Name: Moe-chan (地ちゃん)
Alias: N/A
Relationship Status: N/A
Origin: Tonari no 801-chan
Information:
Chi-chan’ is one of 801-chan’s friends. She is knowledgeable about Akihabara, and her name may reference her abilities as a tour guide. She appears fond of the maid cafe Schatzkiste.
Fujoshi Level:
Nothing is known, other than that she is a fujoshi.
Name: Moe-chan (萌ちゃん)
Alias: N/A
Relationship Status: N/A
Origin: Tonari no 801-chan
Information:
Moe-chan is a friend of 801-chan’s whom 801-chan has tried to get to watch Uta no Prince-sama Maji Love 1000%. She has a peculiar laugh, “Puukusukusu.”
Fujoshi Level:
Little is known about Moe-chan’s fujocity, other than her ability to manifest into a little “fujoshi” creature with ram horns and her association with 801-chan.
Genshiken II‘s been running for a while now, and every so often I go back and look at the earlier chapters of the new series (would you expect me to do otherwise?). Upon a recent revisit, it hit me just how much the artwork had changed between the inaugural Chapter 56 and its immediate followup in Chapter 57.
For comparison, here is Ogiue in Chapter 56 on the left, and 57 on the right.
There’s a clear difference between the two versions of Ogiue (or any other character) that can’t be chalked up simply to the gradual evolution of art style that happened throughout the original Genshiken. This change, given just how drastic it is, was more abrupt, though one has to keep in mind that the real life gap between 56 and 57 was almost a year (Chapter 56 was originally a one-shot that got turned into the start of a new series).
Because of how much softer and more cutesy Chapter 56 Ogiue is portrayed, my suspicion is that Kio’s style was affected by his time working on Jigopuri. Indeed, Chapter 56 of Genshiken actually came out in the middle of his run on Jigopuri.
In fact, if you look at one of the characters in Jigopuri, the little sister Kaname (pictured left), she looks pretty close to the Ogiue of Chapter 56. What’s also kind of funny is the fact that Volume 1 of Jigopuri features an Ogiue cameo on the inside cover, and it’s clear that the Jigopuri style hadn’t fully taken over Kio’s artwork yet at the time he drew it.
I think it’s interesting how an artist can get so influenced by how they’ve been drawing that it makes it difficult to shift gears back to a different kind of story. It’s different depending on the artist of course, but I have to wonder how much effort Kio put into switching into a less moe-type art style. Something tells me it wasn’t easy.
After the intensity and emotion of the last chapter, this month’s winds down with a post-confession Madarame. In order to try and cheer him up, the old Genshiken girls (+ Hato and Kohsaka) cosplay for him, and for a brief moment the old impassioned expository Madarame makes a triumphant return. As Tanaka and Kugayama leave with Madarame for some male bonding, Saki encourages Madarame to not let go entirely of his past with Genshiken. There also seems to be some bad blood between Keiko and Hato, though the reasons are unclear.
As is the case with recent previous chapters, this one also referenced an old anime, in this case the title of Akuma-kun‘s final episode. Appropriate, because whether you want to call it the denouement of dramatic structure or the ketsu of kishoutenketsu, Chapter 81 feels like a wrap-up of the crazy developments that have happened over the past few months with Madarame, at least when it comes to his feelings for Kasukabe. As such, this chapter feels a lot less overt with its significance and its presentation of information compared to last time, but there are still plenty of moments which radiate with potential. As always, this isn’t an end (well obviously because the manga isn’t finished but you know what I mean), but a continuation.
There’s one scene in particular this chapter that I’ve read over and over because I’m not sure how to interpret it. As the girls (and guys) cosplay for Madarame from the gender-bender game that Kohsaka worked on, Kasukabe herself joins in as well. Before we see Saki in un-drag though, we see her having a conversation with Kohsaka about her character, who’s supposed to be “boyish,” to which Saki retorts that it’s actually a boy. Then, we see two characters off-panel speaking to each other (their words are visible but they aren’t), who I’m pretty sure are Kohsaka and Kasukabe. One of them asks if they accidentally “let it slip” and the other says that it’s not about that. I believe we’re supposed to read it as Kohsaka having hid the details of his game from Saki and her response being that the content of his game is besides the point. However, because of the way she says “it’s a boy,” and the follow-up conversation about a secret being out, and the fact that we see Saki go from what others have charitably referred to as “maternity clothes” to an outfit with a corset such that we can never get a clear idea of her figure, and the fact that even with the corset she looks bigger than she used to (notably in the chest area), I feel as if this chapter is lending credence to the theory that Saki is indeed pregnant.
I might just very well be overanalyzing, and things like Saki’s slightly larger figure and larger breasts might just be either a stylistic change by Kio or a sign that she’s growing older, but it just has me wondering. If my speculation turns out to be unfounded, I’m of course fine with that.
This chapter we get to see the “old” Madarame make a return as he muses on the very concept of “trap” characters and how there are different things to consider when translating them to 3D, a rant which Saki quickly reminds everyone is reminiscent of the Madarame she first met and despised. Is this scene a sign of Madarame getting his otaku groove back? Is it the case that the last few years have been a continuous trial and now that it’s over with he can go back to being himself, or is it that Madarame is trying to force it? Is it a regression to a past identity, or is it a progression, a nerd phoenix rising from the ashes of rejection and anxiety? I’d like to believe that the old Madarame is a new Madarame, and I’m definitely looking forward to where his character will go from here.
As a side note, if you’ve ever wondered what I meant by density of information looking unusual in manga, just look at the page above where Madarame is ranting. If you’re used to manga at all, just the whole page seems to stray from how Genshiken usually flows, though that’s what also gives this page its impact.
An interesting thing I’ve noticed about Madarame’s character is that Madarame seems to get paired with more characters than anyone else both inside Genshiken itself and among fans both English-speaking and Japanese. There’s of course the whole ordeal with Kasukabe, but there’s also Ogiue’s Sasa x Mada fantasies, Angela putting the moves on him hard, the ambiguity of Hato’s friendship, Kohsaka feigning (?) interest this very chapter, and then on top of that I’ve seen fanart and such going all the way back to 2005 that put him with Keiko and Sue, well before they interacted with him like they do now. It might just be that, as Hirano Kouta of Hellsing fame puts it, that “Madarame is the most moe character in Genshiken,” but I just find it interesting that so many, fictional or otherwise, seem to want Madarame to be happy (or at least less pathetic). It’s probably a testament to his enduring character and the fact that he is above all others the quintessential nerd/otaku.
In any case, it makes Saki’s comment that Madarame could very well make his own harem feel both tongue-in-cheek, yet somehow serious, though in the end I interpret it more as Saki telling Madarame that he is actually attractive in his own way. That said, I have to wonder how awkward it would be to have a girl who just rejected you also tell you that it’s okay for you to keep the sexy(ish coplay) photos you have of her. That’s the kind of scenario that so many nerds ae desperate to avoid (“What if she knows that I find her sexually attractive?”), but it’s a new world I guess. I wouldn’t be surprised if Madarame ends up throwing them out anyway, though I also wouldn’t be surprised if he keeps them.
I’ve used this comparison to describe multiple characters over the series, but Keiko is something of a Saki-type for Genshiken II. Yajima is a Saki in the sense that she’s a fish out of water and has the dry wit, but Keiko serves the role of being the character with the most “real world” experience, though as Sasahara remarks it’s more the result of making numerous mistakes. Still, it gives Keiko a type of perceptiveness that’s lacking in the current members of Genshiken, and it makes the moment where she just shows Madarame how his secret never really was one quite hilarious. Given how she didn’t even appear in the second TV series (though as far as I know that was just an unfortunate scheduling conflict, and she does make an appearance in one of the drama CDs), it almost feels like the series is making up for that by giving her more presence in the current manga.
As for the dirty look Keiko gives Hato, it’s yet another ambiguous moment in this chapter whose path will lead us who knows where. If we go by the harem view mentioned before, then this could be interpreted as Keiko exhibiting jealousy, but I think it’s something else. If I had to guess, I’d say that Keiko’s impatience towards Madarame dancing around and avoiding his own feelings for fear of confrontation is also showing itself with Hato and where he might stand with Madarame.
Even though she’s clearly not the focus, I do want to talk a bit about Ogiue’s part in this chapter. When Kohsaka grabs Madarame’s arms and tells him that they could’ve had a polygamous relationship with each other and Saki, I like how you can tell who is thinking what in that moment. For most of the guys, it’s just an awkward moment, but clearly Ogiue and Hato think more of it. Ohno seems much less affected, though it might make sense given her preference for significantly older, hairier, and balder guys. Keiko’s blushing on the following page is probably the most surprising, and another moment in this chapter open for interpretation. Could Keiko be a candidate for the Fujoshi Files after all?
The chapter ends with the reappearance of Katou, who we don’t know much about other than that she has Ohno-esque preferences, and that she’s been job-hunting as of late, but I wouldn’t mind seeing more of her at all. At this point Asada has more development than her, and she doesn’t even have a real face! I don’t have confidence we’ll see much of her, but one can always hope.
As an anime by the studio P.A. Works about a group of teenage girls growing up and strengthening their friendship, Tari Tari inevitably draws comparisons to last year’s Hanasaku Iroha, which has both a similar premise as well as visual style. In addition, both feature similar trios: a petite main character with a lot of pep, a more serious one, and a gentler one with a sizable bust. Yet, as close as they are, I find the two shows to feel quite different, and it has to do with aspirations, or lack thereof.
In Tari Tari, each of the girls (and the guys as well) each have a concrete goal they’re trying to pursue. Some of them are more long-term, like Sawa becoming a professional equestrian, while others are more immediate, like Konatsu forming a successful choir club or Wakana composing a song to fulfill a promise, but all of them have a conceivable end point to pursue which drives each character forward. This in turn influences the pacing of the show, as the sense of looking ahead gives the show a kind of momentum.
In Hanasaku Iroha, however, only Minko truly has an objective to push her forward: becoming a great chef. For everyone else, especially the main heroine Ohana, there are no particular goals or dreams associated with them. At the very best they have things they don’t want, like Yuina’s hesitation about inheriting her family’s inn or Ohana’s pensiveness towards responding to her friend Kouichi’s romantic confession, and this lends to Hanasaku Iroha on top of the rural setting a kind of slower and more subdued “day-by-day” feel.
Essentially, Tari Tari and Hanasaku Iroha are both about teenagers becoming adults, but they differ in focus. Tari Tari‘s sense of maturation comes from the characters moving along paths they’ve set out for themselves, learning along the way as a result. On the other hand, Hanasaku Iroha‘s characters are wandering through their growth to adulthood, trying to find their paths among many. Though both are about the everyday, Hanasaku Iroha sits a little more in the present, while Tari Tari shifts a little more towards the future.
In a recent conversation, I was presented an interesting question: why is that moe seems to engender the type of fandom which seems on some level staunchly devoted to it and has fans who can take attacks on moe personally? After some consideration, I thought of two reasons.
The first reason is that on some level, whether it be deep or shallow, I think moe fosters a very individual, perhaps even private connection. Regardless of the specifics and any sort of moral/aesthetic tastes, the idea (nebulous as it may be) begins to resonate with concepts such as catharsis, fantasy, sexual desire and identity, self-reflection, stress, and so on.
The second reason, and the one I’m more interested in for this post, has to do with the ease by which one can become a fan of moe. In a recent interview concerning Starcraft 2 fandom, commentator and personality Sean “Day[9]” Plott was asked why so many SC2 fans have a tendency to identify themselves as “Starcraft fans” and to put down other games as inferior products, to which he responded:
There’s a lot of people who are into Starcraft and it’s just become their identity because, honestly, there’s so much Starcraft content that you can watch it all day, every day, just like you can be into football or baseball. And so, rather than just say, “I like this,” they look down on other things.
I think these words can apply to moe as well, in the sense that not only is there so much of it currently available that you can watch and read nothing but moe genre titles and have your entire day filled, but that the system behind it actively promotes and encourages this sort of obsession. On the fiction-production side, you have this tendency towards characters who each possess easily expressed individuality, and so make it easy to define a favorite, and it’s a process that can be renewed with the next show and the show after that. On the merchandise side, you have figures, posters, limited edition DVD boxes, fan clubs, official events, and so on. If you’re into some show, there’s a good chance you can buy something related to it, and though there’s a lot of talk these days about how fandom is moving beyond expressing itself through simple consumption, it can’t be denied that it is still in its own way an expression of one’s self.
Obviously this model doesn’t only apply to moe or even just anime/manga, nor does every single fan of moe do this (and I want to make the point clear that I’m not characterizing an entire fanbase as having a singular mindset). However, when combined with that very personal connection which moe fosters, I think it creates a particular kind of devotion, which, while not entirely unique, more easily manifests itself as something just that personal.
Name: Aoba, Tsugumi (青葉 つぐみ)
Alias: N/A
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens
Information:
Aoba Tsugumi is a high school student with a long-time crush on her life-long friend, Mikuriya Jin. Upon seeing that Jin was living with another girl (his half-sister supposedly), Aoba has made a much more concerted effort to express her feelings for him. Knowing firsthand about Jin’s troubled past, Aoba is always looking out for him, even bringing over meals prepared by her mother. For this reason, Aoba also learned to cook, though she has a very limited repertoire, her best two dishes being “fried eggs with vegetables” and “vegetables with fried eggs.”
Aoba is a sweet, practical-minded girl, though she can also be a bit of a romantic. She can often be seen fighting with her imagination, both in terms of things not to think and things not to say. A newbie to the world of BL, Aoba was suddenly introduced to the genre by Kimura Takako and Ookouchi Fujino of the Art Club. It is not an active part of her life, though.
Fujoshi Level:
At first shocked by the content of yaoi doujinshi, Aoba very quickly asked for more. In addition, her reborn consciousness has allowed her to view the close bond between Jin and his friend Daitetsu in a new, corrupted light.
Though no one has ever said it to me before, I sometimes feel that my stance on various related topics concerning women in media may come across as hypocritical. I write a fair amount on the depiction of women in visual media, whether that’s anime or American comics or video games, but at the same time I’m also one to defend the concept of moe, often seen as the nadir of female representation in particularly Japanese media. It can be seen as a contradiction which ultimately compromises the arguments I make, but I would argue differently.
While I cannot reasonably argue that moe is faultless, the reason I don’t find my relative fondness for moe and my criticisms of misogyny to be all that contradictory has to do with the way in which characters impact a viewer. I believe that one of the core components of moe, that sense of weakness or perhaps even helplessness in a character (typically a girl), is not necessarily experienced solely as something external, a third party on whom the viewer acts as voyeur. That may factor in, certainly, but there is also a component of personal empathy, the depiction of weakness as a relatable point for those who may feel weak themselves, that is capable of being far more significant than simply the girl being cute or needing an older brother.
The capacity to portray weak characters is a good thing, in my opinion, and the problems of moe aren’t relegated simply to how girls are depicted but also how guys often aren’t allowed to be depicted. For whatever reasons there is a relative dearth of male characters targeted at men who are truly allowed to be weak and who are allowed to rely on others without having their worth as a man called into question either inside the works or by the viewers. This is why I’m fond of the supportive male character type you sometimes see in anime, because they manage to acknowledge their own limitations without issues of pride, and can both provide and receive emotional support. This is not to invalidate the more aggressive images of men of action, your Golgo 13s and Charles Bronsons, but I think there is room to expand both what can be done with men and women in entertainment media. In the mean-time, though, moe is having its positive effects.
That is not to say that moe is without its negatives and its problems in portraying women, and one thing that I have to acknowledge is that there are viewers, including moe fans themselves, who may bristle at the idea of a weak, helpless man (as opposed to girl), or might even be really aggressively sexist anyway. It is certainly not without its problems. In that regard, however, it actually reminds me of an essay titled “Never Trust a Snake: WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama” by fandom and media scholar Henry Jenkins. In it, Jenkins argues that through the imagery of intense competition with a clearly defined goal (winning the title, beating the villains), pro wrestling provides a safe haven for the expression of “weak” emotions such as sadness and betrayal by couching it within the context of a hyper-masculine (and often extremely racist, sexist, and homophobic) setting, to which men in the US would be more willing to relate. They appear on stages and in front of cameras and audiences to loudly proclaim how others made them feel, driving home their characters in a conceivably therapeutic process. They’re shown to be physically superhuman, but prone to the same emotional scars as their audience.
Like pro wrestling, moe has its recurring issues, but I think sweeping it all aside under the single banner of “sexism” is over-simplifying some of the cultural and psychological dynamics at work. This is why I criticize certain portrayals of girls in moe without condemning it as a whole.
As a promoter of mahjong anime alongside my comrade-in-tiles Sub, it was inevitable that I would follow the new series, Saki: Episode of Side A (aka Achiga-hen). Taking place in the same setting as the original Saki anime and manga, the series follows another set of girls working together to take down their fellow tile slingers with yuri subtext so heavy that it might as well be called yuri supertext. Despite its origins and the many similarities between the two Saki series, however, they end up feeling quite different.
I know that this has very much to do with the fact that the manga for Episode of Side A is not drawn by the original artist, Kobayashi Ritz, but by Igurashi Aguri of Bamboo Blade. The girls in Achiga aren’t quite as exaggerated in terms of their personal attributes, which lends them more of a well-roundedness to their characters. In a certain sense, this can be seen as quite a good thing, as Achiga does come across as simply a more tasteful, somewhat more subtle form of Saki (though the yuri is decidedly less subtle), but at the same time I’ve noticed that it becomes more difficult to pick and choose favorites compared to the original series, to think of the characters as iconic extremes. As a quick and informal experiment I asked people on Twitter who their favorite Achiga characters are, and while I received a few responses here and there, it seemed like people thought they were merely okay and much preferred that original cast, and I think that says something.
If you look at the differences between the characters of Saki and Achiga just merely in terms of how they show their mahjong, the original cast of Saki just has way more characters with specific gimmicks and powers. If you look at the main crew of Saki, every single girl in Kiyosumi hassomething. Saki has her tendency towards kans. Nodoka is the pinnacle of the “digital-style” player. Yuuki has tacos and an affinity for the East Wind. Mako can access her memories of mahjong matches like a data bank. Even Hisa, who is the most normal of the bunch, still has her easy-to-summarize gimmick of “intentionally making bad waits.”
In contrast, three out of the five Achiga girls have no identifiable gimmicks. The main character Shizuno appears to just have “tenacity,” and even the Matsumi sisters’ abilities aren’t as wild as Koromo’s ability to always win off of the last tile. Taking this into consideration, I have to wonder if Achiga was set up to intentionally show the “common man,” the more down-to-Earth players.
One of the side effects of having less bombastic characters is that, because Saki primarily conveys its mahjong matches through the use of mahjong super powers, and Achiga‘s characters with their softer abilities can’t be utilized as much in that sense, it becomes harder to clearly identify the attributes that will make a character your favorite. It’s not impossible to pick one of course (Sagimori Arata the bowling girl here), but there’s not much to instantly catch your attention. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I think it’s more than possible to make up for a lack of thrilling game-breaking magic, and in fact I’d probably prefer a series which places the game more in the characters’ psychological states than their special abilities (see the obvious example of Akagi), but Achiga doesn’t really add anything to make up for it in terms of the mahjong, and in fact just blazes through the games, making the yuri aspect seem that much more prominent.
I know there’s this idea that Saki is really just all about yuri, but while I think that it’s certainly a prominent aspect of the series I also think that the mahjong itself as a vehicle for simplified character expression played quite a role in attracting people to Saki as well. I don’t expect people to actually learn the rules of mahjong, and there’s nothing that says tenacity has to be less amazing as a character attribute than using a mahjong Sharingan (and probably shouldn’t be), but the degree to which the mahjong gets skipped over or rushed through in Saki: Episode of Side A sure makes it seem that way.
(But don’t get me wrong, I’m still enjoying the whole thing.)
“Average characters” are a dime a dozen in anime and manga. Whether they’re a girl who’s good at sports and bad at math, or a boy who sleeps in class and never attends clubs, whether they’re main characters or supporting ones, the archetype of the “average person” is often taken as practically a blank slate or a convenient neutral point, which makes it all the more impressive when an anime or manga does an excellent job of portraying the average without making it feel boring or rote. Gundam AGE is one such series which pulls this off successfully, and another is The World God Only Knows, particularly with the character of Kosaka Chihiro.
A girl with no particular hobbies or skills who prefers to get advice from magazines and gossip about her latest crush, Chihiro comes across as a character many anime fans looking for larger-than-life personalities might be disappointed by, the sort of girl people associate with “boring reality” whom they might want to avoid in their entertainment. This is made clear even by the main character Keima, himself a fan of the extreme contrasts in personality quirks common to dating sims, who considers himself an enemy of the “real,” and who describes Chihiro as the equivalent of the random character you see in the background while having a conversation with one of the main girls in a game.
What is particularly compelling about Chihiro, however, is how her averageness is utilized in the story to give her more depth as a character. Chihiro, especially as the story continues, knows full well how more often than not her “passions” are anything but, and it is this self-awareness combined with a newly found sense of general confidence which allows her to explore her own identity more thoroughly.
At the conclusion of her original arc which centered around her aloofness and a desire to feel “special,” Chihiro takes up guitar on a whim. Over the course of the series she forms a band with some of the other girls while also improving her skills, though the band does not become her identity. She is not “Chihiro the Guitarist” the way other girls such as Nakagawa Kanon and Shiomiya Shiroi are “the Idol” and “the Bookworm,” respectively, but unlike those characters the guitar didn’t have to be a guitar. It could have been pottery or gymnastics or any other activity, though perhaps her instrument of choice and the decision to take up music in the first place also stand out as decisions typical for an average girl. The important thing is that starting up a band becomes a way for Chihiro to learn more about herself, and to prove to herself that she can actually stick to something and see it through to the end.
The idea of creating a band from the ground up and working at it might suggest the classic theme of “hard work breeds success,” but I don’t think that’s the case for Chihiro here. Just as she is not the Guitarist, she is also not the Rock Lee. It is less about how effort can overcome a lack of natural talent, and more about how the act of making an effort at all can create positive changes in a person such as Chihiro. There is success, but it is success on her own terms, and as Chihiro says herself, “I suck at singing as well, but in my life, I’m always the vocalist!” Chihiro is not only a character, but also an on-going process, and that makes her fascinating.
OGIUE MANIAX 