Category Archives: Modern Visual Culture

March 28, 2011

Run Ichika Run

By omo

Ok, so it finally made sense. Ichika is someone that unites the girls in their simple goal of… winning for whatever their hearts desire. Revenge, currying favor, satisfaction, confidence, whatever it is that drives the multi-national cast, all for one, one for all. It’s a pretty neat theme. Thanks, episode 11.

In that sense, Infinite Stratos is an exceedingly appropriate anime during a time of crisis in Japan. Japan needs our help, so France, Germany, China and the UK are going to step up to the plate and help ’em out right?

In the “final” ending sequence, people are running in sync. In the previous ones, Ichika ran at the same pace only with one other girl at a time. Who knew running would bring it all together? I guess it would be something I noticed earlier if I wasn’t spending all my time staring at Charlotte’sÂ legs.

Other random comments about Infinite Stratos ED:

The Japanese chick is the tallest and biggest! Wau, what a bold statement.
Only if all the English chicks are oujosamas.
Wait, if Laura’s pants are designed like the skirts, why aren’t Orimura’s?
I like this seiyuu ensemble thing. Anime otakus do, too, generally. I think I’ve liked them like, every season. Or do I just like Marinajou’s and Hiyocchi’s vocals?
There’s no way they are running at the same speed, since their legs are of different lengths.

I guess I’ll leave the obvious LOL-American (not quite anti-American) and the usual nationalist slants to someone else.

Leave a comment | posted in Infinite Stratos, Modern Visual Culture

March 25, 2011

All Good Girls Have Twin-Tails Inside

By omo

I’m sympathetic to 2DT’s take. I always thought Azusa was someone who had to be liken to in some way to a previous experience. The stereotypicalÂ saccharine-filled neko-mimi sweets-lover is not why she won Saimoe last year, nor is it why Azusa is probably my favorite K-ON girl (tho I think Yui is still the best, whatever that means).

To put it in the right context, 2DT saw the light because he realized that Azusa is actually based on some real-life notion of ideals. In the comments he explicitly stated this connection (emphasis and added link mine).

I wasnâ€™t so much a fan of her myselfâ€¦ until I realized that all the students I have who are like her, I love! []Â Such a sweet, good child. I understand her classic moe pull.

I’m not going to talk much about that classic moe thing (by the way, classic moe is better a term than old moe, because there’s, well, actual old moe involving old people). It is different than the somewhat more mature, hime-cut Yamato Nadeshiko moe (Really? You’d think a Yamato Nadeshiko is naturally attractive?) that is better characterized by Mio, so even “classic” is not exactly a great moniker. Furthermore, moe is so dead, I would rather not talk about it if I could avoid it.

What I will share, however, is my previously-mentioned (well, it was over a year ago) note on how I like K-ON because I see that band dynamics play out in my own experience. In short, Mio reminds me of this guy I know. He is adorable, musically talented and everyone likes him, just like Mio is among her friends. Both of them had a fan club. Well, YMMV, as it is with anything personal.

People are multi-motivational and complex things. It takes time to get to know them, and it is is tough to do fiction where part of the charm comes from mapping characters to actual people in a typical yet lifelikeÂ way.Â The good-girl appeal, however, is always going to be a draw to people who like them. I think it channels some sense of righteousness that many of us have within us, a sense of right and wrong, or good and evil. And going by that measure, that applies to most. I just want to separate out the two different kinds of good girls.

So the story goes, to begin with a scene from Conan the Barbarian (lol thanks JP):

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?

Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.

Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?

Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Mongol General: That is good! That is good.

Thanks to a certain parody subber, I have long since fallen with Simoun–more importantly, Mamiina. Simoun has a large cast that comes together for some pretty delicious drama. One of these is exactly the very heart-warming, turn-around good girl that newfags may find familiar in the character Kyouko Sakura from Madoka Magica, if Simoun is unfamiliar to you. Just like Kyouko, Mamiina is not a model citizen. In fact there’s nothing to her that makes me want to stick a pair of cat ears on her head. It’s the difference between a stray cat and a house cat, I guess. But it’s just that Mamiina screams loudly, through her actions, that she is indeed the very sweet, good girl you find in Studio Ghibli’s adventures, even if she is at times antagonistic.

The same idea plays out along the lines of all these Azusa-type moe characters. This is where 2DT’s observation comes into play, but only to a point. Because while we have our Kikis and Sheetas, there’s the Sans and, arguably, Nausicaas in the Ghibli lineup. I’m going to say that there are two sides to the Good Girl archetype, and the difference between the two is a philosophical divide in which only some of us can reconcile.

Back to Mamiina. She is a good girl because she jumps this gap between antagonism and protagonism in order to demonstrates her inner qualities, and she does the Right Thing at the Right Time. It leaves an emotional crater, a desired dramatic impact, especially when framed in the context of her intercharacter relationships. But at the same time, I can imagine a Mamiina-type character would be the nemesis or rival to an Azusa-type character (it probably is the plot to some battle show, wouldn’t surprise me). Without the external stimulus that put these characters through the crucible of tragedy or suffering, maybe the difference between the two types of good girl archetype lies within the answers between the random Mongol and Conan. Conan was just some normal barbarian at first, after all.

Another hypothetical may demonstrate better. Remember the YuiAzu episode? Let’s say if we replace Azusa with the antagonist version of Azusa, what would instead happen is that rather being a type A Good Girl, the antagonist Azusa would not volunteer to help Yui with the performance, yet later on do so anyways for some plot-specific reason. It seems like a typical gap moe tsundere type thing, but that is not directly relevant to a demonstration of character. You can be good or bad and still possess this duality.

I suppose that’s all part of the specification of being good; there is a strictness within Azusa’s tenderness, or the flip side of the coin, a tenderness in Mamiina/San’s intensity. It turns some of them evil, some of them slaved to passionate antagonists, some to reason and some to strange plot devices about clones. I’m not sure how much I can stretch this, but all I’m trying to say is that are Good Girls among us, and there are many. And like girls generally, they have a plurality of face!

Leave a comment | posted in K-ON, Modern Visual Culture, Simoun

March 23, 2011

Reiterating the Problem

By omo

Why am I doing this? Probably because I am conditioned to do so upon certain keywords. It is as if after x period of time since the last regurgitation, upon hearing a certain key phrase (or in the viral sense, when a certain idea enters the mind) I will then attempt to express a certain thing. This thing, well, you can read below.

So, like, why do I think Anime no Chikara is important? I think it is important because it’s kind of neat attempt at a programming block. But more because it is an effort to create original anime. I mean, why don’t people ask why is Yamakan making an original via Fractale, as a way to “fix the industry” he ranted on about, for example? It’s not an arbitrary thing.

When we talk about media mix business strategies, we’re talking about the usual deal where you take some kind of idea and create it across one or more media. So let’s say you have a novel, and you make an anime based on it, then you make a radio show, and video games, and manga, what have you. You make money from one idea via many different outlets. Then you can spin it off the traditional way, with figures and toys and other merchandise.

The thing is, Japan is very good at this. By good I mean it within certain sense of the notion of “good,” where we can take any idea and cheaply produce a line of things you can sell across different mediums. It’s good marginal value. And if you know anything about Tezuka’s Curse you would understand how that can be a problem: the thing is cheap to create compared to how much it is sold for, but the people making the buck are those who are selling, not those who are creating.

Put it in other words–when we want to value and reward creativity, we have to accordingly pay for it. When that creative process is unhinged from the copyright mechanism, it will be subject to market pressure, especially when it is butting heads against other monopolies (well, copyrights). If we look at the global export of anime-based medium from Japan versus every other mass medium except maybe video games, you can see how it isÂ disproportionalÂ when comparing the money and thought space it occupies domestically versus overseas. But in Japan, the copyright financing structure protects manga and print publishers, and hangs animation houses to dry.

It is a very different situation, in other words, when Japan adopts some manga or light novel for a media mix project, than your latest Hollywood comic book adaptation or resurrecting your childhood in another inferior summer blockbuster. The latter is largely motivated by marketing and playing safe, the former is more about who controls the copyright and who is being paid with lucrative royalty contracts or added sales from advertising.

ForÂ example, when Ume-sensei gets her cute, sunlit manga adopted, she probably also gets a pretty penny from the production committee. But what does Shaft get out of that deal? [SHAFT! /zing] Well, it’s not a bad deal for them, after all, because animation studios get their money from anime sales, and Hidamari Sketch sold above the Manabi line.

But there is the problem. The animation production team is probably the #1 responsible party in producing everything we love about HidaSketch on this side of the Pacific. The manga is more like added sales: without it, Ume Aoki’s art school adventure will just sit as yet another4koma gag manga in a sea of them. [Imagine making the case for K-ON if you want to talk about this inequity.] When we buy the manga or a cute figure of a worm, it’s not because of Ume-sensei’s manga. It’s because some producer types realized this title will make good commercial sense as an anime, and is a good match with the talents at Shaft. I’m hoping you are well-familiar with the whole anime-as-paid-advertising thing, yeah?Â It feels like we like the commercial more than the thing it is selling us.

Of course, that’s partly because the commercial is the thing it is selling us: If you are the anime publisher and the anime studio, whose income is increased with the sale of the anime itself, you do have an incentive there. It’s just that being the non-copyright-owner of the original material, they have really no stake in the production committee beyond the anime itself. Everything on top of that is at the mercy of the various parties splitting that pizza-pie-chart of net revenue from any given joint production venture. It’s like going to a shop for their kanban musume, but she is actually the owner’s daughter and gets no bonus for sitting pretty and dealing with creeps like us.

To contrast, for an anime original like Sora no Woto, we’re talking about someone who puts money behind the animation production team as the main copyright owner. It is still financed in a committee structure–for example, Azone probably could care less which entity owns what in the committee–but that extra royalty money from licensing merch is now going back into animation production, rather than keeping some dead tree media afloat. And even so, a media mix of anime original can result in novelization and manga spinoffs that will also help sell dead tree stuff. It’s probably more commercially sound to publish a tie-in than something entirely original, too, for the manga publisher.

The alternative, you know, is do what Bandai does. Unless the financing structure for anime in Japan changes, we’re going to be dealing with people whining about moe or stagnation or how anime used to be better until Kingdom Come. But who knows, maybe it is easier to fix people’s ignorance than to fix the way Japan does business.

Leave a comment | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Franchises, Modern Visual Culture

March 20, 2011

Grade Schema

By omo

I want to get more opinions and arguments for and against for a blog to grade shows using some kind of quantified grading system.

Basically, if someone were to review an episode of a series, by writing a review and ending it with a letter grade (or a 1-10 or 1-5 or 1-4 or whatever), how would you do it? Would you even do it at all?

The question is pretty hard to answer because I think the better one to ask is why are we using a grading system at all? Confession: the only grade I read is from Psgels’s, mainly for the sake of checking out his general impression on an episode without reading the actual review, to avoid being spoiled. And to me that’s the real strength in a grade system like Metacritic or RottenTomatoes–you get an idea of value without looking into it too much. Of course, it is not really a precise measurement on a personal level nor is it a particularly accurate one. Or I should say, it comes with a margin for error and often times reading one reviewer you trust thoroughly can often give a higher quality impression than seeing a score based on hundreds of thumbs up or down.

Actually, I’m more curious as to why you would give a grade? On the one hand, some people enjoy grades for reasons I mentioned above, and more. Some people only care about grades, actually. And sometimes it is another mean to express what you’ve failed to express in a TL;DR post. I mean I’ve read my fair share of episodic blogs and far majority of them don’t have anything to say that you can’t pick up from the screen caps they’ve also posted, so having a grade system actually adds to what these blogs offer.

On the other hand, for every show you note down this way you run the risk of making some kind of over- or underestimate. This is particularly the case in terms of how people judge shows by cover while ignoring that margin of error we all work with when doing so. This is particularly true when anime tend to be serial and each episode is merely building up some kind of bigger picture where the picture is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s kind of a meaningless thing to do. To that extent Psgels uses his impression-based measurement which makes a lot more sense to me, so maybe that objection can be avoided by using a smarter metric.

Some people take this seriously. I’m not sure I do, but I can see why you would want to. I don’t know, any good ideas? I am not really going to implement a grade system, but someone else might, and I want to get some ideas as to why it is a good idea, what is a good way about it, and how do you manage people’s expectations with them.

Leave a comment | posted in Introspectives, Modern Visual Culture, Off Topic

March 17, 2011