Otaku Elimination

New challengers Otaku Elimination seek to shake up what they perceive as the corrupt hegemony of the anime blogosphere.  They have keyboards, and they are angry.

What is all the fuss about?  It’s a quest for purity:

We’re pissed off with people using the term ‘otaku’ incorrectly, and then throwing up some wikipedia bullshit about the technicalities of the word when someone calls them out on it. You have no real Japanese credibility and your point is invalid. To be an otaku is something that takes a lot of dedication and can’t be gotten just from buying figures. You’re either hardcore otaku, or you’re not one at all. There is no middle line.

Let the Right One In: a Meta-review

Mr_faust said, “Fuck you, Owen.”

I was intrigued.  I read the link, and I’m forced to agree: Owen Gleiberman, possibly through no fault of his own, has not grasped the point of Let the Right One In.  Let me show you two quotes from his review:

Where, I want to know, in all this girl/boy, normal/vampire, angel/demon spiritual diddling is the heat, the confusion, even the anguish of young love?

And, sorry, I still think it lacks coherence. Why do a bunch of cats turn demonic and attack a woman who has been attacked by a vampire? And why the sudden, excessive carnage of the swimming-pool massacre?

Are you confused or not, Owen Gleiberman?

Yes.  You are confused.

And this is a point of the movie: the confusion of young love isn’t confusion about love exclusively.  It’s confusion about everything in life.  Why do things appear to happen suddenly? Because when you’re young you have no clue about how to unravel cause and effect, intent and circumstance, mistake and resulting cock-up.  When you are young things simply happen.

Exploitation of women in manga

I came at this review by Yuricon right after my negative review of Yomeiro Choice drew anonymous commentators to rabidly fight for it. I can only think of that disclaimer of hers as very wise indeed.

Yuricon noted,

Violence against women as entertainment for women deeply disturbs and puzzles me.

Violence against men is often part of entertainment for men, but it tends to be between equals.  Violence against women tends to involve picking on the weak.  This is true even when it’s violence by women against women.

Postmodernism in Anime Fandom

Michael Pinto, generally calm, collected, and even erudite, speaks with the voice of rage.  His rage is directed at those who carry on in abject ignorance of the history of American fandom.

At first blush we are sympathetic to Mr. Pinto – without the pioneers, the American fandom would be very different or might not even exist.  However, without excusing this conduct in any way, I want to suggest that Mr. Pinto has missed something very important: the postmodernist streak of anime fandom.

Anon

There is an oft-repeated journalists’ line about how real reporters give their pictures and real names, because they stand by their stories.  Indeed there is something nice about the idea that one who brings the truth can stand up boldly and be unashamed to show his or her face.  However, insistence on this may be maladaptive.  Tim May writes,

Anonymity may not be either good or not good, but the outlawing of anonymity would require a police state to enforce, would impinge on basic ideas about private transactions, and would foreclose many options that some degree of anonymity makes possible.

This is a power that can be used for good or ill: a Chinese dissident who uses TOR seeks to get the word out about his oppressive government, and we look upon it and smile.  A bored fourteen-year-old uses it to spread personal information on an imageboard, thereby creating a huge invasion of privacy, and we cringe.

End the Hate

In Iowa, a man was assaulted simply for being who he was.  This is a troubling crime, all the more so for coming a generation after America fought so hard so that all its people could be free.

From the Press-Citizen:

The victim was in the process or ordering food when a man came up to him, accused the victim of being a zombie, then punched the victim in the eye.

When the victim attempted to use his cell phone to call police, the assailant hit him again, this time breaking the victim’s nose. The assailant then fled out the back door of the restaurant.

My friends, I have a dream. Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of humanity and the corpses of humanity will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood, and not consume each other.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Iowa, a state freezing with the bitter chill of injustice, shivering with the coldness of indifference, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the state of their animation but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Florida, with its vicious animists, with its universities’ lips dripping with the words of ZBSD and nullification; one day right there in Florida, little zombie boys and little zombie girls will be able to join hands with little living boys and living girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all the Creator’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, living and unliving, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Zombie spiritual, “Braaaaaains! Braaaaaaains! Braaaains, Braaaaaaaains!”

Miyazaki the Luddite

R. Kelts ruminates on a Miyazaki quote:

All of our young people today derive their pleasure, entertainment, communication and information from virtual worlds. And all of those worlds have one thing in common: They’re making young Japanese weak.

Appropriately enough, I found this through Mr. Kelts’s Twitter feed.

It’s interesting how with each wave of human innovation, moralists decry it as somehow alienating humanity from its purity or strength.  I’m sure if I dug around, I could find a quote from the Luddites addressing the cotton gin or the tools of the early Industrial Revolution the same way.

In any case, as Richard Feynman was fond of saying, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”  How is it, then, that Miyazaki accuses these successful technologies of alienating man from nature?  More precisely, what was essentially “natural” about face-to-face human relations to begin with?

Miyazaki is truly great as an animator and creator, but this reactionary statement is reminiscent of Pentti Linkola (“Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed.”)  Here Miyazaki sounds more like a reactionary radical than an entertainment guru or visionary.

Play nice

I’ve discovered something I don’t really like about being an adult: the need to moderate people who are childish.

At another blog (not Anime Diet), someone put up a rather graphic post accusing US soldiers of raping women in Iraq.  An individual we shall call “S” responded by attacking her and calling her anti-American.

This struck me as rather beside the point.  If rapes are happening, the proper fix is to court martial those responsible and get rid of the problem, not lash out at the messenger.  In a matter of jurisprudence, whether or not the person who accuses has an agenda is secondary to whether or not the accusation is actually true.

As it happened, a photographer quickly let me know that it was a hoax, so I posted an entry explaining that while this was a convincing story because it played upon our Vietnam-fueled fears (and thousands of years of rape accompanying war.) S showed up yelling, “NOW DON’T YOU FEEL STUPID?”

This was entirely tactless, and would serve no purpose, so I deleted it.

On the one hand, he’s right that it factually did not occur, but on the other hand, I feel like his gross inability to treat people with respect negates happening to be right.

The original poster had put it in the historical context of rape accompanying war, which is unfortunately true as a general historical argument. It was not true in this instance.

The Disturbance of Yuuka Kazami

An arachnid intruder provided readers on Twitter with entertainment.

HOLY FUCK GIGANTIC SPIDER FDHGEHGHWS

IT DOESN’T EVEN LOOK BIG WHEN I TAKE A PICTURE OF IT

FUCK HE’S CLIMGING ACROSS MY HARUHI TOWEL, GET OFF OF HARUHI-SAMA!!!

OH SHIT, I TURNED AROUND TO TYPE THAT NOW IT’S GONE FUCKFUCKFUCFUF

What will the outcome of this startling series of events be?  Will Yuuka Kazami defend her home and hearth?  Or will the minions of Shelob prevail?

Talent

Sam at Bashtarle Symphony talks about idols and talent:

In Japan’s case . . . singers’ lack of natural talent isn’t so much hidden as much as it is ignored.

That’s really it.

A “talent” is not simply an expression of vocal talent, in the way that we often think of it in the West.  Rather it stands for the ability to maintain a certain public image, to keep up with a schedule of public appearances, and so forth.  The modern era of superproduction and pop packaging leaves true vocal ability almost incidental to the matter.

Related for this, I think, is the modern concept of art.  Art is no longer seen as the technical skill of producing faithful replications of visual cues.  Instead, it is merely the use of a medium to communicate ideas.  What this means is that people who can’t draw or paint to save their lives can still be artists.  Similarly, then, why can’t people who can’t really sing be idols?