Omonomono

Just to bounce off this post.

I remember high school. We didn’t have required reading lists for English/lit classes, but there are invariably a series of things we had to read for class. Why? Because we would talk about the things we read for class, to analyze and learn to think of the things we read critically. We would be taught to construct arguments and learn how to find support for those arguments. We were kids who didn’t know what to read, anyways. The familiarity of the canon of English literature among American kids, even the studious ones, is something mostly ingrained from their teachers and curriculum and rarely something self-taught.

The work wasn’t fun. Sometimes it’s just mind-numbing. Sometimes it was easier to crank out words to fulfill limits of assignments than really try to enjoy what I was doing. And maybe that’s the better way to approach it–I didn’t want to develop a knack for all-nighters; relying on them is a fool’s errand after all. Having the due date expressed in terms of minutes instead of days can be exhilarating! I learned the taste of caffeine and how to get by without it at 5am, but I never learned how to get by without sleep. It made for interesting memories, but I would rather have something else instead.

Those are not the things you want to learn to like, anyway. It shouldn’t be the thing that makes studying 18th c. British lit exciting. It makes more sense to make required reading lists to be meaningful in the context of the education you were going to get.

In a nutshell, I don’t think enjoyment has anything to do with required viewing lists. If the titles on a list happen to be enjoyable, great. If not, no big deal. Just like how you have or haven’t seen or read on the list has anything to do with anything, besides having a head start on the curriculum. If you watched all the shows I would like you to watch, great! The sun still rises next morning. If not, it just means now you have something to check out or debate about. I mean it seems like the only problem with those lists is by implicitly leaving things out you’re saying something about those things. It’s like being a jerk, walking around with a “your [favorite band] sucks” T-shirt. And that’s more a jerk being a jerk than anything about lists or implicitly or explicitly leaving something out. N-list based blog posts are all about that, and they tend to be popular partly for those reasons.

What is absolutely right is that creating the list is couched in a context. High school English lit is the context of my example, for example. Today, such lists typically come out from some kind of reason related to being able to communicate with some shared basis of understanding. I mean, it’s kind of like having some passing familiarity with the Bible if you want to talk shop at a seminary. Or how can I make references to boats and cabbages without you having passing familiarity with Yoakena or School Days? How can we talk about Gundam without, well, a passing familiarity of the various timelines and settings? Or being able to talk well for Mawapen and not having seen Utena? I suppose you could do all of those, but it just doesn’t seem like you could do just as well as a version of you that has seen them. So “required viewing” lists are more like “if you watched all this, you are my kind of fan, you belong in my church of /whatever/.”

Now if you just want a list of anime to wank off to, may it be for /m/ech freaks or disgusting moe otaku, you want to ask for a “wanking viewing list” or some such. Problem solved! As long as whoever curates such a list make it meaningful and presents it in a way where that meaning is taken the right way, I think people can knock themselves out.

Colette wrote a great little thing over at CNN’s new geek blog doohicky. But like a wonderful story with an ending you hated, I really had to react to the way it characterizes what is going on with anime today towards the end of the article. And by “today” I mean the past 5 years.

Okay, you can point to Eden of the East for a lot of cool doohickeys, but by not noticing its main social message, a message pointedly for the Japanese domestic audience, it kind of sinks the boat that the article was on.

I do have to say though, the first 2/3 of the article is a good summary, if it kept things brief in order to get to the point and you miss out on a few details. The last bit is just what seems off. It reads:

So what’s changed? Japan has. As Japanese culture evolves, so has the tone of Japanese media. The evolution towards anime with lighter subject matter seems to indicate that Japan needed to laugh more and worry less.

Around the time that “slice of life” shows started to explode in Japanese popularity, it became obvious to the dedicated Otaku viewer that the heart of anime was changing. For example, the average length of a show has changed from 26 episodes to 13, giving directors a little over half the time to build a story and allow characters to develop fan followings. Production focuses on quantity over quality, with twenty or more shows airing every season.

This lighter approach has not taken the reins of the anime industry completely: There are deeper stories to be found in its animated films, such as “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” and series such as “Eden of the East”, which explored topics such as technology, terrorism and political uprising.

To some, it may appear as if Japan has traded a willing exploration into the darkness for escapism in the form of silliness, but the rising popularity of comedies shows that Japanese audiences are enjoying them tremendously. Especially after the Tokoku earthquake earlier this year, the country needs more reason than ever to stay positive and lighthearted, and perhaps shows such as this help to fuel them.

Okay, so we know that anime’s first golden age that America is aware of is in the 80s. The article seems to imply as much. And anime has always evolved ever since it was created who-knows-when in the early parts of 20th century. Even before Tezuka took it to prime time. Slice of life anime [ugh I loathe the term] has been around for a long time, too, technically dating back when TV anime was more stand-alone, kind of like cartoons on TV as we know it (as that’s what they were).

But what about the Akiba boom of the 90s? Maids? Tsundere? The parade of the database animals? Satoshi Kon? I mean Hosoda’s Girl Who Leapt Through Time is great and I believe Colette just watched it not too long ago, so the name stuck. But this geek view is more like the weeaboo view. It’s very mainstream-western-press-centric, American-centric, and misses the point of why anime like Eden of the East was created in the first place: to address its laundry list of social ills from the Lost Generation. There’s also the usual missteps regarding the licensing business about licensing internationally, like why titles that runs forever are shunned over for 13-ep shots that makes easier pitches and sales. With the economy in neutral gear, Japan’s desperate publishers and squeezed animator pool can only shoulder so much creative risks, once the OVA market dried up and shifted into the late-night anime model starting from the late 90s.

For a CNN article, it was pretty nice and I think it addresses well with the majority of the anime-familiar public audience that reads English news on the web. But in the end, the article poses a question about American perception of anime over time and wants to posit that wall of natural ignorance as its perch, the origin of the point of view. It seeks to empathize with other people on this perch and not those of us who’s gotten closer to the ground to see why things are the way they are, let alone the actual Japanese people and the anime industry that’s actually in Japan.

If this is the majority point of view for the American mainstream geek, I’m going to ask the next question: has anime really gotten anime viewers closer to Japan’s actual cultural and social interests? Do we really know what’s going on? The answer is obvious–because they rather care about how much fanservice is in anime today rather than why it’s there, like that, in the first place.

And what’s truly lamentable is how a post like that overlooks the development of the fandom in recent years. Precisely because now you have Americans (and other non-Japanese) with papers and thesis about the way Japanese pop culture influences Japan, America, and the rest of the world. You have books and books of academic press (and some non-academic stuff) about anime and manga and Japanese video games. You even have a Danny Choo, if you want another person who’s been on CNN. In fact, you have people talking about “moe blobs” or “tsundere” in the comments. Oversea fandom itself has since evolved from the time that everyone would put Cowboy Bebop on the highest pedestal: we have a generation of fans who are now asking the why questions, and engaging the works on a much deeper level. These are the people who are real geeks and nerds, those people who are not just tourists gawking at and enjoying these weird Japanese cartoons, but actually learning about them and engaging them on the ground level (or as close as their contexts would allow for).

Amusingly, Colette is the kind of person who asks the why questions. She even uses it to lead off the end of the article.  So maybe this isn’t really about Japan or even anime at all: this is more about a school of thought, a particular tribe within a subculture in America. I mean I remember when I was first watching Toonami’s Midnight Run. You know which title got me excited? Gundam Wing. Gundam! On American TV! For the first time!  The biggest Japanese symbol of geek has now landed on a channel everyone can actually watch! But it’s not even mentioned in Colette’s article. So you know, even before the narrative about the “downfall of anime” or whatever has begun, one could just easily say nothing about anime has really changed, when compared to the pairs of eyes watching Toonami before and after their formative, teenage years.