Humanity Has Declined 3 – We Are the Fairies

I have read more than one person’s reaction to Jintai 3 and complained about the lack of fairies. I think that’s pretty obvious why they’re not present–so far in 2 episodes, the fairies represents the institution in which our organizational/technological complex has become sufficiently…complicated to be understood by the public. The phenomenon of doujinshi publishing, however, is something easy to understand. If there had to be some fairies, it would be to explain to us how we got paper and electricity to furnish Y’s publishing operations in the first place. I don’t think we need any fairies to demonstrate the irony of Y’s actions, or to make a solid critique.

I thought episode 2 was tops in terms of actual humor, but episode 3 struck me as the one that is actually most interesting so far. The story begins with Y visiting our Main Character, explaining her assignment to create or continue to construct some kind of monument to bank the collective creation of human race in terms of history, culture and technology. The discussion quickly went to the direction of medium of storage, interesting enough. Why medium of storage? I don’t know, but if I were to guess it is to both lay the groundwork for what comes next, but also it is a very otaku-sai kind of thing to talk about.

The more important takeaway in that segment was how collectively it is de-prioritized over actually useful things and only idle workers (eg., Y) is sent to work on this project. In other words, it’s not something viewed as critical or important. To me that is already kind of ironic, if we were to assume fairies are sort of like symbolic human beings.

Y’s entire doujinshi movement thing is pretty cool in the sense that Main Character explained it to us as to how it is a way culture is created and propagated. There’s an angle you could take in there, in that scene; we can amuse ourselves in light of the nature of control and commercialism in popular media, and the real interests behind them, in parallel with what Y is going through. But that aside, we see the horde of rich girls that visits the village for their version of the Comic Market; the adults looked on with largely apathy, in which reflects society’s attitude to the same–as long as they don’t cause a problem and can sustain themselves. It’s just not really all that important. It’s is kind of amusing in that it is similarly making the same statement about the effort of collecting and archiving mankind’s cultural information. In other words, the job Y was assigned in the first place was equal or less important than her little sideshow. And nobody cares about either.

The thing that got me laughing was when the thicker, more comprehensive and competitive BL crap that gets published eventually caused a problem to the distribution network, and the couriers stopped distributing them as shipping these books were negatively impacting their ability to ship goods of greater importance such as food and basic supplies. Let’s put aside the innate joke about muscular men shipping BL anthologies for a second, and realize what it is actually saying. Given this was the only point of contention between “the real world” and the nonsense Y was doing, I thought it was worth a second of thought.

I’m just as weary of these otaku in-joke sort of thing as anyone else; for sure I consume as much as anyone else. Jintai’s treatment, though, does not beat around the bush in my opinion, and it hits the spot. I’m not sure if people sincerely enjoy waiting in line for 12 hours just to buy cartoon porn, or are they just people who’s never really been. I mean, I’ve never been and I don’t believe for a second Comiket does not have these fundamental problems that any organization and gathering of its kind would likely have at some point. In light of the troubles we encountered in the first two episodes, the fact that it’s making a joke about doujinshi is already kind of a question mark. The least it could do is to be honest about it.

Times like this I think about the funny media stories on big release dates about hit on productivity in the work force as people jet out of school and work to catch a blockbuster film or something. I guess that is just another way how humanity has declined.