Category Archives: thought exercise

Living Off the Scraps of Continuity

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Although continuity is commonplace in anime, while growing I always assumed a kids’ show would essentially reset itself after the half hour was over. It was safe, it was reassuring. Nobody died or suffered any lasting consequences unless it was a two-part episode, and then it would simply reset back to square 1 at the end of the following week. I craved continuity, piecing together episodes in my head and a personal fanon (before I knew of the term) in the way a child only could. That’s why it was all the more amazing whenever a show would tease the viewer with bits of continuity.

King Mondo directly confronting the Zeo Power Rangers impressed me. So was finding out that one of Grimlord’s lieutenants was the father of the primary VR Trooper. But nothing comes to mind more than Conan the Adventurer.

Conan the Adventurer was a child-friendly version of Conan the Barbarian where Conan and friends sent their enemies “to another dimension” before Saban decided to bestow that phrase upon its Dragon Ball Z dub. And while Conan met his friends across the land and sea, and they didn’t go away after an episode, Conan never seemed to get any closer to reversing the spell of living stone cast upon his family by the evil Wrath-Amon, the very impetus of his quest. Imagine my surprise one morning(no really, do it!) when I saw Conan and his allies directly fighting not only Wrath-Amon but his lord and master Set, the big final boss master of the series. Not only that, Conan actually managed to soundly defeat both of them and even finally save his family. To actually have a satisfying conclusion to a cartoon adventure, it was such a rare sight that the memory stuck with me, as you might have noticed) even if the show was actually not that great.

But even if a show had no sense of continuity or concept of lasting consequences, I wanted there to be some. It wasn’t what I would call a burning desire, but the shows which gave me a taste of what continuity could add to a story, and the shows without continuity which simply made me want it more, I think it’s definitely one of the many factors that got me into anime.

Analyzing the Hokuto Zankai Ken

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I was thinking about one of Kenshiro’s most famous moves, the Hokuto Zankai Ken, i.e. The One Where He Sticks his Fingers in Your Head and a Counter Appears And You Die When it Gets to Zero, and the scene in which he used it on Souther to no effect. Souther’s secret is that his heart is on the right side of his body so all of his pressure points are reversed, and this is why he is, under normal circumstances, immune to Hokuto Shinken. But if that’s the case, that must mean one of a few things.

1) The two pressure points Kenshiro hits are not the same ones on each side.

2) Kenshiro IS pressing the same left and right points on the side of the head, but uses a different amount of pressure on each side.

3) The human head’s pressure points aren’t symmetrical.

4) Souther simply can’t be affected by Hokuto Zankai Ken even if Kenshiro knows his secret.

Yes, I thought too much about this

It’s Halloween, but it’s not Cosplay

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Tomorrow I’m going to a one-day-early Halloween party where costumes are mandatory, and so I’ve decided to go as an anime character. I won’t say which one, but don’t worry, I’m not going dressed as Ogiue. While I’m going to a Halloween party as an anime character, in my mind I don’t consider it cosplay. There’s a distinction I’ve created in my mind, and I don’t know how valid it is, but I think it has to do with the amount of effort exerted in making the costume.

Aside from a few minor purchases, the costume I’ve assembled is base primarily on clothing I own already, and none of it required any sort of modifications. I am not sacrificing my existing clothing and transforming any of it into permanent costume status, nor have I done any handiwork to make it more than it already is. This is why I believe myself to be “dressing up” for Halloween and not “cosplaying” for Halloween.

Nothing wrong with cosplay, though I try not to get involved with the cosplay community to any great extent. It’s more of a personal mental thing, this situation of mine.

The Moe Heroine and the Yamato Nadeshiko

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A “Yamato Nadeshiko” is defined as the traditional ideal Japanese woman. These qualities include being loyal to their husband, putting family first, modesty, and being skilled in domestic matters. Belldandy from Ah! My Goddess is a prominent example in anime and manga of a Yamato Nadeshiko, and the fact that Ah! My Goddess has continued to run for many years indicates that this type of character is relatively popular today.

Of course, the spotlight in recent years has been on moe characters, and while some character traits reinforce the idea of the Yamato Nadeshiko, others defy them. Key’s heroine of heroines Tsukimiya Ayu has loyalty as one of her important traits, but is also a clumsy tomboy whose cooking ability is on par with Homer Simpson pouring cereal. Tsundere characters such as Hiiragi Kagami are strong, capable, and put family and friends first, but are independent-minded and are anything but submissive. Aisaka Taiga from Toradora! meanwhile is a clumsy tsundere.

I don’t think the intentional increase of moe traits in characters is, at the very least on a basic level, “progressive feminism,” but I think it’s worth taking a look at how these characters relate to a concept with a long history in the society from which their fictional media are produced. In American fiction, particularly television and movies, there are certain stereotypes for female characters, particularly when it comes to romantic interests. The Girl Next Door can be considered a reaction to the Bombshell (or vice versa). Any time there’s a shy girl who turns out to be highly sexual, it’s actually just a simplified form of “what you see isn’t always what you get.” Though they are now recurring, even stereotypical concepts in fiction, their basis is in the trends of what most people want in their entertainment, at least as it pertains to female characters.

Granted, otaku are not “most people” in Japan or any other country in which they (or should I say we) reside. And when non-typical people look at something typical, I think there’s often a desire for something “different,” though perhaps not drastically so. But the line between “different enough” and “too different” is a very personal thing, and I think it’s the area in which disagreements regarding the validity of moe characters arises.

I Love Character Lineart

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There’s the front view and the back view, and then some 3/4 views. Accompanying these shots will usually be facial expressions, different poses, possibly different outfits. Whenever I buy an artbook I look for character lineart and design images, prioritizing them over even full posters. They’re one of the main reasons I bought issues of Newtype and Newtype USA. The odd thing is, I’m not sure exactly why I like them so much.

It could be that I like seeing the creator-side of any sort of production or work. Hell, I’m not afraid to admit that years ago I bought the first volume of Megatokyo just because I was curious what Fred Gallagher had to say about his own stuff. I’m always eager to read interviews by creators, and it’s also the reason I go to their panels at conventions. I try to pick their brains and ask questions to get a better understanding of their process and themselves.

These images are the basis from which everything is animated. They serve as guides for animators to go back to whenever they’re unsure of how a character should look or feel. Character design images are the bridge between still and moving image.

Cause, Effect, Necessity? Sci-Fi Fandom and Early Anime Fandom

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Anime World Order recently posted an interview with what are the self-proclaimed “old farts” of anime, and they rightly deserve the title. Hearing them speak, and thinking back to an earlier comment by others in previous shows, such as Joey Snackpants and Neil Nadelman, I had to wonder just how much this has affected the flow of anime fandom in the United States. Though I personally have found some issue with those sci-fi fans who lament the status of anime today because it is not “sci-fi enough,” I cannot help but feel that their influence is hard to deny.

I am certainly not old enough to have experienced any of that early anime fandom, but in listening to those that had been around there is one message repeats constantly: to be an anime fan required obsession. This was before the internet was established, before google and youtube and digital fansubs and wikipedia, so to find any sort of information required the ability to search and research and to find collaborators so as to increase one’s chances of obtaining anime and anime-related paraphernalia. I imagine that either you had to be somewhat extroverted or at least have an obsession so strong it overcame your fear of other people to accomplish this task. And what better place to find those with powerful obsessions than in an already-established fanbase?

For that matter, who better to pursue this difficult-to-obtain treasure from the isles of Japan than those who already had spent time discussing and analyzing technology in their favorite shows, writing fanzines to pursue and exchange ideas? With this many people with the ability to obsess grouped together, and more importantly able to obsess over fictional works on television and comics, two forms of media long thought juvenile or at least unintellectual, it might be no wonder that American anime fandom in its infancy sprang forth from sci-fi fandom.

Of course anime fandom today is also largely the result of arguably bigger influences in the years after. Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, and Pokemon came on TV early in the morning and introduced both boys and girls to a serial story where actions in a previous episode are not reset in the next. They targeted a much wider audience than older anime had ever hoped to, and rather than having their native origins obfuscated where introduced as something from Japan. Still, I believe even this part of anime fandom is influenced by those sci-fi fans of yesterday. Slash, derived from the pairing of “Kirk/Spock,” may have allowed its foreign cousin Yaoi to get accustomed to traveling on western soil. Sci-fi conventions may have given pointers to the anime fandom when it became large enough on how to congregate with like-minded (enough) individuals. In that sense, perhaps the actions of sci-fi fans in the 70s and 80s became a template for today’s anime fandom, who have shaped it to their own experiences and will some day become the old guard to influence others.

Oh my god, I was wrong, it was “anime” all along

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For almost as long as I’ve been playing video games, I have held the Megaman franchise on a pedestal atop a pillar atop a tower with seemingly never-ending steps winding towards the top. Even when it was clear the series had begun to lose steam and ideas were being rehashed, I was still all for it because it meant more Robot Masters. As a kid and even today I love the concept of bosses in video games, these greater menaces that the player needs to overcome in order to gain safe passage to the next part of the game, and Megaman was king of this. Hearing news that Megaman 9 would be out this Monday, the 22nd of September, I took it upon myself to celebrate in a number of ways. I downloaded Megaman 2 on the virtual console today and beat it within a few hours. I also began to make sprites out of the many, many robot master designs I had thought up as a child, one of the first being the one you saw above, the creatively named “Garbageman.”

The hideousness of the Western Megaman art boxes has become relatively common knowledge by this point. Capcom even decided to parody it by making Megaman 9 box art resemble these fiascos. As a kid, I always thought something wasn’t quite right with the Megaman 2 cover, where a macho-looking guy in blue holding a futuristic pistol stands prominently. I knew this wasn’t what we were expected to see when we saw Megaman’s wide-eyed sprite blink and run and die over and over. Years later, I obtained Megaman 8 for the Sega Saturn, and watched the intro sequence involving Megaman fighting select robots from each of the seven previous Megaman games in full animation. It was at that moment that the intended “style” of the Megaman series hit me: “Megaman is anime!” The big eyes, the round faces, the colors, this all came from an anime style. I had gotten into anime in a big way around the time I first started playing Megaman 8, and I was fascinated by the designs, especially of the Robot Masters. Megaman looked like Megaman, but sleek and streamlined without having those features be too prominent a la Battle Network franchise (though I have nothing against that series or its designs). I even started to look for the existence of an actual Megaman anime, thinking the intro couldn’t possibly be the only thing.

Being wowed by fully animated introductions was not new to me even at that point, as years earlier I told my friend to play the intro to Sonic CD on his Sega CD over and over, but Megaman 8 came out at just the right time. Technology in games was steadily improving, allowing games to look more like anime than ever (Guardian Heroes to name one). I was in high school at the time, and thus was big into anime, though definitely not as much as now, and actively sought out things related to anime. And of course it was Megaman, a character whose games I grew up loving. So it was with Megaman that I began to realize just how much companies tried to cover their Japanese origins.

I’m pretty sure that I knew the fact that video game companies in the 80s and 90s didn’t want Americans to know of their Japanese origins, but it was with Megaman though that I investigated this anew. I took a lookat the NES Bionic Commando, and the full body image of (MUTEKI NO) Spencer they’d use at the end of levels, and realized that it definitely had some anime influence to it. I opened up an old issue of Nintendo Power and saw a title, Clash at Demonhead. At the beginning of the section was a large, colored image displaying a blond guy in armor and weapons done in a very cartoony style. Near it however was screenshots from the game’s intro, with character designs reminiscent of late-80s, early 90s anime such as Mikimoto or Takahashi’s stuff. And there were not one, but two Golgo 13 games, though I don’t think the steps taken to cover up Golgo’s origins were too extensive.

I find it amazing how much FULLY ANIMATED INTRO SEQUENCE FOR VIDEO GAMES were able to influence me and many others. Seeing the intro for the Sega Saturn Magic Knights Rayearth game in a store, I cared little for what the actual game was like. It was these intros that gave an air of legitimacy to games, and also provide plenty of fodder for fanfiction, which they most definitely did. These intros, prior to having games simply look that good all the time, provided enough of an inspiration to construct and elaborate everything necessary for creative endeavors.

If you look at the Megaman 9 official art though, the designs in even the official art have gone all the way back to 2, with a chubbier Megaman at the helm. So maybe Megaman 8 was a bit of a lie after all. Perhaps Megaman was anime all along, just not to that extent.

(Dr. Wily Dr. Wily! Dr. Wily Dr. Wily! Dr. Wily Dr. Wily, ohhhh Dr. Wily!)

The Right Way to Do “VS” Arguments

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Who would win in a fight, Kenshiro or Golgo 13?

Lina Inverse or KOS-MOS?

Toilet Paper or a Snickers Bar?

I love this sort of argument generally, but it’s generally considered in very poor taste by large parts of fandoms, tired of seeing them. It is considered a useless endeavor, be it in the “unstoppable force vs immovable object” sense, or just being futile and biased based on favoritism by the people arguing. , but there is a wrong way to do it, as stated, and there is a right way to do it, which begins with realizing its uselessness is not a problem at all.

At the end of the first Phoenix Wright game, and this is the point where those of you who haven’t played should turn back in case you don’t want to get spoiled, the message given is that in a court of law the prosecution and defense aren’t working against each other but with each other to arrive at the truth. This is what you should be doing with VS arguments, except that there’s clearly no actual truth. You may want to reach for it, but the goal is not to grind the other person underneath your forum avatar’s heel. The real goal instead is to build upon each other’s arguments and logic and to challenge each other’s opinions in order to promote critical thinking, even if it’s all in jest.

There’s never really a loser in VS arguments, and that’s the fun of it. Work on opposite sides, but work together, just as Phoenix and Edgeworth* do.

*Substitute their Japanese names if you so feel inclined.

Enjadening

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At some point, it seem likes most anime reviewers begin to lose passion for their work, provided they had any in the first place. Though we may say something along the lines of, “Why do it in the first place if you no longer like it,” they say that one of the reasons they lose that passion is because they are constantly forced to wade through shows they dislike. They cannot choose the anime they review, and so with every disappointing show they become more and more bitter towards anime. That ocean that once seemed so wide turns out to be polluted.

At least, that’s what I think might be happening.

Aside from a few exceptions, I haven’t really tried to talk about anime on here that don’t really interest me. I mean, it’s difficult to talk about things you find boring, right? And anime reviewers have to do it, be it hell or high school romantic comedy.

In that case, what if I did start reviewing things outside of my interests?

I don’t know if I’ll actually do this. While I have a strong love of anime and manga, to put it to the test like this may be asking too much of me. If I go in, I may come out a different person. I’d like to think there’s interesting lessons to be learned in any anime, good, bad, or decidedly mediocre, but how many will it take before I break, if I do at all?

Most likely, if I do decide to begin this self-experiment, I won’t say specifically which reviews are part of it. That would be up to the readers to determine.

The Most Difficult Question

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“What anime/manga would you recommend?”

At some point this went from being a fairly simple question to being an incredibly complex one that leaves me puzzled for long periods of time. As I absorbed more and more shows and comics into my being, as I began to expose myself to more and more types of fans and non-fans, the number of variables just kept increasing.

How long has this person been watching anime, if at all? What titles do I think are good? Out of those, which do I think the person asking me would like? What non-anime genres is he or she already into? How open is he or she to new genres? Different visual styles? How familiar is the person with digital downloads, bittorent, etc?

I know in a previous post that I recommended Slayers, but that is more of a generalist approach. The difficulty arises when I try to tailor my response to that individual. Everyone is unique, and I can’t rely on my own taste to sell a show to another.

An equally difficult question is “Which shows do you like?”

How familiar is this person with anime? If I say a title, will they understand what it is? How open are they to explanation?

And it’s not like I’ll lie or anything. I just prefer to pick an answer that will most accurately describe what I like in anime as efficiently as possible to the person in particular who’s askng.

Or I can just say “Rose of Versailles” and see what happens.