Neither Generically Exceptional Nor Exceptionally Generic

Posted on by

See if the following descriptions sound familiar to you:

1) A young boy uses his mysterious abilities to fight against the forces of darkness alongside his close friends. Though he’s short on brains, he’s long on potential, and as the series progresses you see him gaining more and more power at incredible rates.

2) When a young girl meets an adorable magical creature, she is transformed into a beautiful and striking figure. Together with her friends, she fights the forces of darkness while still finding time to have fun with her friends and care for her parents’ shop.

Most likely, the two images that popped into your head were the most generic shounen fighting anime and generic mahou shoujo anime ever , respectively. However, the two shows I was actually describing are Kekkaishi and Heartcatch Precure.

Kekkaishi and Heartcatch Precure are both series that are firmly rooted in all the tropes one expects out of them. Kekkaishi involves fighting progressively more powerful opponents as our heroes improve their abilities to keep up. The male main character has a lot of “power” while the female protagonist has “finesse.” In Heartcatch, there’s bright pastels and an entire flower motif and transformation sequences. Both series involve Monsters of the Week. But while they are definitely “generic” in a sense, I really believe both to be pretty exceptional, and it mainly has to do with the way both series approach characterization.

In both cases, the strength of the characterization stems from the interaction between the central characters. For Kekkaishi, it’s the subdued and yet progressive romance of Yoshimori and Tokine. For Heartcatch, it’s the budding friendship between Tsubomi and Erika.  And when you look at both, you see just how well one character complements the other, the way their similarities and differences provide sparks of clever interaction. It’s what sets them apart from other series in their respective genres; the characters feel significantly more fleshed out and three-dimensional than the usual fare, and in a way that I think people who don’t religiously follow shounen fighting or mahou shoujo can appreciate.

At the same time however, I think that for people who don’t really look for that sort of thing, both series can still come across as incredibly generic. And for people who outright despise the genres of shounen fighting and mahou shoujo, no amount of smart writing in these shows can make up for the fact that what aggravates them about shows like these are still present in full force. That is, unless the thing that aggravates them is a lack of good characterization.

The Elite Fourdinators: Pokemon Contest and What Could Have Been

Posted on by

Ever since the first games, the Pokemon franchise has tried to include side quests and activities, things that change the game from the classic “beat 8 gym leaders and fight the Elite Four.” There’s the “end of game” content that only happens once you become champion. There have been ideas like the Safari Zone and the Bug-Catching Contest, which were alternative methods of catching Pokemon, as well as alternate venues for battling such as the Battle Tower and Battle Frontier, both of which function as a sort of arena for “advanced” players. But it was in Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald that they introduced a concept which came the closest to being a true alternative from the gym badge system: Pokemon Contests.

In Pokemon Contests, elemental types don’t really matter. Nor do things like attack power and hit points. Unlike the Safari Zone, the Battle Frontier, and all of those other extra features, the Pokemon Contest system is the only competitive activity which was so different from the rest of the game that almost none of the traditional rules applied to the way contests worked.

The goal of a Pokemon Contest is to win the votes of a panel of judges in a specific category, such as “Beauty” or “Intelligence,” and in order to do so you must have your Pokemon be more appealing than the others. To this end, every attack has its own unique features and functions entirely separate from battling and trying to KO your opponent. For instance, the attack “Flamethrower,” which is a Fire-type attack in battles, is a move which shows off “Beauty” in a Pokemon Contest. Contest Pokemon have to be fed strict diets and be groomed properly to win the visual portion of the competitions. They eventually even included dancing.

It might sound pretty boring compared to the intensity of taking on your rival in a flurry of lightning and sandstorms, and this might even be the reason that Pokemon Contests are non-existent in Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver, but the big thing that Contests had that previous side games in Pokemon didn’t was 1) rewards and 2) increasing levels of difficulty. Instead of getting Gym Badges, you get Contest Ribbons, and as you go from city to city, the Contests get more challenging. In a way, it could be seen as an alternate path to the Gym system, something that wasn’t so much a game within a game as it was another activity entirely. It might even be perceived as something on par with battling. In fact, the anime tried to push this idea, by having characters like Haruka (May) and Hikari (Dawn) decide to forego the path of collecting Gym Badges and have them focus on obtaining Ribbons. The only problem is that in the anime, Contests resemble battling with a somewhat different flair, and the games themselves don’t give any rewards other than the Ribbons, essentially meaning that it’s still considered “inferior” to hitting the Gyms.

I think that Pokemon Contests could have become a really viable alternative to Gym Battles, and that it should be an option at the start of games to go on the path of a “Pokemon Coordinator,” the term the series uses to denote people who have devoted themselves to Pokemon Contests. There should be personalities you get to know and the opportunity to practice against opponents. Perhaps winning should net you TMs that are rare and powerful within the context of Contests. There should be an equivalent of the Elite Four to take down, and when you win over them, there should be an ending. Most importantly, you should be able to play against your friends.

I understand that it might be virtually impossible to try and balance two completely disparate systems running off the same basics in the same game. I also think the concept of the Pokemon Contest could stand to have some tweaking, such as making Type matter more, or perhaps even taking a cue from the anime and having it come down to battles where you’re judged on not only your ability to take down your opponent but to look good doing so. But I really believe that, done properly, Pokemon Contests could truly add another layer to the world of Pokemon by giving kids a different kind of opportunity to go off on an adventure.

Here’s hoping to their return in Generation V.

Pokemon types don’t really matter. Nor do things like attack power and hit points.

Do You Truly Know What It Means to Draw the Right Card?

Posted on by

Last week while taking the train home, I saw a kid with his head buried in some kind of Bakugan guide, and it got me thinking. The first thing was that it reminded me of when I used to sit on the same train with a printed Pokemon pokedex, poring over move lists and trying to imagine new movesets and strategies. It filled me with a sense of nostalgia. The second thing was that it got me thinking about the future of anime.

Bakugan, one of those collecting and battling game franchises designed to separate kids from their money, has an anime to act as a half-hour commercial for the product. It’s one of the latest in a long line of merchandising engines, from Pokemon to Digimon to Yugioh to Beyblade and so on. The shows can still be pretty decent; there’s no illusion about their true purpose, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be entertaining.

That said, what if someone made a collecting and battling anime that wasn’t there primarily to push a product? “Impossible!” you might say. And to some extent you’d be right. Shows are made because they have some kind of chance at making money. But my response is, give it a decade.

In those ten years, the kids who grew up with those trading card games and battle tops will be getting older and older. They’ll be adults working full-time jobs and looking back fondly on their childhoods. It would mirror the progression mecha anime has had, with shows now being made for adults and having more advanced and mature concepts. In this situation, a collecting and battling anime which really takes an artistic and philosophical look at the nature of collecting and battling anime would be perfect.

It could look at the nature of probability and psychology. Perhaps it would ask what it means to play a game where you must collect to improve your chances of winning. There could be legitimately well-written characters and a skeptical eye, but still a love letter to the genres of TCGs and monster battles. It would really master and perfect the sense of timing and tension that would make the heroes’ actions seem all the more worthwhile. Actual rules to the game are optional.

It would be the Gurren-Lagann of collecting and battling anime.

Ka-Chinka

Posted on by

Danny Choo, that most famous of bloggers who has managed to turn wacky articles about Japan and PVC figures into a stable career, has announced the formation of his own animation studio, “Mirai Studios.” Their first planned work is an explicitly moe show drawn from the same vein as K-On! or Ichigo Mashimaro or So Ra No Wo To, about a squad of cute female firefighters called Chinka. There’s even a preview trailer out for your convenience.

Potentially this could be a good thing. Danny Choo has money, the anime industry needs money, maybe he can pump some much-needed capital into the system.

On the other hand, I see a big problem with the whole Chinka thing: the whole production seems practically insulting to moe fans. When you take in the basic concept, the character designs, the presentation, it all leads to the idea that moe fans are easy to manipulate, that all you have to do is push the right buttons and they’ll come flocking to you, ready to buy whatever merchandise you throw out. And I’m not saying that merchandising a popular show or having a show built on merchandising is wrong either, but with Chinka you can almost see the piano wires and checklists that are the backbone of this whole concept. They have merchandise available for the show before it even begins, and the trailer is actually rubbing your face in the fact that it has some kind of tsundere or yandere-type. It doesn’t even need to say anything else about the character, as if all you need is the switch and fans will step right up. It knows you want more, and is glad to give it, for the right price.

With shows like Hidamari Sketch, K-On!, and Lucky Star, even if they are designed to appeal to a moe audience and have shameless promotion sewn directly into their very souls, the initial impression these shows gave even before episode 1 hit was that people who worked on these series were trying to entertain and not just fall exactly into what moe fans think of as “moe anime” and doing so on the most shallow of levels.

That all said, I of course have yet to actually see Chinka beyond the aforementioned preview. If it turns out to be a good show, I’ll be glad to be proven wrong. Please prove me wrong, Danny Choo, for everyone’s sake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqjxmFZC-5Y&feature=player_embedded

The Threat of Emasculation in the World of Fictional Icons Beyond Manga

Posted on by

For many years now, manga has undergone a curious transformation. Where once comic magazines devoted space to stories which taught boys how to be men and provided ample role models for how to live, that innocent desire has been corrupted by a display of weak-willed, wobbly-kneed pretty boys who fight not to save the world but to draw power away from men and place their entertainment in the hands of the opposite sex.

Originally, even though I could only shake my head at the manga aisle at the Barnes and Noble, I at least was confident in the knowledge that this breakdown of integrity in fiction was limited to what we’d call “entertainment.” Manga, television shows, books, it was as if the ovarial agenda was happy to willfully quarantine itself to the realm of fictional tales. But I realize now that I was simply too naive, and that the attack goes well into the realm of iconic figures who exist in our daily imaginations.

Look at this man here. You might think he’s the main character in the newest Jump comic, or perhaps his clean-shaven look and gentle eyes mean he’s the latest teen heartthrob. But sadly, truly sadly, you are incorrect. This is the Brawny Man.

Looking back, the clues were obvious. Paper towels absorb the messes of kitchens and bathrooms and store a record of human activity. Likewise, manga pages absorb the ink from the artists’ pens, also resulting in a similar record of human activity. Paper towel rolls and manga magazines are essentially cousins, and if the integrity of one can be damaged, the other is just as vulnerable.

It’s a likely possibility your mind blocked out the first image I showed you. For your benefit I have included a picture of the previous Brawny Man to help transition your mind into the harsh reality of the present. Comparing the two, it is clear that at some point  the powers that be decided that the Brawny Man was too great a symbol of all that is good and decent in the world, and so took steps to correct this “error.” They were threatened by his full mustache and his rugged looks, and concluded that the only solution was to begin depriving him of the very essence of his influence.

The new Brawny Man is still fairly masculine, but the fact that he escaped still well on the side of the Y-chromosome is attributed more to his inherent fortitude than anything else. A lesser male character would have transformed into a female baboon. A visual kei member would have found new life as a sentient petticoat. It is an ordeal few can survive even once.

Let us pray for the Brawny Man. Though he may now be too malformed and misshapen to ever inspire a generation of true men, we must still accept and forgive him.

Twitter and the Control of Conversation Space

Posted on by

I’m sure that tons of people have commented on the idea of Twitter, what makes it unique, why it has been embraced where other forms of social media have failed. I, however, have not read any of those comments, and so everything I say is my own thought, even if it overlaps immensely with common knowledge.

When Twitter first started getting popular, many others including myself questioned the usefulness of it. We already had IMs, chatrooms, blogs, messageboards, maybe Usenet, and dozens of other ways to communicate with others and do that “online social networking” thing if need be. And when I first got my Twitter account, I did so because I was tired of not being able to read interesting conversations that were happening on it. Inevitably however, I started to participate as well. Not greatly, mind you. I still don’t tweet nearly as much as some of my contemporaries, but it’s more than I expected I would, kind of like how I didn’t expect myself to still be blogging after all this time. There’s a niche Twitter fulfills, and I think I know what it is.

Twitter’s most defining characteristic is likely its 140-character limit, which depending on your language can mean a lot of space (Japanese) or very little (English). This makes it a perfect match for cell phone texting and its usual 160-character limit and is part of why it is used by those who are a little less tech-savvy, but I think the 140-character limit is only a piece of why Twitter has caught on. The real appeal of Twitter in my opinion is that it is easy to control the space of conversation while leaving it open for others to jump in.

With Twitter, you follow who you want to by saying that you will follow them. It is an active choice to see the remarks of others. However, it is not in your control for other people to see your comments unless you purposely make your account private. However, not being the default choice means a lot here. Twitter can be both public and private at the same time, and it is up to the user to determine the boundaries of each. And by doing so, you have a situation where a conversation can begin one-on-one, but then another person can interject and deliver his or her point, and then another, and then another. But to those first two people engaging in that dialogue, it can still exist as a one-on-one conversation. What is being said and the scope of the discussion changes depending on who is reading and who is participating and who wishes to see the participation of others.

This is where the 140-character limit really comes in. It makes everything you say on Twitter bite-sized and easier to digest. While discussions can go on for a while, the point at which a person chooses to step in is in reply to one of those 140-word tweets, as opposed to say, a five-paragraph-long comment. Your words are already broken down into specific chunks, and so another person on Twitter can zero in on that, and while their reply can be in response to everything you’ve said so far, they have chosen to reply to that specific tweet and bring emphasis to it.

So basically, Twitter conversations can exist at multiple sizes simultaneously due to the brevity in encourages and the way the users can determine in their own space the number of participants. It is both a closed discussion and an open one, and yet your choices also do not impact the choices of others for the most part. There is near-total control, but that powerlessness over others is also what allows it to expand. And unlike chatrooms or forums you do not have to opt to ignore the words of another, as it is the default. Twitter is as comfortable as you make it.

What to Buy, Man? Why, a Mahjong Set of Course!

Posted on by

The March gathering of the US Professional Mahjong League was possibly the most exciting yet.

For those who don’t know the USPML is devoted to playing Japanese-style mahjong, which is probably best known for the ability to declare a hand as “ready” or “riichi” in order to score extra points and to clearly reveal yourself as the aggressor. While I was without my usual accomplice on this occasion, I was joined by thedigitalbug, who I believe had heard of these mahjong sessions from my previous posts on the subject.

We played two games total, one east + south game and a quick east-only game after that. The first game was quite intense, with people declaring ron and tsumo all over the place, and not a single round ending due to all the tiles being drawn. I was the first to lose points in the match, getting hit for a decent amount, but my fortune was reversed as I managed to win using a high scoring hand which turned the tables of the match and put me in the lead. Actually, at first I thought my hand was worth less than it actually was, misreading my “junchan” (All sets have at least a 1 or 9 in them) hand as the similar and less valuable “chanta” (All sets have at least a 1, 9, or “honor” kanji on them). On top of that, by declaring riichi and winning instantly off of it, my hand’s score increased further. In total, I netted 12,000 points. To give an idea of scale, for these sessions we start with 29,000 points each and games typically use 25,000.

By the final round I was about 17,000 points in the lead, and the other players were scrambling for second place. With such a comfortable lead, I could have very well ended the game by intentionally dealing into another player’s hand, but thanks to a mix of luck, greed, good reading of the game, and even a fortunate accident, I managed to end the game on a very high note.

For this round, I started my hand with two 8-su (bamboo), which was the bonus “dora” tile. If you have seen Akagi, the “dora” tile was the centerpiece in the final battle between young Akagi and the blind player Ichikawa (in that instance it was the pure white “haku” tile). Seeing another 8-su discarded, I called for it, which, while improving my potential score, also limited its freedom by removing the only pair I had in my hand. Having a pair in your hand is a vital part of winning at mahjong, and I could have very well thrown my only opportunity away.

Things were looking good however, especially because I had two of the “south” wind tiles which in sets of three are worth extra, provided you are playing in the south round, or alternately if you’re sitting in the south position. Both of these criteria applied to me at the time so I would score off of both of these if I won. However, when I looked down, I realized my opponent had already discarded a south tile and I had simply failed to notice it. Silently cursing, I waited for the next opportunity, hoping that the last south tile (there are four total in a set) would fly out of someone’s hand. As luck turns out, the same player who had discarded it previously believed it to be a safe tile and decided to toss it out again. Seizing the opportunity, I called for it, and was one step closer to completing my hand. Now the open parts of my hand looked truly threatening, and the other players were surely aware of it.

In the end though, they were unable to stop me, and with a shout of “Ron!” I won off of a player’s discard. My hand ended up being the following:

Toitoiho (All triplets)
Honitsu (Psuedo-flush)
Bakaze (Round wind)
Jikaze (Seat wind)
Dora 3 (3 bonus tiles)

Which all together looks like this:

A demigodly hand

In total, this hand was worth a “Baiman,” or 18,000 points. Winning like this was a rare and wonderful feeling, like I was actually in a mahjong anime and lightning and thunder had come crashing down as I revealed my hand. Actually, I once again did not initially notice just how much the hand was worth, and had to have someone tell me its true value.

What’s funny about this win was that had I paid more attention in the match, I would have probably called on the first discarded south wind tile, which would have then changed the flow of the match considerably. It was possibly my brief lack of concentration which let me win so gloriously.

After some mutual handshakes and a quick break, we started the next game. Here, I did not do so well, scoring dead last, but I did manage to get one good hand in, and I had better concentration than last time. Previously, I had made the mistake of drinking too much soda, which dehydrated me and wore me down and hampered my ability to focus, but this time I went with a non-caffeinated root beer as well as a bottle of water. I still lost, but at least felt alert the whole way through.

I had a great time, as I do every time, and I don’t mean that simply because I won so hard that I accidentally impregnated a woman half-way around the world. It just reminded me that while online mahjong is certainly fun, the direct human element is irreplaceable.

As for the Pringles, they were available once again, but this time I ate them with a pair of chopsticks. Yes, it was rad.

You Get Off to… THOSE Drawings?

Posted on by

Occasionally I’ve run into people who have trouble understanding the concept of being sexually attracted to drawn images. In terms of anime fandom, this often comes in two forms, either disagreeing with a certain character design style or disagreeing with the very notion that anime characters look human enough to even warrant attraction. The latter appears to happen with people unfamiliar with anime and its depictions of sexuality, while the former, which I want to focus on, seems to occur when people from different areas of fandom encounter each other. “I don’t know how you could find Sayla Mass hot,” the Evangelion fan might say to the Gundam enthusiast, who will then fire off that Ayanami Rei is too anorexic and not like a “real woman” at all.

Some of the contention comes from the changes in prevailing trends in anime and manga art styles. For example, younger fans might not understand why other older fans think a certain character is “hot,” while the older fan may see newer characters and accuse them of looking freakish. And neither side is “wrong” in this case, their preferences are just different. Who’s to say which is closer to “human attractiveness?”

And so all of this recently got me thinking about the very concept of depicting humans sexually, and just how subjective it can be. Particularly, it reminded me of classic Japanese erotic woodblock prints known as “shunga.”


Artist: Miyagawa Isshou

Though they clearly do not look like anime or manga characters from the past fifty years, the women in shunga do share something in common with modern erotic stories such as Bible Black in that they all have faces which could not possibly exist in reality, but are still rendered depictions of a beautiful face concurrent with the trends of the time.

The other thing shunga has in common with erotic manga is that both are clearly designed for masturbatory purposes. I’ve intentionally chosen an image that’s relatively tame, but a trip to the NSFW wiki entry on the subject will make the “utility” of shunga that much more obvious. While you’re on the page , you might also notice that it’s not only the faces that are “unrealistic;” over-sized genitalia for both men and women and torsos contorted at angles physically impossible are common. While photographs did not exist in that period, they could have very well drawn people in more realistic poses, and yet they chose not to.

If you’re attracted to anime characters but at the end of the day look at shunga and think, “Man, I have no idea how anyone could find this hot,” then I think that can be a very good thing. On some level, it means that you can relate to those who have trouble with the idea of finding certain character designs sexy (or even the idea that drawn images of humans can be sexy at all without being photo-realistic) and so at the very least promotes a degree of understanding.

Spreading Cubeesm, Finally

Posted on by

I’ve actually been meaning to post about this for almost two years now, but have never gotten around to it until now.

The above image is from the site Cubeecraft, which provides free papercraft models of characters from anime and manga and other areas of nerd popular culture. While I haven’t taken the opportunity to construct any myself, which I understand limits the authority of my opinion a great deal, I’ve seen them in action firsthand. The really great thing about Cubeecrafts is that, unlike many other papercraft which require a lot of precision and know-how and exact details, Cubeecrafts are beautifully simplistic and easy to construct. They don’t even require any tape!

So naturally when it came to picking an image to lead this post, I had to go with my namesake.

So check it out when you have the chance. Having a color printer helps of course, but is not absolutely necessary. Also, I’m well aware that these things have been featured on Adult Swim in addition to Cartoon Network proper, so you’ve likely heard about it well before I ever got off my lazy ass and made this post, but I wanted to do this, just in case.

Postignorism

Posted on by

I like the postmodernist idea that when given a work of art,  fiction or anything with any degree of abstraction, everyone interprets it and enjoys it their own way. The artists have power but so does the audience. That said however, I do feel that there is a distinct danger in becoming too wrapped up in your own interpretation, particularly at the expense of what is actually there.

In the case of anime fandom, this often takes the form of watching something through the lens of esoteric criteria such as a set of rules for enjoying (or not enjoying) a series established by a fan community for a fan community. It’s okay to watch Inuyasha because you really like Sango, but it’s another matter entirely to judge a given episode’s merit almost entirely on percentage of Sango content or that the series would be objectively improved by more Sango screen time. Shipping can often become a similar beast. Having a favorite pairing is very reasonable even in series without a hint of romance, but the game changes when a series’ ability to provide ammo for that specific coupling is considered the most vital criteria of success.

There is a delicate balance in terms of arguing for the sake of the creator vs the sake of the audience. It may sound like I’m faulting the viewers for not going along with what the creators have laid out, but I understand that creators are not infallible gods even when it comes to their own works, and what they think happens in their own story can play out very differently on the page and screen. I encourage people to really understand their own tastes and to not treat their personal criteria as frivolous, but at the same time if your rubric for enjoyment is too narrow, then it starts to reach a point where what you’re demanding from a work of fiction is that it caters to you, even at the expense of the work itself. On some level it’s not even about like or dislike, good or bad, but rather making an opinion on what’s there rather than what doesn’t exist.

I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to tell people they need to enjoy their shows a certain way, as I don’t believe in that. However, what I do believe in is having some sense of how you approach fiction and to acknowledge the whole of the work when thinking about it, and then taking steps from there to express your mode of enjoyment. Indulging your fantasy is okay as long as you don’t confuse it for the “reality” of the story. If you’re going to be ignoring an aspect of a work, at least be somewhat aware that you’re ignoring it.