I think you’re definitely right, if anything, about “things that get in the way.” But it’s such fertile ground for new ideas. In some ways Utena is problematic was its straightforwardness (if one can possibly conceive someone saying this about Utena…) and thus people could just take it and run with it however they wish. Not so with Simoun, so much. Its coherent staging of events and settings necessarily says something with definiteness, and I think no matter if one can cite it for anything, it is a life-enriching experience to enjoy and think about Simoun.

On Motoko as a feminist icon, I have an article I copied recently that made a very nice case. There are so many ways to argue for a character being empowering that it’s a win-win situation, I think.

(Deleted a short rant about academia; I need to start pop culture studies before making a judgement on that.) But, speaking from a position of some frustration, I must disagree that Simoun could ever be afforded the reputation Utena does for being a text that really begs for analysis. The theoretical elements simply aren’t as obvious or self-conscious, and there are far too many things that get in the way instead, one of them being body parts and the suspicious visual style. I can see one way to get at an interesting topic, but that would involve steering away from the anime itself, because somehow it’s really difficult to compare Simoun to any existing text without the differences becoming glaringly obvious. One would ideally be armed with a working knowledge of the World Wars, Japanese culture, and the Japanese language in order to do such an analysis reasonably well.

I guess what I’m getting at is my opinion, still coalescing, that a stunning myriad of skills would have to conjunct in order to do anime justice. Something’s always lacking.

Well, that’s a big and potentially nerve-wracking question. I’m with the great scholars who remind us that books (and by extension other media) should be aids to thinking. You can read all the books in a field (or see every anime ever made) but if you never take time to think or synthesize interesting ideas you might as well have never seen them. But it’s just as possible to read one book or watch one anime (depending on what it is) and fill a notebook with thoughts.

What frustrates me is when scholars use new pop culture examples as fodder to “emperically prove” some old argument that’s been around forever. That’s when you get into trouble. If you want to propose interesting ideas one text is enough. If you want to make a systematic statement it’s not enough to watch a few texts or even a lot of texts, you have to start with a convincing methodology, which very few social scientists do.