Category Archives: thought exercise

The Fear of Ridicule

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Anime fans are no strangers to being ridiculed. We tend to be socially inept to varying degrees, and we have a hobby that others don’t really understand (or more specifically, they don’t understand how we could devote so much time and energy and emotion to it). This creates a strong fear inside of us, that someone, whether it’s people at your school, your co-workers, your friends and acquaintances, does not think very highly of you. I’m no exception, and I know that I am neither the first dork nor the last one to experience this fear. I understand that it’s the kind of thing that can paralyze an individual, and make them unable to interact with others and grow, which in turn paralyzes them further.

Perceived ridicule comes from all angles, but the most interesting by far is the ridicule that comes from your “in-group,” in this case other anime fans. It’s one thing to be attacked from the outside, you can retreat, you can defend, but when the attack happens from “within,” it makes you feel that much more vulnerable. Again, you don’t even have to experience an actual slight. All it takes is the fear of one, and then it becomes a matter of overcoming it or ignoring it.

The reason why this fear of ridicule is so strong and present is that none of us can say we have never met a fellow fan who has weirded or creeped us the hell out. In some cases, as we get to know them we realize they’re okay overall, but there are those who are just somehow unapproachable, whether it’s due to their abrasive personalities, tendency to kill any line of conversation, or just someone whose presence in a room makes everything worse. We’ve seen these people, and then we think, “Wait, maybe I’m like that! I’m so busy thinking less of this person, but I bet that guy doesn’t think he’s that guy either, so maybe I was that guy all along!” Then you start to wonder what qualities about yourself might make you the person no one wants to be around, and now, even if you weren’t that guy, you might become him inadvertently, or worse yet, in your efforts to not be him as much as possible, you change yourself into a sad shell of who you were.

How do you move past this point? I’m not sure if any anime nerd will ever be able to completely rid themselves of these feelings, but we can take things one step at a time, and learn more about ourselves and others. If we know what we like and what we do not, and have confidence tempered by humility, then I think we’re on the right path.

The Anime of Anime Fans

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There are times when I wonder about the perception of anime among regular folks in the US who have been exposed to it, but as of late I’ve wondered more about anime’s perception in the US among people who consider themselves to be anime fans. What do they look for in shows? What draws people to certain titles and has them going to cons dressed as or hugging certain characters? Obviously I can’t just pin it down on any couple of trends, seeing as otaku are a diverse bunch, but why do some shows succeed that you might never expect, and why are certain ones seemingly destined for success flops?  If I could answer this definitively, I would be rolling in cash money so don’t expect any revelations, but I feel like there is a certain something which attracts the vast majority of anime fans, a certain look and feel in any given era that gives off the impression that this is something new and different, and yet somehow just familiar enough to resonate deeply. Depending on the era, these qualities change, but they are what grab the individual, transform them into an anime fan, and then keep them there.

The Effects of Visual Falsehood

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In the Anime World Order review of Nobody’s Boy Remi, Gerald Rathkolb discusses the way in which the narrator plays with the expectations of its viewers by saying things that turn out to be completely false a short while after. If the narrator says that Remi found some money and spent it happily, there would likely be a scene shortly after where he accidentally drops the money down a sewer.

Generally, identity-less narrators are seen as omniscient, so either the narrator does not actually know everything, or is actively deceiving the audience. A similar effect happens with misleading episode titles. How many times does Chiba Shigeru in Hokuto no Ken declare in the next episode that a major character is definitely going to die but actually doesn’t? It makes a person begin to doubt the authenticity of words in fiction.

But words are easy to ignore as lies. The very idea of lying is tied closely to the use of words. If someone says you’re lying, it usually has to do with what you’ve said and not what you’ve done. What happens then, when the lies are not words but pictures?

Ambiguity in a given scene is a common technique used in anime and manga to create a sense of tension and drama. In Dragon Ball Z, a character attacks an enemy with so many energy projectiles that a giant explosion occurs where the target was standing. This ambiguous moment is meant to leave the viewer in anticipation as to whether or not the attack worked, though the explosion itself begins to take on a symbolic identity as a red herring and leads the viewer to assume that the opponent did not in fact die. What I’m referring to with visual falsehood though is something far more sinister.

While I cannot speak for everyone, I tend to believe that what is presented to me on the screen or on the page is what has happened in the story. In other words, there is a certain degree of “truth” to the visuals of a manga, because without them how are we supposed to know what has or has not happened?

One prominent manga author who uses visual falsehoods to their utmost advantage is Fukumoto Nobuyuki, creator of gambling series such as Mahjong Legend Akagi: The Genius Who Descended into the Darkness, Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji: The Suffering Pariah -The Ultimate Survivor-, and Gambling Emperor Legend Zero. In Akagi and Ten for example, mahjong hands are displayed right on the page and presented as what a given character has to work with. In the anime for Akagi, the hand is generally displayed by itself floating in a space, as if to say that this is an objective view of the mahjong hand. Of course, it turns out not to be, and we are presented with what is really there.

This is a scene from Zero where the main character is faced with a scenario where he cannot see who is behind the wall. Fukumoto lets us the readers take a peek at the person behind the wall. Then he reveals the truth!

What are we to believe? Reveals like these are downright disarming.

A non-anime/manga example of this comes in the form of Megaman 9. In this game, there is an enemy that disguises itself as a 1-Up icon. Attempting to get a free life will of course result in an unpleasant surprise.

Though the enemy is not difficult to defeat, it creates some paranoia in the player. Just which 1-Ups are real? Does that 1-Up seem too good to be true? The game has challenged your perception of what “should” be.

I do not believe these visual lies impact these works negatively, but when the images themselves are untruths, it can create a sense of imbalance, a distrust for what is in front of you. Keep in mind that in Fukumoto’s case, this never damages the “gambling” or “mystery” aspects of his stories, so you are also unable to just doubt everything and view his works from a position of absolute superiority. It adds a new layer to reading manga, one where you are in a sense competing against the creators themselves.

Am I “Qualified?”

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This is one of those weird blogging about blogging posts. If you have no interest in waxing philosophy on such matters, then I suggest you go watch some anime (because anime is awesome).

If you look at the way in which I form ideas and write them out here at Ogiue Maniax, you will see that I have a tendency to qualify statements, taking simple sentences and complicating them in order to fully explain what I mean. Generally my goal is to remove as much ambiguity as I can (unless intended), but it can be a dangerous habit that can lead to strong assertions being weighed down by too many technicalities.

It’s not so much that I dislike the fact that I qualify statements so often(ah, there it goes!), but rather that I think it’s a good thing for me and other writers to be aware of. We can then know when it is appropriate to try and clarify in great detail what we’ve said previously, and when it is best to let something just stand on its own merits (in my case, this usually takes the form of a bad pun). In a manner of speaking, it all comes down to “how much should you say?”

The other major pitfall of over-qualifying statements is that if done incorrectly it can make your words seem as if they are constantly contradicting themselves in order to keep your opinion “correct.” That’s something to really watch out for.

A Dance Opening is More Than Just a Dance: Haruhi 1 vs Haruhi 2

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Yamamoto “Yamakan” Yutaka tends to divide the anime community with the anime he’s worked on, especially with his reluctant reputation as the most well-known creator of “dance segments” for anime openings and endings. Think Haruhi, Lucky Star, Kannagi, and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about. Now there are those among us, including myself, who have decried the overuse of dances in anime intros and outros, criticizing them as being too much of a fad, a gimmick which other anime are trying to latch onto in order to give themselves more otaku cred.

And they’d be right, except it doesn’t disqualify any of the above-mentioned Yamakan shows from being catchy bookends to each episode. Simply put, they’re quite good and they deserve to be catchy.

What actually made me newly appreciate Yamakan’s work was the second season of Haruhi. Watching the new ED, it just did not have any of the pop or style of the first series’ infamous “Hare Hare Yukai.”

Haruhi Season 1 ED

Haruhi Season 2 ED

It’s not like I’m criticizing the level of animation in the new ED; in many ways the animation in the new ED is better than the old one. And I’m not comparing the full Hare Hare Yukai dance itself to the new ED either. However, I really feel that the new ED’s sense of timing is a little lacking compared to the original, and that it overuses certain visual elements (a problem that goes double for the new OP). It was a pretty good idea, but the execution leaves something to be desired.

I’m not promoting the proliferation of even more dance numbers in anime, but rather just pointing out an example in which we have to look beyond the fad and into the core of what makes an opening catchy or memorable. I think that if you gave Yamakan an opening to storyboard and told him “no dancing,” he’d still be able to create something just as visually engaging.

Reductive Production

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As of late, I’ve felt that quite a few anime creators have been taking a reductive approach to determining what is necessary for a piece of fiction to actually work. They’re examining the innards of animation as a story-telling device, and removing seemingly vital organs in order to determine whether it was a heart or if it was just the tonsils. The three most prominent examples I can think of are Miyazaki, Oshii, and Kyoto Animation.

Miyazaki asks, “Do I really need a cohesive narrative when I just want to illustrate a series of events in animation?” and then creates Ponyo.

Oshii asks, “Does my movie really need to be actively engaging when I want to make a movie entirely about tedium?” and then creates Sky Crawlers.

Kyoto Animation asks, “Can a work be considered ‘new’ if everything BUT the story itself is entirely redone?” and then creates the Endless Eight portion of Haruhi.

In every instance here, creators are using their reputations to put surprisingly experimental animations in a public setting for mass consumption. In the case of Oshii and Miyazaki, it’s in the theater, and for Kyoto Animation it’s on TV in the form of one of the most popular anime in recent years. And with these experiments, they are asking a rather weighty question: what exactly is fiction? They’re asking themselves, asking the audience, asking the industry, and depending on the answer they receive, we may see more works like this or less.

How do you feel about this? Should creators be using such public settings to experiment to such an extent?

I feel like in every instance here, creators are using their reputations to put surprisingly experimental animations in a public setting for mass consumption. In the case of Oshii and Miyazaki, it’s in the theater, and for Kyoto Animation it’s on TV in the form of one of the most popular anime in recent years.

Aim for the Ace Anime Adaptations Analysis

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The year was 1973, and a young anime studio named Madhouse began work on its first big series, an adaptation of a popular tennis manga called Ace o Nerae! or Aim for the Ace! as it translates in English. Running 26 episodes, it was directed by Dezaki Osamu and had character designs by Sugino Akio, a duo that continues to work together even to this day, including Rose of Versailles, the 90s Black Jack OVAs, and Space Adventure Cobra. They also worked together on every other anime adaptation of Aim for the Ace!

With that in mind, I thought it’d be interesting to just put the openings of each of the Ace series next to each other, if only to see how time, money, and experience have affected the same series over the course of two decades.

1973’s Ace o Nerae!

1978s Shin Ace o Nerae!

1988’s Ace o Nerae 2!

It might be a little unfair to compare openings, but I feel that doing so is a good indicator for seeing how an anime series wishes to be first seen. When you look at the 1973 opening vs the 1978 opening though, you can already see a world of difference. Character designs in Shin Ace are cleaner and more consistent, perhaps at the expense of some of the wild and untamed artwork that characterizes the original. Everything is also much-better animated, with fewer visible shortcuts being taken. Fast forward to 1988 and of course you can see a huge change, brought on by overall progress in anime, an OVA-level budget and changing visual trends in anime (and in real-world fashion). Keep in mind though that unlike, say, Cutie Honey, where each incarnation is done by a different studio and different people at the helm, Ace 2 has the same core team as the first Ace, and what you’re seeing here is direct evidence of how they changed over the course of 15 years.

I think the biggest difference between the original and the later series is that by the time of Shin Ace, the anime is actively trying to portray human figures in a three-dimensional space, and Ace 2 even moreso. If you look at the original TV series, even in the opening it never wants to tell you exactly where the characters are in any given moment. It feels closer to a manga brought to life, for better or worse. In that regard, I feel that the original has a certain charm that the others lack, the kind of appeal that comes from seeing just how much people could do with so little.

Really though, I just think they should have kept the hair from the first TV series throughout each incarnation. That includes the live-action series from a few years ago.

“Liking Less” vs “Disliking”

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While not something I see as often as of late, I remember for a while noticing how people’s tastes in anime shift, particularly in their transition from new fan to fairly hardcore. What may sometimes accompany this transition is a desire to do away with the past and to deny how one used to be, specifically by ridiculing one’s former self for liking certain specific anime titles. The most common form of this is, “I used to like Anime X, but now I like Anime Y, and so Anime X sucks.” It’s that mindset I want to specifically address.

Obviously people’s tastes change over time, and the things you may have been in love with at one point may not hold your fancy years down the line. This applies to many things beyond anime, from food to relationships. I just find it funny though that people, in this case anime fans, would be so quick to divorce themselves from their pasts, to say that liking certain titles is not something they should be doing once they’ve discovered finer entertainment. Again, I’m not saying you can’t end up disliking something you used to like, but that to do so actively only leads to an endless cycle of dissatisfaction.

To this end, I was considering the life of a manga artist. Manga artists in general get better over time. Their art and their ability to tell a story via visuals improve or at the very least might change. Sometimes the shift is so subtle that you don’t notice how different the artwork’s become until you compare Volume 1 with Volume 20. Now let’s say a person fell in love with a manga at Volume 1 and kept reading throughout, and arrived at Volume 20 and then looked at the artwork in both. To his surprise, Volume 20 looks much, much better and by comparison Volume 1 looks unrefined, perhaps almost amateurish.

Then let’s say the fan, having been exposed to the quality of Volume 20, went and read another manga with art on the level of Volume 1, he would reject it because his tastes have become “better.” Which is all well and good, but what happens when he reaches the superior artwork of Volume 40? Or Volume 60? Does Volume 20 no longer meet his or her criteria? When will this ever end?

I’d like to believe that there’s a distinct difference between liking something less and disliking it altogether, but I know that people’s emotions, even my own, are not so easy to bottle and tame and act as if everything and everyone can get along. Even one of my heroes, Megaman creator Inafune Keiji, said that if one of his artists today brought artwork on the level of what he himself drew for Megaman 1, Inafune would call it terrible and reject it immediately. That’s the way it goes.

Slap a Teenager: Maturation of the Creative Process

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I’ve been doing quite a bit of drawing lately, and it’s gotten me thinking about the whole creative process, and the influence of one’s own age.

Recently, an old friend of mine found material for a video game we were creating back in elementary school. It had everything kids (or rather, we specifically) wanted in video games: tons of levels, tons of bosses, tons of neat gadgets and enemies. It was a game we’d spend time on nearly every day during lunch, thinking up new ideas for it. Honestly, looking at the stuff we came up with, I’m a little jealous of what we created back then. These were the unfettered mindsets of a pair of 10 year olds, where anything was possible as long as it made video game sense, and back then video game sense wasn’t very sensible.

Then one day something happened: we started to become teenagers. Now, when we looked back at our materials, everything seemed so kiddy. We thought, if our game was to go anywhere, we’d have to update it to make sure it didn’t look like the game was only for kids! Keep in mind we were like 13 or 14, and of course the hilarity of kids trying to make a game not for kids practically writes itself. This was the age of people accusing Nintendo of not appealing to the older demographics enough, and when Rare decided to revamp Jet Force Gemini and slap a few extra years onto its characters. So we made the characters cooler and tougher. We tried to give the bosses more realistic proportions, closer to Dragon Ball Z than Dragons of Blue Land. It wasn’t exactly 90s extreme, but it was something close to it.

Eventually high school came and we worked on it less and less until it dropped off entirely until more recently when we began to uncover our old materials. Now of course, looking at the things we came up with early on, and then how we tried to change it as we got older, I sort of want to slap my teenage self for accidentally trying to ruin a good thing. Not that I think my ideas as a teenager were all that bad either, but in this one case that teenage mentality was trouble.

I truly think that what we were thinking up at the lunch table back then could still appeal to kids today, though we’d have to apply a more cohesive design philosophy to everything. The goal would shift from trying to replace the products of our childish maginations with something more “mature,” to trying to refining or childhood imaginations and keeping it from exploding out the sides.

Then I hear people say, “Why do you watch an anime that’s meant for KIDS?” and the answer is obvious.

I Am/Am Not an Otaku: The Reverse Thieves’ Otaku Diaries and the Definition of Otaku

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After an initial introduction of the demographics of those who chose to partake in the Otaku Diaries, the Reverse Thieves have released the second part of their study. This time around, the discussion centers around the word “otaku” and what it means to anime fans.

A large number of their results showed that many anime fans consider the word “otaku” to have negative connotations and may even be upset if someone referred to them as an otaku. It is, in other words, an insult. Sometimes, the negative connotations come from wanting to distance oneself from the “other” anime fans, e.g. socially inept naruto fans, and other times they stem from wanting to use the word as the Japanese use it. Of course, I can’t be the only one to see the irony in a person denying that they’re an otaku while also championing the true, JAPANESE definition of the word, or at least their interpretation of the Japanese definition.

I remember years ago when I was part of a Pokemon community on the internet (the Team Rocket Headquarters if you want to know), where one of the site owners got very upset whenever someone called him an otaku, insisting that the term was in reality extremely derogatory and that it should only be used for the most extreme cases of anime fandom. It was around that time that I began developing my hypothesis on the Path of  Otaku Self-Acceptance, or the path the typical anime fan takes when confronted with the term “otaku.”

Phase 1) I Want to Be an Otaku!

This phase is usually the first one that new anime fans feel. Anime is fresh and exciting, and they want to see more and more of it. They consider the status of “otaku” to be a goal to strive for. However, if they start to sour towards the anime community they may enter…

Phase 2) Don’t Call Me an Otaku!

This is the point at which you find many of the subjects of the Otaku Diaries, as well as many anime fans you know. Sometimes they genuinely are just not that into anime and don’t want to be considered hardcore fans, but often times you see that many of the people who fall into this category are simply in denial. They hide their anime fandom from others as hard as they can, and they will put on airs so that no one can discover their terrible, terrible secret. Eventually, some of them pretend not to be otaku so hard that they permanently make the switch. Others, however, may grow tired of the charade and come to acceptance. That is what leads them to…

Phase 3) I am an Otaku

This is the point at which people realize that “Otaku” is just a descriptor. It is no more a self-inherent badge of shame or badge of pride than any other part of a person’s life, like saying “I am short” or “I work in construction.” It’s where I hope to see more anime fans, and I believe it’s the key to becoming true to oneself, provided you actually are an otaku.

I am an Otaku. Are you?