Category Archives: trends

What Do Nancy and Kira Yamato Have in Common?

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No, the title is not a lead-in to a bad humor post.

Like many anime fans out there, I have issues with Gundam SEED Destiny and how it effectively sabotaged the SEED plot with nonsense and a complete and utter lack of direction. Think Code Geass R2 and Gundam 00 Second Season ruined their respective prequels? While I might disagree with you there, I can see easily how you can hold that opinion with the big thematic shifts that happened between seasons. Even then, they’re nothing compared to what Destiny “achieved.”

I have a whole laundry list of complaints about Destiny, but there’s one in particular I want to focus on, and that’s the show’s treatment of Shinn Asuka. Shinn from the start of Destiny was meant to be the main character, with returning character Athrun Zala in the role of older and wiser mentor of sorts. However, as the series progressed Shinn slowly slipped out of the spotlight, replaced gradually by Athrun himself and then eventually Kira Yamato, the hero of the original SEED. Now Shinn is a very abrasive character. I know I’ve used that word a number of times before, but Shinn is the real deal. He’s pig-headed, ignorant, fueled by equal parts petty vindictiveness, trauma, and some sense of justice, and is overall the kind of guy who, if you told him the war he was fighting was wrong, would yell back at you, “OH YEAH?! WELL MY FAMILY’S DEAD.” It’s easy to see why people would prefer Kira or Athrun over him, but at the same time I can’t help but feel that it was a crime to shift main character focus to that extent. It felt disappointing because they could have done so much more with him. It felt wrong.

As much as I dislike the idea of switching up main characters mid-series though, I realize that it is not all that uncommon in animation and comics, let alone anime and manga. Before Tezuka created Tetsuwan Atom, he created Captain (Ambassador) Atom, a story where Atom was more of a side character than anything else. Similarly, the newspaper comic Nancy was originally known as Fritzi Ritz before the introduction of Fritzi’s niece, who would eventually take over the entire comic (as well as the title) and relegate Fritzi to that of a side-character-as-parental-figure.

Both Tezuka and Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller saw the writing on the wall and realized just how much better and more popular their works would be when they pushed aside the old protagonist, and while I can accept that, I can’t quite accept what happened to Shinn. The fact that it used a character who was already a main character in a previous series made it seem like they were taking two steps backwards, and just trying to turn SEED Destiny into a retread of the original, instead of actually making a sequel.

In the end, it really all just comes down to doing whatever might get you a better or more successful work, but changing up your heroes has just as much, if not more of a chance of making a story worse than it does of making it better. One outcome as we saw with Destiny was that the constant shift in focus detracted to the story as a whole,  which resulted in both the plot and the characters sputtering about. On top of that, it happened within a TV series that had a set amount of episodes and probably a decent amount of story written beforehand, and while 52 episodes seems like a lot, it doesn’t compare to the long, long serial run of something like Nancy, and it doesn’t make a sharp division between stories like that of Captain Atom and Tetsuwan Atom. In better hands or in  a looser storytelling environment, the Shinn->Athrun->Kira shift may have been enjoyable, but sadly that was not to be.

Oh, and don’t get me started on what they did to Cagalli.

Please Hunt Me, Onii-chan: The Willingly Poached Anime

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Cardcaptor Sakura

Cardcaptor Sakura is a magical girl series released in 1996 (manga) and 1998 (anime) which remains very popular among otaku. Following the life of a young girl who discovers magic powers and must use those new-found abilities to collect magical cards which have been dispersed throughout her city, Cardcaptor Sakura’s main draw is the natural charm its characters possess, particularly the heroine Kinomoto Sakura. Sakura exudes a sense of authenticity in her character that makes older male fans feel for her, and sometimes even develop sexual feelings for her.

While it’s never clear as to whether or not Cardcaptor Sakura was intended to be received by the fans in this manner (even though Sakura creators CLAMP were fans themselves before becoming professionals), there exists little of that ambiguity with a similar show, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Essentially following the same basic premise as Cardcaptor Sakura, Nanoha features a young girl who receives magical powers and has to go collect items, but the key difference between the two series is that while Cardcaptor Sakura was targeted towards primarily young girls, Nanoha was aimed squarely at those older male otaku who were very fond of Kinomoto Sakura and the world in which she lived. The late-night time slot, the merchandising (posters in the otaku-oriented Megami Magazine, Nanoha-themed hug pillows), all of it points to a show made for otaku. Why then, do the people who make and promote Nanoha go through all the trouble of giving the series this magical girl facade and having it designed to look on the surface as if it were designed for the enjoyment of young girls when it clearly is not? The answer is, because that’s what the fans want.


Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha

“Textual poaching” is a term which refers to the act of engaging a work of media, be it text, television, radio, etc., and taking from it not so much what the author intended, but what is pleasurable or enjoyable to the reader/viewer instead of the work as a whole. Coined by Michael de Certeau in 1984, the term was utilized by Henry Jenkins in his study of Star Trek fans, particularly in the way that fans approached their own creative endeavors pertaining to their chosen fandom. The classic example of this is the notion that Kirk and Spock are romantically interested in one another, based on their close friendship and lines which are interpreted as “hints” towards their “true” relationship.

More recently, Jenkins has talked about how the one-sided conversation between creator and consumer has broken down, and how easy it is now for people to talk to a creator, albeit in the indirect form of shouting into the internet. While Jenkins does not focus particularly on Japanese animation, this is essentially the environment modern anime finds itself in, and in this setting you will find that a number of shows, like Nanoha, are designed to be poached.

At the zoo, chimpanzees are not fed by simply placing the food in front of them. Instead, what the zookeepers do is hide the food in the chimpanzees’ cage so that the chimps may find it themselves, and in doing so are creating a facsimile of the wild setting where chimps would forage for food. Even though the zoo is obviously not the jungle, this artificial foraging is what the chimpanzees prefer to simply having the food given to them. In essence, this is the situation surrounding the otaku and the otaku-conscious creator. The otaku, the fan, gains enjoyment from being able to draw from these works a secondary interpretation of events and characters within, and so the creator responds by making a story which on the surface seems very similar to an “innocent” series, but in actuality is constructed from the ground up as a work meant to simulate the foraging otaku engage in to find aspects of a work they can extrapolate as fans. Another example of this is Prince of Tennis and other similar series which, while running in Shounen Jump, are designed in part to attract the female readers who, similar to the Kirk/Spock fans, saw the “close friendship” theme common in shounen manga as “CLOSE FRIENDSHIP.”


Prince of Tennis

The joy derived from not approaching a work as intended makes sense when you realize that many fans are familiar with the notion of liking things to an extent others may not. Fans, after all, are not the majority. As such, they are experienced with liking things which are not intended for them, to the point that the act of pursuing series not intended for them may become the focus of their activity as fans. Creators understand this desire, and so have responded in kind by making series which are designed to be used in that manner, like a small man-made pond where pre-caught fish are thrown in to make things easier. The relationship between creator and fan/otaku is thus predicated on this willful suspension of disbelief. The otaku are willing to pretend that this series made for otaku is not made for otaku. The creator, in turn, continues to intentionally hide bits of “sustenance” in the fans’ cage, a cage which the fans have willfully constructed themselves and can leave at any time should they choose to do so.

The Otaku Diaries Take a Look at Careers, Escapism, Hobbies

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The Reverse Thieves have their fifth Otaku Diaries entry up, leading off with a beautiful poem by Hisui. Aside from the poem though, I recommend you check it out and the rest of the Otaku Diaries entries, as I’m a fan of fan analysis (no pun intended), and even with the limited sample size I still think it provides a lot of interesting windows into trends and behaviors among otaku.

Two things jumped out at me in particular with this entry, the change in trends from mostly people interested in computers being into anime to anime reaching a wider demographic, as well as the concept of anime used as an escape.

As someone who went through an arts program in college, what I noticed is that among my peers few were into anime to the extent that I was. You could still find people who enjoyed anime to be sure (some of my art school friends and I decided to marathon all of Evangelion in one day Freshman year) but most of my classmates did not treat anime as something worth looking at for any extended period. When I remembered that the same classmates for the most part had never even watched The Simpsons, I began to see the extent to which those who had chosen this path had dedicated themselves to it at the expense of other things. That’s not to say they were mistaken in their decision, but the idea that they had almost no exposure to things which I considered to be common knowledge made me sense a palpable difference in mindset and what we valued. A lot of times it didn’t even occur to them to take a look at anime at all. I was also the only art student I knew of who even attended the school’s anime club at all (though I had to stop going after sophomore year to give myself more time to get work done).

Contrast this with my friends in college who were mostly computer science majors (with some chemistry, business, and other types mixed in), and I would have to say that the majority of them enjoyed anime, video games, things which tended towards the nerdish side. They weren’t solely into nerd hobbies, as some enjoyed sports and weightlifting and playing guitar and such, but they always seemed more ready to accept anime, even if I couldn’t necessarily convince them to watch Cardcaptor Sakura. Why the stark difference between the two groups?

“Fine Artist” and “Geek” do not stereotypically cross over much, and I think it has to do with the idea of right brain vs left brain, and that what brings enjoyment to one type does not apply to the other. All the more interesting then that there were a handful of people I knew who were actually Art/Computer Science double majors, and that out of all of them though, I felt that they more often than not tended towards their Computer Science side. I wonder if it’s impossible to be both in even ratios, and I have to also wonder where I myself fit, because even though I was not a computer science major I did not fit the Fine Arts mold entirely either. Another thing to note was that Geek and Illustrator tend to have much more crossover than Geek and Fine Artist, and the reason behind that lies in the concept that Fine Artists’s sense of aesthetics supposedly exists in a world different from that of the Illustrator, which is such a complex topic I’m gonna have to save it for another day.

Now with escapism via anime, and the active denial of using anime as such, I think it has to do very much with otaku trying to defend their shows or their status as otaku. It’s the idea that anime fans are using anime to avoid reality, whether it’s by moe shows, science fiction, pornography, whatever, no one wants to be told that they’re not living in the real world. In some cases, people will deny outright that anime is an escape, and in other cases they will talk about how escape isn’t that bad of a thing and more people should do it. Either way though, it does have this tinge of defensiveness, even if it’s completely valid to be defensive. After all, what else would you expect people to do if they’re perceiving someone’s outside comment as an attack?

Machinations of the Lyrical Fujoshi

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A while ago when I was at Duet 35 Karaoke with cool dudes OGT and Hisui, I was perusing the catalog of anime songs, when the Lucky Star section caught my eye. Aside from the songs in Lucky Star that are not from Lucky Star, i.e. those initial ending themes, I noticed that there were only about three or four songs. And out of those handful of songs, one of them was “Mo, Mousou Machine,” one of the character songs of Lucky Star’s resident fujoshi, Tamura Hiyori.

Now I know that this is just one karaoke place, and so is not necessarily indicative of any greater trends, but isn’t it odd that of all the songs to be available, one of them would be a song that’s from 1) a minor character (which means her song is available over an image song from a main character) and 2) a fujoshi?

The first thing to understand about Duet Karaoke is that people can make requests to get songs into the system. It could be that Hiyori’s voice actor, Shimizu Kaori, is popular enough among whoever frequents Duet 35, but rarely do I see that happen, and when it does it’s usually because their voice actor is also known as a singer, which Shimizu is not. Then there’s the idea that this is anime karaoke and obscure songs get in all the time, but that’s not necessarily true either. A lot of obscure openings and endings are available, but not so much character or image songs, and in the case of “Mo, Mousou Machine,” the lack of other characters’ songs is suspicious. And in order for people to request such a song, they’d have to know about it, and the only way they’d know about it is if they’re aware of the Lucky Star Character Albums. In other words, they would have to be hardcore otaku. Another possibility is that it’s just a holdover from Japan and when the system was updated that was one of the songs included, but then I ask again, what about the other Lucky Star songs?

While I can’t say that this is some sort of fujoshi conspiracy (as a real fujoshi conspiracy would probably involve a greater increase in the number of songs from yaoi anime), I posit that whether it’s in NYC or in Japan, Hiyori enjoys a degree of popularity over most of the minor characters, and that it has to do with Hiyori’s status as a fujoshi. This is especially evident when the theme of her song “Mo, Mousou Machine” is taken into account, as the title of the song and the lyrics all point to the idea of a female anime fan who can’t help fantasizing. Of course that would require fans to know what the song is saying, but lyric translations are freely available on the internet anyway. The real culprit might even be male fans of Hiyori.

So if you’re a Hiyori fan, speak up! I want to know just how popular she is among the Lucky Star and greater anime fanbase.

While I can’t say that this is some sort of fujoshi conspiracy (as a real fujoshi conspiracy would probably involve a greater increase in the number of songs from yaoi anime),

Colony Drop is Blazing a Trail Through the Information Super Highway

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I thought I knew about Japanimation before, but thanks to the fine folks over at Colony Drop and their Fall TV Cartoon Preview, I realize that I still have a lot to learn. I seriously gotta check out some of these shows, because a show…about driving cars?! And not the boring NASCAR way? Sign me up, good sirs! I think these guys really know what they’re talking about, which is a rarity these days on the internet.

Honestly speaking, there’s a really bad signal to noise ratio on the Anime Web Turnpike, and I’m beginning to wonder if the site (as great as it’s been) is starting outlive its usefulness. I mean, these days with search engines like Lycos and Excite getting better and better, I can find just the webring I want instantly.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to surfing on Cinnabar Island to duplicate my Body Slam TMs.

~A Fantasy All Too Affected by Reality~

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I’d like to talk today about a topic that doesn’t pop up too often on Ogiue Maniax, something that in the eyes of a number of otaku is about as far from anime fandom as you can get: sports.

Well not exactly. Recently I’ve noticed that in addition to rooting for the players they like or the teams from their hometowns, people have been watching sports a new way, the fantasy sports way.

Fantasy sports are basically online games where you build teams based on real life athletes and try to win as many games as possible in a given season. It’s kind of like an RPG, only your characters’ stats are influenced by the players’ performances in real life. If the star of your fantasy team gets injured in a real game, he’s off your roster as well.

The result is that you have people who keep up with sports not only so they can cheer for their team, but because they want to see how the events of the real world will affect their chances of winning their own game. It creates this extra agenda that while similar to just plain old betting and gambling on sports games, is actually more involved as the fantasy sports enthusiast has some level of control over his own team. If an athlete is injured, it’s up to the player to choose who to substitute. It’s an attempt to control the chaos in a way that reminds me of mahjong.

Is this really a bad way of watching sports? I don’t really think so, especially if that’s not the only reason they watch, but it does provide an interesting new dimension to the art of spectating. It’s also probably the closest thing a lot of sports fans will ever get to activities like writing fanfics and drawing fanart. The attitude and mindset of someone who watches sports with his fantasy team in mind is similar to that of an otaku watching an episode of an anime series with the intent of using whatever they find in that episode to fuel their fan works . Just as one might anticipate the latest episode of Bleach to have some fancy new outfits to inform their cosplay, so too do fantasy sports players tune in to the Nets vs the Jazz.

“Tune in.” Do people still say that?

THAT FAT GUY IS AMURO RAY

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When I first went to see Paprika in theaters, one thing that caught my attention was the voices. At first, I could not pinpoint them. Who is the main character? I know I’ve heard her voice before… And then it hit me: Hayashibara Megumi, that most prolific of 90s voice actors (who’s still doing work today and has recently written her own book), was the voice behind Paprika. Then another voice struck me. THAT FAT GUY IS AMURO RAY! I felt the desire to jump out of my seat and shout, “AHA!” but decided against it. Unfortunately for me though, I was not accompanied to the theater by any friends who were particularly into anime, so I could not share my discoveries at the time.

There are anime fans who have watched just as much if not more than I have, who are unable to pick up on a character being voiced by an actor from their favorite series, but there are also anime fans who have watched far less than me who are able to pick up on the subtle nuances of a voice and determine, despite any sort of wild differences in the voices used for the two characters, that the same actor plays these roles. And they’re not even always seiyuu otaku!

What is it that makes some people more able to recognize voice actors than others? I’m not applying this solely to Japanese seiyuu, but rather voice actors in general from Frank Welker to Kamiya Akira. I don’t consider myself to have a keen sense of hearing, so I can’t say I’m particularly tuned to any difficult-to-perceive aspects of voices, but when I do notice a recognizable voice, it generally has to do with something that one role has in common with another, even if those roles vary wildly. Of course, I don’t always get it right, and there are times when a voice hits me but I just cannot pinpoint it. I don’t know, I unfortunately do not have the proper vocabulary to explain it.

Perhaps someone with greater knowledge of voices and audio could explain better.

The Many Faces of the Bionic Commando

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Bionic Commando, originally an arcade game from 1987, found its way onto the Famicom/NES, where a new plot involving Nazis Badds and an improvement on gameplay features made it a hit, particularly in the United States. Since then, while not a super popular franchise, Bionic Commando has gotten a number of remakes, most notably the HD 3-D retooling of the original game, Bionic Commando: Rearmed and the 2009 Bionic Commando sequel.

In each game, you control a man with a gun and a bionic arm, whose goal it is to climb and swing through levels while eliminating enemy soldiers and reach the end of the level. While the gist of gameplay has remained fairly consistent, the art direction has not, resulting in a very different face for our cyborg hero over the years.

Our hero from left to right: Bionic Commando (Arcade, 1987), Bionic Commando (NES, 1988), Bionic Commando (Game Boy, 1992), Bionic Commando: Elite Forces (Game Boy Color, 1999), Bionic Commando: Rearmed (PS3 and 360, 2008), Bionic Commando (PS3 and 360, 2009)

Here you can see the Bionic Commando go from a simple blue-haired arcade hero to different degrees of fantastic and realistic, producing about as wide a range of portraits as a franchise can get. Note that portraits two, five, and six are all supposed to be the same character, i.e. Radd Spencer, bane of mustached fascists. What is immediately evident is that the NES Bionic Commando was originally made for a Japanese audience with his vaguely manga-style 80’s looks, while the newest Bionic Commandos are both conscious of the fact that the NES version built a sizable American audience, and are attempting to appeal to a childhood image of the NES game being a fairly gritty and serious affair. Square jaws are the name of the game here.

Now, compare the Game Boy version to the Game Boy Color version. Can you guess which was done by a Japanese development team and which was done by an American one? Yeah, pretty hard I know.

What I find so interesting about the GB and GBC incarnations of Bionic Commando relative to each other is that they are both trying to achieve the same aesthetic goal: a far-flung whiz-bang high-tech laser future setting for the game that appeals to the audiences in their native countries. The GB Bionic Commando is a full-on early 90s anime bishounen hero with big eyes, small mouth, and hair reminiscent of Cyborg 009 or Soldier Blue from Towards the Terra. The GBC Bionic Commando meanwhile is a rough and gruff 90s X-Treme superhero akin to Marvel’s Cable or DC’s Lobo. “Yes! This is exactly what kids want!” both development teams must have thought as they approved the designs.

If Bionic Commando gets remade again in a few years, I look forward to how the cultural fashions of the time influence our hero yet again. Who knows? Maybe he’ll be some kind of strange amalgam of realistic muscley dude, superhero, and anime protagonist.

The Colors of Modern Fanservice

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As part of the ritual of watching new shows at the start of a season, I decided to check out the show Kampfer. Immediately upon watching it, I got this strong feeling that I knew exactly the kind of show it was going to be (and I was right). Sure, the character designs are what you expect out of this sort of otaku-targeting fanservice show, but it was something much more fundamental than that. Then it hit me: It was the color scheme.

Lots of anime throughout the years have had bright or cheerful color schemes, but there’s something very distinct about the kinds of shows that are made in order to get otaku in a tizzy. When it comes to art, color and color theory were never my strong suit, so I cannot speak with any real authority or learned foundation, but there is a certain optimistic quality to the colors used in Kampfer and shows like Kampfer. Even if terrible things happen to the characters, it comes across as a fantasy that wants the viewer to become engrossed in, but at the same time makes it easy to remove oneself from that fantasy if one desires to do so.

kkitousen is affected by this to a lesser extent, due to the fact that it uses colors with greater saturation and contrast, but it still shares a similar fondness for bright colors combined in specific ways. These shows appear to be aiming for an ideal, trying to tap into a core color scheme that is attractive to otaku on some deeper level.

The reason, I suspect, is that they are getting very close to the colors commonly used in erotic PC games.

Here we have Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien aka Rumbling Hearts. The soft gradients seen here which are common to erogames are also pretty much impossible for any anime to achieve on a consistent basis. It looks as if the staff working on these “erogame color” shows try to achieve the same effect by choosing bright colors with a little less contrast than normal.

I also suspect that this color scheme also exudes a very negative connotation among people who dislike these sorts of shows inherently. It’s probably something which jumps out at them subconsciously and tells them that they may be in for a rough ride should they continue to watch.

Color is such a huge topic that obviously I can’t cover it all in one post. For that reason don’t be surprised if I return to the topic again at some point in the future.

“Upon Then Fighiting Master But an End is a Beginning…”

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Street Fighter II is by far one of the most influential video games in history, and all but singlehandedly launched an entire genre into the forefront of the general gamer consciousness. With SFII there came a new term, “fighting game,” and with it a whole host of companies eager to jump onto the bandwagon.

Among those games is a 1991/1992 (depending on where you live) Sega Genesis game called “Fighting Masters.” Now I had Fighting Masters as a kid, and I loved the hell out of the game, but even then I knew it wasn’t up to the level of Street Fighter II. Still, as I look back on it, I maintain fond memories of the whole thing.

These days, when we see a second-rate fighting game hit the market, be it professionally or as some sort of doujin soft, we can tell that the game makers understand the basic grammar of a fighting game. Or at least, they understand the grammar of the fighting game they’re trying to imitate. Doujin fighters all want to be Melty Blood or Guilty Gear, so they have super crazy air combos and fairly simplified button layouts. Games that want to be 3-D fighters follow suit with either Tekken or Soul Calibur. However, back in the early 90s, when Street Fighter II was just knocking players’ socks off in best 2-out-of-3 matches, companies clearly were unsure of just what a fighting game was supposed to be. This is how we got Fighting Masters.

Fighting Masters features 12 galactic warriors each representing their species in a furious tournament. Their goal? Well actually, that depends on the version of Fighting Masters you have. If it was the 1991 Japan release, it was a tournament to get the chance to defeat the dreaded demon alien Valgasu. If it was the 1992 US release, it was a tournament set up by some elders to save one species from being wiped out by a supernova (while the other 11 are out of luck). Keep in mind that you  still end up fighting Valgasu anyway.

Another difference is that most of the characters had their names changed between versions. The humanoid grappler Larry became Dirk, the cyclops boxer Eyesight became Uppercut, and so on, in an effort to both un-Engrishize the text and provide names that kids in early 90s America would deem “totally radical.” The best one is arguably the horse man Equus, who was once known as Flamer, featured in the previous screenshot.

The gameplay itself is quite unique as far as fighting games go. It wasn’t trying to be a closed-off beat-em-up like, say, “Street Smart,” and its engine seems closer to that of a wrestling game. Every character has two different types of moves, striking and grappling, and your goal is to use your striking moves to stun the opponent long enough to walk up to him and perform a badass piledriver or overhead throw. In all but one case, when a character is knocked against the floor or the walls, they take additional damage. There is no blocking involved, and the game doesn’t even use one of the buttons on the 3-button Genesis controller. In the end, it makes the game awkward, and slower characters have a distinct disadvantage in that opponents can break out of stun much more easily before the slow character can reach them, but it’s still a unique system.

And that’s really the best thing about Fighting Masters. Much like how early manga was by necessity a test bed for all sorts of crazy and wild ideas, Fighting Masters tried to be a fighting game in its own unique way. In fact, I think that the engine itself has plenty of potential, and if only it was a little deeper and provided more options for the players and the characters, it could have its own cult following.

Anyway, enjoy the final boss of Fighting Masters as well as its ending. Valgasu is a very, very frustrating boss, and even though I beat him, you can tell that he can quickly turn the tables. Evident here is Valgasu’s dream of conquering the galaxy with his Mad Skillz on the court, worthy of Magic Johnson, Clyde Drexler, or the All-Star Monstars. Also of note is the text scroll upon Valgasu’s defeat, which provides some of that good old nostalgic video game Engrish that has sadly diminished ever since Japanese and American pop culture have begun to cross over.

Rating: SUPLEX 50T