Sakura of DOOM

These are going to be brief notes rather than an actual argument, largely because my brain is still broken from watching all of FMA and from the beginning episodes of Princess Tutu.

Disclaimer and standard grain of salt: My understanding of shounen tropes is taken from sports anime/manga, fighting anime/manga, and some mecha anime, though most of the tropes that I'm used to come largely from the arena of fighting anime/manga. Also, my samples pretty much consist of Bleach, Naruto, Hikaru no Go and Kenshin. I also don't read/watch that much shounen, so again... grain of salt.

Also, I generalize a ton with regard to shoujo and shounen; I don't mean to imply that female equates emotion while male equates physical. I'm being more descriptive than prescriptive in terms of the genres, given what's largely out there in the market.

Spoilers for all of FMA

( 1. Dangerous Sekrit Techniques that Usually Aren't All That Bad )

( 2. Very Precious People )

( 3. Speshul Abilities )

( 4. Fight scenes )

( 5. Violence and war in FMA )

Anyway, I am running out of bullet points.

In conclusion, go watch Fullmetal Alchemist!

So, I posted the bit on me and anime and manga and culture shock some time last year. Then I got distracted by actually watching anime and reading manga.

But someone interviewed me for a paper a few weeks ago on my experiences with anime and manga, and it brought back memories. So, of course, I spew them over the internet!

Please insert the standard disclaimer that these are my personal experiences and my personal history; they're not meant to reflect the status of anime and manga as a whole or anything of the sort. There's also going to be a lot of talk about female spaces and male spaces and what feels female or male to me. This isn't meant to be a pronouncement from high on what makes something female or male. They're definitions very specific to how I feel, and I'm largely using them as labels so I don't have to say, "spaces occupied largely by female people or people portraying themselves as female on the internet" or "what is stereotypically thought of as a female trait even though I disagree and am not a gender essentialist but will simply use this word so I don't have to type out all my qualms every single time."

Anyway.

( Back to the beginning... )

( The Yaoi/Slash Thing, Take #134098245 )

( Shoujo Manga! (You Knew This Was Coming...) )

( Yay Incest? )

( Shoujo and Academia )

( Shoujo and College )

( Things Keep Changing )

Personal history of anime/manga index

I found some of my old sketchbooks a few days ago, and I've been flipping through them nostalgically. I forgot that I used to draw a great deal before... wasn't particularly good at it, but apparently it was just something that I did. Maybe I'll try and do that again, not so much serious drawing or anything, but just trying it out every so often.

It's rather funny. There's a giant chunk in there of Gundam Wing inspired drawings (aka me learning to draw anime by copying artbooks and the like), and now I'm also slightly nostalgic for the days of GWing obsession and first discovering anime.

In the Beginning...

I had watched anime and read manga prior to the discovery of Gundam Wing in junior year of high school, but most of it was Sailor Moon (the season with Sailor Uranus and Neptune, who, btw, were really cool. Esp. Sailor Uranus). I also read a good chunk of the manga while I was getting my braces done, because the dentist's office had them and I wanted to find out what happened with the Sailor Uranus/Pluto/Neptune/Saturn arc.

Of course, this was in Taiwan, so finding oft-read copies of manga in the dentist's office was par for course, as well as the (really bad) Chinese dub of the anime. I also watched a lot of Robotech, dubbed in English, which I didn't know was actually a rather cut version of Macross. Fighter pilots falling in love with the aliens sent to assassinate them is apparently one of those plotlines that will always get me. Who would have thought.

( Read more... )

Culture Shock and Confusion

College was in America. I realize this is a bit of a silly statement to make, but while I had intellectually realized that I'd be moving to a different country, albeit one I'd lived in before, eight years is still a long time, particularly when those eight years happen during childhood.

Sorry all people reading this who are really bored by the Third Culture Kid talk by now. It does seem to be rather inseparable from pretty much everything in my life ;).

( Read more... )

Homestay

I did a two month homestay in Kanazawa, Japan to study Japanese, and my host family was rather amused to learn I was an anime fan. They actually had all of Evangelion stashed somewhere, and my host mom let me borrow their copy of the Nausicaa manga, none of which I could read, since having taken two years of Japanese does not actually mean one can read sci-fi, to my great dismay. I never really talked with my host family that much; it was difficult to maintain anything resembling an intelligent conversation. I do remember several instances of pointing to the Evangelion videos and saying something like "I watched that and liked it."

( Read more... )

Miyazaki in Three Countries

Despite announcing his retirement after Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki had a new movie coming out the summer I was in Japan -- Spirited Away. I was very, very excited, as I'm sure everyone can imagine (insert lots of loud squeeing and the mad waving of hands, and you've probably got it right). It was coming out around my birthday, and there were ads everywhere. The studio or someone had made some sort of partnership with NTT DoCoMo (the lead cell phone company at the time) and Lawson's (a popular convenience store) to provide i-Mode kiosks everywhere advertising the fact that you could buy your Spirited Away tickets with your phone. The stuffed animals were already in department stores -- I also desperately wanted a stuffie of the fat purple mouse with the buzzy bird on his head, but alas, Japan is expensive. Posters, TV ads, everything. We all pre-ordered tickets and went when it came out, to a crowded theater. I had no idea what it was going to be about, only that there was a girl with some pigs on the poster, with the caption "At the other side of the tunnel, there is a mysterious town..."

I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I laughed hysterically everytime the purple mouse was on the screen. All the other people seemed to enjoy it though.

( Read more... )

Things Change

When I was doing research for my thesis, I dug out some old newspaper and magazine articles on anime and manga in the US, to frame the general climate most English anime and manga scholarship was written in. The trend wasn't surprising to me -- there were many articles on the shocking nature of anime and manga, emphasizing the strangeness of using animation, generally thought of as a medium for children, to portray sex and violence. Several articles were on the manga industry in Japan, and while there were mentions of the broad array of subjects that anime and manga could cover, the author inevitably reverted to the "But it's animated sex and violence!" theme. Around 1999, things had started to change a little, with the Pokemon phenomenon reaching the general audience and with Princess Mononoke winning critical acclaim. There weren't that many other articles published; the bulk that I found were written around the Pokemon/Princess Mononoke timeframe, since that was when everyone started to sit up and notice these things.

( Read more... )

coffee_and_ink also has a post on feminism, manga and anime in the form of a personal history.

Anyone else have their personal anime/manga experiences posted?

Personal history of anime/manga index

Article in this month's Wired on anime, focusing specifically on the upcoming releases of three big directors: Miyazaki Hayao's Howl's Moving Castle, Otomo Katsuhiro (of Akira fame)'s Steamboy, and Oshii Mamoru's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. I'm actually only really interested in Miyazaki's... never was that fond of Akira or Ghost in the Shell, as both belong to a particularly violent postapocalyptic type of scifi that doesn't really appeal to me. I haven't closely analyzed, but I have the impression not only of a great deal of violence, but a great deal of violence directed toward the female body in particular in some anime that particularly disturbs me -- Kai in Akira (the movie, I haven't read the manga), what I remember of Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion even (though I do like Evangelion), Perfect Blue, and probably some others I don't remember.

It's really interesting looking at how articles on anime have changed through the years -- I had particular fun looking at various newspaper and magazine articles while I was writing my thesis. Everything pretty much up through 1999 was in the vein of: Japanese adults read comic books with weird and violent sex! Japanese adults watch cartoons that are pornographic and violent! Look how strange this is! 1999, which I mainly remember as a turning point because of the popular appeal of Pokemon and the art crowd appeal of Princess Mononoke. Then there were a lot of articles trying to say anime and manga weren't just weird and strange with lots of sex and violence, but there was still a lot of the old "how strange, look at those giant eyes and the strange color hair!" type thing. This one is focused very much on the directors instead of the medium as a whole, maybe because Wired is a fairly geeky magazine that doesn't feel like it needs to explain anime. It was also arguing on how these three major releases may very well (finally) bring anime into the mainstream, although I would posit that it's been moving that way for yeeeeaaaaarrrrsssss (albeit slowly). I think Spirited Away won over a lot of the art crowd types, more so than Princess Mononoke, probably because Princess Mononoke had to do the hard work of breaking ground. Of course, I mainly have this impression because I was actually able to drag my non-anime watching friends to see it and have them like it (it's the purple mouse. No one can resist the purple mouse).

I also found it funny that the article was going on about how Japan's economic power may have waned, but it might be coming into a new power via popular culture. I'm kind of amused, because I got to watch (and participate in) Taiwan going through a Japanese pop culture phase. It's still a fairly big part of the cultural landscape there, but there are no longer ramen stores popping up like weeds. And when I went back about two years ago, it was all about jewelry imported from Korea and K-pop and Korean soap operas. And I know on one hand there are all the arguments about exoticization and fetishism and the like, but it will be interesting to see what happens, if Japanese pop culture does indeed catch on. I sort of figure it will be an interesting contrast to the exoticization/adoption of American culture in Japan (Hawaiian stuff in particular in Okinawa). I guess I would probably feel weirder if it were Taiwan/Chinese pop culture catching on. Actually, I would probably just be happy because it would mean that I could get C-pop CDs and things like that. Living in California often does feel like a mix of Chinese and American culture some times. Not the pop culture things, but foodwise... I find it very, very funny (and extremely convenient) that there are four bubble tea shops just on Castro Street/downtown Mountain View. I speak not of a very large stretch of street! They are all concentrated within a four block radius!

Just read the news: WTF is up with the Paul Hamm thing? Jeez. Poor guy.