Category Archives: Franchises

July 4, 2012

Mouretsu Pirates

By omo

One of the reasons why I hit myself for camping the autograph line too much at AX 2012 is because I wanted to stalk down Sato and talk shop about Mouretsu Pirates. I also want to talk about Flower of Rinne but maybe we can write about that after season 2.

There is this silly irony going on, too, because the last episode aired in Japan during AX. If it aired on Thursday I could have camped out at his press gig and filed questions there, on Friday. But by the time it aired Saturday AM Pacific time, I only had one shot to talk about it, and it’s at his autograph line. It would’ve been the best if they just screened episode 26 at the con and did a Q&A right afterwards. (I guess that is one major AX fail on the part of AX?)

So yes, there’s the movie announcement. So yes, I have questions about the way the last episode collates the plot thread in the last anime-original arc. I also think that one cosplayer I saw in line dressed up as Marika has it right: I too rather like the anime-original stuff.

The thing is, episode 25 was just so good. There was no way the arc could end in just one episode while topping 25. And to some extent that was the same with Nadesico as well, except that one actually capped a different narrative thread in the last episode, resulting in that inter-spatial spat and kiss. I’m not so hopeful about the announced movie as a result. It’s wiser to just take what’s on the table.

Author is a little slow on the uptake but he is correct–all those calligraphic end cards are direct works of director Sato. He signs off using that little character doohicky. If I recall correctly the voice actress for Marika also writes for a particular episode earlier on, but other than that slide, every one is a Tatsuo Sato work.

Some other burning questions I might ask:

  • What’s up with the name? Aside from the people who call it “Mouretsu Uchuu Kaizoku” I think the other permutations seem kind of interesting, wondering if there’s anything behind it.
  • The movie? The movie.
  • How do you depict three dimensional fleet combat?
  • What’s up with the chef’s sons? And what is up with those giants?
  • How do you deal with FTL transmission of the pirate songs?
  • Isn’t the final battle just a scaled-up version of the yacht club’s little mission?

Well, it can continue on. Maybe it’s easier if I just wait until the movie becomes available.

PS. Is it me or in the past 5 days every blog I follow (for example, Anipages) updated several times? Is there a mandate to update your blog this past week even if your average blog post/wk rate is below 1? What is this?

7 comments | posted in Modern Visual Culture, Mouretsu Pirates, Nadesico

June 24, 2012

Fate/Zero Goes “To The Beginning”

By omo

I’m still savoring the feeling of enjoying the ride to the end. When the credit scroll hit in episode 25 I was like, that was nice.

Oh, spoiler warning for Fate/Zero, obvious. I’ll break this into a few different parts demarcated by bold titles.

Continue reading

2 comments | posted in Fate, Modern Visual Culture

June 19, 2012

Nodoka’s Unfeeling, Fleeting Dream

By omo

It all started with this tweet. What Kurogane said wasn’t important, but it highlighted a scene in Saki Achiga-hen episode 10 that had several interpretations. It looks like this:

Continue reading

7 comments | posted in Modern Visual Culture, Saki

June 15, 2012

Upotte Is the Definition of New Fanservice

By omo

For years I have been referring to generally things that pleases the fans as fanservice. This includes not only the sexually alluring sort of fanservice, but basically all sorts of things that kind of juts out there in a particular narrative beyond boobies and booties. The reality is that late-night TV anime is largely founded on the premise of giving the fans what they want, so we have a lot of shows over the years that have this broad definition of fanservice at its core. I think we have seen some shifts over the past few years, though, and now we are kind of hitting it with more authority and in a more complete sort of way.

The concept behind Upotte is basically you have these magically morphed assault rifles as middle-school girls, both sharing human and weapon characteristics. In a way their human appearances is kind of the black curtain that hides what the hell is going on; we’re taking them as is, characters, and not as some kind of mysterious creatures that are both sentient and are assault rifles. It’s not like they look like guns with arms and legs, nor do they actually possess any character design elements that can be liken to rifles; just jokes about underwear and character personalities, and occasionally they can overheat.

As representation of assault rifles, admittedly, the girls were more like high-level concepts–caricatures of these guns in the eyes of gun otaku–rather than the weapons themselves. At least that’s how I reconcile the fact that these girls actually use the guns they represent in the show to play their various life-and-(not-)death games.

Of course, the fact that these guns are middle-school girls create a pretty convenient vehicle for fanservice of the boobies-and-booties kind. Actually the show kind of ups this angle by including a large cast that show up alongside with the main four characters. We actually don’t see the main group showing off, so to that extent the Upotte anime doesn’t really push it. I imagine it doesn’t need to given its specific niche.

Underneath all this, though, is another vehicle for fanservice–that the girls are just, as far as from what we can see, normal girls. Aside from their weird characteristics like unable to die from gun shots (a necessity purely to facilitate the need to have gunplay (pun unintended) in a gun otaku anime), when any onlooker sees the cast of Upotte they probably will be none the wiser. Maybe the elf or animal ears hint at their non-human origins, but last time I checked elves and animal girls can still be shot and are not pure representation of high-level ideas. Well, seeing just the setup for “normal” fanservice is just as large of a cloak for what’s underneath.

What kind of tickles me is how the girls in Upotte are ideas for other ideas. Not in the sense that fictional characters are ideas, but these characters are just representation of ideas that are bundled and “moe-ified” natures of the weapons they represent. It’s kind of like the “database animal” thing, except now we’re talking about wholly foreign and kind-of incompatible elements. Thongs for skeleton stocks? I mean, yeah. I said it earlier, but Upotte uses this clean-cut “let’s not get too deep into it” approach to do the human-weapon merger. It provided a fairly plausible bridge to suspense our beliefs, I suppose.

In likewise manner, Upotte approaches the “real fanservice” part of the show, the firefights, in a “let’s not get too deep into it” style. I say this is fanservice because they’ve now gone out of their way, out of the mold of moe anime, and put some good scenarios where the students play some rough games of airsoft, except with weapons that have the right characteristics of actual guns. It’s pretty darn good fantasy fulfillment.

If we look back to Cat Shit One, maybe we can see this coming. Well, that one is a little bit literal; but for military and gun otaku, that’s kind of what we want out of our entertainment: 30 minutes or so of military action with people fighting using rifles and other conventional arms. It’s like a video game. Upotte tries to deliver that, and it was at least successful in having that content present and highlighted as climaxes in the show.  To put it in perspective, the story of K-ON or Soranowoto each has some overarching paradigm in which the narrative follows. Epic spidertank battles or high-energy live concerts, from the perspectives of those paradigms and themes of the story, are fanservice. In Upotte we came for some cool guns and gunplay, and we got plenty of that, because the whole show is pitched around those aspects and it knows that’s what we want. Rather than to go neck deep into philosophy of deadly weapons and the debate about civilian ownership of these things, for example, Upotte knows better. You can kind of see it in the last episode, but really?

Anyways, TL;DR: Upotte is double-barreled fanservice, and the whole thing is designed for this purpose.

PS. In the era of Kickstarter, CSO would probably thrive, don’t you think? IDA needs to get their butts on it pronto.

PPS. If fanservice is extraneous, and the whole anime is about fanservice, wouldn’t fanservice in fanservice anime no longer be fanservice?

PPPS. These name-branded guns, if they weren’t core to the course of human history in the 20th century, they are almost as good as advertising-generated popular culture (think of all the name brands of instruments in K-ON)?

6 comments | posted in Modern Visual Culture, Upotte!!

June 10, 2012

That iDOLM@STER Panel, Decontexualization

By omo

There are a lot of things you can say about iM@S fans but one thing undeniably so are their tendencies to go out of their way for it. I mean, now I can say that I went to a con just to attend an iM@S fan panel, as that was the con experience of AnimeNext 2012 for me. I also dropped by the dealer’s room and artist alley this year (what a weird setup) and said hi to some people, but this con is like, in my back yard. I actually have some humorous stories about it I could share if you ever run into me in the meat space.

Any any rate, I didn’t even really wanted to go. Berryz Koubou was the one guest(s) at the con that I was interested in, but I was also entirely unable to go to their programming due to a variety of obligations. I didn’t know a thing about this iM@S panel besides what was provided by the con website–“ARE WE LADY” and it’s got some generic but pro-feeling text about what iM@S is over here. I didn’t even know there was an iM@S panel until I read on twitter a few days I had to jet out of town earlier in the week. I only knew that this panel happened at a time that I can make.

Even after so many hours after the fact, I still have a lingering feeling to say “woah, an iM@S panel. Really?”

After the panel I did a minimum amount of stalking and here are the two LADIES (I mean, I always felt weird to say “I AM LADY” when I’m not, but anyway that isn’t the case for worry here) who ran the panel. They were nice enough to drop the usual social network tags to make my life easy. One of them was dressed as Makoto. (The other one gave me a tag on her imported 3DS! I think.)

The panel itself was mostly 50 minutes (out of 60) of overview of the basics. It started with some cute quiz questions to get people pay attention to the presentation–who are the voices for Yukiho (for some reason they used Hase Yurina instead of Ochiai, but w/e, there was a brief comment about her eroge/ero histories which was kind of not relevant? Maybe?), the one girl who had video game as a hobby (at least on the official sheets), the new studio in Dearly Stars, and the one idol removed from being playable in SP. Then it went through each of the main idol girls; the Makoto cosplayer identified Makoto as tops but Takane as top voice. The other girl (which I will just say Nyachan for now) is definitely the more avid player and prefers the likes of Chihaya and Haruka. Actually I forgot who she said exactly [Update: Mami was her favorite.] but it seemed that she presented the material in that way.

There’s also a feeling like they read 4chan or something. I probably should’ve asked which iM@S forums they read. Maybe this one? I mean, there was a slide for Nonowa and her kins. But the panel went through page-by-page of what each character and each game was, and the two panelists shared what their impressions were, what they really liked, and what they didn’t. Nyachan pointed out a lot of those little giggle things, like Takane’s place of origin or where the Nonowa doll was, stuff like that. Amusingly, they avoided Cinderella Girls entirely until someone brought it up as a question at the end. One of the girls actually played it! She brought up the gimped foreign aspect, and how it’s really just a tedious game otherwise. That discussion did bring up the complete gacha situation the game is in so that is pretty worthwhile.

There were a bunch of iM@S bros at the panel (out of about 27 people, this constitutes about 4-5), as you’d expect, and one of them did the usual loudmouth fanboy thing, even if it is reasonably so. Just that I couldn’t get a question in. As for the panel proper, I think I even learned something: that Xbox 360 Live for You thing–that’s pretty cool. And it explains a lot.

As for being LADIES, Hisui phrased it best–it’s all kind of oddish. It’s good and all and it doesn’t really matter, but the whole thing reminds me of this again. And in some ways this is why a girl can ask KOTOKO if she’s played any of the eroge her songs were used for, and actually give KOTOKO an awkward smile in, uh, the other way. Because, really, does it matter if 90% of iM@S fans in Japan are dudes? Or that there’s a healthy contingent of female galge gamers oversea?

Well, it’s good to know there are at least a few cosplaying girls who like this stuff. I would be stoked to see something like this at Otakon or the like. Because it sure beats me trying to do it (and it will spare you watching me trying to do so).

Somehow, it wouldn’t surprise me if the one panelist who is more fluent with Japanese knows of this other ex-panelist & eroge player who is fluent with Japanese.

===

It’s not an entirely clean break, but Author wrote about iM@S and the whole children-for-idol stuff. I think that is a problem any child entertainers have, but having your child work as an entertainer is relatively light work when all considered; most would think it’s a privilege or an opportunity rather than some kind of abuse. I can’t really say that would be exploitation–no more than how in America tons of athletes are groomed and compete for the spotlight in various pro leagues, starting from a very young age. These kids work very hard and may end up landing jobs that will end their lives prematurely. Football is probably an extreme example, but this is the kind of thing, to me, that isn’t too unlike what SDB was talking about.

And by “isn’t too unlike” I mean it is exactly like. I mean, the bottom line is this kind of training that your parents put you through at ages 8-12 is probably something you can be entirely remove from as you get to ages 18-22. I think Author is being too romantic about it (see his header pic) but it’s generally right. Child idols have nothing on, say, what Olympic gymnasts do, and those start at like, 3 years old. “Taking away childhood” sounds like the kind of straw-man old people who have forgotten what being a child was like, and has way too thick rose-colored lenses on.

Of course it isn’t to say that is okay, and SDB is right that the industry is very cynical and there are some sleazy producers out there; the real problem I see it is how the Japanese porn industry is just way too pervasive. But Steve’s comments sounds like trite words from someone who isn’t invested; a non-customer complaining about the meal he hasn’t tasted. I mean, I think if anything, iM@S tells a story that all kids growing up has to tell–the one where a child and her dreams come through via some degree of determination from an adult-like attitude. Being “that age” means you’re not all mature, but you’re also kind of mature. That road, that vehicle for this story just happens to be being an entertainer/idol. If iM@S is a story about growing up and adolescence (and it’s fair to say everyone from Ami/Mami to Azusa have to jump through some kind of hurdle in their own character narratives), guided by friends, wiser/older people, and pluck, how is it any different than any other story with the same themes? If I was the contextualization fairy I would go tell SDB to stomp on Accel World and how it robs children’s childhood via high-tech cerebral network connectivity as a statement of the internet’s impact on the next generation.

To cap this, SDB actually replied to Author’s post and said that the age was what bothered him–does he think that being an entertainer should only be a thing adults do, or that 15-yo girls in anime are bothering him? I mean, it does read like the second way if you think about it for a minute. Then again, the more I think about it, the less reasonable (and unfortunately, less interesting) his complaint seems.

7 comments | posted in Conventions and Concerts, Idolmaster