Category Archives: anime

Growing Your Anime Fandom

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I go to anime conventions for many reasons, but when it comes to attending events within the con itself, my main focus is on panels. Industry panels, fan panels, history panels, I’m there to learn and I enjoy doing so. However, I know that in the grand scheme of the con “scene,” I am in the minority. At cons across the nation, the best ways to attract an audience are through masquerades, AMV contests, J-Rock concerts, and to a lesser extent con raves.

It would be very easy to lament that not more people are attending panels that could potentially expand their knowledge and scope as anime fans (or geeks in general). “Look at this sad state of affairs! Don’t these supposed anime fans care at all about anime?” But the answer is that they do care about anime and the fandom that surrounds it; they just choose to take it in different directions.

How do you develop your fandom? When someone reads up on anime history or when they go to informative panels at a con, they are trying to grow the “knowledge” aspect of their fandom. Here, a fan tries to become a greater fan by learning more about the subject they love, and that is certainly a valid way to do it and one I subscribe to myself.  But when someone joins a specific forum of like-minded individuals, attends group panels to celebrate their favorite series, or even calls for FREE HUGS, they aren’t simply being “shallow anime fans” who don’t care about being fans of anime, but are instead choosing, consciously or otherwise, to grow the “social” aspect of their fandom. They are already fans, and they want to find kindred spirits who will understand why they are the way they are without explanation. It’s the desire to belong.

Growing your anime fandom isn’t simply limited to “knowledge” through study and “socialization” through outreach, however. Although there’s reading about anime, there’s also watching as much anime as you possibly can, to broaden your “direct experience” within the medium itself. There’s “self-expression,” the desire to show your fandom to the world, whether through fanart or fanfiction, cosplaying or creating AMVs, or, heck, writing an anime blog. Even seeing these things is in itself a way to affirm one’s own fandom. And it’s not even like these areas are rigidly separate from each other. Socializing with fans can bring you knowledge through an exchange of ideas. Gaining more knowledge can put you in better positions to talk to other fans, to learn to understand others.

When you get down to it, there’s a most fundamental part of being a fan, something that I think everyone can relate to even if they don’t agree on how to get there. I’m talking about that feeling of truly enjoying something and loving every moment of it. At that point, whether we want to have more of it or share it with others or any number of paths, we know at that point that we are truly fans.

Heroman, 1/Progression

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As I watch Heroman, I simultaneously get two conflicting messages.

1) “Whoa, this plot is moving blindingly fast!”

2) “Man, this plot is dragging its feet like crazy.”

It doesn’t make sense at first, but then I realize it’s because the things that you expect to happen quickly seem to take forever, and the things you expect to not occur until much later happen immediately. It’s like Heroman has some sort of “inverse pacing” that defies all conventions of storytelling, especially something you’d expect from the minds of Stan Lee + Studio Bones.

The love interest finding out that the main character is really the hero is something you’d expect to happen towards the end of the series, or at least a season. In Heroman, it happens in episode 2.

Then the rival/bully character to get brought over to the side of evil somehow and become some kind of rival. In most other series, this would be a mid-point “twist,” but here it happens in episode 5.

So all these reveals and events that you’d think would be saved for much later in the series are happening in the single-digit episodes, but somehow giant rolling balls is a strong enough opponent for multiple episodes to the point that we may be looking back one day and referring to this as the “Giant Rolling Balls Arc of Heroman.”

I’m enjoying the series well enough, but this can be kind of disorienting.

Bonus Video Gallery of Total Relevance:

Praying Towards Castle Grayskull

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When it comes to the international phenomenon that is Pokemon, producer Ishihara Tsunekazu had the following to say:

石原： 北米ではけっこうクラシカルに伝説系のポケモンの人気があるんですけど、リザードンのような見た目か ら強そうなタイプのポケモンが好まれています。それとミュウツーでしょうか。

Ishihara: In North America, classical-style Legendary Pokemon are popular, but Pokemon who look strong like Charizard are also preferred. Mewtwo as well.


Charizard and Mewtwo

While Ishihara then goes on to say that  universally speaking, Pokemon like Pikachu are popular everywhere, I want to to focus mainly on this unique bit of difference North America has.

While I can’t speak for Canada, Mexico, or Central America, I think it’s very well-known that America likes powerful characters. More broadly, America likes the hero who rises above all, the larger-than-life figure. He may have a humble background, but the end result is still strong. It speaks to our culture of individualism, and it is reflected in the popularity of action movies as well as in the existence of iconic heroic figures in cartoons and comics such as Superman, Captain America, He-Man and Flash Gordon. When the US encounters the creative output of another nation such as Japan, it very profoundly reflects this ideal.

This is also partly why I think many of the anime that have been popular in the US are or were popular. Compared to the less popular One Piece, Naruto and Bleach exude seriousness and power in their aesthetics, doubly so for something like Dragon Ball Z. The hyper violence of MD Geist and its contemporaries in the 80s and 90s felt new and fresh to some extent, but that level of violence is I think something comfortably American, animated cousins of action movies.

I think it’s very easy to take one’s own cultural upbringing for granted, to think that the ideals of your own culture are the ideals of everyone else’s. It’s not small-minded or biggoted so much as it is a fairly natural progression if there is nothing to jar you out of it. In an article from 1987, Frederik Schodt, author of Manga! Manga!, points out that American superhero comics do not do well in Japan. Back then, they were considered too plain and too wordy, and today I can tell you that superheroes are better known through their movies than anything else. When I was studying in Japan, I had a conversation with a Japanese classmate, where I tried to explain the Flash to him. I told him he was “red and very fast,” to which he responded, “Daredevil?”

That said, there are a number of manga artists influenced by Americann superhero comics, such as Nightow Yasuhiro (Trigun) and Takahashi Kazuki (Yu-Gi-Oh!). In anime, it goes at least as far back as Gatchaman. Still, you will find that just as we have taken anime and said, “This is what we like in our anime,” they have said, “This is what we like in superheroes” and transformed it into something more in-line with their culture.

Cultural exchange, as they call it.

One last thing to dwell on is the way Europe has approached anime and manga. Taniguchi Jiro, who is influenced by the French comic artist Moebius, is much more popular in Moebius’s home country than he is in the US. His style is very European, incorporating complex and detailed backgrounds and placing a great visual emphasis on environment (not to be confused with “the environment”). But as I said before, I’m no expert on European comics, so I’ll leave someone else to fill in that blank until I catch up.

Let’s Try to Foster Better Discussion in the Aniblog Tourney

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Ogiue Maniax wins its first round in the Aniblog Tourney (technically the second, due to a higher seed allowing me to bypass Round 1), and I am happy to be the victor in this instance. I want to thank Caraniel of course, who was not only respectful and courteous during the week of competition but also is a good blogger in her own right.

Ogiue Maniax goes on to face Chaostangent in Round 3.

Now one thing about the Aniblog Tourney is that for those who are actively participating in it, either as voters or contestants or both, the whole endeavor has allowed people to discover new blogs, to get an idea of the range of styles available from just these 96 examples, let alone branching out to ones that haven’t been included in the tournament. But it’s very clear that there’s a lot of blog readers out there who simply are not participating in this fully and are not bothering to read the majority of the blogs available, or at least are not voting.

The first big piece of explicit evidence that the tournament is not reaching as far as it could is the matchup between Colony Drop and Canne, which got by far the most total votes in Round 1. This had very much to do with both the Pro and Anti-Colony Drop campaigns conducted when Colony Drop was poised to lose and then to win, but it’s clear that here was an audience of readers (if only for the one blog) that could have voted in or even looked at other parts of the tournament but didn’t. The second piece of evidence is the matchup between Star Crossed Anime Blog and Just as planned, where, to put it mildly, Star Crossed is dominating like Godzilla mixed with Guts from Berserk. 568 votes, just for Star Crossed! And I don’t think it’s a big leap to say that the crowd that voted so much for Colony Drop is not the same as the one that was so eager to show their support for Star Crossed Anime Blog.

I understand that not even the people who are actively participating in the Aniblog Tourney are voting in every single matchup. I’ve missed a few opportunities myself, but there’s a whole bunch out there who just vote for their favorites without looking at the other.

While Star Crossed garnered plenty of comments on its own blog in regarding the tournament, there were comparatively few on the Aniblog Tourney page itself. Then an equally titanic blog came up, but Random Curiosity’s situation has been far different. Unlike Star Crossed, Random Curiosity is not crushing its opponent and its fanbase is much more vocal (though still obviously just a small fraction of the actual readership Random Curiosity garners). And in those comments is a classic accusation among fans of competing or opposing sides, the foul cry of elitism.

Amidst the complaints that the people running the tournament (and by extension the primary audience of the tournament) are biased against popular episodic blogs, I left a response basically saying that instead of throwing out accusations of elitism or using overall popularity as a metric of superiority, that those who disagree should state just why they read the blogs they do, why they are fans of certain blogs and what keeps them coming back for more. Rather than just  naysaying the other side, we can express our own opinions on why we read anime blogs at all and come to understand each other, even if it’s just agreeing to disagree.

Just to give you an idea, I’ll talk about a blog I enjoy that’s not in the tournament at all: Subatomic Brainfreeze (though actually he writes for Colony Drop so he wasn’t completely removed from it).

While I am friends with Sub and even engage in mahjong camaraderie with him on occasion, the reason I really enjoy his blog is his informative yet accessible writing style. Now I know that I am credited as having an accessible writing style as well, but Sub’s is on another level. When I read his posts, I feel like an arm is reaching out from the computer to grab my shoulder and occasionally high five me. Even his stuff on Colony Drop which makes fun of other fans still has the same basic feeling.

I know that not everyone who enjoys something is willing to comment about it, let alone write lengthy posts discussing the nature of preference itself, but I encourage everyone to think about why they enjoy the blogs they do.

Whiplashing It: Iron Man 2 Thoughts

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I watched Iron Man 2, and just to put down a quick review, it was very entertaining and a worthy sequel, though not as good as the first and the action scenes tended towards the disorienting. What I really want to talk about though is the film’s villain , Ivan Vanko.

Iron Man suffers somewhat from a lack of really memorable supervillains, with few outside of the fanbase even knowing who the Mandarin is, let alone someone like the “Iron Monger” or “Whiplash,” the official name for Ivan (though it’s never mentioned in the film). Strictly speaking, there is no “Ivan Vanko” in the original comics, and is instead an amalgam of two existing Iron Man supervillains, Whiplash and the Soviet-themed Crimson Dynamo.

What an intriguing idea! If your villains aren’t that interesting, try to take elements from at least two, and try to create a more developed character out of it. I feel like it could go a long way.

So then I think, what if we applied this to film adaptations of anime? Let’s just say, HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING, that there was some kind of Dragon Ball “film,” if you will. While there are plenty of strong, iconic adversaries Goku and friends have had to face over the course of their tale, I just have to wonder about the possibilities of “Whiplashing” it.

Merge the Saibamen with the Little Cells to have an ultimate team of deadly jobbers.

Incorporate elements of Android No.19 into Tullece and have a guy who looks like Goku because he is a robot.

Better yet, mix Zarbon and Bacterion into a handsome, self-centered alien whose true form is ugly and also smells.

The possibilities are endless

Good Ol’ Rock Fighter, Nuthin’ Beats That!

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I was thinking about my early experiences with the Super Robot Wars series when I remembered the first SRW game I bought, Super Robot Wars R for the Game Boy Advance. The animations at this point were still very much “paper cutouts sliding against a background,” but I was stoked whenever I could land a finishing move on a boss, especially one of the crossover attacks. However, I think what characterized my play experience for R more than anything else was the fact that I could not read Japanese too well at the time, and so for the first 70% of the game I did not realize that your units had the option to “defend” or to “dodge,” rather than just trading hits with the enemy.

I think it’s very possible that if that game were more difficult, I would have gotten fed up with it a lot more quickly, trying to wonder how I could overcome those seemingly insurmountable odds. Perhaps ignorance was bliss for just the right amount of time.

More Shows Should Be Like Heartcatch Precure

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While I’ve made it fairly clear before that I think very highly of Heartcatch Precure, I realize that I have yet to actually made a post about why I think the show is so good. Today, I will correct that.

From the vibrant and colorful character designs and setting to the energy of the series to the quality of the dialogue, Heartcatch Precure has a lot going for it. But what I think is most remarkable about it is how surprisingly mature the show can be while also still being very much for children.

Since the first Pretty Cure, the central protagonists have always operated on a theme of opposites. One is smart, the other is strong. One is talented in the arts, the other is talented in sports. As the series grew to encompass larger casts, the idea of having the characters be distinctly unique in this manner grew as well, but it’s with Heartcatch Precure that characterization has hit its highest point in the franchise.

When I watched the first episode, the first thing that really caught my attention (aside from the lively animation of the opening) was the interaction between the main characters, Hanasaki Tsubomi (“Cure Blossom”) and Kurumi Erika (“Cure Marine”). Tsubomi is a transfer student, eager to defy her previous reputation as a wallflower. What she doesn’t expect however is for the seat next to her to be occupied by Erika, a fashionable girl who sometimes has trouble with the idea of “personal space.” Erika is well-meaning and is looking to make a new friend, but her aggressive, extroverted personality is too much for the introverted Tsubomi, creating a tension between the two which is only later resolved when they learn more about each other and their own fears and doubts. Tsubomi learns to be a little more confident and out-going from Erika, and Erika is in turn influenced by Tsubomi’s patience and kindness.

In case it wasn’t obvious that Heartcatch Precure is a kids’ show, the Monster of the Week format makes it very clear. Not only is there a Character of the Week that appears and needs helping out, but they are usually transformed into the Monster of the Week as well. The gimmick is that in their monstrous form, the character expresses his or her deepest negative emotions, such as the fears and doubts in their lives. Kids’ shows really don’t operate on subtlety, and the very fact that the show just tells you exactly what is wrong with the character is the very opposite of subtle, but when I take into account the fears themselves I can’t help but be impressed at the level of maturity. Anger at being told that your dream is impossible, frustration at having to grow up too quickly because of a death or illness in the family, depression at letting others down when they need you most, the series does not shy away from presenting some very serious topics. Heck, the very fact that one of the show’s main focuses is the way these negative emotions can exist in a very real way inside all people is in itself surprisingly adult.

When I look at Heartcatch Precure, I see a heart and soul behind the series. Yes, it is still a part of a merciless merchandising machine of a franchise. However,  I can see in the show that the creators desired to make a show for children that tells them, “Someone out there understands your frustration,” and helps them grow in the process. It’s something I can really get behind.

Welcome to the OGI!

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Ogiue Maniax is up today in the “Aniblog Tourney,” a competition which asks readers of anime-themed blogs to vote for their favorites while also encouraging everyone to check out anime blogs they haven’t seen before.

For those of you who are already familiar with Ogiue Maniax, I recommend that you check out the other blogs for the day before you decide your votes.

hountou ni

chaostangent

Caraniel’s Ramblings

Who knows, you might find a new favorite.

Now, for those of you who are new to Ogiue Maniax, an introduction is in order.

As the name implies, I am a dedicated fan of the character Ogiue Chika from the manga and anime series Genshiken, who I honestly believe to be one of the greatest characters ever, if not the greatest. However, the content of Ogiue Maniax goes well beyond my interest in this blog’s namesake. As it says on my About page, I strive for a holistic view of anime and its fandom, approaching and analyzing a great number of anime and manga-related topics from multiple perspectives.

As you read my blog, I’d like you to keep in mind my three basic goals in writing Ogiue Maniax:

First, I want to share and express my own passion for anime and manga.

Second, I want to increase my own understanding of these subjects to which I have devoted so much time and energy.

Third, I want to encourage my readers and fellow fans to look more closely at the fandom in which they exist, to think and rethink and to challenge themselves.

It doesn’t matter who you are or how much you know, there’s always something worth learning, even if it’s about yourself.

Since I began Ogiue Maniax back in November of 2007, I have posted at least once every day. As the content of my posts are subject to my everyday whims, the content of Ogiue Maniax is extremely varied. Combined with the large archive, it can be somewhat daunting, especially if you’re new, so to ease you along, I have provided a small sampling of some of my favorite posts. I think they give a good idea of what this blog is like as a whole. Take a look-see and tell me what you think.

Ogiue/Genshiken

Analysis

Fujoshi-related

Translation

Review

Bad Humor

Artwork

May’s Live Mahjong Event: Where a Boy Becomes a Mangan

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The United States Professional Mahjong League is holding another free play event this Sunday, May 16. If you’ve only played mahjong online and live in the New York City area, this is your chance to play against live opponents in Japanese-style mahjong aka “riichi” mahjong. Saki was right when the show said that playing on the internet and playing live are subtly different due to the external factors, and it’s an experience I recommend anyone try out. And it’s free!

Sadly I can’t make it this time around either, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying yourself.

Now if you’re really not sure whether you should be hanging with the “big boys,” no one is particularly amazing at mahjong to the extent that you’ll feel helpless. This is indeed one of the strengths of mahjong. You might see me talking about the game pretty often now, but realize that I’m not good at the game. It would be a stretch to call me “intermediate.” But I still win some sweet hands and have lots of fun. If you have experience playing at all, even if it’s just a little, you’ll likely do fine, and no one will admonish you for forgetting some rules.

But if you’re really worried about not knowing enough to play, or you know so little that you’d prefer to read “Baby’s First Riichi Mahjong,” then take heart in the fact that they’re also holding a tutorial event for absolute beginners on Sunday, May 23. The rules can seem quite overwhelming, but actually mahjong is a game you can ease yourself into with just a bit of patience.

The location for both events is:

Simple Studios
134 W. 29th Street (b/t 6th and 7th)
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001

Don’t forget to RSVP on the forums, particularly with the tutorial session, as space is limited.

Wait, Where Am I?

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The other day a startling realization hit me.

While I’m still watching anime as I always do, my intake of older and classic anime has been on the wane as of late. When I look at the shows I’m currently watching, Heartcatch Precure, Durarara!, Giant Killing, among others, they’re largely new-fangled series. This solution is as simple as watching older series, but my concern lies more in the possibility that I was getting caught in the seasonal trap without realizing it, that I was starting to get new-series tunnel vision. While I think it’s important to watch what’s new, I don’t want my perspective too shaped by simply what is there “now.”

I also realized easy it is for anyone to get caught in the seasonal trap if you’re an internet-based anime fan. Its ease of access is like a warm embrace and it’s all too simple to just let it happen.

Though actually, I have been getting my “classic content” through manga. I’m on an early shoujo kick, picking up volumes of Attack No.1, reading Swan, getting all of Rose of Versailles, but seemingly at the expense of reading newer titles. It’s like with anime I’ve planted myself with the present, and with manga I’m entrenched in the past. It’s not quite what I’d call a “routine,” but before I knew it these had become my fandom habits.

I’m perfectly aware that there’s nothing really “wrong” with the way I’m doing things, but it’s still something I’d like to change before I get too comfortable with it. After all,  “Running water never grows stale.”