (flexible, amorphous pseudo-character blobs; Hatsune Miku, for instance).
  • Finally would’ve been followed by a call to research postmodernism in an eclectic (maybe POSTMODERNIST?!) way through a variety of sources to see how it is treated by people and discussed by academics.
• Thematic Analysis
  • Why do stories have to have themes? Realized soon after that many books have been dedicated to this exact concept, so no use adding analysis where it doesn’t really contribute much.
• Impact of Learning Japan(ese)
  • Pointing out some of the little in-jokes you start to get the more you learn about Japanese culture and the language.
• Deconstructing Anime: Ping Pong vs. Bakemonogatari
  • To put it bluntly, both directors (for both shows) put in reams of effort to actually deconstruct anime as a visual medium, and both don’t really get much appreciation for it. Might come back to this when I start posting about Ikuhara and what amazing things he did with Penguindrum.
• Anime OPs and EDs Matter!
  • People don’t take these seriously enough, and many times they are chock full of purposeful symbolic usage and good directing that sets the tone for shows.
• Daimidaler is Good
  • I mean, I stand by that statement. I think the show got a bad rap when it was significantly more clever than people gave it credit for. It pulled some of the most incredible plot twists I’ve seen, had some of the most purposefully obnoxious characters, and incorporated a lot of some of the most juvenile humor I’ve seen in any medium, all of which was in service of the simple thesis (stated in the final episode, as always) that “censorship is bad and sex and EROS is a part of life!!!”. I found the ridiculous contrast between the different parts of the show to be endearing, and think it was much more self-aware (and socially aware!) than many people gave it credit for. But…*shrug*.

Anyways, that’s that. Maybe I’ll turn this type of thing into a recurring event so I can air out ideas instead of letting them accumulate.

So is that finally the end? That was a really long post for such a simple announcement you know

Yuuta – representing closet otaku since 8th grade.

I LIKE TO HEAR THE SOUND OF MY OWN VOICE OKAY CAN YOU AT LEAST GIVE ME THAT

NOW SHOWER ME WITH LOVE AND AFFECTION <3

Blog pages have also been updated minus the blogroll k thx bai

*Addendum: Hey guys, Rebecca here to share my excuse…yea I have no excuse I’m pretty much just a bump on a log. Now wasn’t that nice and succinct ;)?

Omg guys I finally decided to watch a new show! I stumbled upon it pretty much by accident on the magical place called Youtube. I watched the first episode expecting it to be a pretty standard shoujo, but since I hadn’t watched one in a while and I’m getting into trouble reading too many paranormal romance novels (Josh says they give me unrealistic expectations for our relationship XD) I decided why the heck not. In all seriousness though is it SO wrong that I want a super sexy vampire/demon/werewolf/angel to sweep me off my feet and tell me I’m his soulmate and that we were bound to be together forever and that I was secretly adopted and I’m also a vampire/demon/werewolf/angel…ok maybe he’s right. Ahem. Anyway on to the review!

SPOILER ALERT. There are definitely spoilers in this review, proceed with caution. 

So I searched the show up on MAL and hey it actually has really good ratings! Here’s a summary for you before I launch into my full review.

Akatsuki no Yona centers around the princess of the Kingdom of Kouka, Yona. Despite her father’s disapproval, she’s in love with and plans to marry her cousin, Soo-won. However, her world gets turned upside down on her 16th birthday, and she is forced to flee from the palace. Now, with her friend and bodyguard Hak, Yona must set out on a journey to find out and fulfill her destiny.

This show was definitely not what I expected. It sounds super generic shoujo–and in a lot of respects it totally was–but at the same time the main character actually got over her whiny, pathetic phase really fast and turned into an active female protagonist. She has a weird savior complex, but more about that later. Yona goes from princess to wandering exile within the first few episodes and she totally rolls with it after getting over a depressive slump (cut the girl some slack she kind of just watched her dad get murdered by the guy she thought she was in love with…awkward), somewhat incompetently at first, but eventually she puts in enough work and performs heroic deeds in her own right.

Seriously guys. Scissors are for hair. Axes are for trees.

This would be better if her motivation wasn’t a weird doormat-ish obsession with not letting anyone get hurt for her. She’s got chronic “gotta protect everyone” syndrome. This is usually kind of an issue for me, but she actually does something about it. The girl is so determined to learn how to use a bow and arrow that she stays up all night practicing until her hands bleed. I know that archery is totally passé since The Hunger Games, but seriously that’s some dedication. She doesn’t want to run around being a healer–she wants to take out those who would want her and the ones she loves dead (I mean people think she’s dead anyway, but you get the point).

I can’t even get myself out of bed to pee that late at night…

It isn’t just the archery though, this girl is a serious masochist self-sacrificer. She climbs along this impossible path to collect a herb to prove herself and then goes on to get herself captured by slave traders in order to free all the girls they’ve captured. Sometimes things like this made me feel like the whole show was just an elaborate way to display what a kickass protag Yona was. I mean writers do this all the time–it’s totally a thing. Although no doubt it did get kind of grating at times when she kept repeating how she needed to save everyone and wouldn’t let people get hurt on her account blah, blah, blah.

The characters and dynamic plot events were the saving of this show for me. Notice the specification “plot events”. I can sort of see how the show is building up to a plot for a second season, but as of now I have absolutely no idea what the main story is really supposed to be. Yona is running around trying to find these four super-powerful dragons, but I think it’s unclear, even to her, what she plans to do with them once she actually finds them. Maybe I’m just missing something, but the show was a lot of running around dealing with minor conflicts and not actually accomplishing much.

Some of the characters were pretty awesome–I enjoyed how each of the dragons actually had a well-developed backstory instead of just random hot guys showing up out of nowhere to rip open shirts and perform acts of derring-do. (I mean there was of course some of that, but it didn’t consume the show.) AnY spends a few episodes on each of them, introducing them and how they interact with their community and the rest of the motley crew. This I actually appreciated. It’s nice when a show or story takes the time to flesh out their characters–it doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should. However, one thing that was weird for me was the antagonist.

Soo-won was a really weird villain for me. On one hand, he kind of murders the king in cold blood, but then on the other, he’s kind of a competent ruler, but pretends not to be a competent ruler???? I didn’t really buy the whole weird facade thing the show tried to enact. Maybe it makes more sense in the second season, but for now, color me completely unconvinced. His mood and personality swings were so intense that I couldn’t rely on him for any consistency in behavior. Sure, it was nice that they didn’t just make him this power-hungry evil guy, but I think they could have been a little more realistic with his personality flip-flops.

But that’s enough about serious things. Can we just stop for a second at the end here and talk about how gorgeous Hak is? Sure I hate his name, but omg. I think I just have a thing for tall dark-haired guys with blue eyes (hey Josh maybe you should find a way to make your eyes blue and shave your stupid beard :p). STOP JUDGING ME. He’s beautiful.

Hey guys, here is the intro to the introduction of a series of posts Josh will be writing about pop culture, media, anime, and all that jazz. I’ve read the original essay that these posts derive from, and know that it is very dense and typical of everything Josh writes haha. That being the case, I have gone through (with his permission) and tried to make it more accessible to someone who doesn’t want to read nothing but academic drivel (I love you Josh). Anyway…moving right along. Here’s the post! Hope you enjoy whatever the heck he’s trying to talk about ;).

From superhero movies to “soft power“, pop culture seems to have infiltrated everything from Hollywood to foreign policy (like this gem). Indeed, I don’t think it’d be to much of an exaggeration to say that we are pretty much surrounded by a constant barrage of media. Social media platforms/forums like Facebook and Reddit have exploded, and just because you don’t use them doesn’t necessarily mean you’re free of their influence: stuff that happens on these outlets now are news stories in and of themselves. Plus with the large (and growing) percentage of people who now own smartphones, our ability to just straight-up access media “anytime, anywhere” has drastically increased.

LET THE FLAMING BEGIN.

This intense media exposure has been accompanied by a “blurring out” of what we are actually consuming. “Trans-media” campaigns and franchises — where some underlying “world” seems to span across a host of different media platforms from books to television series to video games — now carry serious weight, and increasingly seem to shift shine doubt on what we’re actually consuming when we interact with their products.* I mean, just look at the mess that is the (expanded) Star Wars Universe. Or what used to be the Halo franchise. Or the (original) Marvel and DC Universes. Or, for a more anime-centric example, the Gundam meta-franchise.

* Note: given this type of equivalence, I will just refer to abstract media products and physical goods interchangeably as “media-goods” so I don’t have to keep specifying. It might sound weird, but it’s easier on me!

Which raises several really interesting questions:

• What is it exactly that holds these universes together?
• What abstract “theme park” (because using the term “world” is too generous!) are we being granted special access too?
• Is this somehow separable from the actual product itself, or are they fundamentally connected to each other?
• What exactly is our role in this whole “consuming media” process?
• What does it mean for something to be “canon”?
• What are fans tapping into when they can re-create characters for us?
• How exactly can fans move seamlessly between self-generated content and official stories?

And so on.

Given the prevalence of “media mix” marketing in anime, where shows get tie-in goods, video games, T-shirts, figures, and more (often created by a bunch of different companies!), plus the deep engagement of otaku with the whole shebang, trying to understand how this works might hopefully offer some insight into some of the questions I’ve posed above about how exactly fans (especially otaku) relate to shows.

Still no idea how we ended up with Haiyore! Nyaruko-san though.

Now, while it might seem like I’m blowing hot air here and waxing uselessly academic (he totally is), I want to point out that I’m not the first one to take this approach, but rather following in the footsteps of Hiroki Azuma (who used this type of approach in his seminal Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals) as well as Marc Steinberg and Ian Condry (both of whom have also published books on the topic).

For me, there are two big questions related to trying to approach media studies through this particular “media environment<–>fandom” lens:

1. How does this type of media environment — especially in anime — affect the way we fundamentally interact with media? Does it affect the types of shows we like, how we internalize things, how we express ourselves, etc.?
2. How does all of this affect media itself? Does it affect the types of stories we are able to tell, the relationships such media reinforce, etc.?

Almost all of the dialogue within the academic anime community (as far as I can tell) has focused on the first question (with the notable exception of Thomas LaMarre, who really set about to tackling the second question). This isn’t necessarily because the first question is “better” than the second. Rather, I think it’s because the question is much more accessible: it is much easier to come up with theories on people and what they consume (especially without lots of quantitative data!); it’s much harder to create theories centering on the products themselves and the people behind them.

Unless you’re Nabeshin, of course — then you just screw with people for fun and serve as the Deus Ex Machina character in all your own shows.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about these problems, and hopefully you guys will appreciate the fruits of my labor as I try and tackle both of these questions over the next few weeks.

In this first series of posts, I will focus on the first question in an attempt to lay out the broad framework for a heavy extension of Hiroki Azuma’s  “database model” which I have called the media-culture machine. I know, it’s an EXTREMELY OMINOUS-SOUNDING NAME, but it’s actually not nearly that bad. Or, I guess more precisely, it depends on what your opinion is surrounding some of the stuff I’ll be talking about.

In a nutshell, the media-culture machine is centered upon the ability of consumption itself to unify media, culture, and identity — yes, I’m actually making a claim about all three ill-defined, controversial issues! — into one overarching framework where they become increasingly exchangeable: consuming media is culture in and of itself, while simultaneously operating as a way to express yourself and your identity. As a result, I think media “products” shouldn’t really be thought of as just things we watch or buy. Instead, they are fundamentally (and overarching) cultural icons that need to be consumed — watched, read, talked about, internalized — by us in order to understand the very culture they generate. This, I think, is the foundation behind the positive (and ever-growing) feedback loop that is pop culture.

As a result of this much broader approach to understanding media-goods, I think that the consumption of media-goods is fundamentally more diverse than just a simple deconstructed database. In fact, understanding it actually requires a unification of three separate (but relevant) views towards understanding trans-media franchises and the “theme parks” that somehow unite them:

• ‘Narrative’-based (world-building) modes of consumption, where at some level the overarching story, world, or other unifying tendency drives our desire to consume more,
• ‘Trope’-based (world-destroying) modes of consumption, where it is our deconstructionist tendency to pull the story apart into repetitive building blocks, memes, tropes, etc. that drives us to consume more, and
• ‘Character’-based (world-connecting) modes of consumption, where it is the ability of iconography to connect disparate worlds together into some abstract pantheon of similar ideas, representations, etc. that drives us to consume more.

Azuma’s model thus finds it’s (rightful) home comfortably among a broader pantheon of tendencies, all of which play an integral part in the ways we interact with media at any given time.

WHY ONE ROUTE WHEN YOU CAN CHOOSE THEM ALL?

Well, that’s the plan anyways. As always, since I don’t have an extensive formal background in media studies my ideas will probably be rougher than the type of stuff you might see published, which means I’ll be looking forward to input from all of you as we work through these EXTREMELY COOL DON’T YOU ALL THINK THEY’RE SUPER EXCITING TOO??!?!?! ideas and issues together. :)

First I would like to make a public service announcement: I would date Nozaki…y’know if he wasn’t like way too young for me. I would totally do it. Tall, dark, and handsome is pretty much my calling card.

This pretty much exemplifies my relationship goals. GO TO THE GYM JOSH.

First off, here’s a synopsis for those who haven’t seen the show:

High school student Chiyo Sakura has a crush on schoolmate Umetarou Nozaki, but when she confesses her love to him, he mistakes her for a fan and gives her an autograph. When she says that she always wants to be with him, he invites her to his house and has her help on some drawings. Chiyo discovers that Nozaki is actually a renowned shoujo manga artist named Sakiko Yumeno. She then agrees to be his assistant in order to get closer to him. As they work on his manga, they encounter other schoolmates who assist them or serve as inspirations for characters in the stories.

So Josh and I actually watched this show together and we both thought it was pretty cute. Although I must admit that it kind of hits on all of my rom-com pet peeves. There’s a reason I refuse to see rom-coms in theaters. I mean in fairness it was a rom com, just instead of Katherine Heigl being a perpetual bridesmaid, there were a lot of weird anime characters running around. I really enjoyed the show though. When I’m not enjoying something I’ll drag my feet about finishing it *cough Toradora cough*, but this one Josh and I were able to watch pretty consistently. I mean it wasn’t something that I binged or anything, but it was definitely enjoyable. I think the best feature for me was the fact that it didn’t take itself seriously and the whole plot was self-aware and meta enough to be funny.

Nozaki-kun was a great character, if only because he never ever stopped being dense as a brick and totally socially incompetent. I mean the whole premise of the show starts because Sakura confesses to him and he thinks she’s confessing that she’s a fan of his manga. He rewards her with an autograph. This also happens the second time she confesses to him. Of course the irony is that he writes a shoujo manga so theoretically shouldn’t be so dense, but when it comes to girls in real life he’s terrible. He can’t even give good advice to any of his friends about girls. In fairness, shoujo isn’t real life and I’m not sure how successful any shoujo courtship techniques would be in reality.

To be honest though, the schtick got a little bit exasperating by the end. Maybe it’s because I felt totally cockblocked by the show in an extremely aggravating way. I thought maybe by the end he would FINALLY get it and they would FINALLY do something, but nope. No, the show decided to be an asshole and stomp on all my happy ending dreams. This is kind of why I hate anime sometimes. I mean do I understand why the show ended the way it did? Yes. Do I like it? No. I mean clearly Nozaki was supposed to get over his stupid obliviousness at some point right? Maybe? Psh. In your dreams.

My feelings about the end of the show.

One thing I really did love about the show though was the beta coupling. It’s hard to make me laugh out loud unless a show is really doing something right, but the two beta couples were hilarious. I also loved Mikorin who didn’t actually get paired up, but he was the inspiration for Nozaki-kun’s heroine in the manga and had absolutely no idea he was being used as a girl. Another great thing was Nozaki’s weird dedication to his job as a mangaka. He saw literally everything as an opportunity to sketch characters or force his friends into awkward situations so he could use them as inspiration for his work. I wish I was that dedicated to pretty much everything. I mean that level of dedication is something I reserve for my bed.

I know this (intentionally) looks like yaoi, but the one on the right is a girl.

However, even though the show was supposed to be about a manga artist, it wasn’t similar to others in the genre. (In fairness I haven’t actually seen that many shows since slice of life isn’t usually my thing, but I’m going out on a limb here to say that it was unique(ish)). I’m not sure if you’ve seen other shows about aspiring mangaka, but the characters are usually super intense about their craft. In this show, you have Nozaki running around with a weird pseudo-romantic attachment to his editor who doesn’t really seem to give a shit about him or anything that he does. Although, it is an improvement on his old editor who had him draw tanuki in pretty much every panel. For some reason the crazy tanuki subplot resurfaces, but I wasn’t really sure what the show was doing with that other than using it for comic relief.

Then again, a lot of things in the show seemed to happen simply for the sake of comic relief. I think Nozaki has the majority of the cast working on his manga for him by the end of the show, which kind of makes you wonder what he actually does in terms of real labor and what he did before he put all of his friends to work…suspension of disbelief I suppose? I’m also not sure how he actually comes up with his plot lines since he seems borderline incompetent most of the time, but I guess that’s part of his charm? XD

I think one of the most enjoyable/well-done things about the show was that it made fun of character stereotypes, while at the same time subverting them. For example, there’s the one “pretty boy” character who all the girls are in love with and worship, but in this case, the character is actually a girl who just happens to look (and act) like a very attractive boy (don’t ask me why). Kashima has romantic feelings for her ‘senpai’ Hori, but because she is so used to oddly flirting with all girls in the class she has no idea how to approach him romantically. Then of course, there’s the super tomboyish female character who is also socially oblivious, but in a different way from Nozaki-kun. She is hyper-aggressive and pursues another one of Nozaki’s friends, but is secretly this super amazing singer. Anyway no more spoilers. I would definitely recommend watching this show just because it was super entertaining and I was surprisingly not annoyed by any of the characters and that pretty much never happens.

For the record, this was another show I almost didn’t watch just to spite Josh, but I’m definitely glad I did. Don’t be turned off by the fact that it advertises itself as a romcom, it’s really not all that romantic as far as romcom goes and I know Josh is kind of girly, but he liked it so I guess you can use that as a metric.

On another note, I thought I’d give you an updated about my (and Josh’s) life in case anyone gives a shit haha. So Josh is currently in JAPAN (and MIA because he’s swamped with work for his new research position for the next week or two), while because of visa stuff/babysitting younger siblings as a favor to parents I’m still in the US. However, I’m working on my extremely limited Japanese and have a flight booked for the end of the month. Hopefully we plan to post more about our life in Japan and I may even start a how-to guide for all those other clueless foreigners to learn from my mistakes. If I feel so inspired/not lazy. Anyway if anyone has any advice/survival tips I’m all ears!

Hey guys! We’re alive. Josh and I haven’t posted in ages, which I admit is largely my fault–as he will be more than happy to tell you. But anyway you have to forgive us because we are currently living in JAPAN for a year post graduation! I thought that I would start a new series of blog posts to keep you updated on all the wonderful gloriously weird things that happen to us while we are here. We also have an anime post coming down the pipeline so stay tuned for that.

So far we have visited:

Shinjuku:

We met some chipmunk mascots that were trying to warn us about fraud. Remember whenever you see a chipmunk it’s secretly an anti-fraud agent. Either that or Japan has a slightly unhealthy obsession with mascots?

I’m wearing the pink dress and Josh is the one with the stupid smile behind me.

We also went to this amazing fruit parlor (Takano) and got some delicious and over-the-top parfaits. I wish I wasn’t an idiot and had enough foresight to take pictures on my own camera. Because let’s be honest, anything you don’t take on your own camera is a picture that you’re never going to see again.

Yokohama: Guys. There’s an instant ramen museum and it’s hilarious and totally worth visiting if you ever find yourself in Yokohama. There’s a really cute animated film about Momfuku Ando (the inventor of Ramen) who apparently is something of a god to Japanese people and a room filled with a timeline of all the instant ramen ever invented. I think there may also be a few other locations around Japan if you can’t make it to Yokohama.

In addition, it’s also a really beautiful area right on the harbor and there’s a famous ferris wheel. Josh and I are both scared of heights so we opted out, but for you braver souls it would probably be a lot of fun and a great view!

Kashiwa:

We live here. NBD I don’t even have a picture to share haha. Oh wait that’s not true. I have a picture of my joro spider friend that I took while I was out running a couple weeks ago. According to Japanese folklore this spider can turn into a beautiful woman to seduce men and then eat them. Good thing I’m not a dude because I literally see dozens of them while I’m out running in our neighborhood.

Shibuya: Where apparently they keep piranhas at their botanical gardens. There were lots of nice flowers and some turtles and then a piranha? What? Aren’t piranha’s supposed to be eating people in the Amazon?

It’s a surprisingly unimpressive fish.

I’m not sure how a piranha got to Japan, but I’ve learned to not ask too many questions. We also went to this insane food show (Tokyu Food Show) which is basically and underground plaza with everything you could possibly want to eat under the sun. It was there that we found the obscenely priced melon. This melon must have been magical or something because it cost the equivalent of $108 US dollars. We also found a 3-pack of mushrooms for $162. Totally crazy.

Anyway thanks for reading guys. Depending on the responses we get I’ll decide whether or not to continue this series of posts. Stay tuned!

Also any travel tips or suggestions are very much appreciated. This weekend off to Kappabashi!

Since I somewhat recently finished Shin Sekai Yori (SSY), Josh and I were talking (bickering) about it — as we are wont to do whenever I finish a show that he’s been trying to get me to watch for ages. We cycled through a few topics, but somehow landed on comparing the show to Psycho-Pass (PP), seeing as they were both fairly popular anime in the dystopian/sci-fi genre and also aired around the same time. We’re also planning to watch the second season of Psycho Pass, so we thought it would also be a good preface to a future post.

We didn’t want to just list off the reasons why we liked and disliked each show, but a little bit about why we felt the way we did and how we were judging. In a nutshell, the two metrics we decided to compare the show on were “likability” and “respectability”. In other words, how each show ranked in terms of viewing enjoyment versus how much we respected what the show tried to do with its message, tone, etc. Similar to our No Game No Life post, we wanted to do a dialogue and hopefully get at the heart of why we felt each way about the two shows. Josh also wants to start doing these types of posts more regularly because he thinks his stuff will be less boring if I also talk about it.

scrubs

J: So let’s just get things started. I felt like between the two shows you get two very different visions of the future. Which “dystopia” did you think was more appealing?

R: Appealing in what way?

J:  Well, PP takes you to this familiar Neuromancer-esque territory — you know, all those questions about technology as a double-edged sword, the limits of our own abilities, etc. — but SSY has a vision of the future that I hadn’t seen before or really ever thought about. Maybe that’s because it’s so outlandish. But I guess my question is whether that made it more appealing to you over PP’s treatment of familiar territory.

R: I think I liked the idea of SSY better — as an avid reader and someone who’s dabbled in creative writing, I always appreciate a unique story. However, I didn’t necessarily buy into it the same way I could envision a PP future coming to be.

J: So are you saying that a big factor of dystopias is not how appealing it is, but how relevant it is to the present day? Like their true power being as a “distorted reflection of the present” sort of thing.

R: I mean, I think so. I think what makes dystopias so chilling is that it seems as if it could be a legitimate outcome for our future. Right?

J: And SSY didn’t really get at that for you.

R: Not as much. In fact, I wouldn’t even classify it as true science fiction — it was really more of a fantasy.

J: So if you consider SSY a dystopian fantasy does that mean it’s no longer a good comparison for PP? Like, if you could somehow suspend your disbelief then would it be as appealing? Or is that not really a fair question?

R: I think the problem with SSY is that I could barely even consider it a dystopia. If you had told me that the main characters were elves or another magical race I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. It was too removed from the present and everyday reality to really strike me as a true dystopia.

J: But I feel another part of dystopias are the way that they pervert a utopian existence. And in doing so it asks these deep fundamental questions about being human, living in society, etc. I mean, that’s sort of at the heart of the origin of the word, right? So I think you could make the case that SSY fits that definition to the T.

Who knew lazily paddling upriver could be SO EXCITING.

R: I think you can definitely call SSY a dystopia if you want, but I don’t think it has the same effect as PP simply because it is so far removed from anything I can realistically imagine happening to our future. Whereas PP is disturbing because it could very well be what happens in the next few centuries.

J: I’d probably say sooner than that, given how things are looking today.

R: Ha yea, I guess.

J: So, in essence, what makes PP more appealing for you is this imminent impending fear that this society could really exist in the future. It’s not enough to just sort of exist as a scary place that serves as a setting for some story — it needs to have this sort of transcendental quality where it also looms ominously over our real everyday lives.

R: I wouldn’t have necessarily put it like that, but yea.

J: So on the same line of thought, would you say that Wall-E was a better example of a dystopian future than SSY?

R: Sure. But Wall-E was a shitty movie.

J: wut.

R: It was so boring! It was just two robots and a bunch of fat people.

J: But all the humans and their flying hoverchairs were pretty scary weren’t they? I’d say that whole setup was even more terrifying than PP!

R: I mean yea. But I can definitely see how we might be heading there. Still was boring as fuck though.

J: So obviously you liked PP more than Wall-E. What about it was so appealing to you?

R: I mean I didn’t absolutely love PP or anything — I think in terms of basic viewing experience I liked at least the first three quarters of SSY somewhat more.

get rekt

J: I’m a bit surprised. I mean, I tend to really like shows like SSY that are a little bit slow-paced and philosophical. You know — “big idea” shows. But you’ve never really seemed to be a big fan of those. And compared to SSY, PP was much more concrete and action-packed.

R: I mean the world building in SSY was much better and more innovative.  Saki was boring, but whatever. It definitely made me think more than PP did and it was a nice change of pace since I usually watch more action-packed shows.

J: Plus shoujos.

R: Hey, don’t hate on my shoujos. :p

J: No worries — I know you’re the only one allowed to hate on or defend your ambivalent relationship with shoujos. ;)

R: That’s right!

J: Haha. Anyways, getting back to SSY. That’s sort of why I was saying I like SSY better — because it made me think about all this DEEP AND MEANINGFUL shit. But earlier you said PP was actually more appealing to you.

R: I mean I wouldn’t put it that way. I think PP had more credibility for me — although both of the shows had shit endings (motherfucking hyperoats) — and in the end I don’t think SSY is something I would watch again, whereas I might watch PP again.

J: So does this come down to SSY having a shittier ending than PP?

R: I wouldn’t say that…

J: Two words: hyper oats.

https://vimeo.com/101320655 (listen to the words with the music–trust us)

R: I think it’s one word actually.

J: Well fuck it.

R: The ending was more of an issue for me with SSY because it was a major letdown from the rest of the show. I was more forgiving about the hyperoats.

J: Yea I mean for all the shit the hyperoats gets, in the end PP generally did a good job of keeping with the overall style of the rest of the story. SSY did almost a full show-change in the last couple episodes.

R: I agree. It felt too disjointed for me to buy into it. It was jarring by the end and it seemed to happen out of nowhere. With the stupid psychobuster.

J: Right. Well, I would definitely argue the final confrontation ended with strong thematic consistency, but I have to admit it was bizarre to watch the show (d)evolve into a random dungeon crawl.

Because fighting in a wheat field is totally different.

R: So I think I can start by saying that neither show was by any means perfect, but for some reason I had much more of an issue with SSY than with PP.

J: Okay, how so?

R: I think my fundamental problem was that the show was so far-reaching. SSY was super ambitious, which I can respect, but I think it did itself a disservice. I just wasn’t buying the plot and a lot of the things that happened with the world building. I’m not sure if you had any similar feelings.

J: I actually thought SSY did a lot of cool things with the world building. What’d you take issue with?

R: It wasn’t so much the history or any of the established world, but moreso that everything imploded by the end of the show. I thought this spoke to a weakness in the plot and the general storytelling.

J: I mean if there’s one thing to say about that is that SSY’s biggest strength and weakness is that it set the entire show up for the grand finale. It was a story that banked on that final moment (and aftermath) being the realization of everything that had happened up to that point. So not liking the ending pretty much guarantees that the show will leave a permanent bad taste in your mouth.

R: I wouldn’t say it was that extreme. I had issues with PP’s ending as well, but, like you said, while SSY had everything riding on that ending and had consistency issues in terms of tone because of that, PP did more throughout the show.

J: I think what you mean to say…well, let me ask you this instead. What’s the most memorable scene from each show for you and why?

R: The most memorable scene in SSY was obviously the ending with Squealer’s trial and Kikomaru’s inevitable death, but I think therein lies the problem. There were no other secondary climaxes throughout the show other than Shun’s death.

Who knew Shun was such a fan of Halloween?

J: What about the Monster Rat chase and capture near the beginning of the show? Or Mamoru and Maria’s escape? Or Saki’s realization about what happens to the children that go missing?

R: Well I think the final scene climax was so heavily imbued with importance that everything else was forgettable for the most part.

J: Okay. What about PP?

R: There were two scenes that really stuck out to me. First, when Akane’s friend is killed in front of her and she just stands there and watches instead of intervening a la “The Most Dangerous Game”. And the second is when she stumbles upon the room of brains and decides to let them live.

Voted Sexiest Brain Alive 2077

J: Right. I think your answers sort of showcase the fundamental difference between the two shows. PP did a good job with pacing to have a lot of scenes with action and character development throughout. In particular, the show has a heavy emphasis on traumatic and transformative situations for Akane that lead directly to near term plot developments. In addition, PP has a lot of self-contained side stories to illustrate many of the side-characters. SSY really just banks everything hard on the conclusion. Everything feels in service of that one moment.

R: I guess I also felt that Saki was a weaker character than Akane in the sense that she didn’t have the same level of character growth. I’m not sure if that was a function of her society or poor rendition of her personality.

n00bs

J: I think that’s definitely true, but I would instead argue that Saki’s character development is a lot more subtle, and in a way that’s meant to be more telling about the slowness of societal change in SSY. The final scene in the show where she shows mercy to Squealer is actually a really big moment where you can actually see these experiences have culminated in a small but significant act of kindness. It shows how Saki has become fundamentally different from her predecessor and some of the people around her, and gives some small amount of hope that she will be able to pass her experiences on to future generations. I think it’s a pretty deep scene.

R: I guess I can agree with that. Still, in terms of the audience relating to her as a character…

J: Yea…she was pretty muted.

R: Right? I found it to be pretty difficult.

J: Yea — it’s hard to enjoy a show if the characters are difficult to relate to. Especially the main character.

R: Still, I think it was more interesting to see how the society in SSY barely changed at all even though this should have been a pivotal moment.

J: Well, a core part of sci-fi is sort of questioning how good, powerful, or adaptive humans really are. So I tend to think the fact that nothing does change is a very powerful message conveying a dismal view of humanity, rather than just, well, nothing. I mean, it’s not like SSY is the first book or movie to do something like this. Attack on Titan also seems to display a similarly depressing outlook for humanity where we continue fighting amongst ourselves until the bitter end.

R: I mean sure. Either way, it was pretty bleak.

Welp – I guess we’re all screwed.

J: But wasn’t PP also pretty bleak?

R: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everything is fine as long as we have hyperoats. Yum.

J: Food of the gods. But seriously though: while both shows do give a bleak view of humanity, I’d say that PP tends to be a more well-trodden cynical view than SSY’s.

R: I can’t think of many dystopias that are optimistic about humanity.

J: Well, I think it’s very important to distinguish between two types of views of humanity. A lot of these dystopian shows don’t have a lot of faith in humanity’s ability to overcome our base nature or our obsession with technology or frankly even each other. It’s a lot of us losing ourselves to our own creations. So yea, I think there you’re probably right. But SSY asks a much deeper question about exactly what it means to be human. Not just in how we act, but fundamentally.

R: Want to elaborate on that? I don’t really feel like thinking about it too hard XD.

J: YOU WOUND ME.

R: Yea yea just get on with it. :p

J: Well, a lot of sci-fi stories deal with this idea of “losing our humanity”. And what exactly that means depends on the story. In many cases we instigate our own demise and so these dystopias really deal with humanity turning in on itself, usually through the things we create. PP is one of these stories.

R: Okay…

J: But with SSY there’s a completely different starting premise. Humans have become sort of these creatures that no longer have any relationship to humanity as we understand today, and the humans that we do understand have been turned into monster rat slaves. So it really is a story that gets to the fundamental question about what humanity even means when you have a story about humans who are gods and rats who are humans. What does it mean to even have something like that?

R: I’m not sure, actually. It could be that the writer of the original story (I’m not sure how far SSY strayed from the novel that it was based on) was trying to get all deep and suggest that perhaps there are really only two tracks that current humanity could end up on–one where we devolve into our more animalistic tendencies, or another where we evolve into these superhumans, but at the same time lose our capacity for things like empathy. Not sure. What did you think?

J: I think SSY was more subtle than that. I don’t think the two humans are necessarily the paths we have to walk down or even their extremes, but instead a more abstract, self-reflectionary thing about different aspects of humanity.

R: Okay, that’s fair. I think the biggest thing that bothered me about the way I reacted to the show was how even after I learned the truth about the monster rats, a large part of me still rooted for the more human-looking people in the show. I’m not sure how much of that has to do with simple physicality, but I think that’s a large contributing factor. It’s much easier for us to associate with the beings that look like us, even if there is another group that is much more like humans today in everything except appearances.

J: That’s a really good point. Appearances are incredibly important, at least in our society. And at the end of the day, we really were more like the monster rats. I think it also might tie in to how the show inverted the usual “rooting for the underdog” trope by making the main monster rat, Squealer, morally ambiguous in a way that still left the audience favoring the human-looking people instead of the characters who were supposed to represent ourselves.

R: Yea, I guess there really is an inversion of that trope, especially since the usual formula has us rooting for the oppressed (usually humans) enslaved by either another group of humans or higher entity. I don’t think anyone would argue that the monster rats were oppressed and that in theory we should have been rooting for them, but the show doesn’t let us off that easy. We’re stuck in Saki’s perspective and because of that, we sort of automatically have to root for her. Even more so since Saki is ultimately well-intentioned. She isn’t an anti-hero or a sympathetic villain, she is an innocent who wants nothing but to keep her loved ones safe by maintaining the status quo.

J: Exactly. And it’s not like the life she’s trying to protect is all that great either. It’s just uncomfortable all-around.

R: So is that it for our discussion then? This has already stretched on for quite a while…

J: Well, I actually had one more topic I wanted to bring up, if it’s fine with you.

R: Fine. But don’t ramble on too long. :p

J: I won’t! I just wanted to bring up the art style and directing. Since, you know, anime has pictures and people involved and shit.

R: I mean, you’ve pointed this out to me several times, but I didn’t really notice anything until I had finished watching the show and you brought up the weird trippiness in some of the episodes of SSY and I was like “yeaaaaaaaaa”. I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t tend to pay too much attention to art style (except in something like Madoka Magica where you don’t really have a choice) or if you’re just more perceptive about that sort of thing.

J: I mean, I think being on the lookout is definitely part of it. Plus I’ve been thinking a lot about this angle in recent months. So yea — that’s definitely part of it. I mean, one of the things that differentiated SSY from PP was how much looser it was with the directing. I think most people forget that anime director/writer teams tend to a lot of power over how a show will turn out. And this difference really showed between the two shows.

R: I mean I can really only comment on the fact that the shows did have distinct art styles, but I think that’s the case with most anime unless you’re singling out a specific subtype like shoujo or shounen where the art tends to be pretty similar across the board.

J: I mean, you can at least admit that the change in art in SSY was the most egregious/noticeable in the episode where Saki confronts Shun before he dies and things get really artsy and trippy. In a series where the story changes so much going from little children exploring the countryside to a full-blown war, these changes make things seem a little bit uneven.

R: Art style aside, I can definitely agree with that last point, since the general pacing was something that really bothered me. SSY chugged along until the final arc and then all of a sudden everything imploded all at once.

J: Even prior to that there’s weird emphasis on random scenes like when they spent forever just searching for Maria and Mamoru. Or when they spent a lot of time showcasing school life. Many of these particular scenes didn’t matter much in the story and were really just for extended world building, which makes the pacing at the end all the more bewildering. Because you get to the end and think, “they had all this time but they wasted doing artsy crap ughhhh”. I mean, I absolutely love artsy crap, but that type of stuff can be jarring to other viewers.

More symbolic meaning plx.

R: Oh yea. SSY was definitely artsy. I think I only appreciated it because it’s been such a long time since I’d watched anything else artsy, but if I’d watched this on the tail of another artsy show I think it would have annoyed me a lot more. But SSY put emphasis in places where I didn’t think it was relevant or necessary. It’s like how many scenes do we need of Saki and Satoru maneuvering through the snow to find their friends?

J: But contrast that with PP which had very deliberate pacing and a consistent writing/art style for most of the episodes. Gen Urobuchi is known for this type of extremely focused writing and creative control and is sometimes pinged for making shows that seem so linear and so thematically driven. But you can see the clear difference that authorial control has on a show just by looking at some of his other projects like Gargantia where he took a much more passive role.

R: Makes sense. But at the end of the day we still haven’t answered the most relevant question. I think we both agreed that we liked PP better as a show, but which did you respect more for whatever reason?

J: I’d have to go with SSY. I felt that SSY really reached high — higher than most shows would dare to go — and even if it necessarily didn’t go all the way it really hit a lot of big questions and made me think about this type of stuff. This wasn’t as true for PP — I felt like it was comfortable staying in well-worn territory. I enjoyed the show a lot, but didn’t really have that extra “oomph” factor.

R: I think I still have to say that I respect PP more, hyperoats and all. At the end of the day, PP described a more viable and believable future world and I thought that their overall representation and resolution was more successful. SSY fell too short for me in that respect.

J: I mean that’s perfectly fair. I think this really comes down to our first point where we discussed what we think about dystopias. It’s clear that I tend to be more expansive in what I’m willing to consider for the genre and biased toward shows that try really hard and innovate even if they don’t succeed.

R: And I tend to put a lot of emphasis on execution I guess.

J: Yea. I mean, I’ll look upon shows positively even if I found them to be really horrendous to watch as long as they made me think a bit.

R: You gave points to that idiotic Prison School show. I’m not sure if I can respect anything you think after that.

J: But it was SO WELL DONE.

R: Uh huh. Just as well done as Monster Musume?

J: Okay, that one wasn’t so great, even if Miia was and always will be Best Girl. (Arachnea secretly has mai haato though).

R: Right. So tell me again why I should respect anything you think?

J: I guess it’s a topic to talk about in the future. ;)

Welcome to our lovely second installment of adventures in Japan. Unfortunately I was sick this week so we don’t have as much material as last time, but I still have some fun pictures and activities to share. Here’s where we’ve been and what we’ve seen in the past few weeks:

Kappabashi: for the kitchenware festival. It was a lot of fun and we got to see some super expensive and fancy cooking knives for a whole range of applications–apparently Japan is famous for their knives (who knew?).

Kappabashi is also famous for making food replicas, which most Japanese restaurants feature in their window displays.

Apparently these are for cutting soba– not for training serial killers.

Kita Senju: Okay in fairness we’ve really only been in the train station here, but I found something so wonderful that I couldn’t resist sharing. Japan is famous for these Gachapon machines which are basically little plastic bubbles with some kind of toy inside. They have them in the US, but they’re definitely more popular here. Anyway it was in the Kita Senju train station that I discovered my all time favorite Gachapon…

Say hello to frat boy Statue of Liberty.

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. Our lovely lady liberty is apparently a bro who likes to wear sunglasses on Sunday mornings, play Grand Theft Auto, and drink crappy beer. Only in Japan.

Sumida: We finally went to the aquarium. Now I’m not sure if you know, but pretty much my favorite thing to say in Japanese is kame ga ski desu (I love turtles). It drives Josh crazy, but cest la vie. I took a bunch of pictures so prepare to be photobombed by my somewhat subpar photography skills haha.

Mandatory penguin selfie.

I renamed this the “Joshfish” because he was orange and just lay there on the rock unmoving.

Moon jellies!

The aquarium was in the the Tokyo Skytree Tower, which apparently has an amazing view if you go to the top, but Josh and I are both scared of heights and thought our money might be better spent elsewhere.

Coffee: So I finally caved and tried the canned coffee. WHY DID I WAIT SO LONG?! Guys this stuff is seriously amazing and I’m so much more productive with being unemployed when I’m caffeinated XD. That being said, I have a very serious question: will you support me in my quest to try and report on every single brand of coffee I can get my hands on in Japan? I will seriously do it. I will hate myself, but I will do it. Then you can have a comprehensive guide of the canned coffee in Japan. The only reason I came up with this idea is because I tried to see if anyone else had saved me the trouble, but of course they haven’t haha.

Well that’s all for now! I’ll get another post up in a few weeks when we’ve done more exciting things.

I’ll leave you with this:

Seems Godzilla is out of a job…

***Quick note so for some reason Josh’s account was signed in on my computer and I didn’t notice until after I published, but this was written by me (Rebecca), not Josh.***

Hey everyone! Sorry we’ve been out of touch for a while–Josh and I (okay mostly me) have been busy with work. I have a real grown up person job, guys! I’m also addicted to coffee. That being said, we haven’t been traveling around as much, but since it’s New Years vacation and I have some time off I thought I’d throw up another post about what we’ve been doing lately :). On that note: HAPPY 2016! I can’t believe it’s a new year already–so crazy. Hopefully you all did something fun to celebrate and didn’t wake up with a splitting hangover. Josh and I watched a very disappointing feed of the events in Tokyo and then came home to snuggle up, watch a movie, and eat some junk food. That’s my kind of party haha.

This is the creepy Christmas banner Josh insisted on putting up in our apartment. If you can’t read it, it says: “Santa Claus is Coming to your House”…

But in terms of other things? These are the places we’ve visited over the past few weeks. I have pictures!

Ueno Zoo:

I have to apologize in advance, but I’m kind of obsessed with turtles so basically all of the pictures are of the turtles, so bear (this is funny because I also have pictures of pandas) with me.

Bear with me ;)

Ever since I was little, the reptile house was always my favorite part of the zoo–my parents can attest to this. I’m kind of chill with all the snakes and lizards.

Giant salamander!

See I’m being nice and giving you all the other pictures first so that when I spam turtle pictures you can just skip past that part.

Turtle <3

:3

Don’t worry, this one is a tortoise ;D

Last one I promise.

Okay now that I got that out of my system I’d like to include the pictures that inspired this post title. So these penguins are more commonly known as the Africa Penguin and in most of the English speaking world I think that’s how they’d be labelled in the zoo, but this being Japan I guess they had to be a rebel and use their alternate name:

At first I thought this was a mistranslation, but it’s a real thing…

It’s okay though, the penguins are still adorable and look the same as your standard image so no harm done there :).

What cute little jackasses.

Tokyo Station:

I wasn’t feeling super awesome when we went to Tokyo station so I didn’t take a ton of pictures, but it was a lot of fun and definitely worth checking out (they have a Ghibli store!) if you have time. It’s a really good place to buy some cool souvenirs or just some merchandise for yourself. Also, if you like ramen there’s a whole passageway dedicated to ramen restaurants that you can check out!

There was also a Gundam Cafe that I took a picture of because one of my students at the time was super obsessed with Gundam and I thought it was funny.

The specialty food section of the station was pretty impressive: they had fancy KitKats and this automated taiyaki machine and set of presses. This one looks like it has azuki (red bean paste) filling, which is one of the most popular fillings. Totally delicious and worth getting for a snack (or after you drink a little too much…oops) if you’re in Japan.

Appreciate the silhouette of my legs and the crummy lighting.

Akihabara:

Okay guys, now Akihabara has a lot of NSFW stuff and I couldn’t take a ton of pictures for that reason, but I kid you not this sign was just hanging out on the street in plain view of anyone who cared to read it so I’m going to include it in the post, but it’s super NSFW.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED THIS PICTURE IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

(Stay above the safe line if you are in public)

[Josh: The “safe line”? Really? :p]

____________________________________________________

Yea so it’s things like this hanging out in the middle of the street that give Japan a weird reputation. Anyway you can revert your eyes to the rest of the post since there’s nothing else weird in it.

We had fun in Akihabara. Josh got three new figures–much to my chagrin (two from Madoka and one from Chu2koi). I was in a perpetual state of being weirded out and feeling super awkward and female since pretty much every store was filled with guys looking at porno mags.

We had fun though! Or rather, I think Josh had a lot more fun than I did. Although he’s been there like a dozen times already, so…yea. It was definitely an experience though and I think it’s good I went at least once. I was really disappointed that there wasn’t a turtle to be seen, but you can’t win them all.

Pictures like this remind everyone how short I am.

Bonus! Weird Sushi!

So there’s this conveyer-belt sushi place at the mall near our apartment and Josh and I probably go there at least once a week. Most of the sushi is pretty standard fare, but sometimes I stumble upon a real gem so I found two such gems this week and I thought I’d share. The picture quality isn’t wonderful since I had to catch them as they were going around a moving belt.

Corn mayo salad sushi

Bacon sushi

That’s all for today! May your 2016 be filled with all the weird sushi you care to eat haha. Catch you next time!

-Rebecca and Josh (but mostly Rebecca since Josh has spent the last week playing Assassin’s Creed :p)

This anime made me feel so meh. I’m not sure if it was because it’s a shoujo and I’ve largely outgrown shoujo or if because it was just a really crummy shoujo. I’m going to go with the second one since I’d like to believe that I’m not a horrible jaded adult yet XD. To be honest I’m really not sure why I ended up finishing this one. It kind of threw out every random awful trope again and again, but without any panache or enthusiasm that sometimes makes this forgivable. I think the show was bored with itself, which is why it turned into such an unpleasant viewing experience for me.

Unfortunately I was suckered in by the misleading synopsis that made me think this wasn’t going to be another common girl x prince pairing.
Although her name means “snow white,” Shirayuki is a cheerful, red-haired girl living in the country of Tanbarun who works diligently as an apothecary at her herbal shop. Her life changes drastically when she is noticed by the silly prince of Tanbarun, Prince Raji, who then tries to force her to become his concubine. Unwilling to give up her freedom, Shirayuki cuts her long red hair and escapes into the forest, where she is rescued from Raji by Zen Wistalia, the second prince of a neighboring country, and his two aides. Hoping to repay her debt to the trio someday, Shirayuki sets her sights on pursuing a career as the court herbalist in Zen’s country, Clarines.

Akagami no Shirayuki-hime depicts Shirayuki’s journey toward a new life at the royal palace of Clarines, as well as Zen’s endeavor to become a prince worthy of his title. As loyal friendships are forged and deadly enemies formed, Shirayuki and Zen slowly learn to support each other as they walk their own paths. (Courtesy of MAL) 

Although from the beginning there seemed to be a lot of random shit happening that didn’t make sense. Prince #1 was all like, “you have super exotic red hair so I want to keep you like a pet”. And Shirayuki was all like, “oh noes I shall cut off some of my super exotic red hair and run away to somewhere else so you can’t have me”. Gingers rejoice–clearly in this land being ginger means you’re guaranteed to attract marriage prospects from a prince.

Basically what happens is that Shirayuki escapes the clutches of one prince and falls right into the arms of another. But it’s okay because Prince #2 is a cool prince and super tortured and conflicted about his royalty.

Then there’s the fact that the whole romantic premise and most of the action hinges upon the fact that “Shirayuki is just a really nice, brave, and caring person”. In fact, she’s so nice that it makes princes fall in love with her and everyone wants to be her friend. Why would anyone ever want to hurt super nice apprentice court physician Shirayuki?

Speaking of the court physician thing–I thought that was really cool! Until it literally became a plot device intended to give her snuggly moments with the prince. I’m always down to have a female character defying shoujo stereotypes and have her doing something that actually requires her to have a brain. You see flashes of Shirayuki’s intellect at various points throughout the show, but any time she does something even remotely clever it’s so heavily valorized that she loses all her credit. That, and she usually needs someone else to help her execute whatever idea she has.

I’m not saying that Shirayuki’s design had any negative intentions, she just fell into the all too common trap of “special snowflake” heroine. She didn’t have any magical powers or anything, but you may as well have put some wings on her and call her a fairy for all the difference it would have made if she did. She was just too damn perfect. She was a friend to everyone and did nothing wrong throughout the entirety of the series. I’m all for anime heroines that aren’t annoying or whiny, but to do a complete 360 and make one that’s a paradigm of nobility isn’t much better. I’m sure if you’ve read this blog you’ve heard me rant at one time or another about how I like my characters to be conflicted and properly beaten into the ground before they are allowed a modicum of success.

I mean the show also loses me on the fact that there’s no real conflict or enemy or really anything that seems to be at stake. Sure there’s Zen’s older brother, Prince Izana who’s all like “this girl is probably using you and she’s common, blah, blah, blah”. You know typical disapproving family member style. But this whole conflict is literally resolved when Shirayuki shows how wonderful and kind and freaking fabulous she is. Special snowflake with red hair. And then Zen is all like “I’m going to live my life so that you can be in it” Because that’s how politics work in Clarines apparently.

When she and the prince finally got together it was so boring and lackluster. He was all just like oh sorry I kissed you without your permission I’m a bad person. Next time I kiss you I’ll ask first cuz I’m super chivalrous and all that nonsense. Point being, their coupling was obscenely anticlimactic. There were no real consequences. No kingdom got blown to smithereens. Even older brother Prince Izana didn’t try to get her tortured or kidnapped or anything. To be fair I would have had different issues with that, but at least it would have been a smidgen more exciting.

See they’re super chill. No conflict here. Nope.

Anyway, I’ll keep my conclusions brief, but this show is pretty much the anime equivalent of lukewarm tapwater. It’s not like the worst thing in the world and it won’t kill you to watch it, but if someone offers you pretty much anything else to drink you should probably go with that instead. Also seriously, Shirayuki just because a bell decides to jump off a tower doesn’t mean you have to do it too. Talk about giving into peer pressure.

No one is impressed.

Hey Everyone! Here’s the latest installment of our Adventures in Japan series. I finally got 2 consecutive days off so that’s allowed us to do some more travelling of late. This post will detail our trips to Odaiba, Nikko, and Atami. Three very different, yet equally awesome places in Japan. Our next trip upcoming will be to Korea and Taiwan so we’ll have to wait and see how that goes! (I will be going to Hakone, Nara, and Kyoto separately with my parents, but still plan to report back).

Odaiba:

Odaiba, for those of you who don’t know, is basically a giant island in the middle of Tokyo Bay with several mall complexes and various other forms of entertainment. It’s very popular for dates apparently according to some of my students. To get to Odaiba, make sure you take the Rainbow Line train as it takes you past a gorgeous view of Tokyo Bay.

The pictures is a little glassy because I was taking it from behind a train window pane.

This was inside one of the super fancy shopping malls. For some reason it was modeled after a Roman plaza.

Also on Odaiba is the famous giant Gundam Statue. I wasn’t particularly interested, but then again I’ve never watched any of the Gundam series. In fairness, the size of the statue and the fact that it made whirring noises was kind of impressive–I guess whatever floats your boat?

You know, for those of you into robot butts, I’ve got you covered.

However, it isn’t enough for Japan to have all these shopping complexes and a giant Gundam, they also have to include something that is so representative of Japan that I think the picture speaks for itself.

Say hello to Lady Liberty: The icon of Freedom and Japan.

Seriously though Japan…what is going on here? Like I get that you’re just super jealous of Murica’s green toga lady, but you could at least be a little bit more creative with your harbor decorating. New York Harbor’s already got this one on lock.

To close off the wondrous and strange sights of Odaiba, I’d like to introduce you to:

Now we know what Santa Claus does for his summer job. Thank you, Japan, for making me feel so enlightened.

Nikko:

We also took a nice weekend trip to Nikko.  While there, we enjoyed nature, visited Toshogu Shrine, and spent a solid 30 minutes trying to find a single damn restaurant that was open for dinner. Not sure why, but the latter was surprisingly impossible, but I think we had the (poor) timing to visit right before tourist season.

I’m such a foodie it’s terrible. My number one travel priority is good food most of the time haha. But enough of my complaining. There are sights to be seen!

Look! I did something new with the pictures!

The highlight of our Nikko trip was a visit to Toshogu Shrine. It’s a shrine from the Edo period, dedicated to the first shogun of the Tokugawa Shogunate: Tokugawa Ieyasu. Typically shogunates like to share names with the first shogun. If you want to learn more about him you can check out the link.

Also featured at the shrine are the famous monkeys:

We were warned there might be real monkeys in Nikko, but we didn’t see any while we were there. Probably better that way, apparently they’re known for stealing things from visitors…

Atami:

And last, but certainly not least was our trip to Atami. We actually just got back this afternoon. Atami is known for beautiful nature and its natural hot springs. So if you’re looking for a nice day or two trip away from Tokyo to commune with nature or whatnot then this is the place for you!

On to the pictures!

Yea this was a thing. Atami is basically at sea level, so just be aware.

On a less scary note–Josh and I did a bunch of exploring in the day we were there. Unfortunately it was raining for the duration of our trip so we weren’t able to do as many naturey things as we would have liked, but we did our best even though Josh is terrible at holding an umbrella.

These pictures were taken in the beautiful Atami Plum Garden. Seriously it was gorgeous, even in the rain.

We also found a really cool indoorsy thing to do at Kiunkaku, which is basically an old villa turned into a hotel and then currently into a museum. It had some really beautiful rooms and architecture and was nice on a rainy day since we could stay inside haha. Apparently a bunch of artists used to live there, so there’s also a nice gallery with some ahem interesting artwork that will not be featured on this blog.

Also for any brave souls there is an “Adult Museum” in Atami. Josh and I didn’t go because I’m a prude, but just saying it’s there y’know if you wanna check it out or something xD.

The last thing worth sharing for our Atami trip is the troll-est onsen ever. Josh and I got a map from the tourism bureau and it told us that we could try a cool egg boiling experience so we were like ok let’s do it. So we hike up to the onsen and it turns out that it’s not really an onsen, but a waist high hot spring steam vent where you can boil an egg in a basket. So no, it was not an onsen, it was an eggsen and I was extremely disappointed.

Onsen. That’s funny. Maybe an onsen for ants.

Despite my bitterness, we did eventually get to a real onsen.

Anyway, that’s all for now! Let us know if you have any comments or questions about our travels! We’re also looking for more cool places to travel around Japan in the coming months so any suggestions are welcome!