Pardon my recent lack of connectivity. These things happen, I suppose.
But perhaps you might like to know what sorts of things I’ve been doing in my internet absence (still ongoing, at the moment). Yes, this is one of those posts, wherein the blogger simply provides a list of recent activities, but I’ll try to strain myself a bit and include some assorted thoughtful observations.
(This week’s Brocast turned out especially boring, so I won’t inflict it upon you. Instead, I offer you this Genshiken post, which is something of a followup to the last. If you’re especially interested in what we’ve been up to, the previous Brocast is still relevant.)
Ogiue’s appearance marks a shift in Genshiken from loosely organized slice of otaku life to something a little more like a recognizable romance plot — but, I emphasize, only a little more like a recognizable romance plot, as Genshiken has that fantastic way of maintaining absolute subtlety, subverting every trope in the book, and hitting a little too close to home all at once. Genshiken has a generally interesting structure, in fact, involving the buildup of overlapping styles, and I can only adequately represent it with one of those enigmatic graphics I so enjoy.
A few months ago I took the first volume of Genshiken from my shelf, thinking the series deserved a re-read, and that I’d go through it at my leisure. As of now, I’m somewhere in the middle of the third volume. That’s leisurely enough, I think.
I picked up Genshiken for the first time back when I had only just gotten back into anime, manga, and all related accoutrements after a few years of Japanese pop-cultural drought. And it left quite an impression on me, to be sure, but my experience this time around is a bit different. Consider, for example, that, in terms of sheer hours watched, I’ve seen about twice as much anime now as I had when I finished Genshiken the first time — not to mention that the amount of manga I’ve consumed by now renders the amount I’d read at that point positively pitiful, and, in the greater scheme of things, I still haven’t read nearly as much as quite a lot of people.
Here’s some like/(enjoy/appreciate) for you: I’m still reading Octave (a recommendation via TheBigN) even though it makes me feel terribly uncomfortable. So it must be doing something right.
But what might that be?
Besides the characters, I mean, who are fantastic. They all manage to make mistakes and achieve meaningful everyday successes through nothing more than the power of their own character traits, and they all remain more or less sympathetic throughout, which is a real achievement, as far as I’m concerned. But I’m not going to go on at length about characters here. I’d like to take a look at those little stylistic accoutrements that render Aoi Hana more (delightfully) complex than perhaps it needs to be.
Well, no, I can’t do that, I guess. I am and shall remain male and straight; sorry if I got your hopes up.
I have this proposition, though. I don’t claim that it’s true; I don’t even claim it’s plausible, or that it has any foundation in logic or data; all I claim is that it’s something I’ve been thinking about, and it may seem relevant to you or it may not. Accept, reject, or modify it at your discretion.
From Twitter:
3.31.2010 2:53:46 “I’ll read one or two chapters of a Kozue Amano manga before bed” = STUPID PONTIFUS, STUPID
Actually I’ve had a strange relationship with Amano’s manga so far. I love it for being the basis of what is probably my favorite anime series in terms of raw enjoyability (which series that would be should be pretty obvious by now) — but, at the same time, I find the Aria anime generally more enjoyable than its manga precursor. So I suppose I have, semi-consciously and based on inadequate evidence, made Amano into a pretty good writer whose writing might benefit from a little editorial intervention (but whose fantastic art, unfortunately, has not been reproduced in the transition to animation).
Apologies for the delayed final few Strike Witches posts. It’s the end of the spring break now, which means it’s time for me to stop doing mostly nothing and start finish the schoolwork I’ve been putting off. Which, in turn, means I don’t really have time to sit down and hammer out the rest of the transcriptions right now — but I can, at least, present to you this curious example of contemporary anime art at work.
I’ll actually make a conscious effort to avoid major and specific plot spoilers here, both because you probably haven’t read IO (literally イオ) and because I want you to. I won’t say I guarantee you’ll like it if you have an interest in harem, or can get past the harem veneer, but it’s worth a look, not least because its harem lead isn’t quite what one would expect.
(P.S. I have been posting here frequently. If for whatever reason this excites you, I’ll warn you not to get your hopes up. Semester two of grad school is just beginning…)
(P.P.S. Though I guess it would be nice if I could pull out 500 words or so at least once a week. We’ll see.)
Here’s something that occurred to me the other day when I was stumbling as usual through the fiction-writing process: speculative slice of life anime and manga, even those with some emphasis on festivals, rarely include an event analogous to Christmas as manifest in the United States. This is not to say that gifts aren’t given and received in fantastical and science-fictional slice of life franchises — they are, and pretty commonly — but few such franchises seem to present a holiday whose focus or impetus is the giving and receiving of gifts.
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