I finally did it. I watched the entire original Evangelion TV series and two movies. And you know what? I think I have some idea about what Anno was trying to do with this, and I’m not afraid to be wrong. This is what I reckon Evangelion is about. If you want authority, there was a post otou-san did that I once considered the last word on this series but the link is gone now so here’s my thoughts to replace it until he reposts it.
Okay. Here goes.
Remember those anime DVDs you bought when you first became an anime fan, but you never got around to watching all of them because of school troubles? As a graduate of high school, I now had the freedom to do two of three things:
1: Bum around Kerouac style and play my new Bongo Drums I got for Christmas, real beat man.
2: Spend time with my brother and watch DVDs and Blu-Rays with him.
3: Work on my NaNoWriMo novel editing.
Considering my brother asked to borrow my Evangelion DVDs, I decided to watch those with him instead of bum around Kerouac style playing bongos. Besides, what did I have to lose? I had no real expectations for this series other than it being critically acclaimed.
Evangelion certainly has some strong artistic sensibilities to it, as a Gainax work it’s one of the more famous ones. I like Neon Genesis Evangelion despite Shinji because I kind of understand where Shinji is coming from. Anno stated that Evangelion “has no meaning” but fans have been making meaning out of this franchise for at least a decade. My personal meaning out of this is, Anno got rather depressed about the nature of humanity and kinda went off the rails a bit. But this is a stunning, if brutal, statement about human nature. Shinji to me is less annoying than other people I’ve known from blogging say, but your mileage may vary. To me Shinji is representative of Anno’s perceived “modern weakling Japanese youth” – somebody who is forced into a horrific situation but ultimately he can’t handle it alone. He is shy around women and End of Evangelion is particularly brutal about this – splicing voices of rejection from Japanese women into the end sequence to mess with the otaku fan’s head. Make of that what you will.
Shinji is alone in an unfriendly world, and some of this isn’t his own fault. But he doesn’t really attempt to get to know any of the lead females in a significant and mature way. He just idealises Asuka and Rei and Misato to his own perception – even if that perception doesn’t match those women’s actual personalities at all. Sound familiar? Hmm. Keep reading.
I get the feeling that Anno is, (subtly or not) trying to convey that the Japanese male youth of today is afraid of interacting with actual women, and reaching any real understanding about how sexual politics work. Just look at this picture above, Misato is actually one of the strongest characters in the series, she acts like a real woman and has realistic regrets about her life – even overcoming those regrets by embracing her own self in what she has done with her life. But to Shinji, she’s just a Rainbow in the Dark:
If you actually listen to the lyrics of this song you’ll get what I’m trying to say here. Other than “any anime review is better with a reference to Dio”.
The series itself is very dark and it has a grim atmosphere about it most of the time. There’s comic relief in the earlier parts of the series, but by the time you get to The End of Evangelion there are no laughs to be had at all. Seriously. I have no screenshots from the later part of the series because when I was watching the series with my brother, he didn’t want me pausing all the time to take screenshots. Trust me, depending on how much David Lynch you’ve watched – The End of Evangelion will either weird you out or disappoint you completely. I should do a Rewatch of Evangelion series of posts, but I’m afraid I don’t have enough time for that. I just want to get to the main points of my first impressions of this series, and be done with it. I’ve felt guilty for putting this off for so long, so I’m doing it now.
This is without a doubt one of the most depressing anime I’ve ever seen. No, I haven’t seen Grave of the Fireflies, so that is an accurate statement from this reviewer as of the time of writing. Remember Fight Club making nihilism fashionable and chic? Well imagine if a man in the bowels of depression, the bowels of it, when forced to complete his anime series left his emotional input to the series untouched – creating a nihilistic statement about the worth of humankind that hasn’t been equaled in TV anime since. It is a tough love statement, one that implies as much about Libertarianism being the only option when the governments of the world do nothing to save us, when they sit on their hands and the whores and the politicians will cry out SAVE US… and the messiah the world looks to will whisper… NO. This whole series builds up to the realisation that all of humanity’s flaws can only be overcome by humanity itself. It is humanity that is killing itself, and it is humanity who is the one to save itself.
I’ve been reviewing light novels for quite some time now, and I can tell you it’s getting harder to find light novels I’d actually be interested in. Japanese literature, I can go for that, since it’s usually in stand alone volumes (as this post from The Ranobe Cafe explains, Haikusoru’s imprint of Japanese SF might not be selling as well as on hiatus light novels, but I believe it’s a good new imprint for some interesting reading). Manga on the other hand is much more widespread – and longer series are costly to invest in. It’s like putting your money in character stocks – if your favourite character in a long running series fails to meet your expectations, you’ve lost a gamble. This is where reviews of manga help – they help consumers of manga products make decent and sensible decisions about what manga to buy.
You might know me as a big Tezuka fanboy. Being a Tezuka fanboy (at least in Australia were a good deal of Tezuka anime and manga is available to watch or read) makes financial sense for me as well as intellectual sense. You can depend on ol’ Tezuka, 20 years dead but he still hasn’t let me down even once! Tezuka represented the benchmark of commitment I’m willing to make to a manga artist’s work. To me, even an eight volume series is a big investment because of book prices locally. Australia is infamous for expensive book prices. Yet people still buy books here, it is rather strange that way. What you can do to reduce the cost of manga is to buy in bulk-online deals where the local cost of buying is more than the cost of importing including shipping. To me, nine dollars a volume each for Aishiteruze Baby is a great online deal compared to the $23.95 I usually pay in Australia. Now cut me some slack. I nearly always buy locally, especially if Kinokuniya has it in stock. The convenience of buying single volume works like Not Simple locally outweighs importing it if I’m just going to make a single purchase for the one item.
An advantage on the other hand of reviewing manga over light novels is that if I start talking about light novels, nobody knows what the hell I am talking about since they are so scarce now. Manga is almost ubiquitous in many countries (at least for those who speak English). It’s penetrated the Australian immigrant population demographic, I can tell you. There’s something about manga that brings a motley assortment of Asian permanent residents studying at University together. Maybe it’s the idea that respecting your parents depicted in this stuff is less forced than in other mediums that call for youth to rebel. Or maybe it’s one of those things that strangely, despite everything that ever happened to China, Singapore, Malaysia and the Phillipines in World War II because of the Japanese army – some uncanny sense of belonging to something that isn’t quite Western has caused young Asian immigrants to forgive the wrongs their grandparents generation suffered. Australia is one of the most racist countries in the world, mark my words, but the historical irony of Australia having one of the best anime and manga distributors in the Westernised Antipodes despite Darwin being bombed by Japanese planes – this isn’t something that can simply be explained away by cultural amnesia. It’s more to do with the idea that Japan is a bit more cool than it used to be, at least in this historical period. Modern Japan as the Australians see it, poses no threat to anyone. Unless of course there’s a moral debate about lolicon. But that’s a whole ‘nother post.
Yes, manga is expensive down here. But I remain drawn to it as a medium of storytelling because eventually at the end of high school – it didn’t seem like such a big deal that I was an anime and manga nerd anymore. Something changed in my generation’s consciousness, something big – the idea that nerds aren’t really going away. I recommend manga to my friends and sometimes they even read what I recommend them. But hand them a light novel and it’s not like they read regular prose fiction in the first place. A sad turn for Western civilisation perhaps, but maybe the right people are reading books. Manga, it’s just there. You can’t get away from it unless you move away from the city, and even if you do you’ll start to miss it. It’s very different from reviewing anime, don’t make the mistake that manga’s easy to review because it’s just a book with pictures instead of words. I do it not because it’s an easy way out to create blog reviews. I do it because hell, these manga are interesting to me, and less overwhelming to process in the process of reviewing than an anime. I still do anime reviews, it’s just that the screenshots take me ages to do. Manga doesn’t have that problem, and you can easily flip back if you don’t understand something.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Mostly because the way I interact with my hobbies and the way I see my own personality is changing. How is it changing? I can’t really describe it yet.
We all search for certainties in life, whether it be in our actual experiences or the entertainment mediums we consume.
My uncertainties are troublesome particularly with a co-occurring anxiety disorder, and many things which I once thought I would enjoy for the rest of my life have faded away from me. I used to like handheld video games a whole lot, then as I got older I saw less and less handheld games that I was interested in actually getting made. But the stuff I did want made that already existed, I bought it and didn’t pirate it. Osamu Tezuka’s son gotta get paid playa. Remember, just because Courtney Love sues people to get money instead of just relying on royalties doesn’t mean anime and manga creators feel the same way.
For me the most certain anime that I will always like will be FLCL. It ranks even higher on my list than the Read or Die OVA and manga. For those unaware of my tendency to fanboy over glasses girls, to state an anime which contains no meganekko lead females in the cast as the most certain anime I will always like – it flies in the face of expectation but it’s probably because I’m getting older. Not sadder, but older. The sadness remains, but it manifests itself as privately as possible. Some people out there are reading my blog, whether they comment or not. For me even eight comments on my latest Screen Play Your Turn entry about rhythm video games is a victory. What also helps is that those eight people offered constructive criticism about my article, even though one of them thought I hadn’t played DJ Hero at all before critiquing its financial failure or success. The older I get, the more I realise there are no certainties in the traditional sense. Overnight, my expectations of Australia’s political climate could be overturned. That’s how fast the world is moving these days. Moving faster than even Superman can wind it back.
It’s also why I have a fondness for older anime shows I have not yet watched or have watched in the process of growing up as a person, not just a consumer of anime, manga and its related products. Even realising I am a human being took nineteen years to accomplish. It was one of the most important discoveries of my life. Permission to be flawed as a species, because everybody else has similar imperfections that manifest in different ways. I haven’t yet done my post on Neon Genesis Evangelion because I need to do screenshots. Screenshots are important to my blogging style now because they draw readers into the visual metaphors. My photographs should better illustrate the space of a book and its design in its natural environment, this includes how manga book designs work too. I am a composer of both text and visual forms, and trying to marry the two together is a struggle but a rewarding one.
We look for certainties in our lives, but do we really find them in anime? I find they give me more questions than answers personally.
Let me just point out two things that you need to know about my stance on depictions of disability in fiction:
1: I have an autism spectrum disability so when somebody tells me that the Boston Legal version of my condition is the most accurate one, I grow concerned, just as I did when people thought The Curious Incident With The Dog In The Night-Time was an accurate depiction of it as well.
2: Writers and creators of fiction are allowed to portray people with disability in their work, as long as they are portrayed with dignity.
Keiko Tobe without a doubt tried her best and did the research when doing With The Light as a manga project. She treats autistic people with dignity and autonomy, making sure that autistic spectrum people aren’t seen so much as “Rain Men” but ordinary human beings with a distinct disability that really needs better attention to help these individuals make it on their own. Particularly in Japan since over there – as we see in With the Light Vol. 1, the debate over segregation of autistic children and integration is rife. Not all autistic spectrum people are the same, and Keiko Tobe tries very hard to convey that. She also conveys that autistic spectrum children are less incapable of looking after themselves eventually than you might think. She doesn’t coddle them and try to protect them from the harsh outside world, she encourages people who don’t have this condition to allow these people with the condition to thrive.
All the same, the fad of “spectrum fiction” – noted in the 2005 article in The Guardian above, seems to detract from what is a medical condition, not a gimmick to sell books or get TV ratings. People like me actually live with this sort of condition every day, and it doesn’t really allow you to become some kind of “Rain Man” at all. Personally I think police detective work would be horrible to expect of somebody like me, let alone counting cards in a bloody Vegas casino. Worse, if I ever try to market my own fiction or autobiography, will it get put in the same “spectrum fiction” ghetto that Guardian article describes? Compared to that Keiko Tobe’s look at autism through manga is positively innocent in its intentions, rather than deliberately cashing in on a disability bandwagon.
I could go on about this but I’d have to do more research. Jonathan Clements I applaud you for tackling this issue, considering that the Spectrum Fiction fad seems to be very real indeed, and while Keiko Tobe’s work should be praised not only because of her untimely death preventing us from seeing an ending to With The Light, the Spectrum Fiction genre seems to be more like Speculative Fiction than “Spectrum” Fiction in trying to portray with honesty these autistic spectrum disorders.
I’m not saying that nobody can write about autistic people but autistic people. I’m just saying that you need to do a better job at it than milking a new fad disability faster than the Amish Fiction fad that just started recently. And mark my words, the Amish don’t like it any more than us autistics like The Curious Incident.
Hetalia Axis Powers is getting licensed in America – which at the rate of which anime licenses are coming out here mean it could be coming to Australia real soon!
Already there’s arguments over the dubbing in the comments page of Funimation’s press release.
Just goes to show the power of the internet when it comes to LiveJournal fangirls getting the international and political Boy’s Love they crave, huh?
(Somebody should make a Hetalia themed drink like Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. It’s what LiveJournal fangirls crave!)
Those of you who’ve been round the blogosphere long enough remember the Catcher in the Rye Round Robin where bloggers compared their favourite anime shows and media to the novel The Catcher in the Rye. Remember, anything Baka-Raptor posts is NSFW but is perfectly safe for home.
Wow. J.D. Salinger is dead. What a lot of anime fans don’t realise is just how much of an impact The Catcher In The Rye and Salinger’s other works in translation really had on Japanese culture, particularly in the anime and manga fields. Holden Caulfield is largely responsible for inspiring tales of troubled youths that Japanese people find interesting – Welcome to the NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto comes to mind, as does, to a lesser extent, The Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex. The latter I have not watched yet, since I haven’t seen the first two Ghost in the Shell movies. Even in the image above of the laughing man is a direct quote from one of Salinger’s stories. And I’m serious about that.
NISIO: When The Catcher in the Rye was first translated, they changed the title. A Dangerous Age, wasn’t it? But the text didn’t fit that title. I think the audience that bought it with that name and the audience who bought Haruki Murakami-san’s version [*which put the English words in katakana rather than translating them] are totally different. Koga-san and Obata-san’s illustrations might have universal appeal, but words don’t work that way. In a sense, it’s like watching a movie dubbed.
So I guess it’s not just Americans and other English speaking consumers who complain about licensed translations… anyway, rest in peace Salinger – just don’t call St. Peter a phony when you get to the pearly gates.
You want to know why? In Kinokuniya, about a year ago, I picked up a manga called With the Light on a recommendation of a blogger now forgotten, because it was one of the few manga that dealt with autism in a meaningful way available in English.
Keiko Tobe, at the time, I was unaware you were even a woman. I thought you were a dude with one of those gender confused Japanese names, like Tatsuhiko (as in Takimoto). But your manga above all manga I read that year which wasn’t made by Osamu Tezuka… it touched my heart because you dared to take a stand on an issue that directly affected me as a person, even though you never knew me at all.
I had no idea you were sick and I thought you were still working on With the Light… I tried my best to buy your manga volumes as they came out, even if you only got royalties for the one volume I picked up out of curiosity. Now… I want to hear the rest of the story you planned out, even if it doesn’t have a “real” ending.
Because most lives, they don’t end like they do in manga. They end so suddenly and it hurts you when it happens.
This post by mortheil asks “Where is anime blogging’s Lester Bangs?” – a question worth asking but I think it’s a misguided emphasis. Why DOES anime blogging need a Lester Bangs if Lester Bangs is a music critic?
Personally I think instead of the Lester Bangs / Hunter S. Thompson clone the anime blogosphere is crying out for… what we really need is an anime blogger version of Roger Ebert. (Here’s hoping you get this in your trackback links Roger, since I’m a big fan of yours. Hear me out.)
And even that’s questionable since Roger Ebert is of advanced age and has the authority to review movies in the tough love way he does. To explain why it would be difficult to find a clone of Roger Ebert, think of how many imitators of The Angry Video Game Nerd fail: James Rolfe is able to turn off the angry persona when he gets serious about the stuff he actually likes, and he’s researched the history of the entertainment medium he lambastes in every one of his AVGN videos. “What were they thinking?” is a line that has to be earned. “What were they thinking?” implies that one put some actual thought about the implications of a decision by an entertainment studio that made an entertainment product suffer as a result.
For this reason, a Western anime blogger would have to do some significant research into the context of anime itself as much as what anime actually gets produced. Therefore, somebody like 2DT who lives in Japan and blogs about his experiences blogging about anime in Japan – would lean towards some interesting gonzo journalism (unintentionally) because of his (somewhat) unique position as a foreigner in the heartland of anime production. I really like his blog because sometimes the best way to be subversive and edgy is to not try to be subversive and edgy… the best counter-culture writers have a unique sense of lived experience because there was no way in hell you could tone them down if they had anything to say about it. Hunter S. Thompson, case in point, should not be seen as somebody to emulate. Carbon copies of Thompson tend to throw in a lot of controversy for the sake of controversy. What anime bloggers should be doing is just writing what comes naturally to them.
Me, my blog was controversial from the very beginning, even though it hasn’t been really noticed by the mainstream yet. Why? Because autistic spectrum bloggers often receive a hard time on the internet. Daring to express opinions in the face of disability and difficulty in the process of blogging itself – that’s really subversive. Because once being controversial and edgy becomes mainstream – it gets really boring. In the anime blogosphere, the debate between fansubs and licensed anime is one where many bloggers tread carefully. I’ve personally stopped reviewing fansubs not for moral reasons, but financial and career orientated ones. It’s a personal choice that seemed controversial to me, but nobody has seemed to care just yet. Maybe that will change in time. Anyway, for those of you potentially asking about why I made that choice, it’s selling out in a good way, at least in how it works out for me. That and I don’t want to get arrested under copyright laws. Especially in this country where even the internet itself isn’t safe anymore from censorship it seems.
Anyway, my point is that if bloggers/critics try to be subversive by hating on things all the time (aping Roger Ebert in the wrong way) adding swear words and bile for comic effect (aping James Rolfe in a bad way) or trying to be too controversial all the time (aping Hunter S. Thompson in a bad way) the journalism of anime blogging, however amateur or professional it is, suffers from a lack of honest integrity. If you want to be a hero, we don’t need one, we just need you to be yourself.
I’ve been away reading a lot of books, perhaps unrelated to anime at all, such as Moby-Dick, The Element, and more recently trying to finish reading Basho’s The Complete Haiku.
All of these books I plan to review for my miscellaneous dirty hipster blog Ephemeretic. Do check out Ephemeretic for my blogging about photography, art and literature.
In the meantime I’m still working on the Evangelion post – it’s taking longer than I expected but not for the reasons you might think – I’m busy, that’s true. But I want to experiment with more photography in my articles to try and give some original visual input to them.
Hope you enjoy those things for now as I make the critical decision about which of the two universities who offered me a place I will decide to attend my studies at. They’re seriously pulling a Yojimbo on me, as in, the scene in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo where two merchants compete for the same customer at the same time.
Adding a ton of photos to this post which I originally uploaded from the iPhone while at the Wonfes yesterday morning. A load of goodies here including Alter Azunyan, Strike Witches Lucchini and scale figure goodness from Resinya in the form of Aegis.And a load of coverage at the following sites. http://www.foobarbaz.jp/ http://www113.sakura.ne.jp/~kotatsuga […]
Tokyo CGM Night - an event that Andrew Shuttleworth and I have been hosting in Tokyo to bring together smart and interesting people who engage others online through the creation of content. CGM stands for Consumer Generated Media and refers to social media, blog and video content that is generated by consumers. We also bring in the best from the industry to […]
Mentioned just over a year ago in this post that I would like to put together some sort of package tour where I would bring you round to some of my fave spots in Tokyo. I've recently teamed up with CTC Tours and Yoshimi to put together a tour package called the CTC Tokyo AniTour.The first tour package we have put together is the 6D4N – CTC Tokyo AniTo […]
At the Wonfes this morning with Big Boss Aki Takanori and Meiri who I used to work with during my days at Amazon. Guess who Meiri works for now ^^; As usual, the Good Smile Company dominated the enterprise booth area and it looks like it was the biggest booth to date.We set up a screen to show tweets from folks adding the #wf2010w hash tag - thanks to Steve […]
Replacing photos with ones taken on the GF1. BRS is going to be bigger than initially thought - on a global scale... Damn, I've already said too much ^^;All wonfes posts being tagged "wonfes" and live here. […]
From the Good Smile Company booth - Bakemonogatari stuff including this gorgeous figure of Senjogahara Hitagi. Do you fancy having your dolphin stapled by her? All wonfes posts being tagged "wonfes" and live here.All photos snapped on the Lumix GF1.Thanks to your Twitter recommendations, I whipped up Bakemonogatari in a jiffy. I love it! Very diffe […]
Replacing photos uploaded from the iPhone this morning with ones from the GF1. Megahouse Azusa looking rather lovely.All wonfes posts being tagged "wonfes" and live here. […]
Hijacking my own posts from what I posted earlier on at the Wonder Festival 2010 Winter this morning - adding photos taken on the GF1 - love that camera! Azunyan want. Want em all!All wonfes posts being tagged "wonfes" and live here.And these are the photos posted earlier this morning from the iPhone. […]
This certainly came out of nowhere - big surprise. No release dates yet. Prefer Mio head over Yui.Shouldn't that be L bust for Mio?Which of the two do you prefer? There is a poll embedded in this article.I know that many readers have been resisting the Dollfie charm - has your resistance level depleted to zero with the announcement of these two?BTW, all […]
